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Bibliographic Statistics:

The Arabic Union Catalog (AUC) bibliographic records distinguish by their high quality and complete homogeneity. This has achieved the highest degree of unity with international standards considering Arabic information resources' most accurate specificities.

 

The number of records:

At the AUC start, 310,000 bibliographic records were recorded. By 2018, this number reached 2,250,000 records. The AUC available bibliographic records used by the libraries have developed and increased to exceed 400,000 records download and upload transactions in 2017. This reflects the intensive demand for national/international libraries to use AUC services.

 

Authority control:

Library catalogs' transmission from traditional practices to digital environments has led to an increasing need for unconventional authority control tools. Most Arabic libraries lacked such tools, except for some local trials to develop these tools in-house in addition to the traditional practices that don’t match the digital environment. Still, these trials lack the appropriate update policy since they are individual efforts.

 

The AUC administration's awareness of the Arabic Libraries’ need for these tools drove the AUC to take responsibility for creating authority lists in the digital environment, mainly to avoid the imperfections of the previous tools. These authority lists are consistent with MARC 21, the LOC list, and Arabic characteristics. Further, these authority lists have benefited from Arab literature and published tools. The AUC administration also updates these authority files regularly. These are considered institutional work with continuity and development compared to individual works. The following is a brief demo of the authority lists:

  • The list of personal names: includes more than 400.000 normalized in their formats and entries. In addition, cross-references for unauthorized formats have been created.
  • List of organizations and meetings names: includes 70.000 records.
  • The list of uniform titles: contains 30.000 records.
  • List of subject headings of natural sciences and geographical names: includes more than 250.000 subject headings and geographical names, resulting from a priority list of more than 60.000 entries after normalizing, merging duplicates, and adding supplementary subject headings.