a million years a go (1999?) M25 came along with a union search for most academic libraries in my part of the world. which was good, especially when looking for something obscure.

At the time, I thought it was only a mater of counting to ten before a union catalogue of all uk libraries would turn up. Where is it? I want one.

In the mean time we have a number of other options which can help for looking for odd stuff that only one or two places might have.

First there’s redlightgreen.com, though once you have found the book you are looking for, you can only select one library to see if it has the book (typing in a post code and seeing what’s near by would be far more useful).

There’s worldcat from OCLC. I’m sure there must be a good reason but I can’t find a normal search screen for this, you seem to be required to install a plugin, which itself uses google or yahoo, to sarch it. But once on the site a search box appears at the top. I’ve linked to a record for a random book which has the search box at the top.