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June 16, 2008
Where Can I Find Your Book?
WorldCat reports the location of libraries that hold books by specific authors. The only book that I have ever been associated with is Ras Shamra Parallels: the texts from Ugarit and the Hebrew Bible, volume II. I was one of the associate editors; Stan Rummel was the other. Loren Fisher edited it. So I typed my name in the online box and a fairly large number of Duane Smiths appeared. A few clicks later, the site told me that that book was in 299 libraries with the nearest one being at the Claremont School of Theology and the most distant being in the collection of the Wits-Wartenweiler Library in South Africa. It is true that Claremont School of Theology has the nearest more or less publicly available copy. The actual nearest copy is about ten feet from where I am typing this post.
I have no way of knowing the accuracy of the information provided by WorldCat. Many books are in well over one thousand libraries. The site says that 7,377 libraries hold Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. So 299 is not some kind of limit.
Update: At dinner, I was telling Shirley about this site when she informed me that she has been using it on and off for two or three years. We need to talk more I guess.
Via Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog
Posted by Duane Smith at June 16, 2008 4:35 PM | Read more on Odds and Ends |
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Comments
I went to the WorldCat site, typed in my name in the search box & got 29 hits. None had anything to do with me. How come there is no explanation on that page of what WorldCat is all about?
Posted by: Aydin at June 17, 2008 10:50 AM
Yeah, that interface has much to be desired. Shirley told me about a better gateway. Using that gateway and by misspelling your name (Orstan rather than Örstan) I found that A Orstan; M Z Yildirim; S Ceylan; T A Pearce; F Welter-Schultes, A new species of Idyla (Pulmonata: Clausiliidae) from Aydin Mountains, Turkey and the associated land snail fauna was held by 134 libraries. The copy nearest to me is at the University of California, Riverside, literary, some 19 miles away but I could also get one at the Transvaal Mus Library in Pretoria, South Africa should I ever be in the neighborhood and need to reference it.
Posted by: Duane at June 17, 2008 3:29 PM
You don't need to go to Riverside or to South Africa to get it. It's available
here.
Posted by: Aydin at June 19, 2008 11:22 AM
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