The British Library Public Catalogue

Citation

O’Beirne, R. (2001), "The British Library Public Catalogue", Online Information Review, Vol. 25 No. 4, pp. 271-279. https://doi.org/10.1108/oir.2001.25.4.271.7

A dedicated Web site hosting the British Library Public Catalogue has recently been launched. In press releases it has been described as covering “over 10 million books, journals, reports, conference papers and music scores covering every aspect of human thought since 1450”. There is no doubt that the scope of this catalogue is breathtaking and its size most impressive. To put it into perspective, however, a different piece of publicity referring this time to the whole British Library notes: “The library’s services are based on its outstanding collections, developed over 250 years, of over 150 million items, representing every age of written civilisation, every written language and every aspect of human thought.”

We are concerned here with the British Library Public Catalogue (BLPC) and the first question that should be asked is what exactly is in this public catalogue? Of course, the answer is more catalogues. The main content of the BLPC falls into two separate areas: the first is reference material, the second document supply. The reference catalogues represent holdings of the library that may be primarily consulted in the London Reading Rooms; their subject and temporal coverage are:

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  humanities (1975‐ );

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  science, technology and business (1974‐);

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  retrospective (pre‐1975);

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  music (1980‐ );

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  music (pre‐1981).

Although the document supply catalogues represent the majority of the material held for remote access, not all material available for remote supply is listed in the online catalogues:

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  journals (1700‐);

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  books (1980‐);

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  conference proceedings (1800‐ ).

It is important to note that the BLPC is an aggregated catalogue containing other catalogues and parts of catalogues. Many of these parts have themselves their own Web sites or online catalogue. Helpful guidelines, used throughout, alert the user to the fact that the BLPC does not cover all online catalogues and indeed that many catalogues of material are not yet online. Users are pointed to the relevant contact points within the British Library main Web site. The BLPC is available 24 hours a day and seven days a week.

Owing to some historical and organisational factors, the library’s catalogues have tended to grow out of individual collections and so have evolved in an unplanned way since the nineteenth century. The effect that this has had can be seen in the different cataloguing and indexing schemes in use. The structure and detail of each catalogue can therefore differ slightly. It is understandable, for example, that there is not one definitive subject index through which one can browse.

To search the BLPC there are basic and advanced search facilities. The basic facility requires the user to first select which dataset is to be searched: all material, reference material only or document supply material only. The fields of the catalogue upon which it is possible to search are: author/editor, organisation, title, subject, publisher details, ISBN/ISSN and date of publication. Criteria may be entered into any or all of the fields. There is no case sensitivity, no need for punctuation and truncation may be used by inserting an asterisk where required. The advance search allows a more precise initial selection of the collections to be searched; these can be mixed in any way. For example the searcher may select to search the following catalogues; music (1980‐), music (pre‐1981) from the reference collection and books (1980‐) from the document supply collection. Having defined a narrower dataset the user is also assisted by Boolean operators that can be deployed in a number of ways either within a chosen field or between fields.

Should retrieved records be located within the reference collection then the user is pointed to the ways in which these collections might be accessed, for example opening times. However, for records held within document supply collection then the user has the option to order, say, photocopies of articles using various electronic commercial options. Organisations may register and may request material on loan through the site. This level of accessibility is certain to have a profound impact not just on the British Library but also on many public libraries that offer interlibrary lending services. Oh, I nearly forgot to mention the BLPC is sponsored by Amazon.co.uk