I was helping a friend track down some Public Domain books for what at first appeared to be an elusive niche (for Public Domain stuff anyway) when I asked her if she had been to WorldCat yet to start compiling a list of relevant Public Domain suspects.

She kind of gave me a puzzled look and said, “World what? ”

I said, “You know WorldCat – we’ve discussed on the Public Domain Treasure Hunter blog before.”

To which she replied, “Logan, you’ve never mentioned WorldCat before in and I should know, I pay very close attention to everything you guys say”.

Of course, I just couldn’t believe this could be true so I went back and looked myself – I looked through everything we had ever presented here on the site, and sure enough, not a single mention of this great tool that I personally use almost everyday!

Ok, so here it is – if you already use this you know how effective it is at leading you to potential Public Domain gold. If you’ve never heard of it before then you are about to add an incredible new research tool to your arsenal that can literally reveal to you a wealth of knowledge very quickly and put you on the path to getting all the Public Domain material that you may ever need to generate unlimited content for your niche.

In a nutshell, WorldCat is a searchable database that tracks the inventories of libraries around the world. Several years ago, you could only access WorldCat from participating libraries but now WorldCat is available to the general public free of charge through WorldCat.org.

What makes this thing so powerful (and advantageous for us as Public Domain Treasure Hunters) is that you can search the inventories of thousands of libraries all at once which can provide you with a goldmine of useful information as well as lead you to tons of potential Public Domain books in your niche that you may not have even known existed.

When I’m hunting for Public Domain material to conquer a new niche, WorldCat is one of my essential research sites. It’s especially good for finding more recent public domain material from the 1923-1963 range (U.S. published) but you can also use it locate potential Public Domain material from just about any date range, from almost anywhere in the world.

Even if you have nothing to start with but a handful of relevant keywords for your niche market, WorldCat can reveal tons of potential Public Domain books and authors that you probably had no clue about (no one can know everything!).

I’m telling you, 30 minutes digging around inside WorldCat can literally fuel your content production for years so it’s worth taking the time to get to know how this thing works (it’s dirt simple, I promise).

A warning though – if you’re in to this stuff as much as Deb and I are, this tool can be very addictive – you’ll find more leads than you know what to with! Farther and farther down the rabbit hole you’ll go until next thing you know several hours have passed – but I promise, it’s fruitful time well spent as long as you stay on task.

Here’s a bit about WorldCat from the site itself…

What is WorldCat?

“WorldCat is the world’s largest network of library content and services. WorldCat libraries are dedicated to providing access to their resources on the Web, where most people start their search for information.”

What am I searching?

“WorldCat.org lets you search the collections of libraries in your community and thousands more around the world. WorldCat grows every day thanks to the efforts of librarians and other information professionals.”

WorldCat.org lets you:

• Search many libraries at once for an item and then locate it in a library nearby
• Find books, music, and videos to check out
• Find research articles and digital items (like audiobooks) that can be directly viewed or downloaded
• Link to “Ask a Librarian” and other services at your library
• Post your review of an item, or contribute factual information about it

Ok, so let me give you a quick private tour and give you the basics of how to use this to locate fresh Public Domain material for your niche fast…

First off, the WorldCat database can be accessed online at WorldCat.org

Feel free to poke (with all due respect to our friend Steven Poke) around, create an account, and read more about the site (there’s even a WorldCat blog and a community built around this thing) but when I’m ready to buckle down (or as we say in the South, “hunker down”) and get some serious research done I hit the Advanced Search tool (see image below) at…

http://www.worldcat.org/advancedsearch

Let’s say you know what niche you want to work in and you’re ready to go find some relevant Public Domain books to draw your content from. Maybe, you’ve already exhausted all of the known online Public Domain repositories and you still need more content (really, you can never have enough) or you’re like me and you’d rather have the more modern stuff that hasn’t made it online yet (and you don’t mind paying to have a book scanned).

With WorldCat’s Advanced Search tool, you have all sorts of ways in which you can conduct you searches but I’ve marked up the most important fields in red in the image above.

I usually search using keywords and I limit the publication date range to 1923-1963.

Today, I’m looking for content related to “horseback riding” so I’ll enter my most obvious keywords, set my publication date range, and then click on the appropriately titled “Search” button.

Using the keywords “horseback riding” gets me 451 results for publications before 1964.

That’s a lot of stuff! At this point I usually have my text editor open (or a spreadsheet depending on how deep I’m planning to go) because I need to be able to capture information on the fly.

For the purposes of this tutorial, we’ll just look at the top 5 results…

Every one of these books is potentially in the Public Domain because of the years they were published in and of course because they were published in the United States.

A book’s inclusion in this list does not guarantee Public Domain status and proper copyright research must be conducted first but I’ll tell you this – you will find the vast majority of these books to be in the Public Domain simply due to the fact that their copyright protections were not renewed 28 years after publication.

