Lesson 8 WorldCat

It was interesting to learn as I was reading the introduction to WorldCat that librarians use this to find call numbers for books they are adding to their collections.  Our high school librarian does all the purchasing and processing of books and I have wondered how she knew what call number to put on a book.

1.  The ways you can search are much like our school online library catalog.  We are learning about the blue whale in kindergarten reading so I chose to search blue whale by keyword.  I was delighted to see the great list of books both fiction and nonfiction with the keyword blue whale. First book to come up is one that I wish we had in our elementary library titled "Rainbow Fish and the Big Blue Whale".  I wish we were able to download this book and I were able to show it with a LCD.  This allows a person to find books on certain topics, see the summary and make a decision if it is a book to be ordered for your school.  There were 3011 items available on this topic with 519 of them being sound for example.

I looked at books with sound and at the RiverShare Library I came upon "Sock Drawer: Singalong".  Really, could you find anything cuter.  Will definitely look into this one!!

2.  I chose title phrase, used the limiter books and chose juvenile.  I searched for clouds as that is another topic that my kindergarten students are interested in.  The program came up with 119 books with 110 of them being in English. . 1136 libraries worldwide have the number one book, "The Bill Martin Jr. Big Book of Poetry". The Brookings Public Library is the top library on the list.

3.  On clicking on the above book, "The Bill Martin Jr. Big Book of Poetry" I find that the call number is 808.  I find that Bill Martin has a total of 24 accomplishments including 12 books.  I also found that there are braille books available on the topic of clouds.  Amazing what different types of information are available!