Archiva Books uses the library-industry-standard z39.50 protocol to allow searching of hundreds of major university, research, and national libraries (for example, the Library of Congress and the British Library). As shipped, you can search all the libraries—currently over 500—listed on the Library of Congress z39.50 page, as well as others that we have added, such as the Princeton and Cambridge university libraries. And—as described on the main Archiva Books page—you can also add your own, as long as they support this standard.
You can search as many of these libraries as desired simultaneously. In addition, some of the entries in the list of searchable libraries are themselves groupings of libraries. In such cases, you can either select the main heading, to search all the libraries listed beneath it, or select the subheading, to search only that library. In other cases, a particular library’s holdings might be able to be searched both directly and through some more comprehensive gateway. For example, about 30 British, Scottish, and Welsh libraries can be searched either individually, or via COPAC, which includes the holdings of the Consortium of University Research Libraries interface (CURL).
All these libraries can be searched for free—unlike the article databases from which Archiva Articles captures citations, no subscription fees are required. (While a given library could theoretically change this open-access policy, that is unlikely.)
Note, finally, that Archiva Books was not designed to capture citations directly from your own university library’s home page (as those results are displayed in your browser). If you want to capture such data, you will need to get Archiva Articles, and likely write your own capture rules. It’s precisely the need to circumvent the need to do so—that is, write different capture code for every single library home page—that led to the development of the z39.50 standard: Rather than writing code for literally thousands of different pages, software could be written for only a few dozen formats (there are some variants on z39.50).
In addition—and this is more to the point—the z39.50 protocol allows multiple libraries to be searched simultaneously, something that is not possible if you are only viewing individual library results in a browser.
