Google Scholar does something similar. I don't know if it uses the same underlying database. But if you look up a book in Google Scholar, you can find out what libraries near you have it, and whether it is checked out or in the stacks. So far, this information has proved accurate.

When you wrote "WorldCat," I thought it was going to be a global reference to feline blogging. (Hey, here in the east it's Friday!)

Carl Dreyer, the great Danish film director?

wow! that explains your erudition. it's in the dna.

Vincent: I've been promised some Lebanese catblogging for tomorrow. (Seriously.) We'll see if this pans out.

WTF!!

How can you only now find out about Worldcat???

This has been available in libraries and online for at least 15 years!!

WTF!! How can you only now find out about Worldcat???

It's only now released to the public. Doesn't change my world either, but it is something new.

I have just retired from 37 years as a librarian.

WorldCat is a product of OCLC, Online Computer Library Center, I believe. It's based in Dublin, OH, a suburb of Columbus. It was started at Ohio State and was a consortium of libraries in Ohio originally. It's been in existence for close to 40 years.

Your figure of 146 libraries is WAY low, Kevin. I just went to OCLC's site and after some surfing around, determined that there are approx. 9000 participating institutions, mostly libraries. Almost all university and college libraries in the U.S. participate, as well as many in other countries. I think your figure of 146 is actually the number of countries represented. However, not all of the 9000 institutions offer WorldCat to the public.

It's a HUGE database. And GS: it's not the same as Google Scholar. It considerably predates the latter. I think it's larger, also.

The cool thing about it is that you can verify the existence of all nearly all published books, journal titles, videos, records, computer software, etc. And you can rely upon most of the info being correct, as this is a database maintained by catalogers, who are notoriously picky about being accurate. You can also learn about books not yet published but which are in the works.

Anyway, glad you found it, Kevin.

Note to all of you: because this is such a huge database, you may end up overwhelmed by the number of records you retrieve if you search it. If you have trouble, let me know and I will give you suggestions for refining your search. Also happy to offer that service if you're doing lit searches in databases, particularly medical and/or scientific. I'm an expert MEDLINE searcher.

Wolfdaughter: 146 is the number of libraries that have my father's book. Only 8,854 to go!

YEAH WORLDCAT.

I went back to grad school just to use it. If only I knew, I coulda saved a good $40K.

Kidding, but barely.

Wow, your dad's Psych textbook was done in 1966, and his book on Dreyer was put out in 2000. That's some longevity.

Luci: Well, the Dreyer book was actually written in 1970, but it didn't find a publisher. My father suffered a stroke a few years after that and died in 1991.

However, in 1999 my mother was talking to some of her old Danish friends from back when they were researching the book, and they convinced her to update the manuscript and take another crack at getting it published. So she did. And it was finally published in 2000.

You misuse "Who knew?" Kevin. Use this expression only when what is "known" is in fact false. It's a joke.

For example, say you're at the movies and the credits are playing, and the name of that producer guy Alan Greenspan comes on the screen. *Then* you say, "Who knew?" Because it's really *not* former Fed chief Alan Greenspan, it's just some other guy with the same name, you know?

Everyone is misusing this expression these days, even Jews who should know better, as this started out as a punchline to Jewish jokes. Grrrr.

You must be very proud of both your Mom and Dad, Kevin and deservedly so. I am sure they did your family name proud.

I also thought of your great-great-grand-father recently when I read an article in the NYTimes about how Civil War soldiers had to serve despite health problems such as blindness in one eye!

My most gratifying WorldCat moment: hitting on a book that is held by exactly one library: Robert Barclay: Reliquiae Barclianae.... Held by Haverford College....You should see the book, well actually, I haven't seen the book itself, only a facsimile. A lithograph of some copyists perfect penmanship. Wild.

Oh.....well it is pretty cool that the Dreyer book did get eventually published.
Having never heard of him, think I'll check out The Passion of Joan of Arc or Ordet.

Who knew? Librarians. OCLC has been around for decades (I first encountered it when I was in library school back in 1981). I think there are well over 50,000 libraries world wide in its database.

FYI Google Book (and likely Google Scholar) uses WorldCat (the Find it in a Library link).

