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National Library News
September 1999
Vol. 31, no. 9



The National Bibliography: New Wine, New Bottles

by Barrie Burns,
Acquisitions and Bibliographic Services

Since 1950 the National Library has compiled Canadiana: The National Bibliography to document the nation’s published heritage and to make that heritage better known to present and future generations.

For the first 25 years of its life, the current (post-1950) bibliography appeared in printed form only, offering users listings of published Canadiana arranged by Dewey decimal classification number, with consolidated indexes to locate items by author, title, subject headings, or other attributes. With the accelerated development of automation in the Library in the late 1970s, the computerized bibliographic and name authority records that make up Canadiana became the basis of new products. Starting in 1976, Canadiana records first appeared on-line in DOBIS and then in AMICUS. The records were distributed on magnetic tape and later via file transfer through the MARC Records Distribution Service (MRDS). Computer-Output-Microfiche (COM) versions of both the current and retrospective (pre-1901) bibliographies were issued beginning in the 1980s. In 1991, the rapidly rising costs of printing the voluminous cumulations and indexes forced the cessation of the printed bibliography. The on-line, microfiche and MRDS Canadiana services have continued to this day.

The newest addition to the product line is the CD-ROM version of Canadiana. From its advent in 1998, the CD-ROM version has taken advantage of the storage capacity and retrieval flexibility of CD-ROM technology to both broaden the coverage of Canadiana, and provide flexible searching of the records using the software included on each CD-ROM disc. The scope of the national bibliography now extends beyond the works listed by the National Library to include records from other contributors, such as the National Archives of Canada’s Carto-Canadiana, and the records for Early Canadiana, the collection of pre-1920 imprints microfilmed since the 1980s by the Canadian Institute for Historical Microreproductions (CIHM). The June 1999 issue of the semi-annual CD-ROM service includes almost 1.7 million bibliographic and authority records in the newly harmonized MARC 21 communication format. The entire corpus of the National Library’s current and retrospective national bibliographies and the other contributed files are presented on two CD-ROM discs and are updated to the end of 1998.

Users can search this rich collection of data directly by keywords, language, place of publication, publisher, ISBN, ISSN and a wide variety of other detailed characteristics of the MARC records, as well as by the traditional access points such as author, title, subject headings, and Dewey and Library of Congress classification numbers, separately or in combination. Users can move easily between the bibliographic and authority records, view full, brief or MARC formatted displays of the records, and even click on MARC tags to see descriptions of the fields displayed from the text of the MARC 21 format which is also included in the product. Users with AMICUS accounts can continue their searches on-line from within Canadiana on CD-ROM.

The product also gives users the possibility of creating their own customized views of Canadiana and provides useful tools to help them build their own specialized bibliographies. For example, using Canadiana on CD-ROM, it is possible, within minutes, to assemble a comprehensive list of all editions of L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, or Michel Tremblay’s Les Belles Soeurs or compile counts of the various editions of those works by language of publication. Listings or counts of Canadiana by specific publishers, by form of material, place of publication or other attributes are only a few mouse clicks away. The records retrieved in CD-ROM searches can be saved as files of MARC records for use in supporting processing operations in local library systems that are capable of reading and manipulating MARC 21 records, or as text files that can be processed using familiar PC-based word or text-processing programs.

Comprehensive searches of this kind would be impossibly cumbersome and time-consuming to carry out manually in the numerous issues of the printed or fiche versions of Canadiana. This kind of access would also be difficult using on-line bibliographic systems such as AMICUS or on-line public access catalogues (OPACs). While some on-line retrieval systems permit users to modify author, title, series or subject searches by date, language or form of material, few, if any, permit direct searching by the latter attributes in files of this magnitude.

Canadiana: The National Bibliography on CD-ROM brings the world of Canadiana past and present to the user’s desktop. The richness of the database and the imagination of the user can now combine to make our published heritage visible the world over, in ways that the founders of the national bibliography could only have dreamed of 50 years ago.


Copyright. The National Library of Canada. (Revised: 1999-8-31).