Bibliographic database

A bibliographic or library database is a database of bibliographic information. It may be a database containing information about books and other materials held in a library (e.g. an online library catalog, or OPAC) or, as the term is more often used, an electronic index to journal or magazine articles, containing citations, abstracts--and often either the full text of the articles indexed, or links to the full text. Many scientific databases are bibliographic databases, but some are not. Within Chemical Abstracts, for example, there are databases of chemical structures, within Entrez there are databases of sequences. Outside of science, the same holds: there are databases of citations to articles in art history journals, and there are databases of images, such as ARTstor.

Some notable databases are discussed briefly below. For a list of bibliographic databases by subject, see Academic databases and search engines.

Library book databases
These databases are intended to be employed by college and university students to identify and locate books for class work and research. The books are then usually obtained through the catalog of the specific library, or via Interlibrary loan.

OCLC
This very widely used database, known as WorldCat has input from almost all US academic and large public libraries, and from many in other countries. It is available to libraries that subscribe to the service.

A somewhat less powerful free version is now available, called simply Worldcat.org. In a version known as Open WorldCat, it can be integrated into web browsers.

Specific Libraries
The catalogs of the largest libraries, especially the major national libraries,  can be used for general purpose bibliographic searching; they can be assumed to include all significant titles, and information then used to search more specific library catalogs. The catalogs of individual libraries can be used for finding books in those particular libraries.

BL
The very large database of the British Library

LC
The very large database of the Library of Congress

Online general-interest book databases
Some databases are intended primarily for general rather than academic use, and are constructed less formally than those mentioned above.
 * Internet Book Database
 * The Internet Book Database of Fiction
 * Internet Book List

Social networking book databases
There are several databases intended primarily or partially for social networking. They encourage users to make their own catalogs, to rate the books on the site, and to use this information to identify others with similar interests.

LibraryThing
This is perhaps the largest and best known of the social book websites.

Reader2.com
This is another social networking book website.

Consumer-oriented Databases
Typically dealing with many other things than books, and aimed primarily at selling books and other products.

bn.com
This is an online bookseller run by Barnes & Noble.

Compilations of other databases
Also known as book meta-search engines, this combine the output of catalogs from a number of libraries and other sources.

ISBNdb.com

 * ISBNdb.com

ISBNdb.com is a website that attempts to build a free database of books by querying various libraries across the world for book data. The results are then indexed by a variety of parameters (authors, publishers, subjects, similarity, etc.) and presented on the website in an organized format. Original MARC records are available for download as well. As of May 2006, the site has data on more than 2 million unique ISBNs and corresponding books searchable by title, ISBN, author, subject, and other criteria. 2000-5000 records are added daily.

The ISBNdb.com website also offers book price comparisons for availability and pricing in many online stores, including both general dealers such as Amazon and large used book dealers (Abebooks, Alibris, etc). ISBNdb.com displays the pricing information immediately, in parallel to normal book browsing.

Effective July 2005, ISBNdb.com offers an XML based remote access API that allows access to all of the same data that is displayed on the website itself. ISBNdb.com was started in 2001 as a hobby project by Andrew Maltsev. it is now a project of his company, Ejelta LLC.

General

 * Proquest
 * Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature
 * Scopus - large scale commercial database of social science journals indexed by subject and with cross-references
 * Web of Knowledge - large scale commercial database of scientific, social science, and humanities journals indexed by subject and with cross-references

Subject-specific

 * Education Resources Information Center - free database by U.S. Department of Education

Publisher-specific

 * ScienceDirect