Category Archives: Library News

Applying “More Product, Less Process” to very large collections: Mudd archivist presents at professional conference

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MARAC
Recently project archivist Adri­ane Han­son par­tic­i­pated in a panel at the recent spring con­fer­ence of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Con­fer­ence (MARAC) in Cape May, NJ. The topic of her talk was how she is han­dling the size of her cur­rent project, pro­cess­ing 2,500 lin­ear feet of the records of the Amer­i­can Civil Lib­er­ties Union Records in a two-year project funded by the National His­tor­i­cal Pub­li­ca­tions and Records Com­mis­sion (NHPRC).
In a nut­shell, this feat is accom­plished by:
1. Stay on top of the sched­ule through care­ful project man­age­ment, col­lect­ing met­rics to have real­is­tic data on how long each task requires, and fre­quently revis­it­ing and adjust­ing the time­line of the project.
2. Be flex­i­ble about the work­flow, exam­in­ing the way you have always done things and adjust­ing as needed to bet­ter work with a mas­sive collection.
3. Think of it as data man­age­ment. Use tools to repur­pose data from one step of the project to another, and to ana­lyze and trans­form the data once the box inven­to­ries are complete.
4. Spend extra time writ­ing descrip­tions about each part of the col­lec­tion to pro­vide the researcher with impor­tant key­words to search for and con­text to under­stand the sig­nif­i­cance of the sec­tion. But do not spend time on descrip­tion that is not aid­ing in search­ing, such as lists of doc­u­ment types in the col­lec­tion inven­tory. Time should be spent on value-added description.
The slides and text for her pre­sen­ta­tion are avail­able here.
If you have any ques­tions for her, you can reach her by email:

Dissertations in Dataspace policy temporarily changed

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The Grad­u­ate School’s pol­icy of hav­ing dis­ser­ta­tions sub­mit­ted into Data­Space, the University’s Open Access repos­i­tory, has been changed tem­porar­ily, pend­ing res­o­lu­tion of some out­stand­ing ques­tions. David Red­man, Asso­ciate Dean of the Grad­u­ate School, sent the fol­low­ing mes­sage out late today. If you have any ques­tions, :

Dear Direc­tors of Grad­u­ate Studies,

As many of you know, the Grad­u­ate School, work­ing with the Uni­ver­sity Archives, estab­lished last fall new pro­ce­dures for the sub­mis­sion of Ph.D. dis­ser­ta­tions to Pro­Quest. Two sig­nif­i­cant changes were: a) agree­ing to use ProQuest’s Elec­tronic The­ses and Dis­ser­ta­tions (ETD) sub­mis­sion por­tal, which greatly speeded the abil­ity of stu­dents to sub­mit their dis­ser­ta­tions; and b) elim­i­nat­ing the neces­sity of a sec­ond hard-bound copy of the dis­ser­ta­tion in favor of stor­ing an elec­tronic copy of the dis­ser­ta­tion on Princeton’s Data­Space and mak­ing the elec­tronic “sec­ond copy” acces­si­ble there. One con­se­quence of the sec­ond change was that our stu­dents’ dis­ser­ta­tions became almost instantly acces­si­ble to any­one with a good search engine. In short, Prince­ton dis­ser­ta­tions were “out there” in the world faster than we had imag­ined. This has caused some anx­i­ety and dis­tress among many of our new Ph.D.’s, so much so that we are amend­ing our pro­ce­dures in the fol­low­ing way.

By the end of this month, we will restrict access to doc­toral dis­ser­ta­tions in Data­Space to those on the Princeton.edu domain, that is, to on-campus users.

This is an interim and (we hope) rel­a­tively short term address to a larger prob­lem of easy and fast access to Ph.D. dis­ser­ta­tions at a time when stu­dents, par­tic­u­larly those in the human­i­ties and social sci­ences, are anx­ious about their oppor­tu­ni­ties to pub­lish their work and advance in their careers. The Grad­u­ate School has already had pre­lim­i­nary dis­cus­sion with some mem­bers of the Pol­icy Sub­com­mit­tee about this issue and wants to con­tinue the dis­cus­sion with them about refin­ing our poli­cies and procedures.

