Accessing Medieval Religious Manuscripts on OCLC

Abstract

OCLC contains records for medieval manuscripts and for microfilms of those manuscripts, but finding those records requires persistence. There is no index term, such as the shelfmark, format, or date, which can be found on every cataloging record representing a manuscript. This article describes some ways a creative researcher can use phrase, keyword and “derived” searches with various qualifiers to find records of manuscripts. While OCLC searching was not designed to retrieve manuscripts, the greatest bars to finding such records are the inconsistent cataloging standards and practices used to create them. Such standards need to be implemented.