OCLC / WorldCat Love

There's not many exciting aspects to getting a master's in library science, but once in a while I do stumble across some tool or feature that strikes me as being particularly useful or just plain cool. And as I am an Information Professional (drums and trumpets, please), I like to share these findings with others of a curious bent, so they can incorporate them into their daily lives or wherever else they could use a quick search.

So, listen up, folks! I want to let you in on a little secret. There is one easy-to-use and very effective website / database operation that allows any user to see where, in their city or beyond, a particular library book lies at a particular moment. This goes beyond calling up the local library or searching their online catalog, which doesn't always work satisfactorily. This is a method that ranks, by physical distance from your home address, all the holdings of the title you seek, be it public library, county library or university library.

The program is WorldCat, which is itself a product of the larger organization Online Computer Library Center, Inc. (OCLC). What WorldCat does is function as the world's largest (sheesh, terminology, sorry) OPAC, or Online Public Access Catalog. An OPAC is any old online catalog you find at a library these days, that is, the system which supplanted the old card catalog. Most OPACs serve their library and a few city or county locations. What WorldCat does is link up the catalogs of all these libraries (or most of them, anyway), with 90 countries and 10,000 institutions represented.

WorldCat has the same relation to a regular library catalog as the Internet has to your home computer. For many years, this service was only available to librarians and paying subscribers, but in 2003, Open WorldCat began making motions towards non-professionals. Today, there are numerous ways to tap into WorldCat, such as through the OCLC page or through WorldCat.org.

Once you're on the website, just type in the name of a book you're curious to find. You may be asked to fill in your zip code, so the program can determine where to start looking for items. A screen should then offer specific listings. Clicking on them will reveal which libraries have holdings, and how close those libraries are to your home. And through a decent Inter Library Loan system, you should be able to get your hands on most any of these.

This all presupposes that there's some of you out there still tracking down books, and that you don't accept Borders or Barnes and Noble as the final stop on the journey. Give WorldCat a try. I've found it to be somewhat addictive.