Thank you for your inter­est in and con­cern about this issue. If you have any ques­tions, please do not hes­i­tate to call (x8-3902) or write me ().

–David Red­man
Asso­ciate Dean

UPDATE: As of today, March 23, dis­ser­ta­tions in Data­Space are now restricted to on-campus users only. How­ever, please note that if Google has cached a PDF that it crawled pre­vi­ously, that PDF will remain in Google’s cache until Google expires it. That typ­i­cally takes a cou­ple of weeks, but that’s entirely up to Google.

UPDATE: As of Novem­ber 5, all dis­ser­ta­tions that have not been granted an embargo are avail­able via Dataspace.

Scholarship Available for Graduate Students

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TigerFOL

Lynd Ward, acrylic paint­ing on Japan­ese paper. Cot­sen Children’s Library.

The Friends of the Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Library Prize for
Out­stand­ing Schol­ar­ship by a Prince­ton Grad­u­ate Stu­dent
First Prize: $1,500 + Pub­li­ca­tion
Sec­ond Prize: $500 + Pub­li­ca­tion
Com­pe­ti­tion for Essays Writ­ten in the 2011–2012 Aca­d­e­mic Year

The Coun­cil of the Friends of the Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Library invites stu­dents enrolled in all depart­ments of Prince­ton University’s Grad­u­ate School to com­pete for the Prize for Out­stand­ing Schol­ar­ship by a Grad­u­ate Stu­dent. First and sec­ond prizes will be awarded for essays based on research in one or more divi­sions of the Library’s Depart­ment of Rare Books and Spe­cial Collections–Cotsen Children’s Library, Graphic Arts, His­toric Maps, Man­u­scripts, Numis­mat­ics, Pub­lic Pol­icy Papers, Rare Books, Uni­ver­sity Archives, West­ern Americana–and/or in the asso­ci­ated Scheide Library, Mar­quand Library, and East Asian Library. Essays of all lengths and on all top­ics will be con­sid­ered. To be eli­gi­ble, authors must be enrolled in a Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity grad­u­ate pro­gram in the aca­d­e­mic year 2011–2012. Essays will be judged on schol­arly merit and cre­ative use of Spe­cial Col­lec­tions materials.

The win­ners will be announced on Octo­ber 15, 2012, and the win­ning essays will be pub­lished in a forth­com­ing issue of the Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Library Chronicle.

To enter an essay in this com­pe­ti­tion, send one copy (file attach­ment or print­out) and a com­pleted appli­ca­tion form to: Gretchen Ober­franc, Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Library Chron­i­cle, Depart­ment of Rare Books and Spe­cial Col­lec­tions, Fire­stone Library. (Elec­tronic sub­mis­sions may be sent to .) Application forms are available online at www.princeton.edu/~rbsc/new/application-12.pdf. Entries may be sent at any time but must be received by August 17, 2012. For further information, call 609-258-7093 or write or send e-mail to Ms. Oberfranc.

Wikipedia Edit-a-thon at Mudd Library

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by: Q Miceli
A group of six­teen enthu­si­as­tic vol­un­teers, includ­ing Prince­ton under­grad­u­ates, Prince­ton com­mu­nity mem­bers, Wikipedi­ans from the Wikimedia-New York City, and Mudd Library staff, gath­ered in the Wiess Lounge on Sat­ur­day, 18 Feb­ru­ary 2012, to write and update Prince­to­ni­ana Wikipedia articles.
Princeton_editathon_Get_the_food_1st
In July 2011, I par­tic­i­pated in an edit-a-thon about the Armory Show at the Archives of Amer­i­can Art in Wash­ing­ton, D.C. A Wikipedia edit-a-thon is a gath­er­ing of indi­vid­u­als cre­at­ing Wikipedia arti­cles and upload­ing media related to a theme, events, sub­jects, or places. Once I saw first­hand how GLAM (Gal­leries, Libraries, Archives, and Muse­ums) insti­tu­tions and Wikipedia can ben­e­fit one another, I returned to Prince­ton and my stu­dent job at the Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Archives inspired to act on this expe­ri­ence. After dis­cussing the idea with Uni­ver­sity Archivist Dan Linke, we decided to host an edit-a-thon in Feb­ru­ary with the theme of “A Valen­tine for Prince­ton.” The goal was to have par­tic­i­pants update pages on Princeton’s pres­i­dents and other Prince­to­ni­ana materials.
Mudd_Library_Edit-a-thon_participants
On the day of the event, after intro­duc­tions over pizza and Indian food, I gave a brief Pow­er­Point pre­sen­ta­tion describ­ing basic prin­ci­ples of Wikipedia arti­cles: nota­bil­ity, neu­tral point of view, reli­able sources, and indi­vid­ual account­abil­ity. Ref­er­ence Archivist Christie Peter­son intro­duced the ref­er­ence room and the sources avail­able for par­tic­i­pants to browse. After that, we were off!
Choosing_Topics

