Mudd Manuscript Library Blog

More than 1,100 feet of records providing insights into 20th-century economics history available

Princeton University’s Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library has completed a two-year project to process all of its economics-related public policy collections to modern standards. These collections provide a rich resource about American economic thought and policies in the 20th century and the impact of American economic policy and the ideas of some of the leading economic thinkers on the emerging world economy, especially in developing nations.

Twenty-eight collections, totaling more than 1,100 linear feet, were processed through the support of the John Foster and Janet Avery Dulles Fund and a grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission. Electronic finding aids for each collection are available on the library’s website for researchers.

I am pleased to announce the availability of several new EAD finding aids resulting from the Princeton University Archives Processing Project. Processing and finding aids for all three collections were completed by Dan Brennan.

Finding aids for all Mudd library collections (478 finding aids in total) are now available and searchable on the EAD site at http://diglib.princeton.edu/ead . Please contact Dan Santamaria with any questions or comments

New Finding Aids:

Dean of Undergraduate Student Records:

Department of Politics Records

Office of Government Affairs Records

For those of you who missed my presentation “What I Learned This Summer: A Week at SAA’s First Electronic Records Summer Camp” that I delivered Friday, December 14, 2007, you can download my PowerPoint presentation here. This was for all interested Library staff and was given in conjunction with two other speakers who discussed what they learned at recent professional meetings.

Last Friday, Dan Linke, Don Thornbury, and I gave presentations reporting on recent conferences and workshops that we've attended. (See the previous post for Dan Linke's electronic records presentation.) My presentation is available here.

Rather than give a session by session review of the last few conferences I've attended or presented at (the Society of American Archivists Annual Meeting, the Digital Library Federation's Fall Forum, and the Society of Georgia Archivists Annual Meeting), I decided to discuss some of the more provocative ideas from the OCLC/RLG Services' report "Shifting Gears: Gearing Up to Get Into the Flow," which addresses many issues relevant to archives, special collections, and digital libraries, both at Princeton and elsewhere. The report was inspired by the "Digitization Matters" forum held at SAA 2007. (Audio of the forum presentations is also available online.)

Given some of the ongoing discussion we've been having at Princeton, one of the most resonant parts of the report for me is the portion related to description, particularly the urging to "take a page from archivists" and "stop obsessing about items." As archivists, we have experience and expertise in describing large (and small) collections of materials; we should make use of our abilities in this area and not limit ourselves to the item-level, bibliographic cataloging approach that has dominated digital collections, especially since the majority of collections we are digitizing consist of unique and non-published material. Bill Landis' talk at the Digitization Matters forum discusses this issue in greater detail.

For those interested in more specific information about individual sessions, the SAA 2007 wiki and DLF's conference website have a number of presentations up and available. And as I mentioned on Friday, anyone who missed Mark Greene's presidential address at SAA's closing plenary session should read the text online.