MoCoLibraries.com launched Wednesday (Jon Worley)

Quick — how many books are in the Montgomery County Public Libraries system? Also, which branch can you go to find an extensive glass art book collection?

No worries, Jon Worley’s got you. The Takoma Park man spent the past six months visiting every library in the county’s system, and as he did, he counted up books, CDs, and DVDs. For fun. 

Worley organized his findings on a website, MoCoLibraries.com, that he launched on Wednesday. It’s partly a service to “crazy people like me who like to hang out in libraries,” Jon says, and partly a way for the stay-at-home dad to get back into the workforce. He’s adding the site to his portfolio as he looks for a Web-based communications job.

Job search aside, the site is useful if you want to know which branch has a designated urban fiction section (White Oak) or where to find Spanish romance novels (Gaithersburg). If a section had less than 50 books, DVDs, or CDs, Worley counted them. Above that, he counted one row and multiplied it by the number of rows to provide an estimate.

Yes, Worley says, the MCPL website can do a lot, like allow you to manage your account. "But in terms of browsing and looking around, I wasn’t getting much," Worley says. "I just kind of decided since I’m going to all these branches anyway, I’d just compile this.”

Worley’s eye also caught things that maybe you didn’t know about. For instance, Rockville seems to have a lot of early 1980s compact discs, or “relic CDs,” as I like to call them. Remember when you would happily pay $18 for a CD? Yeah, me neither.