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May 14, 2001
Press contact: Audrey Fischer (202) 707-0022
Public contact: John Celli (202) 707-9797

Cataloging in Publication to Celebrate 30th Anniversary

June 2001 will mark the 30th anniversary of the Cataloging in Publication (CIP) program at the Library of Congress.

CIP records are distributed to book dealers, national libraries, and bibliographic utilities worldwide to notify the library community about forthcoming publications and to facilitate book ordering. CIP records are bibliographic data prepared by the Library of Congress for books about to be published. Participating publishers submit the text of eligible publications to the Library, prior to publication, to enable creation of the record. Publishers subsequently print the CIP record on the verso of the title page at the time of publication as a service to libraries and book dealers.

"Thanks to the cooperation of participating publishers, catalogers, and the CIP staff of the Library, more than 1 million CIP records have been created and made available to the library community, saving libraries millions of dollars annually in cataloging resources," said John Celli, chief of the Cataloging in Publication Division.

A bulletin board has been set up to enable libraries to post thank-you notes to participating publishers and Library of Congress staff for making the CIP program possible for the past 30 years. The thank-you notes will be shared with publishers at a June 15 reception, supported by Quality Books, during the upcoming 2001 American Library Association (ALA) Annual Conference at the San Francisco Marriott, and with Library staff at a reception to be held at the Library of Congress on July 19. Other plans to celebrate the 30th anniversary include a June 18 ALA Annual Conference program in San Francisco titled "CIP: A Vision for the Future," sponsored by the Association of Library Collections and Technical Services (ALCTS). Program participants will include Mr. Celli; Craig Van Dyck, John Wiley & Sons; and Pat Thomas, veteran librarian and Margaret Mann Citation recipient, who will discuss the CIP program's milestones and future plans. For further information about these events, visit the American Library Association Web site at www. ala.org.

The CIP program began in 1971 as a special project, funded in part by grants from the Council on Library Resources Inc. and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Since then the CIP program has evolved from creating 6,500 pre-publication cataloging records during its first year to creating more than 57,000 catalog records annually. It is now fully supported by Library of Congress appropriations and is administered by the Cataloging in Publication Division.

In 1996, CIP expanded its cataloging process to allow publishers to electronically transmit CIP information via the Internet. Through the Electronic Cataloging in Publication Program (ECIP), cataloging is completed online at the Library and the CIP data are transmitted electronically back to the publisher for inclusion in the printed book. The transmission of text electronically speeds up the overall process and eliminates postage costs.

Building on the success of ECIP, plans are under way to enable publishers to post additional pre-publication information on the Library of Congress Web site while simultaneously requesting CIP data. Under the proposed New Books project, publishers may post an image of the book jacket, book jacket blurb, table of contents, and other relevant information. When posted on the Library's Web site, it may also include a link to the catalog record, if one has been created for the title, as well as a link to enable readers to request a copy of the book at their local library. A prototype of this dramatically new system will be demonstrated at the ALA ALCTS program on June 18.

For more information about the Cataloging in Publication Program, visit their Web site at http://cip.loc.gov/cip.

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PR 01-072
5-14-2001
ISSN 0731-3527