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Overview of WorldCat Digital Collection Gateway

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Find an overview of the WorldCat Digital Collection Gateway synchronization process.

The WorldCat Digital Collection Gateway enables you to synchronize your OAI-repository metadata item records with WorldCat records, expanding access to your digital items to users around the world via WorldCat.

To accomplish this, the Gateway harvests Dublin Core metadata from your CONTENTdm or another OAIcompliant repository, transforms the Dublin Core metadata to MARC, and offers a suggested mapping to MARC standards. 

Before you synchronize your records, you can customize mapping metadata via the WorldCat Search View or MARC View. When you are satisfied you approve the map as a profile for the entire collection. This map is saved and can be used again with that collection, or with any or all of the collections in your repository.

When the sync is complete, the metadata records are loaded into WorldCat and the OCLC numbers for each item are returned to you where they can be added to your local copy of the metadata records.

Over time, as you add new items to your collections and make changes to your item metadata, you can use the Gateway to schedule ongoing synchronizations. Synchronizations can be set up in one of two ways:

  • Only new items (since the last synchronization) are added to WorldCat.
  • New items are added, and existing records in WorldCat are updated with any changes made to the metadata records in your repository. 

Use the Digital Collection Gateway

In order to use the Gateway with your OAI-PMH compliant repositories, be sure that the following conditions are met:

  • Your OAI-PMH compliant repository is running. 
  • You have one or more existing collections with metadata fields mapped to Dublin Core and/or Qualified Dublin Core (dcterms).
    • Qualified Dublin Core will only be available for collections whose repositories are CONTENTdm. Other repositories are not supported. If you are interested in purchasing CONTENTdm, please contact our Orders department at OCLC Order services with your name, OCLC symbol, and contact information.
  • You have an OCLC-supplied Key for the Gateway. 

To successfully create WorldCat records from your CONTENTdm metadata records:

  • The CONTENTdm Server must be running with one or more collections enabled for WorldCat Sync.
  • The collections enabled for WorldCat Sync must have metadata fields mapped to Dublin Core.

To obtain a list of your library's Digital Collection Gateway content: