We’ve written before about the money-saving goodness called your local public library, but a lot of readers may not know about a powerful online search tool, WorldCat, that lets you search the holdings of 57,000 libraries in over 100 countries. Even better: “Tell it what book you’re looking for and your zip code or city, and it will pinpoint the nearest library that has the book.”

You can perform searches on the home page of the official site, or append “worldcat” to a book search in Google or Yahoo. There’s also several toolbar extensions you can use if you like that sort of thing. WorldCat results link directly to your nearby library’s online public access catalog, to save you more time. It also lets you search magazines and journals, and audio and video formats.

“WorldCat” [Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools]

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WorldCat.org
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