CATALOGUES AND BIBLIOGRAPHIES OF PERIODICALS. A SURVEY OF SOME FOREIGN GUIDES TO PERIODICAL LITERATURE SINCE 1945

Abstract

As every librarian knows only too well, there has been in recent years, particularly since the war, a vast increase in the amount of periodical literature published. Scarcely a day passes which does not herald the advent of yet another new title; mercifully for the librarian, many of these are fated to expire prematurely, but a high proportion flourish and live to form an important contribution to every conceivable branch of knowledge. As with the periodicals themselves, so with the bibliographical tools which seek to bring some sort of order to this journalistic chaos, until there can be few European countries in which there has been no attempt to undertake at least one of several possible bibliographical enterprises. To enumerate comprehensively every published union‐catalogue, catalogue, bibliography, or press‐guide would itself be a task resulting in the compilation of yet another bibliography of considerable size, while a critical assessment of the value of each such work would be not only impossible but verging on the impertinent. Each has been compiled with a special purpose in view, and the fact that an individual foreign publication may be of little practical use to the British librarian does not necessarily detract from its value in its native country.