Choos­ing topics.
Discussing_the_finer_points_of_Wikipedia

Dis­cussing the finer points of Wikipedia.
While writ­ing arti­cles about top­ics such as See­ley G. Mudd Library to the Put­nam Col­lec­tion of Sculp­ture to the East Asian Stud­ies Depart­ment, and updat­ing arti­cles about the Log Col­lege, the Two Dick­in­son Street Co-op, and the Joseph Henry House, we used ref­er­ence room pub­li­ca­tions and online resources to increase the num­ber and reli­a­bil­ity of Wikipedia arti­cles about Prince­ton University.
RefRoomWriters

Prince­ton res­i­dent Mimi Omiecin­ski said about the event, “My fam­ily was so impressed that I was doing this today.” Wiki­me­dian Pete took pho­tos of the nearby eat­ing clubs to update their pages. A Free Cul­ture Cho­rus recorded a ren­di­tion of “Old Nas­sau”, and both the pic­tures and the record­ing are avail­able on the Wiki­me­dia Com­mons web­site for the event: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Editathon,_Princeton_University. We chal­lenge any Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity a cap­pella group to upload an ani­moso ver­sion of “Old Nassau.”

By the num­bers, we had:

16 atten­dees
6 user­names cre­ated
4 arti­cles cre­ated
9 arti­cles expanded

We look for­ward to hold­ing more edit-a-thons in the future!

For more infor­ma­tion:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/Princeton_University_Edit-a-thon

Annual Report 2011: Goals for Fiscal Year 2012

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To final­ize our series on our 2011 Annual Report, please see a descrip­tion of our goals for fis­cal year 2012:

  • Com­plete NHPRC-funded ACLU pro­cess­ing grant
  • Col­lec­tion devel­op­ment: con­tinue to build the Pol­icy col­lec­tions through dona­tions and efforts such as the Baker Oral His­tory Project
  • Imple­ment Aeon for reg­is­tra­tion and other pub­lic ser­vice functions
  • Con­tinue high level of pub­lic services
  • Begin work on redesign of EAD website
  • Con­tinue to exploit our blog, Face­book, and other social media as part of out­reach efforts.
  • Com­plete Daily Prince­ton­ian dig­i­ti­za­tion project
  • Build a records man­age­ment program
  • Suc­cess­fully host IMLS intern
  • Con­tinue Uni­ver­sity Archives pro­cess­ing and description
  • Com­plete descrip­tion of addi­tions to audio­vi­sual and mem­o­ra­bilia col­lec­tions; fin­ish P-collection sur­vey; begin HPC descrip­tion and cleanup work
  • Pro­vide access to all newly cre­ated data either through revamped data­bases and Primo, or con­ver­sion to EAD
  • Con­tinue work on pro­cess­ing and descrip­tion doc­u­men­ta­tion enhance­ment and consolidation
  • For­mal­ize plans for start of elec­tronic records man­age­ment program
  • Shift to elec­tronic sub­mis­sion of doc­toral dis­ser­ta­tions begin­ning in Fall 2011

We hope you enjoyed our series on our 2011 Annual Report. You may read it in its entirety here. Check in next year for a review of our activ­ity in FY2012!

