Recent Books Cataloged at the Library of Congress

A Selected List of Titles, with Online Tables of Contents, Summaries, or Sample Pages

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About the Recent Books Guides

The Recent Books Guides list selected monographs on a range of topics in business and economics, the humanities and social sciences, and science and technology. These titles, which, in general, were added to the Library of Congress collections in the last five years, were selected through one of several catalog enrichment projects projects sponsored by the Library of Congress' Bibliographic Enrichment Advisory Team (BEAT) in which the tables of contents, publishers' summaries, and/or selected pages are available online.

All of the Table of Contents (TOC) and Summaries projects are designed to link the online data with underlying MARC records using access through the World Wide Web to present the information to users of the Library's online catalog and Web pages. Hyper-links from the table of contents or publisher's summary to the catalog record, and the reverse, allow researchers to move from or to the Library's online catalog where they can make additional searches for related or other material. The controlled vocabulary as used in subject assignment is added to the HTML keyword meta tags, providing additional search points to the material in the TOC or summary record.

In the Digital Table of Contents and the BeCites Plus projects, the process involves scanning and optical character recognition and utilizes programs written in the Cataloging Directorate to automate much of the work. In the ONIX and CIP projects, TOC and/or summary data is received directly from the publishers in electronic form. Programming developed by a BEAT team member utilizes the data to create table of contents or summary records that the Library makes available on the Web.

In the ONIX Sample Texts Project, the Library makes use of sample texts for selected books that the publishers have made available online, such as a first chapter, content from the book jacket, or images. This project makes links from LC catalog records to copies of these sample texts, which, with the publisher's permission, have been stored at the Library to insure long-term availabilty.

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