Bibliographies
The bibliography and ready reference collection (Bib, Ref and Reading Room
collections) includes nearly 3,550 titles, many of which are located in
the Society's reading room. The collection consists of bibliographies of
those topics, persons, regions, periods, and classes of publications in or
about which the Society collects printed materials, as well as standard
reference sources. Many of the volumes in the collection record the
Society's holdings as noted by our library symbol (MWA or AAS) and are
updated by library staff as new items are acquired. Several of these
annotated bibliographies are housed in the stacks, and thus need to be
requested from the readers' services staff. All annotated bibliographies
may be found by doing a subject search for annotated bibliography in the
online catalog.
General bibliographies include Americana, state, local, and regional
bibliographies, as well as bibliographies for the West Indies and
Bermuda. The collection also contains bibliographies of the major
colonial and Victorian writers, notable non-literary figures of eighteenth
and nineteenth-century America, bibliographies of early American fiction,
cookbooks, songbooks, penmanship and letter- writing books, children's
literature, American books of color plates, federal government documents,
dime novels, American fishing books and early American sports books,
medical imprints, popular music, anti-Masonic literature, travel books,
and technical publications prior to 1831, to name but a few of the topical
ranges. Bibliographies of newspapers and periodicals are one of the
largest groups in the collection.
Other reference sources include atlases, city directories, encyclopedias,
dictionaries, periodical indices, published catalogs of special
collections at other institutions, and an extensive array of general
genealogical materials.
The largest reference source in the collection is The National Union
Catalog, which reproduces in book form the author and other main-entry
printed cards in the Library of Congress card catalog, through 1955. There
is also a twenty-year, multi-volume supplement to the NUC. Both of these
are located in the Reading Room.
A group of ancillary bibliographies from England are also part of the
collection. These include bibliographies of British autobiographies,
ballad entries in the Stationers' Register, catalogs of prints, drawings,
and printed music in the British Museum, and seventeenth-century
descriptive catalogs by London booksellers.
- Updated by Joanne Chaison, Reserach Librarian, and S.J. Wolfe,
Senior Cataloger
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