The folks at the State Library are offering a new and very helpful online program called Wayfinder that can let you search for something among millions and millions of items found in many libraries throughout Washington. Wayfinder is an online catalog that provides a single search for locating materials owned by the participating Washington libraries.

The catalog contains information on the collections of more than 250 public, academic, government, law, medical, corporate, special and tribal libraries throughout the state. Combined, these libraries hold more than 17.8 million items in various formats: books; newspapers, magazines and journals; movies; CDs; DVDs; digital objects such as electronic documents, subscription research databases, or historical items that have been scanned and made available on the Web; books in audio and large-print formats, and much more.

“If you’re a researcher or a student looking for a tough-to-find item, the Wayfinder catalog will be especially useful by helping you pinpoint where you can find it,” said Will Stuivenga, the State Library’s Wayfinder manager.

Wayfinder is a subset of the larger WorldCat library catalog search site, which has 1.4 billion holdings and more than 142 million unique  bibliographic records. All of WorldCat can be searched from Wayfinder by choosing “Libraries Worldwide” from the pull-down menu where it says “Washington Libraries.” WorldCat can be searched directly by going here .

To search Wayfinder, go here . Several search scopes are available in Wayfinder, including by geographical region within the state and by type of library.

Click here to visit the State Library’s Wayfinder page. The link also provides information about Wayfinder that is geared toward librarians.

The State Library is a division of the Office of Secretary of State.