Author Archives: Dan Santamaria

New Accessions at the Mudd Library

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The Mudd Man­u­script Library typ­i­cally adds between 100 and 150 items or col­lec­tions to its hold­ings each year. As part of our com­mit­ment to pub­licly pro­vid­ing infor­ma­tion about our col­lec­tions, we will be includ­ing a monthly list­ing of new acces­sions on our blog. Any­one inter­ested in addi­tional infor­ma­tion about the acces­sions listed below should con­tact the library through our .

In addi­tion to the monthly list­ings here, an rss feed on newly cat­a­loged resources at Mudd is avail­able via the Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Library web­page (be sure to select See­ley G. Mudd Library from the “loca­tion” drop down menu). We are also, as part of our efforts to revamp our acces­sion­ing processes, cre­at­ing, updat­ing, and post­ing find­ing aids on the library’s EAD web­site within sev­eral weeks of the accession’s arrival at the library.

Con­tinue read­ing →

Digitizing Special Collections: Shifting Gears

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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.

New Finding Aids From Princeton University Archives Processing Project

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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

Online Access to All Collections at Princeton’s Mudd Manuscript Library

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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.