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Appendix A - The Special Collections reference shelf

Alison Cullingford
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Summary

Every Special Collections librarian needs to be aware of the following core reference resources. They are invaluable for helping users, and also for management activities, for example assessing rarity for acquisitions or insurance or assistance with cataloguing. Many are short-title catalogues (STCs), which abbreviate the very long titles characteristic of early printed books. The resources are freely available online unless otherwise noted. See the Chapter 3 ‘Further reading’ for more resources on these subjects.

Union catalogues

These are vast catalogues combining records from many libraries and archives:

  • WorldCat. Managed by OCLC, records for 2 billion items from over 70,000 national, academic and public libraries worldwide. Particularly useful for accessing Special Collections in North American universities, www.worldcat.org.

  • COPAC. A Jisc service, offering 40 million catalogue records from 90 UK and Irish research libraries, very rich in Special Collections records, http://copac.jisc.ac.uk.

  • Karlsrüher Virtueller Katalog (KVK). Via the Karlsrüher Institut für Technologie, 500 million records from libraries in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and worldwide, useful for European early printed books, https://kvk.bibliothek.kit.edu.

  • SUNCAT. Delivered by Edina on behalf of Jisc, this catalogue brings together records for serials from UK research libraries. Records for historic journals and periodicals can be difficult to track down on union catalogues, so using SUNCAT can make research simpler, www.suncat.ac.uk.

    • Archive gateways

    There are several databases which bring together finding aids for archival collections:

  • Archives Hub. Managed by Jisc, the Hub contains collection-level and multi-level descriptions of archives held in UK universities and colleges, archiveshub.ac.uk.

  • Discovery. Discovery is the catalogue of The National Archives; it also hosts descriptions of archives held in other institutions – over 32 million records! It is particularly valuable for researching material held by record offices. Discovery incorporates the records created by the Access 2 Archives project in the early 2000s, http://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk.

  • Archive Grid, an OCLC project which brings together 4 million archival records, mostly harvested from WorldCat. Useful coverage of US archives, https://beta.worldcat.org/archivegrid.

  • Archives Portal Europe. Records of archives across Europe from over 6000 organizations, generally managed and input at country level, www.archivesportaleurope.net.

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    The Special Collections Handbook
    , pp. 271 - 274
    Publisher: Facet
    Print publication year: 2016

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