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How do I find online books available to me through the UW Libraries? | Time - 01:35 | Transcript | Play Video

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UW Catalog

 This provides access to materials owned by and held at the University of Washington Libraries. If you want a book right away, this is your best choice. It indexes books, journals, and media, but not articles.

UW Worldcat [UW restricted]

This interface was developed by OCLC Worldcat, a database of catalog records from most U.S. libraries, many European libraries, Far Eastern libraries and an increasing number of libraries in the rest of the world.  UW Worldcat is different from OCLC Worldcat in that some Google searching functionality is added.  This functionality makes titles owned by the University of Washington display first on the hit list, followed by holdings from Summit, a consortium of libraries inWashington and Oregon.  Books borrowed from Summit libraries usually arrive within three days.  Holdings by all other libraries come last and inter-library loan generally takes about ten days.

Google Books

See the box in the right column to search.

Google has partnered with several large academic libraries to help them digitize, if not all, certainly large portions of their collections, and make the digitizations available and searchable online.  Google has also made efforts to work with publishers to put their materials online.  Many books have been scanned and are available in full text.  Google Books provides the best searching mechanism for finding information withint these books.  However, due to unresolved copyright issues, unless a reader is from one of the libraries whose book was scanned, it may be possible to see only a portion of the scan, for example, perhaps 10 pages of the books.  As time passes, this issue may be resolved.

Center for Research Libraries

The Center for Research Libraries is the equivalent to libraries of the Federal Research bank to banks.  The Center acquires materials that are too expensive for a single library to buy, houses little used materials, and collects foreign dissertations.  To limit a search to their dissertations, see:

Center for Research Libraries--Foreign Dissertations