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