IDT and OCLC visit and work at the National Library of Vietnam

On the morning of December 15, 2016, a professional expertise exchange between the National Library of Vietnam and OCLC global library cooperative representative took place in the Vietnam National Library. Participants of the National Library of Vietnam include Mr. Nguyen Xuan Dung – Deputy Director of the library, Ms. Nguyen Ngoc Anh – Deputy Director of the library, and all the Deputy of department of the national library. From OCLC, there were Mr. Andrew H. Wang – OCLC Vice President, OCLC Asia Pacific, Ms. Shu-En Tsais – Executive Director, OCLC Asia Pacific Services, Mr. Duong Dinh Hoa – CEO of IDT Vietnam, representative of OCLC in Vietnam.

The meeting focused on exchanging issues about the benefits of a library when being a member of OCLC, the experience of building and operating the world’s largest network of library content and services Worldcat, experience in organizing national index system. During this meeting, OCLC representatives shared their experiences with the National Library of Vietnam on operating a national index system and how to operate the system stably. Currently OCLC is the largest organization in the world operating a Worldcat global federated catalog system. Worldcat is currently the largest global federated catalog database in the world containing more than 380 million bibliographic records, 2.4 billion holdings. Currently in Asia alone there are over 6,000 libraries, and there are 5 countries that maintain the national federated catalog system on Worldcat. When using Worldcat librarians will save a lot of time cataloging material by directly using the records cataloged by world libraries, records are always libraries together with OCLC, to ensure the accuracy and compliance with international rules. In contrast to libraries, Worldcat can also share bibliographic records as well as resource information in their libraries to libraries around the world. Using Worldcat will be a first basic step from which libraries can grow to use very valuable OCLC products and services.
At the end of the meeting, the National Library of Vietnam would like to thank the useful sharing of OCLC as well as the experience of OCLC in the operation and management of the library and hopefully in the near future. There are cooperation steps between the National Library of Vietnam and OCLC to help contribute Vietnamese libraries to deeper integration with libraries around the world.