the expansion of print in the seventeenth century. Electronic publication enormously increased the potential of such catalogues, and in 1977 the Eighteenth-century short-title catalogue project was launched, with the aim of creating a machine-readable bibliography of books, pamphlets, handbills, and other ephemeral materials published between 1700 and 1801. The ESTC was an ambitious transatlantic project with a base at the British Library and at Stanford. Its publication on CD-ROM in the mid-1980s was seen as the way of the future, its search facilities speedy and flexible, although it was by no means cheap. Pollard and Redgrave and Wing are now part of a full-text database (Early English books on-line) and the Eighteenthcentury short title catalogue has become the English short title catalogue, with a brief to extend its coverage retrospectively to the advent of printing in the British Isles. Such is the way we live now, bibliographically.For the nineteenth century the story has been a less happy one. The problem of exerting some form of bibliographical control over an age of mechanized printing has been enough to deter even the most optimistic. The announcement, in 1983, of the Nineteenth century short title catalogue (NSTC) project was greeted, not surprisingly, with a mixture of wonder and scepticism. Its aim was 'to provide increasingly complete listings of British books printed between 1801 and 1919'. British books were taken to include 'all books published in Britain, its colonies and the United States of America ; all books in English wherever published ; and all translations from English '. The first two series (1801-14) and (1815-70) were published in sixty-two volumes between 1983 and 1995. The third and final series extended the coverage to 1919, and ran in tandem with development of publication on CD-ROM. The project has now been completed with the publication in 2002 of two CD-ROMs covering the long nineteenth century, 1801 through to 1919.Unlike the ESTC, the Nineteenth century short title catalogue was not based on a physical scrutiny of texts, with entries glossed reassuringly as ' verified ' or 'unverified '. Rather, it was compiled from the published catalogues of major libraries : the British Library, the Bodleian, Cambridge University Library, the National Library of Scotland, the libraries of Trinity College Dublin, Harvard, and the University of Newcastle upon Tyne (the project is based in Newcastle). To these were added a computerized sorting of the nineteenthcentury holdings of the Library of Congress. Where possible the cataloguing practices of