Researching the EU: remote access to EDC holdings

By | 7 January 2016

Those of you that have visited our Library during the last six months will have noticed that many of our collections have been on the move as part of our major refurbishment programme.  The European Documentation Centre (EDC) is no exception, as it will move from Level 1 to Level 0, reuniting the current EDC collection with the older EDC holdings that have been available in rolling cases for a number of years now.

All the material is currently available, but there will be a brief period of time during the rennovation programme when the EDC will be inaccessible.  Happily, this is no longer the major problem that it would have been even a year ago, as in 2015 the Bodleian obtained from the British Library a file of over 58 000 bibliographic records for European Union publications, which, along with links to the EU publications online,  have been loaded into SOLO, Oxford’s search and discovery tool. This means that, whether or not you are in Oxford, you can now access full text EU publications via the Articles & More tab on SOLO.  To view the entire collection (currently 215,562 items), use the search term:  EU Bookshop (European Union).  This resource is freely available for anyone to use.

You can be more specific.  For example, a search under the Articles & More tab for:  jean monnet speeches will find you the the link to download the full text of Jean Monnet’s speeches at the inauguration of the High Authority on August 10th, 1952, in Luxembourg and at the opening session of the Assembly on September 11th, 1952, in Strasbourg:

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EU publications such as this one are notoriously tricky to find.  Further, over the years innumerable pamphlets of current but ephemeral interest have been published;  different versions, particularly different language versions, have presented cataloguing challenges, and the physical format of many small and sometimes flimsy items has made them physically difficult to manage.  This access via SOLO to the full text of a vast body of hard-to-source material is a tremendous advance and a wonderful gift to EU research, not only for the duration of the Library’s refurbishment programme but also for the years to come.

Posted by the EDC Librarian