Current Lists:
Current books - those that are published during the year - represent the majority of materials usually acquired by most libraries, although it may not always be so in case of large re-search, industrial and academic libraries which cater to the special requirements of their respective users. But even in these libraries, a large proportion of their acquisition may relate to current books.
In countries with a high volume of publications in a year such as the USA and the UK, there may be weekly listings of new books. Listing of this type normally provides information on author, title, publisher, place of publication, year of publication, pagination, special features including series information, and International Standard Book Number (ISBN). Sometimes cataloguing data, including subjects are also given. Information on subject contents in the form of subject headings, is particularly valuable, as very often the titles of documents do not convey adequate information about their contents.
Monthly lists are common, either as cumulations of weekly lists or as first listing; there may be quarterly, half yearly, and annual cumulations of such lists. Lists of forthcoming publications are also issued frequently, but there are two limiting factors in these cases. Quite often they may not be on schedule and in a few cases, these titles never get released for one reason or the other.
Examples of weekly and monthly lists: For American Books: Weekly Record, R.R. Bowker;
American Book Publishing Record, R.R. Bowker, a monthly cumulation of the Weekly Record.
British Books: Bookseller, Whitaker; Books of the Month, Whitaker, a monthly cumulation of Bookseller.
Publishers market their products though announcement leaflets, pamphlets and other such methods. Generally such announcements contain more information about books than those published as weekly or monthly lists. A lot of useful data is available such as a brief note on the contents and other descriptive features. Useful as this information is, it should be noted that these announcements are to promote sales and hence information contained in them may not always be reliable or objective.