Annual Report 2011: Exhibitions, Public Relations, and Outreach

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As a con­tin­u­a­tion of our series on our 2011 Annual Report, please see a descrip­tion of our work in exhi­bi­tions, pub­lic rela­tions, and outreach:

  • The John F. Kennedy exhi­bi­tion assem­bled by Nicole Milano in August 2010 was very well-received, so much that we extended its run through the end of August 2011. In addi­tion, in March Mudd co-hosted a panel with the Woodrow Wil­son School enti­tled “JFK and Civil Rights: 50 Years After” that filled Dodds audi­to­rium. John Doar ’44 and Nicholas Katzen­bach ’43 were the high­lights of the panel that rem­i­nisced about their ser­vice in US Jus­tice Depart­ment in the first half of the 1960s. A din­ner in the Gar­den Room at Prospect fol­lowed where over 50 peo­ple dined with the speak­ers, includ­ing Pres­i­dent Shirley Tilghman.
  • Mudd hosted an Open House on Sat­ur­day, Octo­ber 23, fea­tur­ing the exhibit and stacks tours that attracted 17 people.
  • The Mudd blog con­tin­ues to be a source of infor­ma­tion on new col­lec­tions, inter­est­ing ref­er­ence inquiries, dig­i­tal col­lec­tions, staff, acces­sions and find­ing aids, and other library news. We cre­ated 25 new entries last year. Mudd con­tin­ued to expand its embrace of social media this year by adding a new blog, The Reel Mudd, devoted to pro­vid­ing access to our audio­vi­sual media, with 58 entries fea­tur­ing over 85 films. We also launched Face­book and Twit­ter sites. At the con­clu­sion of the fis­cal year, our Face­book page had over 200 monthly active users and we had more than 200 wall posts, a sig­nif­i­cant num­ber of those orig­i­nat­ing from our Twit­ter account where we deliver the “This Day in Prince­ton His­tory” facts.
  • In con­junc­tion with Alumni Day, Mudd Library assisted The­atre Intime’s 90th anniver­sary din­ner in Feb­ru­ary. Stu­dent mem­bers assem­bled an exhi­bi­tion in the Har­lan Room that was viewed prior to the din­ner which was served in the read­ing room.
Stay tuned for fur­ther dis­cus­sion of our goals for fis­cal year 2012.

Annual Report 2011: Collection and Financial Development

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As a con­tin­u­a­tion of our series on our 2011 Annual Report, please see a descrip­tion of our work in Col­lec­tion and Finan­cial Development:

  • See the entries on acces­sion­ing Pub­lic Pol­icy Papers and Uni­ver­sity Archives for col­lec­tions of note acquired in this fis­cal year. In addi­tion, dur­ing the past year gift agree­ments were signed with Edward Djere­jian (who served as Ambas­sador to both Syria and Israel) and James Hoge (the out­go­ing edi­tor of For­eign Affairs), though no doc­u­ments were deliv­ered dur­ing the fis­cal year.
  • Linke fin­ished rais­ing money for the dig­i­ti­za­tion of the Daily Prince­ton­ian, with over a quar­ter of a mil­lion dol­lars accrued for this project.
  • The James Baker Oral His­tory Project com­pleted seven addi­tional inter­views with Susan Baker, Edward Djere­jian, Fran­coise Djer­jian, Mar­lin Fitzwa­ter, John Major, John Sununu, and Robert Zoellick.
Stay tuned for fur­ther dis­cus­sion of our 2011 work involv­ing exhi­bi­tions, pub­lic rela­tions, and goals for fis­cal year 2012.

Modernization of Dissertation Submission Procedures

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One of the Uni­ver­sity Archives’ impor­tant roles is to pre­serve and pro­vide access to Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Ph.D. dis­ser­ta­tions and Master’s the­ses. Recently the Mudd Man­u­script Library has taken steps to both mod­ern­ize and stream­line the process that Ph.D. can­di­dates carry out to sub­mit their dis­ser­ta­tions, while at the same time improv­ing access to these works.

