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OCLC Support

Guidelines for promoting cooperative collections to the knowledge base

Review these guidelines and best practices before promoting a collection to the global knowledge base.

About adding global collections

You can submit any "Locally Created" collection to the WorldCat knowledge base cooperative. 

Every submitted collection will go through OCLC’s approval process before it becomes available to the community.

Make sure your collection meets the following guidelines before submitting your collection to OCLC. Once the collection is accepted and made available to the community, users must contact OCLC Support  for any changes needed in the collection.

Update cooperative collections added to the knowledge base

Users can submit edits to the global collection by participating in cooperative management. Edits to global collections will be retained. See Update title information in existing collections for more information.

If a global collection requires substantial updates, the institution that originally submitted the collection to the global knowledge base should submit a KBART to OCLC Support.

  • If a different institution believes a KBART reload is necessary, they should contact the institution who originally submitted the collection and request they submit a new KBART file to OCLC Support
    • Cooperative collections are identifiable by the collection ID. When the institution submits the collection to the cooperative, it becomes a cooperative collection and has global.[RegistryID] at the beginning of its collection ID. Use the WorldCat Registry to search for the Registry ID to identify and contact the submitting institution.
  • For more control over who manages the data for a collection, the creating library may want to keep the collection local instead of submitting it to the global cooperative. The institution can then share the collection with affiliated libraries.  See Share knowledge base collections for more information.

Include OCLC numbers

The titles in your collection must have a valid OCLC number whenever possible. In some cases, titles in a collection may not have been cataloged in WorldCat and therefore will not have an equivalent OCLC number. Collections missing a small percentage of OCLC numbers may still be approved.

As a best practice, aim for at least 70% OCLC number coverage for your collection and then add the additional numbers as the titles are cataloged in WorldCat.

Include Standard Numbers (ISSN / ISBN)

Highly recommended. The titles in your collection must have a valid Standard Number (ISSN/ISBN) whenever possible. Standard Numbers will help with the discoverability of full-text knowledge base links for patron search results. In some cases, titles in a collection may not have a Standard Number.  Collections missing Standard Numbers may still be approved.  

As a best practice, aim for at least 70% Standard Number coverage for your collection and add the additional numbers to the knowledge base titles if they become available.

Use valid URLs for titles

The titles in your collection must have valid URLs. We will spot check the URLs associated with the titles in your collection to make sure they resolve to the correct place.

It’s important to make sure the URLs to the full-text are not specific to your institution in any way. If there is a value in the URL that is specific to your institution, then your collection will be denied and it will not be added to the WorldCat knowledge base data. 

Contact OCLC Support if the URLs for your custom collection include library-specific values or you need our help creating a link scheme for the collection so that it can be used by all libraries.

Serial collections: If you want to submit a serial collection, contact OCLC first so we can help you build a link scheme before you submit the collection. Having a link scheme allows users to link to the article level of WorldCat Discovery.

Submit a subscription package or a full set of titles

The cooperative functionality of the WorldCat knowledge base should be used to represent collections that your library has curated or created to represent full collections from a provider that the WorldCat knowledge base might be missing.

Do not submit a single title or a few titles as a collection through the cooperative. If you are working on building a collection with other libraries and that is the reason for the incomplete title list, note this in the comment field of the confirmation window upon submission so your project will go through.

Please keep your gap title collections as private, local collections and alert OCLC Support so that we can address the issue with the provider. 

Database-only collections: It's not currently possible to submit database only collections to the cooperative.

If all titles are open access, select the attribute

When you create a collection, you have the option in the Properties accordion to select attributes that describe all of the titles in your collection. If all of the titles are open access, select the open access attribute. If needed, you can edit your attribute selections after you've created the collection.

Proxy settings are set at the collection level and if enabled, inherit libraries' institution settings. Select the collection-level setting that fits your and other libraries' needs. For example, make sure it is disabled if the titles in the collection are open access and can be accessed by off-campus users without the need for authentication.

Leave OPAC Linking set to Manual

When you create a collection, you have the option in the Linking accordion to have links built based on information you may have entered in OCLC Service Configuration about your web-based catalog or Online Public Access Catalog (OPAC). Libraries sometimes use this setting for collections of print serials. It is only available in local collections.

The OPAC Linking setting is not available in global collections. When you promote your collection, make sure "Manual," the default setting is selected. Once the collection becomes a global collection, the setting will no longer be available. If "From WorldCat Registry" was selected, libraries that select the global collection will be unable to change how links are built. If this should happen by mistake, contact OCLC Support.