[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Small Collections: summary & thanks



Dear list members,

I'd like to thank everyone who wrote, both on- & offline,
about their experiences with small collections. I think I
probably phrased the question awkwardly--my apologies!--
but most people seem to have picked up on the issues I
was raising.  Several institutions had something like the
approach I was considering:  a MARC record for "Small
Collections," with individual listings in a database or inventory
of some kind. One institution has the MARC record for the
general collection and the inventory of the individual collections
up on the web (Yale).  Many repositories, like mine, will not be
able to put up MARC records for all of the individual small
collections any time soon.  My goal in all this was to find the best
compromise, but without, of course, mixing the collections together, which
some people might have misunderstood.

Some archivists suggested  that size shouldn't matter, that content
alone should determine the decisions to retain a collection and catalog
it.  This is truly ideal, but I (like most of us, I suspect) am bound
by donor agreements signed decades ago, and I also have to
give account of myself to higher-ups.  I would have a difficult time
justifying the focusing of so much effort on small collections while the
larger ones go untouched, no matter what I might think of the content.

The whole correspondence has helped me to finalize my
plans for these collections, and I hope it has helped other
list members too.  Thanks again.

Joy Kingsolver
Chicago Jewish Archives

A posting from the Archives & Archivists LISTSERV List!

To subscribe or unsubscribe, send e-mail to listserv@listserv.muohio.edu
      In body of message:  SUB ARCHIVES firstname lastname
                    *or*:  UNSUB ARCHIVES
To post a message, send e-mail to archives@listserv.muohio.edu

Or to do *anything* (and enjoy doing it!), use the web interface at
     http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/archives.html

Problems?  Send e-mail to Robert F Schmidt <rschmidt@lib.muohio.edu>