Cover letter
Dear Editor,
We kindly ask You to consider the attached manuscript for publication in the special issue on "The Role and Function of National Bibliographies for Research in Different Academic Disciplines" in Cataloging & Classification Quarterly. The work is original, it has not been published elsewhere or submitted simultaneously for publication elsewhere.
We present an analysis of the overall publishing landscape in the period 1500-1800 based on comprehensive harmonization and joint analysis of four large bibliographic catalogs. This has allowed us to assess publishing activity beyond what is accessible by the use of national catalogs alone. In addition to the historical analysis of knowledge production trends, we are releasing the openly licensed source code for catalog harmonization, and a notable improved version of the Finnish national bibliography, Fennica. This code and data release demonstrate the potential of our approach for research use of library catalogs, and the essential role that data harmonization and integration plays in this process.
The work directly addresses multiple aspects that are relevant to the CCQ journal in general, and the special issue on national bibliographies in particular. This work demonstrates how comprehensive data harmonization is essential for accurate and useful data retrieval tasks and relevant for the overall usability of the catalogue information, and how the available classification and subject analyses, geographical information, and other data can be utilized, augmented, enriched and validated based on auxiliary information sources.information sources, such as digital maps for instance. Integration of national bibliographies, special collections, and archives is relevant for international aspects of digital cataloging. As such the work highlights specific bottlenecks and shortcomings in the available cataloging and classification information, and can therefore provide relevant information for education, training, and management of cataloguing. Finally, we demonstrate how bibliographic catalog records can be used as a digital research resource, rather than a mere information retrieval tool.