Part­ner­ing with ProQuest

Since 1950, the Uni­ver­sity has part­nered with Pro­Quest (for­merly UMI) to pub­lish and dis­sem­i­nate the work of Princeton’s Ph.D. stu­dents to the wider aca­d­e­mic com­mu­nity. After decades of mail­ing bound man­u­scripts to Pro­Quest for micro­film­ing and/or scan­ning, and more recently, mail­ing CDs with PDFs of dis­ser­ta­tions, Prince­ton Ph.D. can­di­dates will now upload their own PDFs to Princeton’s ETD Admin­is­tra­tor site (www.etdadmin.com/princeton). Can­di­dates will choose pub­lish­ing options, decide if they want Pro­Quest to reg­is­ter their copy­right, and pay any rel­e­vant fees on the site as well.

Reduced Cost for Students

The new online sub­mis­sion sys­tem allows can­di­dates to real­ize sig­nif­i­cant sav­ings in pub­lish­ing fees—Traditional pub­lish­ing is free and Open Access pub­lish­ing is $95—in both cases, a sav­ings of $25 over the pre­vi­ous process. The optional copy­right reg­is­tra­tion fee remains $55, and a dis­ser­ta­tion main­te­nance fee of $15 is due at the Mudd Man­u­script Library at the time of submission.

In addi­tion, with the new pro­ce­dure, can­di­dates are required to sub­mit only one bound copy of their dis­ser­ta­tion to the library (instead of two), which cuts their bind­ing fees in half, a sav­ings of $40 or more.

Enhanced Access to Dissertations

Depend­ing on the pub­lish­ing option that can­di­dates choose, dis­ser­ta­tions will be made avail­able either through ProQuest’s Dis­ser­ta­tions and The­ses sub­scrip­tion data­base (avail­able to the Uni­ver­sity com­mu­nity at http://search.proquest.com/pqdtft/advanced?accountid=13314) or through ProQuest’s open access data­base PQDT Open (http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/), which offers full text ver­sions of dis­ser­ta­tions to any­one with Inter­net access.

Another step for­ward in pro­vid­ing access to dis­ser­ta­tions is their avail­abil­ity on Princeton’s dig­i­tal repos­i­tory, Data­Space http://dataspace.princeton.edu/jspui/. Start­ing with dis­ser­ta­tions sub­mit­ted for the Novem­ber 2011 degree award, an elec­tronic copy of each Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity dis­ser­ta­tion will be placed in Data­Space. This will be a full text, uni­ver­sally acces­si­ble ver­sion of the dissertation.

More Infor­ma­tion

Full details of the new dis­ser­ta­tion sub­mis­sion pro­ce­dures are avail­able on our web­site at: http://www.princeton.edu/~mudd/thesis/index.shtml . If you have ques­tions about the dis­ser­ta­tion sub­mis­sion process, please con­tact the Mudd Man­u­script Library at 609–258-6345 or .

Annual Report 2011: Records Management

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As a con­tin­u­a­tion of our series on our 2011 Annual Report, please see a descrip­tion of our work in Records Management:

