The briefest explanation of how we found comedias sueltas in academic libraries and independent research libraries around the country is that we executed FirstSearch searches in WorldCat. To expand on that a little more fully: Wikipedia defines WorldCat as “a union catalog that itemizes the collections of 17,900 libraries in 123 countries and territories.”
We took advantage of its FirstSearch function that allows for combining keywords (found in the caption titles of these plays—such as comedia, auto, loa, entremés, etc.), limited searches to Spanish language works, sought publications within the time period 1650 to 1833, and added the unique OCLC symbol of the library in question.
