UCL Library Services card catalogue was digitised and made available as an online resource in 2008 in order to deal with a specific need at that time – namely to preserve and make more widely available the UCL Library card catalogue without the need to retain the physical cards and cabinets.

The online card catalogue contains information relating to books, pamphlets, official publications, conference proceedings, theses and maps added to the library’s collections up until the early 1980s.

Since then, all new acquisitions have been added to the online library catalogue. All theses have been catalogued and are discoverable via Explore. There has been no systematic amending of the card catalogue since that time, which means that there is a significant amount of misinformation.

Much of the non-rare material has been either added to the online catalogue or discarded. Of the material that has been retained, both classmark and location have changed.

This renders the process of retrieval difficult and often fruitless resulting in a lot of wasted staff time and disappointment for the requester.

Having said all that, it *is* still used by some library colleagues, mainly Special Collections staff, some Subject Liaison Librarians and the Reference Librarian. After consultation with the colleagues mentioned above, review of the usage statistics,  and with the assurance from the Digital Libraries team that content can be transferred to the S: drive without any major loss of functionality it has been agreed that it should be removed from public view. This was endorsed by the Collection Management Advisory Group (CMAG) at its June meeting.

It will remain available to any staff who require access to it.  I will post again regarding access etc. when the transfer is complete. In the meantime, don’t hesitate to contact me with any queries or concerns.