What has 1.3 billion holdings from 69,000 libraries in 112 countries in 470 languages?  OCLC’s WorldCat is the world’s largest virtual library.  Three dozen national libraries are now adding digital images, national files and bibliographies to WorldCat. 

In the next year, there will be over 325 million holdings from non-U.S. national libraries from all over the world.  Google Scholar is nowhere near as deep although some may argue that it will be!

There are over 110 million different bibliographic records in its catalog. The advent of this product has made resource sharing obviously more transparent.  However, it also is providing something else.  The walls of libraries have been kicked down and the prior response to patrons that “we can’t get that for you” is practically meaningless.