Developed by OCLC, WorldCat is the world’s largest union catalog. A great feature of WorldCat is that it allows a user to search in the original Asian scripts, in addition to romanization, which makes it a great tool for finding books in Chinese, Japanese, or Korean. A user can search by author, title, keywords, subjects, and ISBN. After the book is found, WorldCat.org can tell you which libraries in your area have a copy of the book based on the location information you provided. WorldCat started to provide article searching feature a while ago, but IMHO, book searching is still its strong suit.
In addition to WorldCat.org which is freely available, OCLC also provides a subscription-based bibliographical database that have more advanced features.
Description updated. (2/4/2010)
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