Union catalog

Last updated

A union catalog is a combined library catalog describing the collections of a number of libraries. Union catalogs have been created in a range of media, including book format, microform, cards and more recently, networked electronic databases. Print union catalogs are typically arranged by title, author or subject (often employing a controlled vocabulary); electronic versions typically support keyword and Boolean queries. Union catalogs are useful to librarians, as they assist in locating and requesting materials from other libraries through interlibrary loan service. They also allow researchers to search through collections to which they would not otherwise have access, such as manuscript collections.

Contents

The largest union catalog ever printed is the American National Union Catalog Pre-1956 Imprints (NUC), completed in 1981. [1] This achievement has since been superseded by the creation of union catalogs in the form of electronic databases, of which the largest is OCLC's WorldCat. [2] Other examples include K10plus in Germany, Library Hub Discover (formerly COPAC) provided by Research Libraries UK and AMICUS, provided by Library and Archives Canada. [3]

For academic publications, several academic search engines exist to combine the open data provided by open archives through OAI-PMH, as well as records from publishers deposited in CrossRef and other sources. They include BASE, CORE and Unpaywall, which indexes over 20 million open access publications as of 2020. [4]

Historical development

The idea of sharing catalogue records among libraries is at least as old as the French Revolution, when a cataloguing standard was published encouraging librarians throughout France to contribute to cataloguing the nation's books by writing records on the backs of playing cards and mailing them off to the home of the national library in Paris. [5] : 30–31  The idea was thus common knowledge among librarians throughout the 19th century. Nonetheless, it was not until 1901 that the U.S. Library of Congress exchanged cards with the Boston Public Library, Harvard College Library, and the New York Public Library [5] : 194  and also began a card publishing service to sell copies of its own catalog cards to public libraries throughout the U.S. [5] : 138–193  Card catalogues grew huge during the next six decades. In the late 1960s, the development of machine-readable cataloguing in computerized and programmable form via the MARC standards meant that union cataloguing from then onward could be done electronically instead of physically.

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Machine-readable medium and data</span> Medium capable of storing data in a format readable by a machine

In communications and computing, a machine-readable medium is a medium capable of storing data in a format easily readable by a digital computer or a sensor. It contrasts with human-readable medium and data.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open Archives Initiative</span> Informal organisation

The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) was an informal organization, in the circle around the colleagues Herbert Van de Sompel, Carl Lagoze, Michael L. Nelson and Simeon Warner, to develop and apply technical interoperability standards for archives to share catalogue information (metadata). The group got together in the late late 1990s and was active for around twenty years. OAI coordinated in particular three specification activities: OAI-PMH, OAI-ORE and ResourceSync. All along the group worked towards building a "low-barrier interoperability framework" for archives containing digital content to allow people harvest metadata. Such sets of metadata are since then harvested to provide "value-added services", often by combining different data sets.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Library catalog</span> Register of bibliographic items

A library catalog is a register of all bibliographic items found in a library or group of libraries, such as a network of libraries at several locations. A catalog for a group of libraries is also called a union catalog. A bibliographic item can be any information entity that is considered library material, or a group of library materials, or linked from the catalog as far as it is relevant to the catalog and to the users (patrons) of the library.

The online public access catalog (OPAC), now frequently synonymous with library catalog, is an online database of materials held by a library or group of libraries. Online catalogs have largely replaced the analog card catalogs previously used in libraries.

MARC is a standard set of digital formats for the machine-readable description of items catalogued by libraries, such as books, DVDs, and digital resources. Computerized library catalogs and library management software need to structure their catalog records as per an industry-wide standard, which is MARC, so that bibliographic information can be shared freely between computers. The structure of bibliographic records almost universally follows the MARC standard. Other standards work in conjunction with MARC, for example, Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (AACR)/Resource Description and Access (RDA) provide guidelines on formulating bibliographic data into the MARC record structure, while the International Standard Bibliographic Description (ISBD) provides guidelines for displaying MARC records in a standard, human-readable form.

The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) is a protocol developed for harvesting metadata descriptions of records in an archive so that services can be built using metadata from many archives. An implementation of OAI-PMH must support representing metadata in Dublin Core, but may also support additional representations.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">WorldCat</span> International union library catalog

WorldCat is a union catalog that itemizes the collections of tens of thousands of institutions, in many countries, that are current or past members of the OCLC global cooperative. It is operated by OCLC, Inc. Many of the OCLC member libraries collectively maintain WorldCat's database, the world's largest bibliographic database. The database includes other information sources in addition to member library collections. OCLC makes WorldCat itself available free to libraries, but the catalog is the foundation for other subscription OCLC services. WorldCat is used by librarians for cataloging and research and by the general public.

The Library of Congress Control Number (LCCN) is a serially based system of numbering cataloged records in the Library of Congress, in the United States. It is not related to the contents of any book, and should not be confused with Library of Congress Classification (LCC).

