The Folklore Society Library
‘Rare’ books, Pamphlets and Folios: finding aid
We reported a while ago that our FLS ‘rare’ books, pamphlets and folios were moved with University College London Special Collections to temporary quarters at The National Archives at Kew. Very few of our items at UCL Special Collections have been added to UCL’s online catalogue, and it is likely to be many years before sufficient funds can be raised to pay for the retrospective cataloguing. Hitherto, the only finding aid for these items was our card catalogue at our office, but we now have a much more useful digital one: Dr Paul Cowdell has made an Excel spreadsheet of the bibliographical details, classmarks and barcodes of all of our ‘rare’ books, pamphlets both bound and boxed, and folios held at UCL Special Collections at Kew.
The list is available as a downloadable file
Our Loan Collection and Periodicals
The bulk of The Folklore Society Library (around 12,000 books and volumes of serials) is stored at University College London Library’s Wickford stores outside London. All of these items may be ordered for delivery (usually the next day) to UCL’s Stores Issue Desk in the Science Library. Many of these items may be borrowed. FLS members seeking a UCL library card should contact the FLS Librarian.
About two thirds of our holdings at UCL’s Wickford Stores are catalogued on UCL’s online catalogue and you can browse these by searching by classmark. Our books have the classmark prefix FLS or FOLKLORE, and our periodicals are FLS Pers. The only finding aid for the remaining third is our card catalogue at our office.
Reference Books
We keep around 1,000 reference books and a selection of important works on folklore at our FLS Office at The Warburg Institute. These are not available for loan but visitors can browse and read them at our office Monday to Friday between 2 and 5 p.m. (to make an appointment, contact us). Some of these books are listed on UCL’s online catalogue with a note that they are held at FLS Office at The Warburg Institute.