A Tale of Two Commercially Available Library Databases

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

NewPages.com sells a spreadsheet of American public libraries and their contact info. It wasn’t what drove me there but it seemed like a good idea and the price was cheap so I went for it. Upon opening it I discovered that email addresses were not among the fields being provided. My bad, should’ve checked beforehand.

Did some Googling around and then asked a real live paid reference librarian who, umm, did some Googling around with better focus, I suppose, and directed me to American Library Directory. Which lets you pay by the record (or quantity of records), do an Advanced Search, select which ones you wish to download, and then download them. Email addresses, for those institutions for which they have that info, are indeed included. Unlike NewPages.com’s data, ALD’s is not cheap:

NewPages (all public libraries in their system): $95
American Library Directory (“main”, not branches, that DO have emails): $1195

:eek:

Yeah, well, they have a 14 day free trial which lets you search to your little heart’s content and download a few hundred for free.

I decided to see how practical it was going to be to match the library records I already had from NewPages (figuring since they had considerably fewer records, they probably had at least the main ones or some such thing, right?) and then I could import as a match-merge and just add the resulting emails. Did some trial searches.

There’s almost no overlap. :confused: :mad: :dubious: :smack: :frowning:

NewPages has a record for the Broken Arrow Library of Broken Arrow Oklahoma. ALD doesn’t have it. ALD has a record for (I kid you not) the Broken BOW Library of Broken Bow Oklahoma. NewPages doesn’t have it.

In North Carolina, ALD has:

Granville County Library System
Grifton Public Library
Gunn Memorial Public Library

in the same section the alphabet, NewPages has these North Carolina libraries:

Gaston County Public Library
Goldsboro Library
Greensboro Public Library

What the FUCK?!??

Hey, you’d think a spreadsheet potentially costing more than $1000 would be unabridged or close to it… oh yeah, I went back in and did a search for every library (not just “mains”), with or without email addresses. Nope, still didn’t have most of the NewPages libraries. I’m a little less perturbed that the $95 NewPages spreadsheet doesn’t have all the ones I see in ALD but this is freaking surreal.

2

Two places to find library information are:
MARC Code List for Organizations
Directory of OCLC members

Both databases are free to search. In spite of the names, they are just databases of libraries.

I don’t think that you can download either database in full, and they are not limited to public libraries or to libraries in the U.S. However, you can limit searches by state in the U.S.

3

I’ve used library data from here before; it’s free:

4

Thanks. They don’t have email addresses, as far as I can discern. Or even phones. I do a search for libraries in Alabama and they return to me the MARC code, other codes, Organization Name, Address, and the dates the record was created or modified.

Same issue. This one returns the OCLC code, type of library, library name, and address.

Both databases are free to search. In spite of the names, they are just databases of libraries.

I

That one has more links and options. I’m waiting for a callback so I can ask whether they have a downloadable list of libraries and their email addresses.