I ran into a fabulous internet tool the other day. It’s called WorldCat, short for World Catalog, and is a means of searching for, and browsing, the holdings of all participating libraries. Your “hit” can be sorted into actual, physical libraries — by distance from a zip code you provide!

You can search for example for Mystery: Montana as I did, and get an enormous list of such books — by library!

Even better, each find (book) has several tags. My search turned up 256 hits. One was “Bitterroot” by James Lee Burke. It had tags for “Montana — Fiction,” of course, but also for “Private Investigators – Montana – Fiction,” and, surprise! “Vietnam War – Veterans – Fiction.” Off I go! And in every case, instead of being invited to buy the book, you can find a library near you holding it.

There are of course caveats, and rules.

For example: Can I check something out?

“It depends on whether you have an active membership with a library that owns the item, and whether that library’s Web site permits remote checkout of an item. WorldCat.org lets you find an item of interest and then locate a library near you that owns it. Usually you will link directly to the item record on the library’s Web site. The actions available to you on that page will vary from one library to another. You may be able to join a waiting list, reserve the item, check it out or even have it shipped or delivered.”

Besides good old paper and ink books there is much else.

“You can search for popular books, music CDs and videos—all of the physical items you’re used to getting from libraries. You can also discover many new kinds of digital content, such as downloadable audiobooks. You may also find article citations with links to their full text; authoritative research materials, such as documents and photos of local or historic significance; and digital versions of rare items that aren’t available to the public. Because WorldCat libraries serve diverse communities in dozens of countries, resources are available in many languages.”

But don’t hang around here! Check it out at http://worldcat.org/default.jsp