More information about the project
The project was established to re-catalogue the ‘non-academic’ books published from 1910-1919, book in hand, in order to provide a single high-quality descriptive catalogue record for each title.
Cambridge University Library only holds a basic, mostly hand-written, card catalogue for the material of this period. The cataloguing rules for the card catalogue originate in the early 20th century and can create problems for library users used to modern catalogue searching. Researchers and Library staff find it difficult to use the catalogue for anything other than searching for known items and thus important sources of research are often overlooked. Given the recent rise of interest in the period, it is vital that this material can be shared with the international research community.
Once catalogued, records are immediately visible on the Library’s Newton catalogue. Each week, catalogue records are exported to the RLUK and OCLC bibliographic databases, which are searchable by the public as COPAC and Worldcat respectively.
Project staff catalogue about a thousand books each week. In July 2011 staff were cataloguing books published in the year 1910. By January 2012 we are scheduled to be cataloguing books published in the year 1914, and to complete cataloguing of books published in 1919 by end December 2012.