MARC to EAD or EAD to MARC

I just got an email from Martha McTear, Metadata Librarian for special collections at College of Charleston.  Turns out she is an WS alum from the class of 1997.  That’s 6 years before I got here, but it’s still pretty cool.  Martha asked about my cataloging strategy. Seemed like an easy post to just cut and paste my answer in a post. [You say lazy, I say efficient]

I would have to say I go from EAD to MARC.  It took me a few years to get the hang of going from being a librarian to being an archivist. [collections, not items] I start by having student workers do inventory input into Archivist’s Toolkit.  Eventually I get around to doing bio/history, scope and content notes and name/subject entries. Then AT spits it out and I put it on the Finding Aids web page. I then do a MARC record in Voyager that links to the finding aid, with minimal information.  We also have the library website set up now so that in the home page you can put a keyword search in the find box and choose archives on the drop down menu and it will search the web pages and finding aids as well as Voyager.  I believe most of our researchers, other than HWS students, find us through Google searches.

Authority files

I don’t know if any of you have run into the same situation with authorities that I have…

The  archives was originally setup  with item cataloging.  All  folders  are items in the card catalog.   I estimate  at best  20% of the  card catalog has  be converted to  MARC  and in our Voyager catalog. Since I came I’ve been item cataloging the digitized photographs.

Once Archivist’s Toolkit showed up on the scene, I’ve been trying to do incoming materials as collections.  Also, pulling some of the existing “items” together into subject collections for ease of use.

Now the names and subjects headings that are in the Voyager catalog are not in the AT names and subjects and visa versa.  I want to be as precise with our local names and subjects as p0ssible.  Here is my plan:

• I have Pauline, a super precise cataloger in our Tech Services, working with me.
• Pauline is checking the names and subjects I have already put in AT for correctness. (I’m not a cataloger by training.)
• She is then going through Voyager and checking that the headings conform to AT.
• I’m using AT as THE authority file.  As I’m cataloging more photos or adding collections, I check the AT headings.  If a heading isn’t there, I add one.
• I’m keeping track of my additions to send to Pauline, so she can check for correctness.  I’m hoping this way new things won’t slip through the cracks, as she moves alphabetically down the list.

I hope I’m not making both Pauline’s and my life too complicated. It just seems there are so many possibilities for forms of all those faculty and alum names that without an authority file we might loose someone.

Rethinking our archives

With a new library director we get the chance to look at everything we are doing with fresh eyes. Vince Boisselle has background in archives and special collections, so his fresh eyes are particularly helpful.

Since I came into the position with library no archives background I changed very little of the real organization. Everything in here is part of the Geneva Collection. That includes books dealing with the colleges and local history, mss files that could be pretty much anything, alumni files, program files, and faculty files (all of those cataloged as individual items and in folders in document boxes. On top of that are individual collections, like the Myler Half-Dime Novels, the Saga Corporation Archives…

Shall we move towards classing everything that is the historical record of the Colleges as a different collection? Start pulling individual items into artificial collections for ease of use? Some of them may have originally been collections that were separated of individual cataloging and classification.

It looks like we will put a greater emphasis on the rare book collection. I’m very excited about that, I’ve always wanted to learn more about what we have.

If all or any of you have any great insights to pass along. I’d love to hear them.

Using Adobe PDF to make viewbooks viewable.

There seems to be much repetition with in our photograph collection.  Many early viewbooks were taken apart and cataloged as separate images.  The student workers alerted me to the fact that they seemed to be scanning images that they had already scanned.  When there was more than one image on a page, we have scanned each separately.

I decided to catalog the whole viewbook as an item, so they started scanning them as whole pages, text and all. My first thought was to make each page a separate holding.  I’m glad to say that it dawned on me to make the whole viewbook one pdf file.  I used the genre heading “viewbooks” from AAT so they can all be found easily in the catalog.

This means that the same image can be found in the catalog with it’s own subject tracings, and as part of the viewbook from which it came.

I’m very happy with the results.

Cataloging photos

I’ve just been asked about the templates I use for cataloging photos in Voyager. Since I have it all written out I thought I might as well share it here. Any catalogers out there, feel free to tell me if I’m doing it wrong.

For the Marc bib record I use the following template:
099 _ 9 ‡a G phot file [insert phot number]

245 0 0 ‡a [insert title] ‡k photograph.

