OCLC has released its annual report for 2014-15. The report details the organization’s progress in meeting its goals, including sharing knowledge, connecting users, delivering value, and transforming spaces. Several of the major projects that OCLC has undertaken to reach these goals include helping national and regional institutions in Spain, China, and the Netherlands add millions of titles to their collections; working with the Library of Congress to advance its BIBFRAME bibliographic-description initiative; streamlining collection-development tasks, such as analyzing e-book and e-journal packages, through WorldShare Reports; and working with Sustainable Collection Services to help libraries balance space needs with maintaining physical collections.
In the sharing category, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign makes several “Top 10” lists. These lists cover lending members (ninth, with 31,965 items lent via OCLC in 2015; Minnesota’s statewide Minitex system leads the list) and online original catalogers (also ninth, with 10,999 original records added to OCLC in 2015; the University of Hong Kong is number one).
Other interesting numbers from the report:
- OCLC currently has 16,912 member institutions, spread across 118 countries. Sixty-nine of these nations (58 percent) are in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa; 28 (24 percent) are in the Americas; and 21 (18 percent) are in the Asia Pacific.
- The Americas have the highest number of OCLC member institutions, with 11,244 (66 percent). Europe, the Middle East, and Africa have 3,871 members (23 percent), and the Asia Pacific has 1,797 (11 percent).
- Over the past year, 61 institutions have joined OCLC. In addition, 11 countries that did not previously have any member institutions are now represented. These nations include Cameroon, Liechtenstein, Macedonia, and Saint Lucia.
- Public libraries make up the largest proportion of member institutions, with 5,392 (32 percent), followed by college and university libraries, at 4,912 (29 percent). There is a separate category for community college and vocational libraries, which number 1,086 (about 6.5 percent).
- State and national libraries are at the bottom of the list, with 112 (0.66 percent). This category does not include federal, state, and municipal government libraries, which number 1,533 (9 percent).
- The total number of holdings in OCLC is almost 2.3 billion. Nearly 150 million holdings were added in the past year, amounting to a 7-percent increase.
- The total number of records is over 340 million. This includes more than 20 million that were added in FY 2015, or an increase of just over 6 percent.
- The number of digital records in OCLC is now over 43 million, up about 2.5 million from the year before, an increase of 6 percent. There are over 14 million e-book records, an increase of more than 300,000, or a little over 2 percent.
- Sixty-one percent of records are in a language other than English. There are 482 languages and 15 scripts used in WorldCat. The most-common languages are English, German, and French. Scripts include Cyrillic, Devanagari, and Tamil.
To access the full report, go here.