Tag Archives: worldcat

Many Paths to Sources: City Directories, Part 2

Research - General, ,

Last time we looked at major online locations where you might be able to find city directories. But what happens when that does not turn up a city directory for the location you are hoping to find one? There are a couple of extra steps I take before I declare “There was no city directory!”

The first stop for me is WorldCat. WorldCat stands for the “world’s catalog.” It is a conglomeration/consolidation/consortium (I’m not sure what the exact right word is here) of libraries who participate in sharing their collection’s catalog in this larger catalog, called WorldCat. It allows users to find books, journals, articles, and other media across many, many collections, making it much easier to locate a source you are looking for.

When you go to WorldCat, you treat it just like any other library catalog. You can type in a title or keywords in the search box and get results. The fun comes in what you can do with those results. Let’s look at some results for “bowling green ohio city directory.”

WorldCat Results for “bowling green ohio city directory”

You can see at the top of the results list that there are 94 items that come back for these key words. You can see along the left some filters you can use to narrow your results if you have more specific needs. Let’s take a look at a specific directory entry and click on the 1930 Bowling Green, Ohio, directory at the bottom.

Catalog Entry for an item from the list

This page is similar to a library catalog page you’ve likely seen before. You can see the title, publisher information, subjects, and so on. WorldCat then shows you all of the libraries you can find this item in. In this particular case, only one library (well, one that participates in WorldCat, remember) has this item in their collection. It is at the Ohio History Connection in Columbus. From where I live, it is 1100 miles away. When you find an item that is located in more than one collection, you’ll be treated with a list of several libraries where the item can be located.

WorldCat also has a nice feature in that you can designate your favorite libraries, and they will pop to the top of your list. Another item from our search list is Bowling Green (Ohio) city directories on microfilm. That catalog entry looks like this:

Another entry from WorldCat showing a favorited library

This item is located at the Family History Library in Salt Lake City. You can see the little heart on the left which indicates that it is one of my favorite libraries. If there are libraries you frequent, having them indicated as “favorites” brings those libraries to the top of your list and makes them easy to find. When I find items at my favorite libraries, I often add them to the research list for the next time I visit that facility.

Let’s refer back to number 1 in the first results screen above. It is for Bowling Green, Ohio city directory by Johnson Publishing Company. Here is the catalog entry:

WorldCat entry

You can see there are only two locations that have this particular series of directories in WorldCat, Bowling Green State University and SEO Automation Consortium. However, having been to the Wood County District Public Library myself, I know they have a whole bunch of city directories for Bowling Green. Let’s look at their catalog:

Wood County District Public Library Catalog

They have the Johnson city directories starting in 1975. Examining their other catalog entries reveals that they have a large number of directories, covering a wide range of years. They are not a participating library with WorldCat. In fact, their website has a Local History and Genealogy section detailing some of the resources they have that could be of use to genealogists.

WCDPL Website showing the Local History & Genealogy page

My point with this is, use WorldCat, but don’t stop there. Your next step, if you don’t find what you are looking for in WorldCat is to look at a local public library. Most often, I find these directories in those small, local libraries. Very often they have a local history and/or genealogy room. If you don’t find it in a catalog, give the library a call or send an email. I have found most of these repositories and their employees to be quite helpful. They are likely to be able to make copies or have a system for requesting copies. Or you might need to find a volunteer to help you or pay a local genealogists to look for you if you can’t make it yourself. Some items might be available via interlibrary loan.

Just don’t stop looking.

PERSI: Tips for Getting Copies of Articles

PERSI, , ,

You might notice, when you use PERSI, that once you find an article you want to read, there’s no link to view it. Can you imagine the task and resources needed to digitize, store, link, and do all of the other techno-shizzle-wizzle needed to house digital images of the over 8,000 titles in the collection that starts from publications in 1847 to today? That’s millions and millions of pages. So, remember, PERSI is an index. In our day of instant gratification, we want to be able to click and see the article. But that is not possible, here and now. You have to do some extra work to get the benefit of PERSI.

When you find an article you want here are some ways to try to obtain a copy. These are not in any particular order. It depends on the journal, the society, the library, etc. There’s no way to know ahead of time which one of these will work best for that journal.

  • Look up the journal title on WorldCat to locate a library that holds that journal. Then see if they have a copy/scan service to provide the article. Most do. Or you can try interlibrary loan to obtain a copy.
  • Look up the publishing society’s website. I have found several genealogical societies that have already digitized their own quarterlies and make them available on their website, often for free.
  • Hire a professional to make copies. You could hire someone that frequents Allen County Public Library, or someone that frequents a library you located using the WorldCat step above. I recommend the Association of Professional Genealogists’ Directory. This link will show you those that list Allen County Public Library under their repositories.
  • Contact ACPL directly. There is a form for ordering articles under the “Our Services” link found under “Explore Genealogy” on the ACPL homepage. No offense to anyone that works at ACPL, but that form indicates that it will take “6-8 weeks” and I’m an impatient genealogist, so I try any of the other steps before I will try this one. And I have never had to use this form. Something else invariably works, and works faster than 6-8 weeks.
  • If none of the above work (which I highly doubt, but anything is possible), then visit ACPL and find them yourself. (Highly Recommended!) The library is lovely (see below).
Allen County Public Library, photo by author, 2013

Those are my best tips on PERSI, on of genealogy’s most under utilized resources in my opinion. I hope you will use it more and learn how to use it more effectively with the tips in this series.