North American Imprints Program, 1639-1840: Creation of a Union Catalog

FAIN: PW-228112-15

American Antiquarian Society (Worcester, MA 01609-1634)
Alan N. Degutis (Project Director: July 2014 to June 2019)

The production of 6,700 detailed catalog records for publications printed in North America from the colonial period up to 1840.

This project seeks funding to continue work on the North American Imprints Program (NAIP). NAIP’s long-term goal is the creation of a machine-readable union catalog of books, pamphlets and broadsides printed in the United States before 1877. With funding requested here, NAIP staff will integrate 2,615 records received from the English Short-Title Catalogue (ESTC) and the Library Company of Philadelphia; will upgrade 4,097 acquisition-level records to rare-book level; will read several recently published bibliographies against the file, creating new records and adding information relevant to existing records; and will improve the consistency of uniform titles, subject headings and genre headings in the file. In accomplishing these goals we will make the pre-1841 NAIP file more complete, more accurate, and more useful to scholars.