Thing 12, part two: WorldCat

I was introduced to WorldCat by a library science classmate who works for Palinet in Philadelphia and have used it to see how other libraries catalog their non-fiction Graphic Novels. Currently, the Library of Congress and Dewey Decimal Cataloging book recommend that all graphic novels go in the 741.5's, where we put items related to drawing. I'm really unhappy with this suggestion, as it puts Graphic Novels with serious content (like Art Spiegelman's Maus, which deals with the Holocaust) in the same section as Garfield.

When browsing WorldCat today, I looked up Joe Sacco's Safe Area Gorazde, which is a richly detailed look at the civil war in former Yugoslavia, based on the first hand accounts of the people Sacco met during his two years in the small city of Gorazde. I was happy to see that not only was OCL's copy listed on WorldCat, but that the library of Ocean County College also had a copy, as well as the libraries of Burlington and Monmouth county. Only a few of the libraries were willing to loan out their copies, however. These were the only libraries that let me see the call number of the book, and I was thrilled to see that most of these libraries had this item cataloged in history--the 949's.

I liked looking at the details provided under the other tabs, especially how I was invited to "be the first person to add notes for this item". The possibility of adding this to my "Del.icio.us" social bookmarks was also handy. However, I'm unlikely to use WorldCat to fill out those ILL forms (and trust me, we fill out plenty of those forms here in Lacey). Although WorldCat gives me the title, author and ISBN number, finding the price of the item takes at least one more "click", wheras Amazon.com gives me the same information AND includes the price of the item, all on the same page.