Library Garden

Free, Quality, Full-Text Articles, Books, & More–You Know That’s What You Want!

August 8, 2006 at 5:26 pm Robert J. Lackie 3 comments

OK, as you may have noticed, Library Gardeners, I have been in a serious blogging mood today, and I just can’t wait to share about this:

I have been demonstrating how to locate books in libraries via the “Find in a Library” WorldCatLibraries links within Yahoo! and Google for some time now, but only a small percentage of the items available via WorldCat were available in the two search engines. I signed up for their email update a week ago, and WorldCat has just announced today that their new worldcat.org beta site is now available–I am thrilled, since WorldCat seems to be one of the largest library networks out there:

“This site—and a downloadable WorldCat search box you can easily add to your Web site—opens the complete WorldCat database to the public, not just the smaller data subsets utilized by Open WorldCat partner sites such as Google, Yahoo! Search and others. WorldCat.org builds on the success of OCLC’s Open WorldCat Program that has elevated the visibility of library materials on the open Web since the summer of 2003.” (box on left courtesy of WorldCat.org)

What I really liked about this site, besides being able to find many more items in libraries, is that you can search for any item in any library near you, now using keyword searches (i.e., you can enter a title, subject or person). You can also now refine your search (box on left of screen) by author, content, format, language, and year. I am sure that there will be some kinks in it right away, as it is a very new beta site, but I am happy with the direction it is going in now. I look forward to reviews about it after it gets “used a lot” but for now, I like it (and everyone can give them feedback using the link in the top right-hand corner of the results pages).

By the way, if you do like “finding tools” and sites like this, you might also like to browse my “The Changing Face of the Scholarly Web: Finding Free, Quality, Full-Text Articles, Books, and More!,” published this July/August 2006 in MultiMedia & Internet@Schools magazine. The article is freely available on the Web via their magazine’s main site (which I visit often for its very relevant K-12 library info) and in many of the EBSCO databases now. I do hope you enjoy it and find it useful! And since I was limited to less than 3000 words for the article, here is another site of mine, “WOW!–Full Text AND Free?!!: An Internet Hotlist on Finding Free Full Text Articles and Books” (I used this site to write the article) that lists these and other quality, full-text finding tools, especially with some more of my favorite Open Access (OA) sites. Feel free, please, to share and comment!

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