As of Clojure 1.3, defrecord (and deftype) automatically define factory functions in the same namespace as the record itself. defrecord generates 2 such functions, one that takes positional arguments and one that takes a map. So once you have :use'd or :require'd the namespace, you can do stuff like the following without having to import anymore:

    (->World [:foo])
    (->World {:tiles [:foo]})

More details here:

http://dev.clojure.org/display/design/defrecord+improvements