TIP OF THE WEEK – WORLDCAT

Suppose you just learned about a book on a subject or a family that you were researching, a book that you had not heard of before?  Wouldn’t it be great if there was a quick & easy way to find the library closest to you that had that book?!

Well, there is.  It’s called WorldCat and it’s the world’s largest library catalog, literally a global catalog of library collections.

On this website, https://www.worldcat.org/, you can enter the title or the author of the book to find a list of libraries that hold that book.  By entering your zip code, you can quickly determine whether a nearby library has that book.  Seattle Public Library, the King County Library System, the University of Washington libraries and the Fiske Genealogical Library are all participants in WorldCat.  (The SGS Library is not at this time because the costs have been deemed too great.)

If no nearby library has the book, you can still obtain information from a library that does have it, via interlibrary loan, or by requesting photocopies of relevant pages. WorldCat can also be used to search for all books on a given topic or subject, thereby discovering books that you didn’t know about before