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The Cataloguing of Mss. in the Bodleian Library
The Cataloguing of Mss in the Bodleian Library Author:Andrew Clark Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: The dividend will be supplied by the three last items in the table at the end of paragraph 18 :—i.e. 9000 MSS. still to be done in the form of the Quarto Catalog... more »ue. The quotient is over 61 (years), which gives the period which must elapse before the Catalogue on the present system can be completed. We must, however, make a deduction for a possible increase of speed when the cataloguers come to re-catalogue those MSS. already entered in special Catalogues ; so that we may put 50 years hence as the probable date of the completion of the Catalogue of MSS., if the past rate of progress be maintained. 26. Forecast of the work which may be expected to be done on the Catalogue of MSS. for some years to come. The conclusion reached at the end of the preceding paragraph is a sufficiently disheartening one: and it presents itself in a still more hopeless light when we take into account the certainty that, under existing conditions, even the present rate of progress cannot be kept up. For the following considerations must each receive due weight. (i) If we take the second table in paragraph 25, we observe a marked diminution in the later years in the work of cataloguing old MSS., both in Mr. Madan's column and in Mr. Macray's. The explanation in both cases is the same; in the later years of the five their other work took up more of their time, and consequently left a smaller fraction of it to be employed in reducing the arrears of cataloguing MSS. Mr. Macray, it is understood, has been busy with State papers and with his ' opus magnum,' the Annals of the Library. If the first and second tables in paragraph 25 are compared, the greatness or smallness of Mr. Madan's work in overtaking arrears in a given year will be found to be explained, to a large extent, by the smallnes...« less