"Make Your Genealogy Roar with WorldCat."
(The Billion Book Library)
by Irene Walters
Come to the BAGS meeting on September 29th and find out when Clayton Library’s resident database queen, Irene Walters describes how to "Make Your Genealogy Roar with WorldCat."
"Who has a copy of that small town newspaper that talks about great-grandpa's gold medal in butter making, or the obituary for great-great grandma that finally tells you her maiden name?" Where in the world is a copy of one of the four books by the author you are named after? Or even "I found this index at Clayton, but I can't seem to find the book it indexes on the shelf, can I get the book on Interlibrary Loan?" These and many more questions can be answered by using WorldCat. What is WorldCat you ask? Let's break it down. Hmmm, "Cat?," libraries have things called catalogs and "World?," maybe "around the world"? So is it maybe library catalogs from around the world?
WorldCat is the world's largest bibliographic database, built and maintained collectively by libraries that participate in the Online Computer Library Center is (OCLC) global cooperative. Created in 1971, WorldCat catalogs the content of more than 50,000 libraries in 90-plus countries. As of April 2006, it contains more than 63 million records referencing physical and digital items in more than 360 languages. WorldCat itself is not directly purchased by libraries, but serves as the foundation for many other fee-based OCLC services (such as resource sharing and collection management
Irene Walters was born and raised in rural New York. She has a Master of Library Science degree from the State University of New York (S.U.N.Y.) at Buffalo. She has been a librarian at the Houston Public Library's Clayton Library for Genealogical Research since 1997. Her interest in genealogy extends back to her years as a teenager, and encompasses much onsite research within New York State's courthouses, town clerk's offices, historical societies, churches, libraries and archives. Her personal genealogical research is concentrated in New York State, France and Ireland.