It was pretty cool to find my senior thesis from 1984 in there. Unfortunately, it hasn't propagated beyond my college's library.

you are right,kevin, worldcat.org is one mucho macho information search tool

there is more information on worldcat.org on wikipedia(under worldcat not worldcat.org)

you are not the first person,after hearing about
worldcat.org, to go out and immediately check out their books or their friends' books on wcdo

after all the bush-lieberman-lebanon postings it's nice to get a fun posting for a change

Sadly, WorldCat isn't perfect, even for participating libraries, though it's still an amazing tool. Up here in Canuckistan, most of the univ. libraries east of Quebec are left out of its searches. Luckily, we have "Amicus," which is like a nation-specific worldcat, but better in so far as it actually gives you call numbers right in their search results.

Yes, there's OCLC, and before that, there was the National Union Catalog. You really should go to libraries more often.

I am also a librarian, at a college.

146 libraries owning a book isn't bad at all for something on an esoteric topic. I've occasionally helped a student look for a book that was held by fewer than 10 libraries.

WorldCAT is vital for finding out what research libraries own. I suspect that Google Scholar is better with ordinary public libraries.

Of course, if you know what book you want, you don't have to bother with either. Just ask your library to locate it for you. It's called interlibrary loan, and it's a useful and under-marketed service.

It's time for me to stop now, before I turn into the gabby librarian.

Well, shut my mouth. My master's thesis (MM in composition - a concerto for euphonium and chamber orchestra) is in there.

Hopefully in a year, my Ph.D. dissertation will join it.

WF

Canuck, Worldcat is based on contributions from members. So if those libraries you mention are not included is because they aren't members.

And GS: it's not the same as Google Scholar. It considerably predates the latter. I think it's larger, also.

Google Scholar isn't really targeted at the same task, at least from my experience with it. You can find book locations (Scholar links directly to WorldCat for its Library Search function), but Scholar is much more useful in tracing citations to a given work, and it finds papers and such that may not be recorded in library catalogs. For example, if I wrote a paper in 1996, and there's an online reference to it, I can track down what other work it's given rise to (if any) in the past ten years.

Wow, I found my dad's doctoral dissertation in there too. That was from 1972, and I was surprised to see that it's actually available at two other libraries besides the university where he wrote it.

I did my father's name too, but nothing came up. Then I remembered him not being able to read or write, or shave, or bathe, or change his clothes as he rampaged around slobbering drunk puking singing slobbering drinking. So that WorldCat thingy is of no use to me and even if my father was alive he'd have to learn to write before he could pen a book about drinking and such cause that's all he really knew if he sobbered up. I'm glad he didn't do drugs, though. At least I can say that about him.

Mormonism will come into play in some way or other, but I think Romney's lack of experience & his demeanor (he often comes off as a Boy Scout on speed) will play a more crucial role in his candidacy. Will people really turn to a candidate who comes to the campaign as lacking in experience as GWB was when we can see what such a lack of experience has led to in this administration ? Will they turn to a man who has practically no record to run on since he has been an absentee, hands-off Governor for most of his term ? He's desperately hoping his actions with the Big Dig fiasco will be his "Calvin Coolidge Moment" (i.e. analogous to the Boston Po

I typed in 'Nixon Potato Culture' and got "The Selected Writings of Eqbal Ahmad" and "Classic Commercials of the 50's and 60's".

Making WorldCat publicly available is one of many extremely interesting developments from OCLC. Their research division, under the leadership of the inimitable Lorcan Dempsey, has been doing a lot of interesting work in creating web services for integrating metadata from the library world with larger applications. Their xISBN and LC Authority File projects in particular I find interesting. See
http://www.oclc.org/research/researchworks/default.htm if interested.

When are we going to be able to do a seach under your name and pull something up, Kevin? Do you have any ambitions along those lines?

Founder of OCLC, producer of WorldCat, Frederick Kilgour, died last week. The obituary was in the Times:

Frederick G. Kilgour, Innovative Librarian, Dies at 92

By MARGALIT FOX (NYT)
Published: August 2, 2006

Frederick G. Kilgour, a distinguished librarian who nearly 40 years ago transformed a consortium of Ohio libraries into what is now the largest library cooperative in the world, making the catalogs of thousands of libraries around the globe instantly accessible to far-flung patrons, died on Monday in Chapel Hill, N.C. He was 92.

