[Sca-cooks] 2016 Silly Season Starts

[Johnna Holloway]

There's a quick summary here:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Union_Catalog

There is an entire world of printed library and union catalogs. The best of the research libraries in this country owned them all. What were they used for? Bibliographic verification, cataloguing information, holdings to a degree, etc. They are largely superseded by the  online catalogs and databases, yet sometimes they are still valuable and there are scholars who still use them. Today it's often a question of retention. See this paper for information about medium sized libraries keeping or discarding their sets. 

https://libres.uncg.edu/ir/asu/f/Abbott_Scherlen2013_NUC.pdf

Johnna

Sent from my iPad

> On Aug 1, 2016, at 4:33 PM, Stefan li Rous <stefanlirous at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> <<< All bibliographic catalogs and databases have their errors and inconsistencies, but Worldcat beats using the printed volumes of the NUC when it comes to a quick search.
> 
> Johnna >>>
> 
> Uh, for us non-librarians, can you translate that, please?
> NUC? why is using the printed volumes important?
> 
> Thanks,
>  Stefan
>