University of Virginia Library

(i) the editorials are unconventional in that they are usually indistinguishable from articles or review articles (e.g. of Voet's The Golden Compasses), but—presumably because they are editorials and because they are generally unsigned—they are infrequently indexed.

(ii) The 'News and Comment' section is a lengthy editorial piece comprising a continuous narrative on a series of topics. Some are regular pieces (on recent book auctions, booksellers' catalogues, and exhibitions), others items of news or notes on recent publications. Presumably because analysis of the section would be needed, material that might otherwise be indexed is in fact seldom indexed.

(iii) Items in the Queries section may amount to no more than a request for information about the location of a lost manuscript or for assistance in identifying an anonymous work. But others are indistinguishable from Notes except that they end with a question of the kind 'Does anyone know of other examples?' Yet others are in fact answers to Queries and therefore absolutely indistinguishable from Notes. I.e. Queries may be of three kinds, but they are generally disregarded by the indexes, as if they were all of the first kind.

ABHB: The fullest indexing of BC for 1974 is in ABHB, but because of its variability from year to year it may not be consistently the fullest. The exclusions are generally literary, though not all are to be explained on that score. Where ABHB stands out is in noticing the News and Comment section: besides the two blanket entries, Notes on recent book auctions and Notes on recent booksellers' catalogues, there are entries for the comment on Paul Morgan's Oxford Libraries outside the Bodleian and for the note on the Clover Hill private press—though at the same time it must be admitted that the section might have generated another 20 justifiable entries.

MLA: BC constitutes a blind spot as far as MLA is concerned (see above). The five articles indexed are the most obviously literary of parts 1-3.

MHRA: By comparison with MLA, MHRA performs particularly well (see above), and in its coverage of articles and notes is even fuller than ABHB. The omission of certain notes from part 4 (e.g. 'Beer at York Minster Library', which supplements an indexed article from part 2) suggests a decline in indexing efficiency.

LL: There is no obvious pattern in the five exclusions. No items are indexed from News and Comment. (See further above.)

IBZ: IBZ is discussed separately below. Suffice it to say here that for an index which seems to imply comprehensive coverage of the periodicals listed its showing is dismal. The selection defies explanation.

BHI: BHI differs from ABHB, MLA and MHRA in indexing a fixed list of periodicals exhaustively, though for BC only the articles are covered. It does index several other bibliographical periodicals (e.g. Bodleian Library Record and the Transactions of the Cambridge and Edinburgh Bibliographical Societies), but not Library, so that its utility for British publications is to that extent limited. And in any case so much of BHI is devoted to economics, social sciences and weekly papers that even with Library bibliography would not constitute a very large element.