WorldCat Assignment

I finally had the chance to work on my WorldCat assignment today.  It was a pretty straightforward assignment: find 50 items related to scholarly journal publishing.  I entered the entire phrase into the WorldCat search bar, and immediately found over 1,000 hits.  I refined the search by selecting only items in English, and limited the results to the items found in the Library Sciences.  This narrowed my results to over 100.   I saved the first 50 results (sorted by relevance) as a list to my WorldCat account.  I then exported the list in the .RIS format, and saved it in Excel.  It looked bizarre (i.e., the citation details were spread over a series of excel columns, instead of being neatly formatted), so I checked the class Bulletin Board for Tim’s explanation.  My file looked reminiscent of the .xls file he uploaded as an example, so I think I did this correctly.

Finally, I uploaded the spreadsheet to my Google Docs account and sent Professor Tomer an e-mail notification of its completion and his access to view it.  

My initial impression of WorldCat was a positive one.  It seemed to be a less cumbersome method of obtaining and saving citations than Google Scholar.  This was a short assignment with a general search request, however, so I'm curious if WorldCat is refined enough to provide significant citation information for more specific searches.  I'll probably try some additional searches on my own time and decide if I prefer WorldCat as my primary citation engine.

It's almost 9:30 PM, though, and food takes precedence over WorldCat any day.