Suppose you are watching the Today Show as you are getting dressed for school, and you hear one of the guests talking about several books he has written on the research topic you have chosen. (Of course, he is trying to sell his new book too). Fabulous! You run to your college library (after finishing getting dressed, of course), search the OPAC, and find nothing by that author. Rather than despair, you have another option. Wouldn't it be convenient to search a database that contains the holdings of many libraries at one time? OCLC and WorldCat
Online Computer Library Center, OCLC is a nonprofit organization that sells technical and reference services to libraries. One of the services it provides is access to 60+ databases covering a wide range of subjects.
One OCLC database you should explore is WorldCat. WorldCat, often referred to as the catalog of catalogs, is a database comprised of the holdings of more than 30,000 libraries in over 65 countries. This means that as member libraries add books and other materials to their collections, new records describing the materials are created and added to the WorldCat database. The types of materials in the WorldCat database include books, dissertations, periodicals, audio and video cassettes, musical scores, sound recordings and more. New records are added every 15 seconds.
WorldCat is an excellent database to use to identify material you may not have access to locally. Since it is such a large database, with more than 40 million records, the probability of identifying materials on your topic is excellent.
So, remember the guest on the Today Show? You do an author search on WorldCat, and Voila!, you find the books that he discussed. Not only that, but WorldCat identifies which libraries have the books so you may get them using the Interlibrary Loan service.
