Wikidata:Property proposal/National Union Catalog ID

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National Union Catalog ID

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Originally proposed at Wikidata:Property proposal/Creative work

DescriptionThe identifier for this work in the The National Union Catalog, Pre-1956 Imprints: a Cumulative Author List Representing Library of Congress Printed Cards and Titles Reported by Other American Libraries (Q107434107)
Data typeExternal identifier
Domainitems of type version, edition or translation (Q3331189)
Allowed valuesregex: N[A-Z]? \d{7}(\.\d+)?
Example 1Robert Carter: His Life and Work (Q106913633) -> NC 0506050: qualifiers:
Example 2In Memoriam: Faded and Other Poems (Q106914750): NJ 0071762
Example 3Authoritative Christianity, First Council of Nicaea, vol. 1 (1891) (Q106917163): NC 0407550
Planned useadding NUC authority control to editions
Number of IDs in sourcethe number of items in the NUC (hundreds of thousands)
Expected completenessalways incomplete (Q21873886) (as new volumes being published)
Distinct-values constraintyes
Wikidata projectWikiProject Books (Q8487081)

Motivation

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The NUC is a huge catalogue of all works catalogued by a group of libraries in the US, including the Library of Congress. Of particular interest are the 754 volumes of the Pre-1956 Imprints, which are, for many works, the only place they are catalogued. Inductiveload (talk) 20:45, 19 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

  • It's described at en:National Union Catalog.
    • Many entries do not have an 'identification'. These entries all represent "alternate entries", in library-speak....redirects. There is little point to trying to enter those on WD, in my opinion.
    • The catalog was compiled from copies of catalog cards submitted by hundreds of US research libraries, starting in the 1950s, of (what was intended to be) every title they held which was not already represented by a Library of Congress printed card. This was added to the works that already had cards (meaning, works that have an LCCN and are held by the Library of Congress).
    • This means, specifically, that the NUC was intended to include every US publication that does not have an LCCN (as well as those that do), and many of the libraries that contributed to the NUC are not contributors to WorldCat..... there are a massive number of works in the NUC that have probably never been electronically cataloged, and are not in the Library of Congress.
    • The LoC almost never obtained copies of later editions unless there was a new copyright claim registered, which is why many such editions do not have LCCNs.
    • The 'human brains' that created this were far better than the OCLC algorithm at merging duplicates, as well.
    • When you find references in LCCN or LoC authorities records to 'the old catalog'.... this is it. Much of the catalog of the Library of Congress that you find online, for older works, was a transcription from the printed card (often with info left out)... these are replaced as the LoC re-catalogs the actual books, and will probably take decades. This is where you look for complete bibliographic information... the entries are 'photostatic' copies of the submitted library catalog cards, cataloged by actual professional librarians from books they were actually holding, in the original binding (so, correct pagination).
    • Additionally, the NUC itself also gives abbreviations for what libraries submitted information on each book, which is probably the most valuable bit of information... these libraries mainly still hold the same works. This allows you to search for digitized versions at those libraries based on the actual cataloged search terms, instead of whatever Google or the Internet Archive mangled it into.
    • This is also the information one would need to possibly use interlibrary loan to obtain a copy.
  • TLDR; referring to the actual Mansell catalog is how you resolve the not-uncommon problem of either zero or way too many, and not matched, entries for a pre-1956 book in WorldCat, or obtain realistically accurate 'lists' of multiple editions of the same book. This is the pre-digital WorldCat actual people spent decades on. Jarnsax (talk) 21:43, 19 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

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  • With enough items, you could certainly book-end a range of pages that a given ID would land in, though it would be a lot of items before it would land you right on the page reliably, since there are something like 500k pages in the catalog, and, AFAIK no machine-readable way to ingest the data. Inductiveload (talk) 13:00, 20 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • FWIW, since the scans are on Hathi, it's possible to permalink to the scan of a specific page (using a handle url). It's down near the bottom of the left menu on Hathi. Jarnsax (talk) 16:06, 20 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]