260 __ ‡c [insert date]

300 __ ‡a 1 ‡f Photograph: ‡b b&w; ‡c 18 x 13 cm. [change subfields as needed]

506 __ ‡a For use only in the Colleges Archives.

520 2_ ‡a [scope and content]

530 __ ‡a Electronic reproduction available.

533 __ ‡a Electronic reproduction, ‡b Geneva, N.Y.: ‡c Hobart and William Smith Colleges, ‡d [insert year scanned] ‡e Scanned at 300dpi and saved in TIFF format; resized at 640 pixels as JPEG for catalog display

540 __ ‡a It is the Colleges policy that material in its collection be made available for research and scholarship. We ask that should material be reproduced or published in any way, that the Colleges are given appropriate credit.

610 24 ‡a Hobart and William Smith Colleges, ‡b Trinity Hall. ‡v Photographs. [change subject as needed]

651 _4 ‡a Geneva, N.Y. ‡v Photographs.

655 _7 ‡a Black-and-white photographs. ‡2 AAT [change as needed]

856 __ ‡d /m1/voyager/images/ ‡f XXX_t.jpg ‡o UNIX [this is where the Archives webpage picks up the pictures.. the XXX is the filename for the thumbnail that shows up]

For the MARC holding record I use this template:

852 8_ ‡b ARCH.PHOT ‡h G phot file [same as bib 099]

856 41 ‡u http://archive.hws.edu/Archives/PhotFile/XXX.jpg ‡z <img src=”http://archive.hws.edu/Archives/PhotFile/XXX_t.jpg&#8221; border=”0″> [this shows the thumbnail in the voyager record, when you click it brings up the full picture. Again the XXX is the file name]

Archivists Toolkit and Name Authorities

OK, now here is a project that can only be done at an institution as small as this one.

Since it’s so quiet here in the summer, it lends itself to detailed work.  I’m going through all the authority records I’ve created on Voyager in the last four years and adding them to the Names database in Archivists Toolkit.  In the names record I’m putting a note with the Authority record ID number.  By doing this I’m finding places where I wasn’t consistent, and adding a lot of 410 and 510 fields.

The main reason for doing this is that the filter on AT names is so easy to use, compared to searching the authority records on Voyager.  I will use AT when cataloging to speed things along.

I should mention that I can’t do this for more than 1 1/2 a day, I seem to become lethargic after that.

EAD 101.2

(Originally posted January 16, 2006)

I remembered one more benefit of EAD using the Cookbook method. The
mark-up text gives the MARC tags to use for each section, so then it's
just a matter of cutting and pasting into your online catalog MARC template.

So if you've done your homework you have the idea of what EAD is about,
and what online finding aids look like. Are you ready to tackle it? I
must warn you, when I first took this on I did nothing else for 2 weeks.
(I work a 20 hr wk.) I started with a very short finding aid that was
already done in paper. It's easiest if it's already in a wordprocesser
file. That way you can just cut and paste into the EAD.

*Today let's just start getting the tools together.*

On page 20 of the EAD Cookbook 2002 you will find *Section 4: Authoring
Tools*.

I went with *NoteTab*. It is free and, I thought, very easy.
You will find information and installation instructions in *Section 4.2*
starting on page 25.

To get the software go to Fookes Software and
click on the Info button for NoteTab Light 4.95 (Free!) There are
download instructions at the top. I recommend the EXE Package. When
you click you will be asked if you want to save it to disk. Say OK. It
will save it where ever your downloads usually get saved. Note the name
of the program is NoteTab_Setup.exe, in case you have to search your
disk to find out where it went. After it is downloaded you should just
have to double click on it to run the installation.

More next time. Good luck.

Welcome back

I went to a workshop at the Rochester Regional Library Counci (RRLC) last night on Professional Blogging, presented by Christopher Harris.  Based on what I learned there I decided to move my blog to WordPress.  This site will allow you to comment back to me, so we can get a conversation going.

Now I have to figure out the details to get the most out of software.  I'm hoping to import my work from bloglines.com into this blog, but at first glance it doesn't seem to support that.  I also will be able to add tags to my posts so those of you interested in my thoughts on EAD, or cataloging photographs, or other specific topics won't have to sort through it all to find what you want.

Be patient with me.  I believe it will be an improvement.