English short title catalogue

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The English Short-Title Catalogue, or ESTC, is a "comprehensive, international union catalogue listing early books, serials, newspapers and selected ephemera printed before 1801. It contains catalogue entries for items issued in Britain, Ireland, overseas territories under British colonial rule, and the United States. Also included is material printed elsewhere which contains significant text in English, Welsh, Irish or Gaelic, as well as any book falsely claiming to have been printed in Britain or its territories. The database contains over 480,000 entries, and represents the holdings of some 2,000 libraries world-wide."

ESTC and Hamnet

Ambox notice.png This section is currently a draft.

Eighteenth-century phase

The ESTC started life as the "Eighteenth-Century Short-Title Catalogue," following the pattern of abbreviated short title catalogs established in print by Pollard & Redgrave covering 1473-1640, and Donald Wing for 1641-1700. The editorial center at the British Library proceeded to recatalog its 18th-century holdings. The North American editorial center solicited reports from American libraries of their holdings, and created new records and matched holdings from these reports. ESTC numbers for 18th-century records created by the British Library are prefaced with a 'T'; those created by the North American office begin with an 'N'. The Folger was an important early contributor to the project. There were a number of ways libraries reported their holdings to the ESTC; the Folger chose to send photocopied title pages with bibliographic information attached.

STC and Wing phases

Once the 18th-century was considered substantially finished, the ESTC arranged to incorporate the earlier short-title catalogs into its database, and changed the name to English Short Title Catalogue while retaining the acronym. Electronic files of STC and Wing were loaded as "placeholder" and "unedited" records into the ESTC.

Working methods changed for this phase of the project: instead of canvassing libraries for reports of their holdings, ESTC staff worked with published resources to flesh out records and match holding libraries. Cataloging standards also changed, and these records were much fuller, belying the "short-titleness" of the originals. In addition to the Folger holdings already recorded in STC and Wing, ESTC/NA staff added pre-1701 Folger holdings to the database by working through the G.K. Hall catalog. Mistakes were sometimes made by misreadings of the reproduced cards, resulting in occasional Folger holdings added to ESTC records when in fact the collection only held microfilm or other type of reproduction.

ESTC records for STC-era imprints begin with an 'S', for Wing-era imprints an 'R', and for serials, a 'P'.

ESTC Project at the Folger

A seven-year project to do book-in-hand recataloging of the Folger's STC and Wing collections commenced in 1996. Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Folger ESTC project employed eight grant-funded catalogers over the course of the project. Hamnet had been brought up in 1996, and the impetus behind the project was to create machine-readable records for our early modern English holdings using ESTC records.

Trained on site by ESTC/NA cataloger Stephen Tabor (now Curator of Early Printed Books at The Huntington), Folger grant catalogers worked directly, but with limited privileges, in the ESTC database. They compared Folger copies and existing card catalog descriptions against ESTC records, and attached holding information with extensive copy-specific notes. But with a few strictly-circumscribed exceptions, they did not edit the ESTC record itself.

Folger catalogers worked systematically through the vaults, starting with the "Cataloged Wings" (the now-frozen section of Wing books classified by Wing number), the STC vault, and finally the accession shelves (1501–1831 imprints with classifications based on their six-digit accession numbers). By the end of the project, Folger grant catalogers had worked their way through nearly all the collection. The books they didn't get to were more recent acquisitions that had accession records in Hamnet.

Questions and problems were communicated through use of '509' notes, a MARC field created by the ESTC to hold informal notes for catalogers and matchers, and modified for use between Folger and ESTC staff. These notes are labelled "Uncontrolled note" in the ESTC database. Although cryptic—sometimes incomprehensible by general ESTC users—these notes can signal important deviations between recorded bibliographic description and evidence from individual copies. 509 notes are not shown in standard Hamnet displays, but may be searched ('dfonote' as a keyword, for example) and viewed by selecting "MARC view."

On 19 January 2004, all ESTC records with a Folger holding attached were batch-loaded into Hamnet. Although a certain amount of machine manipulations were programmed into the load—added access points for voluminous former owners, for example, and certain genre/form terms—the loaded records essentially duplicate their original ESTC records.

