Announcement: Kew Library Catalogue goes online

[Mark Jackson]

The Kew Library Catalogue has gone live at
http://www.kew.org/library/catalogue.html making information about
Kew's collections available to a world-wide readership for the first
time.

This unique resource currently holds more than 145,000 individual
records, mostly for published material like monographs and
pamphlets. About 700 of the ca. 4,000 periodical titles held at Kew
have entries on the catalogue, mainly those acquired by purchase.

The catalogue has been created since 1991 using the Unicorn
Collection Management System. The library's old catalogue cards
were converted to electronic format by OCLC between 1992 and
1995, and since then we have continued to add new material at a
rate of ca. 3,000 items per year. This resource will continue to
grow, and there are plans to make the catalogue entries for the
Archives and Illustrations Collections available at a later stage.

More recent additions to the catalogue include recommended
Internet resources relating to botany, which can be viewed via
hyperlink from within bibliographic records. Another key feature of
this botanical gateway is the ability to search other libraries from
within the catalogue itself. Live connections to the Library of
Congress and the Natural History Museum, London, are already
set up and links to further libraries with relevant collections will be
added in the future.

If you have any questions or comments please contact Gabriele
Popp at webcat at kew.org


Mark Jackson
Applications Development Manager
Royal Botanic Gardens,
Sir Joseph Banks Building,
Kew,
Surrey
TW9 3AB
United Kingdom
020-8332-5716
M.Jackson at rbgkew.org.uk