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#worldcat — Public Fediverse posts

Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #worldcat, aggregated by home.social.

  1. Has #Worldcat fully retreated behind log-in with user accounts? Trying to access titles by their #OCLC ID from our institutional IP range at HU Berlin, I get the following response:

    ```
    <head>
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="resource://content-accessible/plaintext.css">
    </head>
    <body>
    <pre>This content is available to authenticated users only.
    Please sign in to continue.</pre>
    </body>
    ```

    #OpenInternet

  2. Projects like these are only possible thanks to the terrific #librarians and #cataloguers sharing data openly through well documented APIs and formats. The same cannot be said of all aggregating platforms feeding off of the commons. Even though we recorded thousands of #OCLC IDs on #Wikidata, #worldcat cannot be queried for the dimensional data of physical artefacts without an institutional subscription to their APIs—which not a single academic library in Germany seems to do (rightfully so imo. one should not pay for access to data one contributes pro bono)

  3. TorrentFreak: U.S. Court Order Against Anna’s Archive Spells More Trouble for the Site. “Anna’s Archive is having a rough month. Following mysterious .org and .se domain suspensions, the shadow library is now facing a permanent injunction from a federal court. After dropping a multi-million damages claim, OCLC won a default judgment and permanent injunction against Anna’s Archive, which it […]

    https://rbfirehose.com/2026/01/19/torrentfreak-u-s-court-order-against-annas-archive-spells-more-trouble-for-the-site/
  4. #MarcXML encapsulated as a string in #JSON is a pain to work with as I am finding out trying to query #HathiTrust APIs for digitised items with a list of #OCLC numbers obtained via #SPARQL from #Wikidata.

    Things I wish for:

    1. direct access to the MARCXML from HathiTrust
    2. a publicly accessible API for #Worldcat / OCLC to find holdings

    #DigitalHumanities #libraries #metadata #bibliography

  5. TorrentFreak: Anna’s Archive ‘WorldCat Scrape’ Lawsuit Drops $5M Claim, Pivots to Takedown Tactic. “OCLC is no longer looking for millions in damages from Anna’s Archive, but has adopted a tactical ‘takedown’ strategy instead. In a renewed motion for default judgment, the organization requests a permanent injunction, to restrain the shadow library from sharing WorldCat data.”

    https://rbfirehose.com/2025/11/24/torrentfreak-annas-archive-worldcat-scrape-lawsuit-drops-5m-claim-pivots-to-takedown-tactic/

  6. Hey @pluralistic , would you know what's up with the #enshitification of #WorldCat and its ralation to #OCLC ?
    Book locations in libraries behind paywalls, links to "Buy at #Amazon" etc.

    And how come a cooperative of libraries pays:

    $1,347,322 to Prichard David (President & Ceo)
    $832,584 to Rozek William (Cfo, Treasurer)
    $765,667 to Murphy Bart (Chief Tech. & Info. Officer)

    cf. report from a librarian:
    ruthtillman.com/post/whats-up-

    projects.propublica.org/nonpro