The Copernicus Library’s contribution to the creation of national bibliography

Abstract

Since 1 January 2006 the Copernicus Provincial Public Library in Toruń has participated in the creation of an electronic bibliographic database (“Articles from Polish dailies and weeklies (MARC21, 2005-)”. This constitutes part of the present Polish national bibliography, as it has emerged from the Bibliography of the Content of Periodicals. The database is available free of charge at: http://mak.bn.org.pl/cgi-bin/makwww.exe?BM=26. The Common Press Database in the Copernicus Library in Toruń is being created by the employees of the Information-Bibliography Department. At present we are preparing two periodicals in the MAK system: “Tygodnik Solidarność” and “Dziennik Gazeta Prawna”. Since 2006 we have introduced 33,998 bibliographic records to the bibliography of articles from dailies and weeklies. This constitutes 1/6 of the content of the whole database created by 14 libraries. The only library which has introduced more entries is the National Library. The database contains 209,404 documents and has been visited by 599,408 users, which means that over 1/3 of the users checking the Bibliography of the Content of Periodicals use the Common Press Database despite the fact that it records only 25 periodicals. All this proves how much interest our database attracts and that it requires further development.