Did you know that you can search the contents of the Congress Book using the Philatelic Union Catalog?
The Congress Book is published annually by the American Philatelic Congress (an affiliate of the American Philatelic Society) and each volume contains scholarly articles by philatelic researchers. The 77th Congress Book was released in August during APS StampShow.
Here at the APRL, we catalog the Congress Book as a journal, with each volume received added to the same bibliographic record. This is very handy if you want to see quickly which volumes we have available. However, it means we don’t record the contents of each volume.
Fortunately, the Rocky Mountain Philatelic Library has taken a different approach. They have cataloged each volume individually, including the contents.
This means you can do a keyword search of the Congress Book – simply include both your keyword and American Philatelic Congress in the search.
Some Congress Book articles are also indexed in the article database included in the union catalog. To do the most comprehensive search, select All Locations and search on “American Philatelic Congress” plus your keyword.
The American Philatelic Congress website (www.americanphilateliccongress.org) contains a searchable index of article titles.
The index on the American Philatelic Congress website is also searable by author, or subject. It is an electronic version of the print index published a few years ago.
I should have mentioned the index on the American Philatelic Congress site, which is linked from the APRL record for the Congress Book. What I really like about what the RMPL has done is that it makes the Congress Book articles searchable in the same place as other articles. So, a researcher does not need to know that his subject was covered in a Congress Book volume in order to find the article in his search. The index on the Congress site is probably easier to use if you know that you are looking for something in a Congress Book.