ABSTRACT
In the People’s Republic of China (PRC) the trend is to manage periodicals separately from books, including their acquisition, cataloguing, and circulation. An example of a periodicals department with such an all-encompassing mandate is the Shanghai Library, which is the PRC’s second largest library (7 million books, 14,450 current periodical titles). Here, foreign published periodicals are administered separately from periodicals published in the PRC; each has its own circulation section. In 1986, the Periodicals Dept. of the Shanghai Library started distributing descriptive cataloguing cards for its foreign titles to libraries throughout the PRC.
