Staff at the See­ley G. Mudd Man­u­script Library at Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity have recently com­pleted a project aimed at pro­vid­ing online access to all of the Mudd Library’s col­lec­tions, both processed and unprocessed.

In addi­tion to a num­ber of ambi­tious pro­cess­ing projects, in the fall of 2006 the library began a retro-conversion project, result­ing in the con­ver­sion of all legacy elec­tronic find­ing aids to Encoded Archival Descrip­tion. Collection-level MARC cat­a­loging was com­pleted for all col­lec­tions lack­ing find­ing aids, and the MARC records were then con­verted to EAD, pri­mar­ily through the use of XSL stylesheets and Terry Reese’s MarcEdit soft­ware. With the new EAD find­ing aids, descrip­tive records, at at least the col­lec­tion level, for all of Mudd’s col­lec­tions are dis­cov­er­able in the Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Library’s OPAC, the Depart­ment of Rare Books and Spe­cial Collection’s EAD web­site, union cat­a­logs and data­bases such as OCLC’s World­Cat and Archive­G­rid, and via com­mon inter­net search engines such as Google and Yahoo. As of Novem­ber 2007, 478 records for Mudd Library col­lec­tions are available.

Staff will con­tinue to add to the collection-level records through the cre­ation of series, box, or file-level inven­to­ries. The Mudd Library is also cur­rently revis­ing acces­sion­ing pro­ce­dures in order to ensure that both collection-level MARC records and EAD find­ing aids are pro­duced at the time of acces­sion­ing. We also plan to increas­ingly link find­ing aids to dig­i­tal sur­ro­gates of mate­r­ial in col­lec­tions and to explore addi­tional ways for users to inter­act with find­ing aids and the mate­r­ial that they represent.

For addi­tional infor­ma­tion please visit the Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Library’s Depart­ment of Rare Books and Spe­cial Col­lec­tions Find­ing Aids web­site at: http://diglib.princeton.edu/ead or con­tact Dan San­ta­maria, Assis­tant Uni­ver­sity Archivist for Tech­ni­cal Services.