WorldCat: a Powerful Library Tool

Plenty of tools librarians use all the time as part of their work can also be very useful for everyone else. WorldCat is a service of OCLC, a company most libraries of any size depend on. There’s no need for anyone else to know much about OCLC, but WorldCat amounts to a catalog that shows the holdings of almost 27,000 libraries in 171 different countries, or as their slogan goes, “the world’s largest library catalog.”

Suppose you look for something at your local library, and they don’t have it. Fair enough. Not even the Library of Congress has everything anyone might want. You have two good options. One is WorldCat, or you can go to the library’s interlibrary loan office and ask for what you want. (Or perhaps the online library catalog has an interlibrary loan request form that you can fill out even if you are at home.) The Interlibrary Loan librarian will use something very much like WorldCat to identify another library that owns what you want and borrow it for you from that library.

Many people have access to several different libraries. For example, large cities often have public libraries with multiple branches, along with numerous college and university libraries, and maybe even some corporate or government libraries that the public might be able to use. Each suburb may have its own public library, along with academic libraries or corporate libraries. All of these libraries might be part of a library system, which may entail reciprocal borrowing agreements. And here is one way the general public can benefit from WorldCat.

When the WorldCat window opens, you will see an opportunity to sign in. It is not required unless you want to become a power user and use it to compile lists or write reviews. Of course, if people are writing reviews on WorldCat, you might come across them as you search WorldCat. But if you’re looking at the service for the first time, pay attention to nothing else but the search box.

WorldCat’s search box looks comfortingly like Google’s. Google is a search engine and a library catalog is a database. The single search box works less well for databases, but it’s a good place to start. WorldCat’s already allows one database searching feature you won’t find on Google: you can search the whole database or limit your search to books, CDs, DVDs, or articles.

If you happen to know the ISBN (International Standard Book Number), that is a powerful thing to put in the search box. It will take you directly to the one thing you are interested in. Otherwise, the author’s last name and a distinctive word or two from the title makes a good start. If it doesn’t take you directly where you want to go, it will at least return a limited list (unlike a search engine’s thousands or millions of matches). You will probably recognize what you are looking for from that list.

Your search will soon enough take you to a screen for the particular item. It might even have a picture of it. In any case, it will have such basic information as the title, author(s), publisher, and date of publication. If you want more information from the catalog, you can click on the title. But chances are that once you find this screen, you only want to know how to get your hands on the item. Underneath that basic information you will find a box with a ZIP code in it and a list of the libraries that own the item. If the ZIP code isn’t your own, change it.

The screen will now have the closest library at the top of the list, and the rest of the list is in order of distance. The link for each library takes you to its own catalog, where you can find out whether there are copies available or if someone else has borrowed all of them. When I performed a sample search to be able to describe it for this article, the closest library that had a copy was about 45 minutes away. That’s probably too far to travel unless I learn from the catalog that item doesn’t circulate. I live within 15-20 minutes of at least four public library branches and five academic libraries.

Depending on what you learn from WorldCat, you can decide whether to go to a nearby library yourself to see the item you want or request it on interlibrary loan. Or, if you are planning to travel, you can use the ZIP code of wherever you are going and see what libraries there have your item. (You won't be able to borrow it, but you can look at it or listen to it.) And you have learned all of that information without having to leave the very computer that told you your own library didn’t have what you wanted.