LIBRARY CATALOGS ON THE WORLD WIDE WEB

More and more libraries are making their online catalogs available on the World Wide Web. These catalogs include citations to the holdings (mostly books, but other materials, such as non-print media or periodical titles are often included as well) of individual libraries or groups of libraries. Most web library catalogs allow combining search terms. Remember, however, that when searching for books on a topic, you should usually keep your searches broader (often just one or two concepts) than when searching for articles in a periodical database or when searching for web pages using a general web search engine.

The following are examples of library catalogs available on the World Wide Web:

• PLS WebPAC (http://plsinfo.org/plsclient.html)
• San Francisco State University catalog ("InvestiGator") (http://opac.sfsu.edu)
• Melvyl (University of California system-wide catalog) (http://www.melvyl.ucop.edu/)
• Library of Congress catalog (http://lcweb.loc.gov/catalog/)

There are thousands of library catalogs now available on the World Wide Web. To find catalogs for libraries around the world, you can use a directory to look up libraries by location, library type, name or other information. Two of the most extensive directories of library catalogs on the Web are:

• LibWeb (http://sunsite.Berkeley.EDU/Libweb/)
• WebCats (http://www.lights.com/webcats/)

Just like the search engines for other web databases, each library catalog provides different search features and it is important to review the search instruction pages before searching any catalog.

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These materials are copyrighted but may be used for educational purposes if you inform and credit the author and cite the source as: LSCI 105 Online Research. All commercial rights are reserved. To contact the author, send comments or suggestions to: Eric Brenner at brenner@smcccd.cc.ca.us