Building a national or international China bibliographic utility

Today, Chinese libraries are in urgent need of a national bibliographic utility resembling the OCLC union catalog for cooperative cataloging and resource sharing. Three options are presently available for Chinese libraries: purchasing bibliographic records from the National Library of China (NLC), joining the China Academic Library and Information System (CALIS) Union Cataloguing Center, and contributing records to OCLC WorldCat. This paper analyzes the problems associated with each option. To implement the third option, Chinese catalogers will have to meet the three requirements set forth by OCLC: adding Pinyin, DDC (Dewey decimal classification) or LCC (Library of Congress classification), and LCSH (Library of Congress subject headings) or MeSH (National Library of Medicine subject headings) data to each contributed record. Impact and implementation are also discussed.