In Jan­u­ary 2011, we hired Anne Marie Phillips as the first Uni­ver­sity Records Man­ager, kick­ing off the devel­op­ment of a for­mal­ized records man­age­ment pro­gram for the uni­ver­sity. Anne Marie spent the first three months meet­ing with admin­is­tra­tive and aca­d­e­mic depart­ment staff to deter­mine what were the most urgent records needs and to pro­vide pre­lim­i­nary instruc­tion to those who wanted to move ahead and imple­ment rec­om­mended fil­ing sys­tem and records reten­tion prac­tices. These inter­views and instruc­tional ses­sions led Anne Marie to iden­tify finan­cial records as the first group of records to address at a university-wide level, as every depart­men­tal man­ager has finan­cial account­ing and report­ing respon­si­bil­i­ties and the atten­dant records issues. To make progress in this area, Anne Marie, Dan Linke, and Dan San­ta­maria met with the Vice Pres­i­dent for Finance and Trea­surer, Car­olyn Ainslie, and her direct reports to dis­cuss the project, and the result has been that Anne Marie has been work­ing closely with finance and trea­sury staff to clar­ify cen­tral and depart­men­tal needs for finan­cial records and cre­at­ing reten­tion and dis­po­si­tion poli­cies for these records.
Anne Marie has con­tin­ued to work with depart­men­tal staff across the uni­ver­sity address­ing the man­age­ment of both finan­cial and non-financial records, con­duct­ing indi­vid­ual and group train­ing in the areas of file sys­tem devel­op­ment and the appli­ca­tion of reten­tion and dis­po­si­tion sched­ules. She has also begun cre­at­ing infra­struc­ture for the records man­age­ment pro­gram includ­ing cre­at­ing records sched­ules, estab­lish­ing meth­ods of com­mu­ni­cat­ing records man­age­ment infor­ma­tion, and build­ing part­ner­ships with uni­ver­sity staff with value to add to the records man­age­ment pro­gram devel­op­ment process.
Dur­ing the first six months of the records man­age­ment pro­gram, Anne Marie:
  • Met with thirty aca­d­e­mic and admin­is­tra­tive depart­ments to gather infor­ma­tion and pro­vide advice and training;
  • Worked with Finance and Trea­sury and Audit and Com­pli­ance to iden­tify and address the high­est pri­or­ity finan­cial records of the university;
  • Cre­ated a records man­age­ment blog, Just for the Records, to dis­sem­i­nate records man­age­ment infor­ma­tion to the Prince­ton community;
  • Deliv­ered a spe­cial­ized records man­age­ment pre­sen­ta­tion to the staff of the Teacher Prepa­ra­tion Program;
  • Rep­re­sented the records man­age­ment pro­gram at a sus­tain­abil­ity open house for the res­i­dents of 701 Carnegie, dis­cussing the pos­i­tive envi­ron­men­tal effects of good records management;
  • Devel­oped a rela­tion­ship with the PU Stor­age Facil­ity staff and iden­ti­fied how the records man­age­ment pro­gram will mesh with the records cen­ter func­tion of the PUSF;
  • Worked with Facil­i­ties staff to address records issues raised in the process of a major reor­ga­ni­za­tion in their work­flow; and
  • In con­junc­tion with the Linke and San­ta­maria, began plan­ning for an elec­tronic records man­age­ment program.
Stay tuned for fur­ther dis­cus­sion of our 2011 work involv­ing col­lec­tion devel­op­ment, exhi­bi­tions, and more.

Annual Report 2011: Digital Projects, Content, and Delivery

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As a con­tin­u­a­tion of our series on our 2011 Annual Report, please see a descrip­tion of our work in dig­i­tal projects, con­tent, and delivery:

  • Mudd staff con­tin­ued work to increase our dig­i­tal con­tent in FY11. We con­tin­ued a pilot project to dig­i­tize col­lec­tions using our photocopier’s capac­ity to scan directly into PDF files.
  • Uti­liz­ing OIT’s Web­space we acces­sioned over 8 GB of elec­tronic records from the Project on Eth­nic Rela­tions Records and made them avail­able via the online find­ing aid for the collection.
  • Mau­reen Calla­han inves­ti­gated the Zeutschel imag­ing sta­tion acquired last year and devel­oped image spec­i­fi­ca­tions and work­flow. We hope to imple­ment these rec­om­men­da­tions in the fall.
  • Christie Peter­son over­saw the cre­ation of struc­tural meta­data for vol­umes 3–8 of the Trustees Min­utes Dig­i­ti­za­tion Project. Related to this, work­ing with the Uni­ver­sity Secretary’s office and OIT, we began scan­ning 20th cen­tury Board of Trustees min­utes for ingest into OnBase, which will OCR them. Linke also worked with the Sec­re­tary and President’s office to reduce the restric­tion on the Trustees min­utes from 50 to 40 years.
  • The Dig­i­tal Library stu­dio com­pleted the imag­ing of the His­tor­i­cal Pho­to­graph Col­lec­tion: Grounds and Build­ings series (erro­neously reported last year), vol­umes three to eight of the Trustees Min­utes, and Mudd’s Polit­i­cal Car­toon Col­lec­tions, though these images are not yet avail­able online due to the redesign of the Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Dig­i­tal Library, and, in some cases, the inabil­ity to of the PUDL to uti­lize EAD as a descrip­tive meta­data format.
Stay tuned for fur­ther dis­cus­sion of our 2011 work involv­ing records man­age­ment, col­lec­tion devel­op­ment, exhi­bi­tions, and more.