Two billion is a large number, regardless of whether you are referring to dollars or granules of sand. WorldCat has reported the addition of its two billionth holding. This impressive and somewhat daunting piece of news was found on OCLC in their post, “WorldCat database reaches 2 billion holdings.”

The monumental entry was from the University of Alberta Libraries in Edmonton and was for the e-book, Evaluation of the City of Lakes Family Health Team Patient Portal Pilot Project: Final Report, published in 2012 by the Centre for Rural and Northern Health Research.

WorldCat was created in 1971 for libraries to share cataloging information from a central database. It took the OCLC cooperative almost 34 years, from August 26, 1971 to August 11, 2005, to add one billion holdings in WorldCat. It has taken just seven years and eight months to add the next billion holdings.

Melody K. Smith

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