The Proportion of NUC Pre-56 Titles Represented in the RLIN and OCLC Databases Compared: a Follow-up to the Beall/Kafadar Study

Abstract

This article replicates a previous study that investigated the proportion of bibliographic records from the National Union Catalog Pre-1956 Imprints in the OCLC WorldCat database, and expands it to search a similarly-sized sample of records in the RLIN database as well. The author seeks to determine the impact that the merger of the RLIN and OCLC databases will have on the ability to locate catalog records for older materials, and whether there are still significant numbers of library materials for which there are no online bibliographic records. Entries for non-Roman language materials were not included in the study.