Adding Recent Books from Library of Congress

Is anyone else finding that when adding books from the Library of Congress, the add books import does not show recent titles? I have had several occasions where a book is in LOC’s online catalog at www.loc.gov, but can’t be found when searching to add the book to our catalog from LOC in LibraryThing.

Thanks,

Charles B. Campbell
Grace Pointe Church Library

It depends on how recent. Very recent titles may take some time to get catalogued on LoC (or other national libraries) too.

It will help if you provide a few examples of books which you looked for and can find in LOC but not via the LT Add Books and what you searched then by - Isbn, LCCn, title?

Sometimes the LoC is behind in cataloging books from the last year or two. Sometimes they have books in the catalog before they are actually available using Forthcoming Books data for things they have ordered or expect to get as part of the copyright registration process.

When a new book is not available on LoC as a data source, I usually have to resort to Amazon. For new books the data is better than it is for old ones. The latter are usually input by sellers who may have different levels of care and attention to detail. Often subject and other important data is not included in the Amazon data.

If this does not appeal and you prefer a library data source, try OverCat which is a collection of records added by LT members. Most of these should be library sources.

LoC sometimes has their servers overloaded and they don't respond promptly to the LT requests for data.

James

>3 AnnieMod: It happened today with “Judaism and its Bible” by Frederick Greenspahn, released this month. I tried importing this morning using ISBN and title. This afternoon, I tried using the author’s last name and there it was!

Very curious. Seems to be happening some with the British Library, too.

Thanks,

Charles

>5 GracePointeChurch:

That almost sounds like some kind of an indexing not getting populated fast enough on the library side - as the author has other books, their name had been indexed already so the search finds them (including the new book as it is under the author); the ISBN/title are too new so the index for them is not built yet.