The New York State Library's collection of 19 million items includes major holdings in law, medicine, the social sciences, education, American and New York State history and culture, the pure sciences, and technology. Its information resources include manuscripts, government documents, newspapers, microforms, and bibliographic aids including abstracting, indexing and looseleaf services. It serves as a major union catalog for everything from books and serials to archives, manuscripts, maps, music scores, sound recordings, films, photographs, posters, computer files, and more. Records include names of contributing libraries as well as local call numbers for easy access. Over 365 languages are represented.
Coverage includes incunabula to the present.
Over 27,000,000 titles as of July 1996. WorldCat is one of the world s largest and most comprehensive databases of bibliographic information. Containing the merged catalogs of libraries around the world, it is the most consulted database in higher education.