Outcomes and consequences

  • [Get number of records loaded]
  • To date (September 2015), there are still over 2000 'DFonotes' in Hamnet records.
  • Discrepancies in cataloging standards
    • ESTC's non-standard records
    • Lack of added entries for printers, former owners &c., mean that the Folger's continental holdings are in the main better and more fully described than the Folger's English holdings
  • Belated discovery that project catalogers inexplicably missed approximately 20% of the Folger's uncataloged Wing holdings in the accession shelves, which means that these holdings are not in Hamnet. As of September 2015, a project is underway to identify and download accession records from WorldCat for these "Uncataloged Wings" (with the appropriate HBCN) while being queued for cataloging.
  • Eighteenth-century materials were not included in the project. The bulk of Hamnet records for 18th-century English materials retain the abbreviated, bare-bones character of the initial short-title project, and have not been reviewed by a Folger cataloger.

Current status

  • All new and much revised cataloging is done to Folger standards in WorldCat through the Connexion client, and downloaded directly into Hamnet by the cataloger.
  • Folger holdings, including detailed copy-specific notes, are attached to ESTC records.
  • The Folger cataloger responsible for ESTC-scope materials is authorized to edit ESTC records directly, and does so when information in the ESTC record is demonstrably incorrect or misleading.
  • The cataloger reports issues or editions not found in the ESTC. The reports consist of images of the title page and other crucial pages, and a link to the Hamnet record. When the cataloger is notified that an ESTC record has been created based on a Folger report, she replaces the "Not in ESTC" note with the ESTC citation. The current (September 2015) turnaround for new records is typically days, rarely more than a month.

Matching to the ESTC

The Folger collection of in-scope holdings are intended to be completely represented in the ESTC. Pre-1701 and some 18th-century holdings were added to the ESTC database by Folger catalogers. Most 18th-century holdings were added by ESTC staff based on Folger reports to the North American editorial center during the initial, 18th-century phase of the project (approximately 1980-1990). Our intention is to have all Folger holdings in the ESTC either added or updated by Folger catalogers.

Cataloging and Preserving the Shakespeare Collection (NEH)

Eighteenth-century Folger holdings are included in the ESTC, having earlier been added by ESTC North American staff working from Folger reports. In the interests of focusing grant-funded time and labor on item-in-hand descriptive recataloging, confirmation and augmentation of the ESTC was quickly dropped from the NEH ShCol grant project as something that could be done later by Folger staff. These procedures outline that process.

Search Hamnet

  • The pool of applicable records can be obtained by doing a builder search in the cataloging module:
cms? in Holdings Record NOT estc in Holdings Record
  • Do this exact search (initial number retrieved 826)
  • Read the notes in the bibliographic record
    • If the ESTC is mentioned in any note aside from the 510 "Cited in" field, add the Voyager record id to the table below and move to the next record
    • If it seems straightforward, copy the ESTC number from the bibliographic record and switch to the ESTC

ESTC

  • Open the ESTC XML interface
    • The Senior Cataloger for English materials can supply the link
    • It is confidential; do not give out the link location to anyone for any reason
  • Paste the copied ESTC number into the ESTC IDs search box
  • Find the Folger holding(s), which will be prefaced by nDFo (the libraries are alphabetized by MARC Organizational code within these categories):
    • British libraries (prefix 'b')
    • European libraries (prefix 'e')
    • North American libraries (preface 'n')
    • Other regions (prefix 'o')
  • Select the Folger holding and examine the information carefully
    • Is the call number correct? Is there a space after the hyphen in an accession call number? Does it have "Sh.Col." or "Cage" at the end? Are the elements in the proper order and formatted correctly? If not, please correct.
    • Are the copy-specific notes 852 ǂz from the Hamnet holdings record in the ESTC holdings record? If not, please copy-and-paste from Hamnet. Notes having to do with the completeness, readability, or other physical aspects of the book go into box 7a. Everything else goes into 7b.
    • Save the holdings record by selecting the Update button. Close the window
    • Does each Folger copy attached to the bibliographic record have a corresponding holding in the ESTC? If not, please add new holdings as needed by selecting the Add holding button at the top of the window.

Back to Hamnet

Needs discussion

  • Open the holdings record for each copy that has been confirmed in the ESTC and update the 852 ǂx by appending the following information to the existing string:
estc [cataloger's initials] [yeardate]
  • Copy field 852 and replace the 852 in the bibliographic record ???

Reporting unrecorded editions to the ESTC