NUCMC is the abbreviation for the National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections. It is a national-level program based at the

Library of Congress The Library of Congress (LOC) is a research library in Washington, D.C., serving as the library and research service for the United States Congress and the ''de facto'' national library of the United States. It also administers Copyright law o ...

that seeks to promote free access to the documentary heritage of the

United States The United States of America (USA), also known as the United States (U.S.) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It is a federal republic of 50 U.S. state, states and a federal capital district, Washington, D.C. The 48 ...

. It does this by providing

cataloging In library and information science, cataloging (American English, US) or cataloguing (British English, UK) is the process of creating metadata representing information resources, such as books, sound recordings, moving images, etc. Cataloging ...

for

archives An archive is an accumulation of historical records or materials, in any medium, or the physical facility in which they are located. Archives contain primary source documents that have accumulated over the course of an individual or organ ...

and historical societies around the country that do not have access to national online databases. The program started in 1959 and published bound volumes of cataloging records from 1962 to 1993. One famed editor was Arline Custer, Head of the Manuscript Section, Descriptive Cataloging Division of the Library of Congress. As of 1986, the cataloging records were input into

RLIN The Research Libraries Group (RLG) was a U.S.-based library consortium that existed from 1974 until its merger with the OCLC library consortium in 2006. RLG developed the Eureka interlibrary search engine, the RedLightGreen database of bibliograp ...

, the Research Libraries Information Network, an international online database. As of September 2007, all cataloging records in RLIN have been migrated into the

OCLC OCLC, Inc. See also: is an American nonprofit cooperative organization "that provides shared technology services, original research, and community programs for its membership and the library community at large". It was founded in 1967 as the ...

database (

WorldCat WorldCat is a union catalog that itemizes the collections of tens of thousands of institutions (mostly libraries), in many countries, that are current or past members of the OCLC global cooperative. It is operated by OCLC, Inc. Many of the O ...

), since RLIN was merged into OCLC. All cataloging since that time has been input into OCLC. It is not related to the NUC Pre-1956 volumes.

References

External links

NUCMC home page
Archival science Library cataloging and classification Library of Congress {{LOC-stub