One of the rare bright notes of the lockdowns has been the chance to embark on projects that we would otherwise have struggled to find time to do.  Chief among these has been our department’s retrospective conversion cataloguing of some Official Publications (OP) material.  The collection contains governmental publications from around the world, and the lion’s share of this enormous collection can be tracked down only through the subject-led OP card catalogue in the Rare Books Reading Room.

The OP class catalogue is somewhat on the opaque side.  With normally only one card per title, several attempts to find material are often required.  First, find the country or region or organisation (eg the United Nations).  Then find the appropriate subject – which is far easier said than done.  The Rare Books staff hold copies of the subject listings, which are remarkable in their own right.  Squares [open spaces] and Squash (game) share a page with Squirrels and Stability of ships.  Similiarly, Cathode sputtering, the Catholic Church, and Cats sit together.

The OP collection is also listed in class catalogues: hand-written classmark-led lists which also provide some bibliographical details (normally author/editor for a monograph, title, height, place of publication, and date of publication).  Such catalogues were used for almost all of the UL’s collections to keep track of additions to classmark sequences until easier electronic management was introduced.  Many official publications are periodical in nature (annual government department reports, for example) and the switch mid-run from logging new additions in these ledgers to logging them electronically is highlighted by the application of a stamp to the relevant page saying “CLASS CATALOGUE CLOSED. CONSULT CULPRIT RECORD”.  The excitingly named CULPRIT was a periodicals log-in system.

Eight of us in the department have taken part in the project, each taking one or two class catalogues, and we were fortunate enough to be joined in the endeavour by the Head of Periodicals and Legal Deposit.  A full write-up, more for the library audience, of how we have gone about the work can be found on the Decolonising through Critical Librarianship platform.  The decolonisation aspect has been an important spur for the project.  While a great deal of the OP collection contains UK publications, we have focused on material produced in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and the former Soviet Union.  The last has given one colleague a particularly good intellectual workout, with some of the publications being listed in English translation, requiring her to think through various options for the original to search for…

In the last couple of weeks, we have been able to come into the UL more than previously, so our attention has had to shift to new acquisitions.  Hopefully we can continue to do some OP work even if at lower rates in whatever the “new normal” might be.  So far, we have added or edited over 3,000 records, which is a great achievement in itself, and the project has given us a workflow that could be adapted for similar projects.

Mel Bach