Coming in August: WorldCat.org

On the relatively recent heels of Open WorldCat, OCLC is planning to release WorldCat.org in beta next month, as a  way for more people to find the holdings in Open WorldCat.  Their product page slyly admits that people just aren't finding WorldCat through search engines yet, despite their best efforts.

But with this new project, they'll be providing "a permanent destination page and search box that lets a broader range of people discover the riches of library-held materials cataloged in the WorldCat database."  Aha!  Permanent destination pages...that's the key.  So the search engines can crawl and index the actual contents of the page, not rely on a back-end voodo "Find it in a Library" method.  I think this is a great step, and look forward to seeing how findable this makes WorldCat holdings.