Dear forum members: Some of you will recall a questionnaire more than two years ago about a "Union Catalog of Clemens Writings" along the lines of my two Union Catalogs for letters by and letters to SLC. Although I did compile the results of that survey, I was forced to put aside the work of the catalog itself because of heavy demands here at UC Santa Cruz, where early retirements and budget cuts have increased workload tremendously. I've promised Taylor that I would give you a brief update on the three catalogs. First, I consider it a high priority to put both UCCL and UCLC online in some form. Unfortunately, I don't think that loading the databases on a gopher system using WAIS searching would be a service to anyone, so I am investigating ways to bundle the databases with some relational database software, possibly something in the public domain. Ideally, I would be able to find some library system that would be willing to carry the two catalogs, and that would be accessible through the internet. If anyone has experience or ideas that would help get these two catalogs up and available, please let me know, as I hardly consider myself an expert in these things. For your information, the total in the Clemens Letters database is now 10791, about 500 more than when UCCL was published in 1986. UCLC has 18409, the same as when published. Second, I am proceeding with the third catalog, albeit at a very slow pace. I've purchased software for creating records in the MARC format (which I had previously determined to be the best way to go), and will this summer create a test batch. More than 100 people responded to the survey (about 400 forms were sent out) and the overall response was that the document-specific information (letterhead, paper, ink, watermark, etc.) and the content-specific information (subject, characters) were indeed less essential than the more typical bibliographical/archival information (titles, dates, places, repository, etc.) I plan to create a record structure with slots for all the information, but only to record the higher-priority information at present. At any rate, I welcome comments or suggestions about these catalogs, and will meanwhile be plugging away at making the first two available on the internet. Sincerely, Paul Machlis