National Diet Library of Japan adds 4 million records to WorldCat

The National Diet Library has successfully added 4 million records to WorldCat, making these valuable research resources more visible and accessible to scholars, students and Web searchers worldwide through the world's most comprehensive database of materials held by libraries. In June, the National Diet Library and OCLC announced their agreement "to cooperate for the benefit of libraries, library patrons and end users of information services." OCLC staff from Leiden, the Netherlands, and Dublin, Ohio, USA, worked with National Diet Library staff to create a conversion program to convert JAPAN/MARC to MARC 21 records. Cataloging staff with language expertise were also critical to the successful data conversion and load into WorldCat. The addition of Japan's National Diet Library records increases the number of records containing CJK (Chinese-Japanese-Korean) script data in WorldCat by nearly 33 percent