Bodleian Library Pre-1920 Catalogue of Printed Books

Founded by Sir Thomas Bodley in 1602, the Bodleian Library contains collections in practically every field of human knowledge. It has one of the largest collections of scientific work in Europe and the biggest open-shelf collection of legal materials in the UK. The first Bodleian Library Catalogue which was published by Thomas James in 1605, spread the library's fame around the learned world. The catalogue grew in size until in 1920 it contained 1.3 million records. In the 1960s the decision was taken to convert the Pre-1920 Catalogue to machine readable form. This was completed in 1989 and now Oxford University Press publish the catalogue on a single CD-ROM. For academics worldwide this is a major step forward in information retrieval. The data in the Pre-1920 Catalogue has been revised and enhanced so that academics can carry out sophisticated searches in their field of interest. Running in the Windows environment, this package is very simple and easy to use.
You can search on: BLHeading BLTitle BLSubject BLCollections BLShelfmark BLBibliographic Reference You can also make your searches sensitive to upper and lower case, punctuation, diacritics, and special characters and impose place and year filters to narrow down your searches. You can use the Boolean operators AND, OR, NOT, AND NOT, OR NOT and the wildcards * and ? to construct more complex searches. Results can be displayed, printed, and downloaded to bibliographic management software packages. With this CD-ROM in their university library, scholars will be able to check in seconds if the pre-1920 books they are interested in are to be found in the Bodleian Library.