Canada's Anglo-Celtic Connections: Voici Voilà

11 October 2019

Voici Voilà

"Library Search" at the Library and Archives Canada website has two resources. Aurora is LAC's own catalogue of its published holdings, including books, newspapers, magazines, maps, music and works in accessible formats.

Voilà is Canada's National Union Catalogue, a single point of access to the collections of libraries across Canada and includes books, magazines, maps, music, and more, including works in special format (e.g., braille, large print, talking books, captioned videos, etc.), for persons who are print- or hearing-impaired. Voilà is hosted by OCLC, an international nonprofit library cooperative.

Voilà is growing. A December 2018 search for genealogy found 142,388 results; today it's 201,835.

It's also growing in libraries that are members. Although LAC did not have the information Daniel Boivin from OCLC sent a list of 528 member organizations. They are all the significant academic libraries, alphabetically from Algonquin College to York University, public sector organizations and 74 public libraries including 24 in Ontario.

The member list is too long for the blog. You can find out if a given library is one of the 528 at https://www.oclc.org/en/contacts/libraries.html.

How can you use Voilà?

It does not replace your public library catalogue. A search for an Ottawa local history book in Voilà found it listed as being at the OPL. A popular general genealogy book was in Voilà but not listed as being in the OPL collection, even though it is. OPL informs the process of adding items to Voilà "has been very complicated ... with several barriers along the way beyond our control." They hope to have further progress by the end of this month.

Voilà will find repositories that hold the item, not all of them, so you can perhaps visit or request an inter-library loan through your own library knowing there is one available (although it may not be available for loan).