The world's largest database of library records continues to grow at an ever increasing rate. OCLC's WorldCat had:1 million records in September 1974;
10 million records in October 1983;
25 million records in December 1991;
50 million records in June 2002;
75 million records in November 2006;
100 million records in April 2008.
From OCLC Abstracts:
On April 1, a record for the 1950s publication from the U.S. Fisheries Laboratory, Miscellaneous Contributions, marked the 100 millionth bibliographic record entered into WorldCat. The record was part of a retrospective conversion project for the University of Washington Libraries.
In the past, WorldCat millionth bibliographic records were easily recognized by an OCLC record number that ended in zeros. Over the past year, additional types of records have been added to WorldCat, including article-level citations available in WorldCat.org and Institution Records reflecting an institution’s edited version of a bibliographic record. Both of these types of records are assigned OCLC numbers from the same numbering sequence applied to master bibliographic records. As a result, OCLC has developed a process that continuously monitors the total number of master bibliographic records in WorldCat. This process was used to determine which master bibliographic record was the 100 millionth.
The WorldCat database continues to grow at an extraordinary rate. Libraries added 18.7 million records to WorldCat in 2007 compared with 9.3 million in 2006 and 4.7 million in 2005.
Learn more about WorldCat.
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