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
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Post-1910 authors (monographs)
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Subject (monographs/periodical articles)
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Periodicals titles
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Corporate authors
Map card catalogue
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Holds post-1940 items
Archive and picture catalogues
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Mostly online
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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:
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General, ‘Gen.’ or ‘G.’
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Division or ‘Div.’
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District, ‘Dist.’ or ‘D.’
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Special, ‘Spec.’ or ‘S.’
Requesting
On registration, you will be provided with a general request form.
The fields required are:
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Control number (only available on online records; write ‘card cat’ here)
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Class number
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Author
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Title (include periodical title/volume/issue/pages here when requesting an article)
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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'.