From: Allan Scherlen <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Fri, 3 Feb 2017 10:20:45 -0500

We did a little study of the use and retention of the NUC Pre-1956
Imprints by mid-size academic libraries a few years ago.
A post-print can be found in our IR:

https://libres.uncg.edu/ir/asu/listing.aspx?styp=ti&id=10083

NUC, Quo Vadis? Have Mid-Size Academic Libraries Retained the National
Union Catalog Pre-1956 Imprints? Retained the National Union Catalog
Pre-1956 Imprints?. Collection Management, 38(2), 119-142.
DOI:10.1080/01462679.2013.763740. Version of record available from
Taylor & Francis at http://www.tandfonline.com/

Allan Scherlen
Professor & Social Sciences Librarian
Appalachian State University
218 College Street
PO Box 32026
Boone, NC  28608

828-262-2285
[log in to unmask]


On Thu, Feb 2, 2017 at 9:57 PM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> From: "Jim O'Donnell" <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Thu, 2 Feb 2017 19:26:37 -0700
>
> WIth thanks to many, here's a summary.
>
> 1.  Some still use it.  (There's a line of discussion about just how
> much is in NUC pre-56 that has not been captured by digital catalog
> projects esp. WorldCat.  Probably not much, but certainly something.
> Nobody really had anything at all reliably quantitative to offer.)
>
> 2.  Some have pitched it.
>
> 3.  One has done what I incline to do, keep a few representative volumes.
>
> 4.  The whole set appears to be in Hathi from a U. Michigan copy and
> Google Books quality scanning; that's a kind of problem because the
> underlying product was a challenge -- a variety of scripts and
> qualities of cards, then photographed, then reproduced, then scanned
> by Google.  Some pretty muddy text in there, but for a focused
> bibliographic search it's functional.
>
> 5.  The Big Ten has archived a master print good quality set for
> long-term print preservation.
>
> 6.  For comparison, there are about 17,000 cards per volume, about
> 12.5M in the whole set.  The Bible reference was to the fact that the
> available materials for "Bible" were a mess and so those four volumes
> were skipped on the first pass while, presumably, work went on to
> organize them, and then to everybody's credit, they came back at the
> end a decade later and filled in just those four volumes.  Do the
> math, that means that "Bible" alone ran to almost 70,000 cards.  If
> anyone remembers how many cards were in a typical drawer, you could do
> a little more math in that direction.   -- The Bible situation is a
> reminder that at the limit there were always drawers that had become
> unwieldy.  From my own experience, I remember that Cicero and
> Shakespeare drawers were like that, where it made more sense to go to
> the stacks and just look at the shelves to get a picture of what was
> held.  That was an imperfect measure, but the catalog drawers had
> gotten appreciably more imperfect.
>
> 7  A fair number of institutions have built temporary, often holiday,
> trees in a lobby by stacking them pyramidically.
>
> Again, great thanks to all.
>
> Jim O'Donnell
> ASU