Although the Official Publications Library of the British Library Reference Division contains the most extensive collection in Europe of British and foreign official publications, much of the foreign material has not been fully catalogued find has hitherto only been known to readers consulting a temporary catalogue card file in the Official Publications Library.

To help to overcome this difficulty and to make this invaluable body of material more widely known, the Library is issuing a microfilm of the unedited cards. It supplements in provisional form the corpus of official publications already included in the General Catalogue of Printed Books.

The time required to correct, expand and amend entries and headings is so considerable that this microfilm, with all its many imperfections and shortcomings, appears the only alternative to prolonging for many years the lack of any sort of published catalogue record of most of these holdings.