Does WorldCat Holdings have a retrieval limit for OCLC symbols?

[mybright107]

Hi! First, thank you for creating and maintaining this tool—it's incredibly useful! I have a question about the "WorldCat Holdings" result type (when the source is set to WorldCat). Is there a limit on the number of OCLC symbols that can be retrieved? It doesn’t happen often, but occasionally I see "FALSE" when the holding count is over thousands (for example, oclc no.12080389) Just wondering if that’s expected behavior.

[tventimi]

Thanks for bringing this up - we actually just discovered this issue recently as well. It turns out that the OCLC Z39.50 server cannot return records above a certain length. This doesn’t come up often, but sometimes when a record has many holdings (around 1700), it pushes the size above the limit. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a good way to retrieve a full holdings list in such cases. But a future version of the plug-in will have a better way of informing the user when the full list is not available. It should still be possible to provide a holdings count and indicate if there are holdings for your institution (i.e. the institution associated with the WorldCat login you are using.) Thanks for reaching out, and please let us know if you have any other questions or suggestions. Tom Ventimiglia Princeton University Library

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[mybright107]

Thank you so much, Tom! It’s really helpful to know about this behavior—appreciate you taking the time to explain it. Thanks again!