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About

The Acquisitions and Cataloging Department acquires, catalogs, and provides access to library materials in all formats, including rare books, maps, sound recordings, and videos. We work closely with Department of Research and Scholarship librarians to acquire resources for the collections budget. We contribute to national cataloging standards via CONSER (Cooperative Online Serials) and NACO (Name Authority Cooperative Program). We are responsible for the creation and accuracy of all records and access points in  Summon, the Classic Catalog, Journal Locator and databases. We support the creation of metadata for all digital projects, including our institutional repository, SURFACE.

Statistics of interest:

  • Collections budget is $10 million
  • We catalog approximately 36,000 new non-electronic resources per year
  • The Classic Catalog has 4.5 million volumes, 3.3 million titles, 550 databases, 328,000 e-books and 173,000 e-journals.

For cataloging procedures, visit our Cataloging Wiki.

Our web-scale discovery provider is Proquest's SUMMON, which requires the use of Intota for electronic resource management. The Classic Catalog requires Ex Libris' Voyager system for the acquisitions and cataloging modules. Our Journal Locator contains serial holdings in elextronic form, print, and microfilm and is maintained via Intota.

Vendors, please see SUL Contact Information for Vendors [PDF]

Cataloging projects recently completed

[i]These are Columbia "F" series recordings, which were known as "ethnic" series recordings, released between the mid-1920s and early 1950s. Some of the musical traditions represented in these recordings: Serbo-Croatian, Irish, Hungarian, Greek, Ukrainian, Polish, Lithuanian, Jewish, Turkish, Albanian, Slovak, Slovene, Finnish, Scandinavian, German, Italian, Russian. Some recordings artists are from immigrant communities in the United States and others are on imported recordings. The F series was one of many ethnic series released by Columbia in the United States. The Belfer also holds significant -X suffix series recordings of Spanish and Portuguese language materials and many E-prefix series, which were acoustic recordings that preceded the F series.