The collections of the Advocates Library, with the exception of its legal books and manuscripts, were given by the Advocates to the National Library of Scotland in 1925.

Manual of Library Cataloguing is the tell-all manual to unlock the secrets of catalog collection from libraries as small as a private person's independently owned collection to libraries as large as the British Museum. Excerpt: "Generally I find a library catalog is assumed to be a thing that is somehow 'made' at a single stroke, as Aladdin's palace was built, at intervals of ten or a dozen years, or whenever a 'new catalog' is thought to be needed..."