Sender: Rare book and manuscripts <EXLIBRIS-L@LISTSERV.INDIANA.EDU>
Although I use OCLC, whenever I look up an item there,I go past OCLC
and check each library on their list. Very often the book which many
of the libraries list is only another book on the same subject
published at a different date, not necessarily in the same country.
Or, it could be a different edition of the same book, often published
many years later or earlier than the edition I am working on.
This is particularly true of well known books, but it is all over the lot.
The peculiarity of the titles without any locations is that they
often publish titles located only in European countries, or, also
titles only in Japan. In Japan they regularly use books at the
Waseda University library, which does have the finest public
collection of Japanese woodcut illustrated books issued before
Meiji[1867]. They also use the National Diet Library which has the
finest collection of books from Meiji and Taisho [from 1867 through 1926.]
These holdings do not seem to be exhaustively cataloged.
Usually when I find a European book without a location on OCLC, I can
find it on KVK [Karlsruhe Virtueller Katalog]. Sometimes, such books
also turn up at Harvard or Yale, or Princeton or one of the major
American research libraries, even though they cannot be found on OCLC.