WorldCat and SkyRiver

In 2009, a new company, SkyRiver, began offering bibliographic utility services to libraries in direct competition to OCLC’s WorldCat. This study examines the differences between the two databases in terms of hit rates, total number of records found for each title in the sample, number of non-English language records, and the presence and completeness of several elements in the most-held bibliographic record for each title. While this study discovered that the two databases had virtually the same hit rates and record fullness for the sample used—with encoding levels as the sole exception—the study results do indicate meaningful differences in the number of duplicate records and non-English-language records available in each database for recently published scholarly monographs.