ISSN 1039-3498 | no. 45 | June 2000
The last great card file
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Members of the team
with the card catalogue they are converting: (from left) Pam
MacFarling, Deirdre Kiorgaard, |
The National Library converted its two largest card catalogues about 10 years ago, putting half a million records into its online catalogue. Now the Library is turning its attention to a large residual file of uncatalogued material known as the BIP (Books in Process) file.
This file, consisting of around 250 000 order slips and cards, represents material received in the Library in the 1960s and 1970s but never fully catalogued.
The unusual nature of much of the material, the lack of detail on many of the slips and the range of languages represented discouraged attempts at converting the contents of the file into machine-readable records. However, the easy access to the Research Libraries Information Network (RLIN) offered by Kinetica was a determining factor in deciding to tackle this last great card file held in the Library.
In July 1999 a small team was gathered and procedures developed for working through the file. Since then, the team has removed nearly 24 000 slips from the file and catalogued nearly 7000 items. About 30 per cent of items have records on the National Bibliographic Database (NBD) and a further 30 per cent have records or close copy records on RLIN. The material represented in the file ranges from microform series to serial issues and dates from early imprints to the early 1980s. Almost every language is represented, and rare books and scarce Australiana items are found occasionally.
The work has generated a large amount of housekeeping for the Library, particularly for serial titles but when the task is completedsometime in the next decadea wealth of unusual scholarly and research material will be available online for the Librarys users.
Peter Haddad
Please address any comments and enquiries to The Editor, Gateways: gateways@nla.gov.au