Nearly two-thirds of the 5,000 books and pamphlets have been catalogued, classified and made accessible to students and researchers. From October 1995- January 1997, 3,156 descriptive records have been created to AACR/MARC standard on the BLCMP automated cataloguing system. Eighty-six percent required the attachment of local data to existing records, including Library of Congress Classification details, and the remaining fourteen percent involved original cataloguing and the generation of new records.
This latter statistic emphasizes the rarity of many of the books in the Collection, which includes a particularly strong focus on Anglo-Irish literature. So far over seventy Irish publishers have been identified, ranging from private printing presses in nineteenth century Belfast through to the better known Dublin publishers like M H Gill, James Duffy and the Talbot Press. More than forty percent of the monographs are works by, or about individual authors and these include over two hundred personally signed copies by well-known poets like Seamus Heaney, John Montague, Derek Mahon and Michael Longley.
The accumulating database of records is being made available on the library's OPAC (On-Line Public Access Catalogue) which can be accessed through the world wide web on the internet. It is planned to construct a stand alone catologue of the Hewitt records so that networked researchers can browse the index to the Collection, as well as using more formal search strategies.
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The manuscript archives are currently being sorted and prepared for listing. Wordperfect for Windows and Adobe Acrobat software will be used for data creation and compiling multi-level descriptions of the manuscripts. Records for thirty radio scripts, broadcast from the 1940's to the 1970's on BBC Northern Ireland, are now being produced. It is hoped to provide world wide web users with free text search facilities using Free WAIS-SF Database package and also to install an electronic enquiry service for the Collection.
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A leaflet was launched during May 1996 to promote the Collection. It was distributed to all UK University Departments of English Literature, and through the support of the John Hewitt International Summer School, mailed to over six hundred interested academics along with their 1996 programme.
An exhibition was held during August 1996 at the International Summer School at Garron Tower, County Antrim. This was viewed by over two hundred people throughout the week and information from the exhibition formed the basis of a report filed by the art critic of the Irish Times.
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The Collection has already proved to be the linchpin of the work of a number of UK based researchers and has been frequently used between 1987 and 1997.
It is one of the most significant Collections in the UK and Ireland, outside Oxbridge, Trinity College, Dublin and the National Library of Ireland, of modern and contemporary Irish literature and of the manuscript holdings in that literature. It is a unique resource for researchers particularly in Irish poetry but also in modern Irish culture, history and folklore.
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