Campus buildings resource guide

I just added a new resource guide to my Finding Aids page on our campus buildings.

When I started my morph from librarian to archivist someone told me you can’t call something a finding aid if it isn’t describing a distinct collection, so I went with “resource guide” for this type of project. There are subjects, like campus buildings, that we get asked about all of the time and a resource guide helps us put our hands on items that are spread out throughout the collection more quickly.

I have my student workers

• list everything they can find in the card catalog and the online catalog on a subject (there is little overlap between the two)
• add description information from the cataloging
• pull the material to check that it’s where it should be

Then I cut and paste the information into NoteTab and create an EAD “resource guide”.

We have done the same thing for Elizabeth Blackwell, first woman to receive her degree as a Doctor of Medicine (this one is a PDF)  and Dr. Benjamin Hale, President of Hobart College from 1836 to 1858.

I don’t know if anyone else uses them, but the speed up the reference process for me when I get questions.