I’m loving these results because obviously I have a ton of potential Public Domain books to choose from. I can tell from the titles in this list that they’d be perfect content for this niche. My product is half-way done!

I start copying and pasting titles, author names, relevant publishing info, etc. paying extra special attention to the stuff I’m really interested in (at this point you can only gauge something by it’s title).

Anyway, let’s delve a little deeper into the actual title listings. Clicking on a book’s title link will supply you with more info as shown in the image below. Here you have all of the info you need to do some quick copyright research. Sometimes, you’ll find a cover image of the book on file if one is available.

Scrolling just a bit further down the page reveals some more interesting things…

First is the “Library” tab. If you enter your location in the location box shown below WorldCat will show you the closest libraries to your vicinity that hold this particular book in their inventories. In the example below, I found 2 libraries pretty darn close to me that have this exact book. If I wanted, I could jump in the car and go check out the book in person (I hardly ever actually do that by the way and I definitely wouldn’t do it unless I was sure the book is in the Public Domain).

Of course the above information doesn’t help you much if you live in Australia and the book you are looking at is 9000 miles away but…if you live in the U.S. this info may be helpful especially if you find that the library that has the book isn’t that far away.

Another alternative is to request the book be transferred to your local library through the Intralibrary Loan System (consult with your local library for more info on this). I don’t generally pursue that route because I’m too impatient – it takes way too long (in my opinion) to get books this way but it’s a great way to get the book in your hands for free.

Instead I usually take what I learn here, and then if I find that I definitely want the book, I’ll track it down and order it through one of my favorite online used book portals.

If you live outside of the States, this would definitely be the method I would sugggest.

Clicking on the “Details” tab will give you some more good info.

In this case as shown in the image below, I can get a page count for the book and I also find out that this is actually a 2nd edition – the first edition was published in 1948, under the title, “Riding Simplified”.

This is really useful information to know when conducting my copyright research. (Incidentally, later research did reveal that this particular edition of the book published in 1963 was renewed for copyright protection in 1991, however the 1948 first edition was not renewed and is therefore in the Public Domain.)

Clicking on the Author’s name in the image above brings you deeper into WorldCat, revealing a goldmine of info…

Because I’m interested in developing products for this niche market (horseback riding), I want to develop a detailed list of potential Public Domain books and authors in this niche so I’m recording a lot of information as I go for closer study later.

You can tell by the publication timeline above that this author wrote quite a bit (not necessarily exclusively regarding horseback riding but still…).

Scrolling further down the page reveals more related books by the same author.

Bingo – jackpot! And this is just one author! She wrote a lot of books regarding horses and riding. You’ll notice that not all of them were published in the timeframe we need for potential Public Domain status (1923-1963) and we still haven’t verfied the copyright status of any of them but still we have some strong candidates here.

One thing you’ll find with authors – in general, an author was either really diligent about renewing copyrights or they weren’t. In other words, when you find an author that let the copyright protection lapse on one of their books, many times you’ll  find that they were lax in renewing the copyrights on any other books they have written as well. So, this could be good news for me if I find that she was one of those authors that never bothered to renew – I could have a bunch of great content from the same author!

Another interesting thing on this page is you scroll down further is this section…

Here, WorldCat gives you more leads for your research by reporting “Related Entities” (WorldCat always refers to authors as “entities”). Basically, this list gives you more leads to check out which will lead to more authors, which leads to more potential Public Domain books, which leads to more “related entities”, which leads to more great content (remember that “rabbit hole” scenario I described earlier?).

And this was just one book we’re looking at here – I’ve still got 450 more to check out!

If you can’t use this tool to quickly locate Public Domain material for your niche, you may want to consider a different line of work - Public Domain publishing may not be for you ; )

I found a copy of the exact book that we were looking at on Abebooks in pristine condition for $18.00. They had far less expensive copies but this one is in tremendously good shape…

Abebooks is always my “go to” source for used books. I always start there first and then explore others if I can’t find what I need. 90% of the time, I don’t have to go anywhere else.

Now, I wouldn’t bother ordering this second edition because, as I noted earlier, this second edition is NOT in the Public Domain. However, the first edition is and…I just found a copy on AbeBooks for $4.00!

Spend some time checking out WorldCat and you’ll discover that it’s an incredibly powerful tool for Public Domain research.

There are several media formats that you can search for but one point of interest I wanted to show you is the fact that you can easily limit your searches to just magazines. This makes WorldCat a fantastic tool for discovering new Public Domain magazines related to your niche that you may never have known about otherwise…

That, in essence is how I use WorldCat.

I love it, use it all the time, and would hate to be without it.

Let me know if you have any questions by replying to this post.

About The Author:

Logan Andrew is an online entrepreneur, information publisher, and author that has been using Public Domain material to create profitable products and businesses since 2001. He is also co-author of "The Public Domain Treasure Hunter's Survival Kit" available here. For more info Logan, click here.

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