Library hub cataloguing

Your library’s catalogue is a go-to resource for your institution’s researchers when they want to find research materials, but it’s time-consuming and often impractical for library staff to create comprehensive records. Library hub cataloguing is a service that means you don’t need to.

It helps to:

• Reduce duplication of effort
• Ensure quality, by creating the ‘best’ records from merged sets
• Enable wider use of resources, through effective description and enhanced discovery
• Give your students and staff the best chance of finding the resources they need by improving record quality

UK-wide catalogue records, for download into your own systems

Library hub cataloguing is built on the national bibliographic knowledgebase (NBK), plus data from the Library of Congress, British National Bibliography (BNB), and International Standard Serial Numbers (ISSN).

The NBK is the most complete aggregation of UK academic, national and specialist library metadata available. Our library hub cataloguing service brings you access to comprehensive bibliographic data, collated by us and made available free of charge to Jisc members and to libraries that contribute data to the NBK.

We’re continuing to talk with people in the library community to make sure the cataloguing service can deliver the support people expect they will need over the coming years. 

Improving the quality and consistency of bibliographic data

The shared nature of library hub cataloguing supports collective cataloguing initiatives. It makes it easy for those library staff who do their own original cataloguing to share their work and their expertise with peers, for the good of the wider sector.

The records supplied by contributing libraries are processed, de-duplicated and cleaned up (if necessary) before we make them available to the community.