Worldcat

I'm not sure how much you all use the library and/or all the features on Google, but I found a pretty neat and useful feature today. Tomorrow I'm going to a book club. The book we're reading, Wendell Berry's What are People For? (featured in the screen shot above) is the book we're reading/discussing. Not really wanting to buy the book, and not too confident that Barnes and Noble would have it, I decided to look for an alternative. After checking the KC Public Library catalog online (all their copies were checked out probably from people from the book club)I thought I'd just search the "Books" section of Google.

Of course they have all the places you can buy the book listed on the side, but if you look a little further down you can click on a library search. What this does is hook you up with Worldcat, which is an online catalog that gives you the search power to look in the catalogs of just about every library in the world. This allowed me to find the book I was looking for in the Grandview Mid-Continent Public Library, which I'd have overlooked if I had just simply gone to the KC Public Library site.

Something else I think Google does is allow you to search and read online books that are...I guess public domain (not sure what they call it for books) so you don't have to buy or even go to the library for those books. Couple all this with the standard interlibrary loan capabilities of most libraries and you've got the information world literally at your finger tips. Who needs to go to college when you can get an education with the click of a mouse?

Power to the People!