An institutional repository (IR) is an archive for collecting, preserving, and disseminating digital copies of the intellectual output of an institution, particularly a research institution. Academics also utilize their IRs for archiving published works to increase their visibility and collaboration with other academics. However, most of these outputs produced by universities are not effectively accessed and shared by researchers and other stakeholders. As a result academics should be involved in the implementation and development of an IR project so that they can learn the benefits and purpose of building an IR.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Index card</span> Standard sized card for recording data

An index card consists of card stock cut to a standard size, used for recording and storing small amounts of discrete data. A collection of such cards either serves as, or aids the creation of, an index for expedited lookup of information. This system is said to have been invented by Carl Linnaeus, around 1760.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cataloging (library science)</span> Process of creating meta-data for information resources to include in a catalog database

In library and information science, cataloging (US) or cataloguing (UK) is the process of creating metadata representing information resources, such as books, sound recordings, moving images, etc. Cataloging provides information such as author's names, titles, and subject terms that describe resources, typically through the creation of bibliographic records. The records serve as surrogates for the stored information resources. Since the 1970s these metadata are in machine-readable form and are indexed by information retrieval tools, such as bibliographic databases or search engines. While typically the cataloging process results in the production of library catalogs, it also produces other types of discovery tools for documents and collections.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Outline of library and information science</span> Overview of and topical guide to library science

The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to library and information science:

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Grey literature</span> Documents and research not produced for commercial or academic journal purposes

Grey literature is material and research produced by organizations outside of the traditional commercial or academic publishing and distribution channels. Common grey literature publication types include reports, working papers, government documents, white papers and evaluations. Organizations that produce grey literature include government departments and agencies, civil society or non-governmental organizations, academic centres and departments, and private companies and consultants.

OAIster is an online combined bibliographic catalogue of open access material aggregated using OAI-PMH.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">National Union Catalog</span>

The National Union Catalog (NUC) is a printed catalog of books catalogued by the Library of Congress and other American and Canadian libraries, issued beginning in the 1950s. The National Union Catalog is divided into two series: the Pre-1956 Imprints is a 754-volume set containing all older records in a consolidated alphabetical format, while post-1955 volumes continue to be published serially. Since 1983, the NUC has been issued on microfiche. It is not related to the National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections (NUCMC).

A bibliographic database is a database of bibliographic records. This is an organised online collection of references to published written works like journal and newspaper articles, conference proceedings, reports, government and legal publications, patents and books. In contrast to library catalogue entries, a majority of the records in bibliographic databases describe articles and conference papers rather than complete monographs, and they generally contain very rich subject descriptions in the form of keywords, subject classification terms, or abstracts.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fred Kilgour</span> American librarian (1914–2006)

Frederick Gridley Kilgour was an American librarian and educator known as the founding director of OCLC, an international computer library network and database. He was its president and executive director from 1967 to 1980.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">PANGAEA (data library)</span>

PANGAEA - Data Publisher for Earth & Environmental Science is a digital data library and a data publisher for earth system science. Data can be georeferenced in time and space.

SimpleDL is a digital collection of management software that allows for the upload, description, management and access of digital collections. It is UTF-8 compatible and is not limited by format, capable of handling documents, PDFs, images, videos, audio files, and data-only objects. Furthermore, it can connect content so that multi-page documents, scores, or books can be uploaded and organized into chapters, books, or by page number. It can also combine any number of images into one single display object. The software is mostly used by libraries, archives, museums, government agencies, universities, corporations, historical societies, and other organizations that wish to host a digital collection.

The Maschinelles Austauschformat für Bibliotheken or MAB is a bibliographic data exchange format.

References

  1. ↑ Beall, Jeffrey; Kafadar, Karen (2005). "The Proportion of NUC Pre-56 Titles Represented in OCLC WorldCat". College & Research Libraries. 66 (5): 431–435. doi: 10.5860/crl.66.5.431 .
  2. ↑ Wakeling, Simon, Paul Clough, Lynn Silipigni Connaway, Barbara Sen, and David Tomás. “Users and Uses of a Global Union Catalog: A Mixed‐methods Study of WorldCat.Org.” Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology 68, no. 9 (2017): 2166–81.
  3. ↑ "About AMICUS". Archived from the original on 2016-11-04. Retrieved 2016-11-01.
  4. ↑ Dhakal, Kerry (2019-04-15). "Unpaywall". Journal of the Medical Library Association. 107 (2): 286–288. doi:10.5195/jmla.2019.650. PMC   6466485 .
  5. 1 2 3 Library of Congress (2017). The Card Catalog: Books, Cards, and Literary Treasures . Chronicle Books. ISBN   978-1452145402. OCLC   953599088.


This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.