Polk Library will no longer offer access to BadgerCat.
What was BadgerCat, exactly? According to OCLC site, BadgerCat was Wisconsin's version of Group Services which is "a package of services for a group of libraries focused on resource sharing. The heart of the package is a Group (union) Catalog created from records already cataloged in WorldCat by members of the Group. Combined with unlimited access to the full range of cataloging and interlibrary loan products and services, Group Services allows users to search locally, regionally, group-wide or worldwide from a single interface that integrates with local library systems." All UW libraries (and some public libraries) participated in BadgerCat and it helped students to identify items held by other UW libraries so that a Universal Borrowing or Interlibrary Loan request for the item could be made.
Access to BadgerCat ended on July 1, 2010.
OCLC offers WorldCat to pick up here BadgerCat left off. WorldCat is a catalog of catalogs, if you will. When you search WorldCat, you can find out which of the items you've found are near by. For instance, if you are looking for the book The shallows: what the Internet is doing to our brains by Nicholas G. Carr, you can search for it in WorldCat by title or author or the keyword Brain. Once you have found the record for this book, click on the title and you will be taken to the item record. Scroll down the page and you will see which libraries closest to your have this book in their collection. They are organized geographically - the closest library to you to those farther and farther away - all over the world. Making a request from another library for this title is easy!
In addition, you can still search through out UW library holdings using Universal Borrowing. So, we've got you covered. Here is a link to
WorldCat!
