How to use the card catalogues

In-house card catalogues

Materials not in our online catalogue can be found using our remaining card catalogues:

Library card catalogues

• Post-1910 authors (monographs)

• Subject (monographs/periodical articles)

• Periodicals titles

• Corporate authors

Map card catalogue

• Holds post-1940 items

Archive and picture catalogues

• Mostly online

• For Antarctic expeditions and Everest pictures, please consult Collections staff

 

Searching

Author catalogues are organised alphabetically.

Corporate author catalogue entries are created when there is no obvious individual author; entries could be the name of a project, expedition or organisation or occasionally a country name.

Subject/map catalogues are geographical by continent, then country.

Subject catalogue divides each country into subfields, for example ‘geology’.

Maps are subdivided:

• General, ‘Gen.’ or ‘G.’

• Division or ‘Div.’

• District, ‘Dist.’ or ‘D.’

• Special, ‘Spec.’ or ‘S.’

 

Requesting

On registration, you will be provided with a general request form.

The fields required are:

• Control number (only available on online records; write ‘card cat’ here)

• Class number

• Author

• Title (include periodical title/volume/issue/pages here when requesting an article)

• Publication date/edition

Please complete all requested fields.

Subject catalogue cards do not include the class number. You must check the main author/periodical title catalogue entries for the class number.

For map class numbers, please state the country, then the map type and number, for example 'Map type G, number U.S.A. G.45'.