Digital reference services in Open WorldCat

As you may have heard elsewhere, this week OCLC officially launched their Ask a Librarian pilot in Open WorldCat (here's the news release that OCLC put out about it). As you can see from the screenshot I made of a book in Open WorldCat, there is a list at the bottom of the page for "Local Libraries" that hold a given item. If that library is a Questionpoint client, then an icon with a question mark appears that offers a link to that library's digital reference service.

This is yet another way that we can get our library's digital reference service out there where the users actually are (specifically, the often-visited kingdoms of Google and Yahoo). Being where the users really are (and it's not our library website) and then finding ways of bring them back to our site (or at least given them alternative routes of connection to our services and resources) is a huge challenge that is critically importantly if we are to remain relevant to our users. We should be exploring every angle we can to find our users and bring ourselves into their world.

I don't have a sense of how popular Open WorldCat is. Apparently, it is possible to login to your OCLC account to see how many clicks have been made from Open WorldCat records to your library's OPAC. But I'd like to know whether many folks searching the web commonly find the records in the first place? I almost never find them unless I use one of the specialized tools that allow you to search just Open WorldCat records. What do searchers make of it when they stumble upon it while searching? What does this mean for the libraries who don't participate in WorldCat? Are they being left behind? If the searcher with an Open WorldCat record on his/her screen sees there's an interesting book available at library a few towns over but doesn't see his/her own library (because that library doesn't send records to WorldCat), will that searcher think, "Hey, let me see if my local public library has got this book by going to their web site?"

Some libraries with digital reference services may be fretting that thanks to this Ask a Librarian pilot in Open WorldCat their service is now going to get flooded with questions from users unaffiliated with their library. I think this worry is about as grounded in reality as the older fear that newly launched chat and e-mail reference services would be overwhelmed with users. As far as I am concerned, the minor annoyance of having to explain to an unaffiliated user why you can't completely fulfull their request is outweighed by the benefit of being able to keep libraries in general visible to the public. (And of course, a question from an unaffiliated user is an opportunity to redirect them to his/her own local library that he/she may have forgotten to consider.)