Yellowknife (Feb 28/05) - There's a unicorn loose in the NWT, but you have to love books to see it.

The magical horned horse is the namesake for a new loans system linking 15 libraries across the territories.

The Department of Education, Culture and Employment launched Unicorn, Thursday.

Users can now search one or all of the nine public and three college libraries, the Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre's research library, the legislative library and a research institution library, said Bev Garven, head librarian at Inuvik's Centennial Library.

"It's bringing us into the 21st century," Garven said of bringing service levels up to the south.

The $100,000 Unicorn replaces the previous DOS-based system with a Windows-based program.

You can pull up summaries, abstracts, even pictures of the books, said Sarah Tilley, student success co-ordinator for Aurora College in Inuvik. Tilley, who runs Aurora's one-year-old library, said Unicorn will have a big impact on the way students conduct their research and studies now that they can get at more specialized collections.

"Our library is small so it gives them the opportunity to share other resources," she said.

A children's library, organized around word and pictorial searches, allows kids to click on an image and quickly retrieve all the juvenile literature on that topic.