Sources for business and commerce in the Department of Printed Books

The most significant feature of the Department of Printed Books is that it is almost entirely a general library. It is the library of national deposit, with a general brief to collect material in all fields of knowledge from the rest of the world. There is no specialized acquisitions function for business information, and no reference collection except that for the whole field of the social sciences. The stock is not classified, so that material of concern to commerce and industry is scattered in the general collections, and there are no special catalogues or indexes. This means not only that it is a difficult library to use for those accustomed to other conventions, but also that it is difficult to talk about in so specialized a context as this. The Library's resources are known by the business information community to be considerable; but because they have never been organized for this particular purpose they are very much under‐used. (The set of the electoral registers, used for market research, is probably our best‐known source).