calimac

So long as data remains in print form - and despite various Google projects, that's going to be a long time, especially if you want access to the whole book - online library catalogs have been a godsend, because they tell you what the library has before you go there, and help you choose which library to visit. (That's beside the virtues of interlibrary loan - sometimes I just want to go somewhere and look things up.) And union catalogs, listing multiple libraries in one place, are even better. As a Californian whose needs are mostly academic, I use Melvyl (UC system) and Link+ (just about everybody else) a lot; between them they cover all the academic libraries in my reach except Stanford.

But up till now, if I wanted to use the biggest of them all, the bibliographic utility OCLC, which includes thousands of libraries (including, and indeed especially, public and special libraries) worldwide, I had to use a terminal at work. But a beta version of OCLC's public access catalog, WorldCat, is now on free access on the web.

Unfortunately it is, for now, very very beta: much more primitive in its search and display features than any other online library catalog I've seen. Search is bad enough: there is only one crude keyword search box for author or title or subject; specification of additional searches is offered with search results, but it's a results-generated guess list, not an authority list to specify, say, one person out of many with overlapping names; phrase searching can be done within quote marks, but it doesn't tell you that, and there is no guidance on tricky points. (Entering a person in phrase search in direct order or inverted will get a different set of results, depending on where the name is found in the record.)

Display is worse: there appears to be no way to put the results in a desired order, and worst of all there is, despite a "details" screen, no way to see the full bibliographic record. (The 245c, 300, and 5xx tags except for 505 in particular are all undisplayed.) That means, among other things, that there's no info in the record showing what the various names displayed have to do with the book: who is author, editor, illustrator, etc. - a replication of the most frustrating feature about Amazon.

However, the holdings screen, telling you which libraries have the book, is wonderfully clear, far more informative than any version of OCLC I've ever seen, and clicking on a library's entry for a book will get you the record in its online catalog, which will show you the missing info, as well as that library's call number, holdings status, etc.

So the info can be dug out, though especially in searching one may need to do a lot of wading. All that's really needed is a tweak of the user interface - but there's lots of ways online catalogs could be improved with such tweaks. And there will always be tricks of searching the catalog that librarians can help you with: they weren't invented with online searching, but many were just as applicable to the card catalog.

In the meantime, WorldCat is the gold mine, if very far from the gold standard, of online library catalogs. Use in good health.