by Justin Furlong, Periodicals/Newspapers Librarian
Library users often only get to interact with staff in our various Reading Rooms and may be unaware of the many behind the scenes projects that are taking place. With this thought in mind I felt it would be useful to detail some of the developments currently happening in the Department of Periodicals here at the National Library of Ireland.
Online check-in of periodicals
During 2011, well over 1,000 periodical catalogue records were amended, enabling staff to record online the arrival of new issues and replacing work which was previously done manually. This allows users to identify which particular issues of a journal or magazine the library has acquired.
Our staff are now checking in issues of journals and periodicals online as we receive them, e.g. the most recent issue of the RTE Guide is already showing on our catalogue...
Ceased title project
Since September 2011 a small team of library staff has been making ceased periodical titles such as Meatmatters, Minor Mag (the magazine for Irish Morris Minor owners), Spotter: Cork's Football Magazine, The Yoke and Metalworks: Ireland's only Metal Magazine, shelf ready and available for library users. To date over 1,000 titles have been added to the library stacks as part of this ceased title project.
Ceased Title Project: Tiny sample of over 1,000 titles that have been added to our shelves since September 2011
Electoral Registers
Catalogue records for Irish county and city electoral registers (with holdings information, i.e. what we have) are now available on the library’s online catalogue for the first time. A simple keyword search ‘electoral registers’ and the city or county you're interested in, will retrieve the relevant records.
Users can now search online to see which City and County electoral registers we hold - an important resource for family history research. In this example, it's clear that for Co. Wicklow we have 1936/37; 1944; and from 1964 to date...
New Acquisitions
Two very interesting titles were recently donated to us here at the National Library by the The Pharmaceutical Society of Ireland, the Irish Chemist and Druggist, 1923-1925 and the British and Colonial Druggist, 1889-1892. The British and Colonial Druggist is the subject of a previous blog post by my colleague Inez Fletcher.
Volumes of the British and Colonial Druggist, 1880-1892 donated to us by the Pharmaceutical Society of Ireland
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