The cause was a cerebral hemorrhage, said Bob Murphy, a spokesman for O.C.L.C. Online Computer Library Center, the nonprofit cooperative Mr. Kilgour founded in 1967.

At his death, Mr. Kilgour was a distinguished research professor emeritus at the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where he taught from 1990 until his retirement in 2004.

Mr. Kilgour's cooperative is known to librarians everywhere simply as O.C.L.C. (The initials originally stood for Ohio College Library Center; the name was changed in 1981.) Based in Dublin, Ohio, the cooperative oversees a vast computerized database that comprises the catalogs of some 10,000 libraries around the world -- more than a billion items -- available to anyone who walks into a participating library and logs on to a computer terminal.

Starting later this month, the database will be available to anyone with an Internet connection. Known as WorldCat (www.worldcat.org), it includes the catalogs of many of the finest libraries in the world, among them the New York Public Library, the Brooklyn Public Library and those of Harvard, Columbia and Yale. By entering a ZIP code, people will be able to identify nearby libraries that own copies of the books, videotapes, CD's and other materials they seek.

Although some WorldCat listings have been available in recent years through several search engines, among them Yahoo and Google, the new Web site will let people search the entire database directly.

Frederick Gridley Kilgour was born on Jan. 6, 1914, in Springfield, Mass. He earned a bachelor's degree in chemistry from Harvard in 1935 and afterward held several positions at the Harvard library. He also did graduate work in the history of science and published many scholarly papers on the subject.

During World War II, Mr. Kilgour was executive secretary and acting chairman of the Interdepartmental Committee for the Acquisition of Foreign Publications. Part of the Office of Strategic Services, the committee amassed a collection of publications that had been covertly microfilmed in enemy and enemy-occupied territories around the world.

A lieutenant in the United States Naval Reserve, Mr. Kilgour was awarded the Legion of Merit for his intelligence work. From 1946 to 1948, he was deputy director of the Office of Intelligence Collection and Dissemination at the State Department.

Leaving government service, Mr. Kilgour joined Yale University, eventually becoming its associate librarian for research and development. In 1955, as the librarian of the Yale School of Medicine, he helped the university acquire one of the world's most famous medical manuscripts, The Codex Paneth, an illuminated medical encyclopedia from the early 14th century.

In 1967, he was hired by the Ohio College Association to develop O.C.L.C., which pooled the catalogs of 54 academic libraries in the state. Introduced in 1971, O.C.L.C. was expanded to libraries outside Ohio in 1977. Mr. Kilgour was O.C.L.C.'s president and executive director from 1967 to 1980.

He is survived by his wife, the former Eleanor Margaret Beach, whom he married in 1940; three daughters, Marta Kilgour of the Bronx, Vajra Alison Kilgour of Manhattan and Meredith Kilgour Perdiew of North Edison, N.J.; two grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren.

Mr. Kilgour wrote ''The Evolution of the Book,'' published by Oxford University Press in 1998. According to a beta version of WorldCat made available to The New York Times yesterday, the book can be found at more than 500 libraries throughout the United States, from the Anchorage Municipal Library in Alaska to the Yakima Valley Community College Library in Washington State.

If it is more convenient, copies may also be borrowed from the Erasmus University Medical Library in the Netherlands; the National Library Board of Singapore; and the National and University Library of Iceland, among other places.

Discussing subjects such as WorldCat , OCLC , ISBN ,
LC Authority File projects will have GWB & Co. investigating all of you people . He does know about BOOKS.

Canuck, Worldcat is based on contributions from members. So if those libraries you mention are not included is because they aren't members.

Sorry, replying way too late (does anyone read these after they go off the first screen?!), but at least one of those I was thinking of is a member. Whether the fault lies with the OCLC/worldcat rep on campus or not, I don't know.

Passion of Joan of Arc is the best movie ever made, IMO. I'd love to read Dreyer's bio. Is it still in print?

Hehe! My Dad's dissertation is in it, too. But not easy to find, our family name is way too common...

Ok, there are only three libraries that have dad's work, but one is the Library if Congress. Nice.

this is so cool. I didn't find the book I was looking for, but thanks for the link.

and thanks to cliopatria as well.

NI is an a-hole..."Who Knew"!!