Book People Archive

Worldcat.org now live

OCLC has recently opened a free search interface to its "find in a library"
service that's been featured on various search engine websites.   Reportedly,
all 50+ million WorldCat records, representing the holdings of most larger
North American libraries (and a few major overseas libraries as well)
can now be searched by going to

    http://worldcat.org/

and entering keywords for the title you're looking for.  As far as I know,
this is the biggest library-based bibliographic databases in the world.
(Altogether, they claim to track more than 1 billion items, where an "item"
is a particular copy of a book in a libraary.)

The site is optimized for finding the closest copies of titles you look
for, in any edition; that is, it will try to combine different
editions of the same title into one "hit".  If you tell the site where
you're located, the site will then show what libraries near you have
some edition of that title, ordered by distance from where you are.  It
will often also provide links for buying copies.

The database includes Internet-based resources as well.  It's not
that obvious how to get to them, though.  The trick I've found is to
run your search, click on "Internet Resource" in the far
left column to filter for online items only, click on a title you're
interested in, and then click on the "Details" tab.  That will then
show some linked domain names you can click on to try to get to the item.
Note that the links may well be out of date in any given instance, and
that the database includes many online resources that require payment
or a subscription to access.

Worldcat.org is a simplified interface to the full WorldCat system, which
is sold by subscription to libraries.  (If your library has inter-library
loan, they may well have a subscription to the full WorldCat.)  Many features
available in the full WorldCat are not available in the free worldcat.org
interface, including advanced search and full cataloging and indexing 
information.  (I'm also having a hard time effectively filtering by edition,
though this may just reflect my inexperience with the interface.)  The
system does link to individual library catalogs, so you can often follow
those links to find out whether a particular library's copy is the edition
you want, if you care, or get detailed cataloging information via that
library.  Some classes of users will want to stick with the full
subscription-based WorldCat, but this free interface is still quite
impressive in its scope, and includes an interesting mix of features.

John