We are considering moving the library print catalogues currently shelved on Level 3 to another location in Central Library or to the Warehouse. Please advise me by email or via the comments if you currently use these resources and would be inconvenienced by their move. A selection of titles which I am referring to are: National Union Catalog, British Museum of General Catalogue of Printed Books, Index of Manuscripts in the British Library, Times Index, Royal Catalogue of the Library of Royal Society etc. We will be moving the Z’s from Level 2 this summer to another floor in Central. I will need your comments by Thursday 12 November. Thanks Joan Simpson
The pre-1956 NUC is a reference resource for Collection Services and if there is a need to move them from level 3 it would be most useful to keep them in the Central Library.
Relocating this resource to level 5 might be an option.
Nicole
The abstract of the article, The Proportion of NUC Pre-56 Titles
Represented in OCLC WorldCat / Jeffrey Beall and Karen Kafadar (College and research libraries, v. 66, no. 5, p. 431-5) makes interesting reading.
"This article describes a research project that included a designed experiment
and statistical analysis to sample and estimate the proportion of
records in the 754 volumes of the National Union Catalog Pre-56 Imprints
(Mansell) that also appear in OCLC WorldCat. The authors randomly selected
a sample of records from Mansell and then searched the records
in OCLC WorldCat. The results show that 72.2 percent of the records in
Mansell were found in WorldCat and 27.8 percent of the sampled Mansell
records were not (95% confidence interval [26%, 30%]). Because
a significant proportion of works held by libraries is not found in OCLC
WorldCat, Mansell remains a valuable library resource."
I do use NUC pre-56 occasionally, for example, when cataloguing old rare serials for Special Collections. Kate Samuel told me that she also sometimes used it for interloans. It is still a useful resource.
Peter H.