IN DEPTH
TUC Library Presentation on its new Digital Card Catalogue
Bringing the 100-year-old card catalogue of the TUC up to 21st Century standards, was no small task. But with work now completed on digitising the 130,000 entries, Jeff Howarth explains how the project developed and what it means for library users.
WORKING with the Digitisation and Archive Services company Max Com- munications the TUC Library launched its digital card catalogue at the annual conference of the International Asso- ciation of Labour History Institutes on the 15 September 2022 (held in Zurich at the Swiss Social Archives). This site (
https://tuclibrary.maxarchiveservices.co.uk) will allow users to search through the approx- imate 130,000 cards that have been digitised as part of this project, allowing researchers easy access to all the library’s catalogues and indexes for the fi rst time.
Background
The TUC Library was founded 100 years ago in 1922 with the amalgamation of the TUC Parliamentary Committee, the Labour Party Information Bureau, and the Women’s Trade Union League. The collection was developed for the use of the TUC and affi liated unions, but its specialisation has led to its parallel development as a major research library in the social sciences.
From around that time it has built its card catalogue, although some of the older cards appear to precede this foundation and record items prior to this date.
The card catalogue is organised by category, author and publisher, but, most signifi cantly, not title. The Library moved to its current home at
London Metropolitan University in 1996 as it was believed it could better serve its wide audience in an academic setting. From this date the TUC Library and Lon- don Metropolitan University staff started
44 INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL
Jeff Howarth is Academic Liaison Librarian for TUC Library Collections, Special Collections | London Metropolitan University.
If anyone has any questions about this project I would be happy to answer them, contact
j.howarth@
londonmet.ac.uk
to catalogue on its OPAC covering all new acquisitions. Cataloguing of older items has been done where possible in order to highlight the extent of the TUC Library, illustrating its breadth and diversity.
But still the vast majority of the contents of the TUC Library are only accessible via the card catalogue and therefore visiting the reading room was required to thoroughly examine what was available on its shelves. It has sometimes felt that such cataloguing eff orts were in eff ect attempts to second guess what researchers might want and there was a risk we were neglecting unidentifi ed needs and demands without providing full coverage of what was available.
And so the card catalogue has continued to be an important fi nding aid, used by almost every visiting researcher. And it has been a frequent site to see visitors hunched over an open card drawer painstakingly studying cards
January-February 2023
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