Using WorldCat Lists for the big picture

by Emily Barney

WorldCat.org is an excellent tool to use if you would like to link to many sources housed in libraries around the world. To share these sources with other people, you can create a login and start making lists. You can make private lists, too, but public lists could be a great way to acquaint your local users with materials they could get using interlibrary loan if you can't afford to keep them in your collection.

Worldcat itself can sometimes be used for interlibrary loan - if your library is set up to do this, all the better reason to use these lists. You can annotate your list using the "details" tab or export citations in multiple formats by using the "citation" tab. We've created several lists for this project that you may have seen linked to in other posts, but here's the home page for them:

http://www.worldcat.org/profiles/GothamFreeLibrary/lists

I think it's pretty intuitive and fun to play with, but here's a little description if you don' t have time to play with it to figure it out:

You have to log in to add books to the lists or to make new lists. You can't comment on another person's list - it isn't a terribly "social" tool yet. It can also be hard to tell if you've already added a book when you work on adding new ones, but it still has some great features.

In the details view (the automatic tab) you can add notes about each book. The problem is, especially with long lists, you can only see 10 books at a time and it's hard to get to the end of the list.

In the "citation view" (the second tab) you can view a list of all the books in the list. You can sort the list several different ways, and you can choose between five different citation styles.

There are extra options only the person who makes the list can use:

You can write a short description paragraph that will show above the list, send the list to a group of people with a link to view it (how nice to use for a reading group or class!), or export the data. The Export data comes as a "CSV" file, which you can open as a table using most spreadsheet programs like Excel. And they have a handy print version too, that opens in a new window and will show all the books.