Introduction
One of the more indispensable tools for writing any dissertation (masters or PhD) is the bibliography software, which I wrote about in a previous post.
The bibliography software ensures that EVERY piece of your bibliographic sources is perfectly captured and organized for use in your work. This is not to mention the ability to sort, tag, search and capture notes in any number of extremely flexible ways for each record.
Saving the World Cat Link
In the short video at the end of this post, I take you through the task of cataloguing just one simple detail for your bibliographic records: the World Cat link.
As you know, World Cat is a catalog of 72,000 libraries worldwide containing more than 300 million records. There are number of ways I use World Cat:
1) Whenever I need to add a bibliographic source to my records, I track down the title in World Cat, I make sure I have the right version / year, then I use a handy extension in Chrome that automatically saves the information into Zotero.
2) Once you find a book in the catalog, you can type in a zip code in the “Find a Copy in the Library” section of World Cat. World Cat will then list the libraries closest to your zip code where you can find this volume. You can click on those links and go straight to each of these libraries’ catalogs to ensure the book you are looking for is not checked out.
3) If you access World Cat through a school library’s proxy, you can access the inter-library loan ability in World Cat. If you find a book in a Texas library and you live in Vermont, you can have the book shipped to a library near you for pick up and use (free of charge).
There are many more possibilities. For this reason, I found it useful to save the World Cat link to any book that I catalog in my bibliography software. The video below explains this process:
Happy researching:
