The University of London Library has recently undertaken a project to catalogue one of its special collections online, that of Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence (1837-1914, a protagonist of the Baconian theory in the controversy over the authorship of the works attributed to Shakespeare. The collection is especially rich in editions of Bacon's works and other Baconiana and in seventeenth-century English drama, with other strengths being emblem books and early editions of the works of Daniel Defoe. This article places the retrospective cataloguing project in the context of the international drive for retrospective conversion of antiquarian material and of the Library's mission to support research within the federal University of London and the region and internationally. It describes the method used for cataloguing, then focuses on the benefits of the project both academically for researchers and administratively. In addition to the commonly acknowledged benefits of multiple access points in online catalogue records and speed and precision of searching from anywhere in the world, others include the opportunity as part of the project to conduct a preservation survey with little extra cost of time or handling, establishing the rarity of particular items and classes of items in the collection, and insight into the collector provided especially by provenance notes in the catalogue records, enabling scholars to learn a considerable amount about Durning-Lawrence and his collecting patterns from direct electronic access. The value of projects conducted along similar lines may easily be inferred.

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The University of London was established by royal charter in November 1836, and its first donations of books are recorded in Senate Minutes of 1838. 1 The list begins, atypically for the years before 1871, with two bulk donations. The first of these summarises: 'Parliamentary Reports and Papers on Education in England, Scotland and Ireland. Presented by the Chancellor and Mr. Warburton', and refers to minutes of the Committee of the Faculty of Medicine for a full list. These minutes show the reports to date from 1809 to 1837, and to focus on Ireland; most are on primary or secondary education, and appear unrelated to universities (a local English example is 'Reports from the Select Committee on the Education of the Lower Orders in the Metropolis'). 2 The record of the second bulk donation states briefly: '185 volumes. Presented by Nathaniel Vye, Esq.' Nothing indicates the further identity of the donor or the motivation for the donation, and, unlike the educational reports, no list survives elsewhere. It is this hitherto unidentified group of books which forms the basis for this article.Nathaniel Vye appears not to have been a University man; certainly nobody of that name is recorded in Foster or Venn. 3 The Vye family was an established one at Ilfracombe in Devon (with a family tomb in the churchyard and monument in the church there), and Nathaniel was a family name: the 62 men sworn in as special constables and listed on a handbill from the 'Ilfracombe Association for the Preservation of the Peace', dated 7 December 1830, included, alongside William Vye and W.B. Vye, both 'Nathaniel Vye senior' and 'Nathaniel Vye junior'; 4 a third Nathaniel Vye, 'eldest son of Nathaniel Vye, of Ilfracombe, Devon', was a student of the Middle Temple on 14 January 1840 and was called to the bar on 5 May 1843. 5 The eldest of the three Nathaniel Vyes mentioned here, born in 1759, is named in the first decade of the nineteenth century as selling brigs, 6 and was also a banker, dissolving his partnership in Ilfracombe with William B. Vye and G. Harris in 1828. 7 Having died in 1835, he could scarcely have donated books in 1838 -although he could feasibly have owned them --and his lawyer grandson, born in 1818, is somewhat young to have been the donor. This leaves the middle Nathaniel Vye (1791-1840), evidently a man who took an interest in the community; he is mentioned in 1837 as Vice-Chair at a Devonshire Reform Dinner in the Ilfracombe Rooms. 8 Professionally, he was a medical man,

The second edition of Bliss's Bibliographic Classification (BC2) has been acclaimed as a modern, faceted scheme that offers short classmarks with enhanced exactitude. Simultaneously, doubts have been voiced about its success because it is new and lacks institutional support. Both praise and skepticism have been expressed in theoretical terms. The present article tests the opinions by case studies. It compares BC2 classmarks with DDC, LCC and UDC classmarks for works about Shakespeare to demonstrate the truth of the claim that BC2 offers greater precision and brevity. It then summarises the results of a survey sent to non-Bliss Cambridge College libraries which substantiates in practical terms reservations about BC2, but shows that evidence of its success where practiced causes it to be regarded sympathetically.

How does a University library established in the late nineteenth century and donation-driven into the twentieth acquire a collection of incunabula? This article examines the growth of the incunabula collection at Senate House Library, University of London (formerly known as the University of London Library) from the twenty-two fifteenth-century books in the foundation collection of Augustus De Morgan, given in 1871, to the twenty-first century. It describes the influx of incunabula through the gifts of various named special collections, looking also at the role that incunabula played within those collections; through purchase; and through the demise of other institutional libraries. The article further details Senate House Library's treatment of its incunabula and shows how exploration of a small collection (134 of the Library's estimated 200,000 early printed books) sheds light on private and institutional library history.