In about two minutes, you can learn how to make a WorldCat.org profile, create and add items to lists, generate citations, and use facets to narrow your search criteria.
It’s a quick way to introduce yourself to the basics of searching the world’s largest collection of information about materials in libraries.
Not just a search engine—a library learning experience
There’s a lot of information online. Some of it good and some, not so good. Libraries, though, have already put together lots of trustworthy, useful, and even one-of-a-kind materials. WorldCat.org helps you find exactly what you need from thousands of libraries around the world: books, ebooks, audio books, videos, databases, research materials and data, maps, records, archives, digitized documents, scans of rare works, photos of local historical significance, musical scores, genealogical records, and much more. As you search, you’ll get options to refine results and details about the materials you find. WorldCat.org is just the starting point—libraries are your destination. We’ll connect you to a library—maybe one that’s close by, maybe one across the globe—that has what you’re looking for.
Everybody loves lists
Maybe you’ll use WorldCat.org for research and keeping lists of materials is an important part of that process. Or you might use lists for books you want to read or have read, books you want to recommend, syllabus items for a class you’re teaching, or just for fun.
To get started, create a WorldCat.org profile (learn how tocreate a WorldCat.org account). Once that’s done, you can create new lists (learn how tocreate and share lists on WorldCat.org) and add any item that pops up in a search result to that list. Click “Add” in the upper-right corner of any search result. You can see lists in action in theplanetary term paper walk-through for more details.
Generating citations is a huge timesaver
A citation is how you tell readers that you are referring to material from another source. It helps people find that information if they want it and gives them data about the source, including title and author. Professors, teachers, and publications often require citations in specific formats, and WorldCat.org can automatically output them in APA, Chicago, Harvard, MLA, and Turabian formats.
You can create a single “instant citation” from any item details page. Just select the citation button (the quotation mark image), choose the format you want, and copy the citation text. You can also generate and copy citations for up to 25 items in a list.
Find more, dig deeper
Many times, WorldCat.org’s basic search functions will take you where you want to go. But if you want to find materials of a particular type, language, or publication date, additional search features can be your guide.
For example, you’ll notice a panel along the left-hand side with sections to explore. Those are “search facets” that let you refine your search results. Click the top one, “Open Access,” and all your results will be materials you can get to without a subscription or a log-in. Under that, there are facets for format (print books, ebooks, maps, music, and many more), author, audience (juvenile and non-juvenile), content (fiction, nonfiction), year, language, and topic. Facets can be handy when trying to narrow down results of a search that brings back a long list of materials.
You can start an advanced search by clicking on the “advanced search” button next to the search box. Using the advanced search is like preloading a lot of the options you can check off in the facets after doing a search. You can also choose to search using terms more familiar to people who work in publishing, research, and libraries (ISBN, ISSN, accession number). We’ve highlighted some of the features of advanced searching in a special subject section where we look at how one person used WorldCat.org to explore theirinterest in genealogy.
Thank you for visiting
We’re so glad you’ve started your search with libraries. You’ll be amazed at what you find.