Tuesday 10 June 2014

RCBLibrary's catalogue hits 40,000 items

It's another milestone – this time for 40,000 items – for the Representative Church Body Library's project to convert the card catalogue of printed books to a computerized catalogue. The latter is available via the Church of Ireland website here.

Records for all the modern book stock are now available on–line, as are many for the older (pre-1851) printed books.

It's a pretty straightforward and uncomplicated interface but not necessarily the fastest search engine; the relatively slow reaction might, of course, be due to overload since the news was released, so my criticism may be unfair. However, the search can certainly pull out some interesting options to match the search term, so it'll be useful for those looking to extend their research beyond the obvious.

The project will now continue with cataloguing the rest of the old books which will increase the size of the catalogue by 50%.