WorldCat

A lot of times people are doing research on their own families or crimes that are happening in their families.

Did you plug in Silas's name into worldcat.org, and that's how you found out that there were some files at the National Archive in California, or how did you figure that out?

No, uh, I didn't do that.

I often do that, uh, when I am researching, but it, it didn't turn up anything in this case.

There are plenty of gaps.

My, my first thing would be to go into WorldCat and look at a subject and see how many books or papers have been written about it, and don't do that topic.

Aha.

Uh, I, I get so tired of the same topics over and over and over.

We do not have internal documents such as blueprints, ledgers, correspondence, and the rest.

He also checked with WorldCat, the Global Library Index.

No blueprints there either.

Just a secondary report about the building that was already there.

I know this because I have cross-checked the online catalog.

I know it's being circulated, but when I go to WorldCat, it pulls up three libraries.

It's not 100% effective, but if you need to know, that's one way you can check and see how many libraries are carrying your title.

So,

And so as a result, it's, This is a long way to say that I don't think we have something quite comparable to the 24 theses, partly because it's just there hasn't been someone to write them.

Yeah, Father Charles, I'm just hearing you say that reminded me of another remark that my Dominican teacher, Father Augustine Thompson, who wrote a biography of St. Francis, mentioned that at the beginning of doing his research for it, He went to WorldCat, I think, in 2005 when he was starting off, and then he just entered St. Francis biography into the search function of WorldCat and out popped up for the previous 10 years like 220 or 230 biographies of Francis.

And if they weren't just like reprints or reworkings of what we know from Bonaventure, They were like St. Francis and nature mysticism or St. Francis and the donkey, a saint for your children.

It's all of these different appropriations of St. Francis for concerns that are really only of the 20th century.

And so that system is now online and is accessible to the public.

It is called WorldCat.

But this system predates the Internet.

So in certain ways, libraries were doing this, were doing this kind of information sharing before this network of networks, before the web took place.

And I think that, you know, if we kind of think about the ways that libraries can communicate and cooperate together to create systems like the one that enables us to see the holdings of many, many libraries, WorldCat's a little bit of a misnomer because it is like largely libraries in the US, although it's gotten a lot better.

Uh, but yeah, to just have these systems that are much more cooperative, that are much more, um, open in terms of resource, resource sharing because that is the other thing that libraries do is resource sharing.

Like if my public library can't have it, then maybe a public library down the road can have it.