Purdue e-Pubs

Destroyer and Preserver, Hear, Oh Hear! Not All Uncirculated Books Must Chariotest to a Dark Wintry Bed: How We Used the OCLC WorldCat Search API to Inform Our Weeding Decisions with Holdings Data

Weeding a specialized collection, such as the geography/oceanography subset of the marine science collection at the Marine Resources Library, requires thinking beyond our own walls and users. To ensure potential access to weeded items through other libraries, as well as the preservation of items unique to our own collection, we sought an efficient and free means to incorporate national holdings data into our decision-making process. The OCLC WorldCat Search API enables bibliographic data, as well as holdings from other libraries, to be obtained easily. With a Python script we obtained holdings data for most of our several thousand oceanography items, making more than 10,000 queries of the API over six minutes. We identified holdings of this collection subset within our five peer libraries, NOAA regional libraries, PASCAL (SC state consortium) libraries, LVIS member libraries, and libraries in the United States to inform (not determine) our weeding decisions.