WorldCat iphone App offers 'smart prefix'; search

Following a number of previous mobile site redesign efforts, OCLC has released a dedicated iPhone application for the WorldCat.org bibliographic database. Notably, the WorldCat iPhone app makes use of existing features like the phone's GPS capabilities and integrated mapping functions to connect users with materials at nearby OCLC member libraries.

Like the other mobile experiments, the app features information and records from the WorldCat database optimized for the device's screen. But much of what sets this effort apart is the “smart prefix search” made possible by mobile software technology developed by Boopsie, Inc., OCLC's partner on the app. Essentially, this means that users can search for just the first few letters of any of the words in a title and come up with the correct match (see image). Boopsie CEO Greg Carpenter provided an example of the technology's efficiency as it has been applied to another popular resource, Wikipedia, explaining that the same record-matching algorithm allows users to locate over 90 percent of the articles in Wikipedia using seven letters or less. To test how the search functionality works on the WorldCat database from any browser, go to worldcat.boopsie.com.