Worldcat for Non-Librarians
As a librarian, I am a HUGE fan of Worldcat and think it is sadly underutilized by non-librarians. Worldcat is basically a shared catalog of thousands of the world’s libraries. Why is this useful? Well, you can discover not only physical books in libraries around the world, but also tens of millions of open access digitized materials. With physical books, articles, etc. that aren’t freely available online, you can request them via Interlibrary Loan (ILL). This means going to your local library and asking them to have the owning library send the item to them. Then you can check it out or use it just like you would any library material. Some libraries charge a small fee for this, but it’s usually negligible.
Worldcat’s search box has options to search Libraries, Lists, or Items.
Libraries
You can search libraries by name or location, or you can browse by location using the navigation bar at the top of the screen. This is helpful if you know what library you are looking for, or if you are in an unfamiliar area and want to find the nearest library. But otherwise, it’s not super useful for the ordinary user.
Lists
Lists on Worldcat are basically exactly like lists on Goodreads. Users can create lists of books on topics that interest them, things they are studying, things they want to request through Interlibrary Loan, etc. Unfortunately, Worldcat doesn’t really offer browsing of lists. They have a featured list, and show a few recently updated ones, but really you have to search to find them.
Searching may be hit or miss, too. You may have to use a little trial and error. For example, I searched for “farming” and pulled up 4 lists, but a search for “farm” got 11 lists, including the 4 that came up for “farming.” So, try the simplest version of the word you’re looking for.
Items
The item search is the crown jewel of this resource. You can do a simple search or click on the little icon that looks like a volume slider next to the search box to bring up the advanced search options. This offers the option to search by 8 different facets using Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT), date range, format, and language.
Once you’ve searched, you’ll have tons of options for filtering your results. You can filter by:
Open access content
Format
Author/creator
Language
Content type
Publication year
Audience
Subject
Formats include both print and online versions of the following. That’s not to say every title is available in both print and digital, just that all of that stuff is included in the catalog.
Books
Periodicals
Articles
Videos
Archival materials
Audiobooks
Chapters
Images
And more
Example Search
Let’s walk through a search so you can see some of the other handy features of Worldcat. Here, I’ve done a simple keyword search for ecofriendly packaging, which brought back 503 results.
Next, I narrowed the results to Open Access only, then clicked on one of the top results. In the result, you can click on “Show more information” to see what subject terms this item is tagged with. (Yay metadata!)
This list of subjects shows us some additional search terms. In this case, I can click on “Bio-based packaging” to narrow my search a little further.
Book Features
Finally, I want to highlight a few features on the item page when you are looking at a book. One, you can see all the libraries that have the book. This will help you find a nearby library where you can go read it or have your own library request it for you. But the item screen also gives you options to buy the book, including (sometimes) options for Better World Books and Bookshop.org if you want your money to go to a good cause.
