Local creation/global use - Bibliographic data in the international arena

OCLC has grown from the original group of Ohio academic libraries to 27,000 libraries located in North America, Europe, Asia, Latin American, and South Africa. Each of the records in WorldCat (the OCLC Online Union Catalog) is a local creation that is available for use across the globe for different purposes. Common issues that must be faced with the expansion of a bibliographic utility include cataloging standards, subject access in languages appropriate to the user, local needs versus global usefulness, and character sets. Progress has been made with the cooperative creation of an international name authority file and the uniform application of ISBD principles. A method of linking various subject vocabularies and an improved infrastructure of MARC formats and character sets are needed. Librarians need new automated tools to provide preliminary access to date available in electronic form and to assist them in organizing and storing that data.