WORLDCAT for Images?

I’ve written before about the ideal for access to heritage digital images.  In case you don’t recall I described it as follows:

Universal, scalable, trustworthy, sustainable, and permanent access to all heritage digital images from the publicly accessible to the privately held, including those from all museums and cultural institutions, archives and libraries, private collections, and publishers, using a system of organization that maximizes entry points and interconnections between objects and relevant texts, to facilitate retrieval for all imaginable purposes, through interfaces which have the capability of searching across all platforms, providing high resolution images, thumbnail browsing, copying and reuse for non-commercial purposes, and links to contextual materials, with continuously updated information of the applicability of worldwide copyright status and contact information for obtaining permissions.

While it is utopian, this ideal provides a context for looking at what exists, and what is evolving.  Having an ideal toward which we strive is critical, even if entirely impractical at present. It seems to me that the steps that are being taken now should at least consider the ways in which they will impede or facilitate movement in this direction.  We must keep the big picture in view.  The broad access to books and periodicals we currently enjoy grew gradually out the hard work of collaboration across borders and in the face of differing practices.

Worldcat Home Page

Worldcat has 1.2 billion items from more than 10,000 libraries, cataloged.

Google books has the full text of over 7 million books (as of October 28, 2008), searchable.

Now, let’s now imagine 1.2 billion images from more than 10,000 museum and other digital collections, cataloged and searchable.

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Tagged as: Digital image, google books, searchability