Category Archives: Library News

Annual Report 2011: Other Major Activities in Technical Services

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As a con­tin­u­a­tion of our series on our 2011 Annual Report, please see a descrip­tion of other major activ­i­ties in Tech­ni­cal Services:

  • We accepted 354 dis­ser­ta­tions and over 1,185 senior the­ses in FY11 under the super­vi­sion of Lynn Dur­gin. Dur­gin has also invested sig­nif­i­cant time prepar­ing for the shift to elec­tronic sub­mis­sion of dis­ser­ta­tions begin­ning in Fall 2011.
  • Adri­ane Han­son man­aged the Daily Prince­ton­ian Dig­i­ti­za­tion Project which was nearly com­plete by the end of the year. Mau­reen Calla­han devel­oped an ini­tial plan for dig­i­ti­za­tion of the Prince­ton Weekly Bul­letin; the project is sched­uled to begin in fall 2011.
  • Dan San­ta­maria and Mau­reen Calla­han con­tin­ued to pro­vide sup­port to other depart­ments in the Library who are now cre­at­ing EAD find­ing aids, such as the Engi­neer­ing Library and the Latin Amer­i­can Ephemera projects.
  • RBSC’s Best Prac­tices for EAD guide­lines were revised and Calla­han con­verted the doc­u­ment to wiki for­mat which allows for eas­ier main­te­nance and revi­sion. As part of the RBSC EAD Work­ing Group, Calla­han and San­ta­maria also made con­tri­bu­tions to the devel­op­ment of a frame­work for deliv­er­ing EAD data via Primo and also authored a pro­posal for a redesign of the EAD web­site in FY2012.
  • Staff, par­tic­u­larly Han­son and Peter­son, tested and eval­u­ated Archive­mat­ica for pos­si­ble imple­men­ta­tion as an elec­tronic records and dig­i­tal preser­va­tion tool.
Stay tuned for fur­ther dis­cus­sion of our 2011 work involv­ing dig­i­tal projects, records man­age­ment, col­lec­tion devel­op­ment, exhi­bi­tions, and more.

Annual Report 2011: Major Activities in Accessioning of University Archives

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As a con­tin­u­a­tion of our series on our 2011 Annual Report, please see a descrip­tion of major activ­i­ties in acces­sion­ing of Uni­ver­sity Archives:

In FY11, the Uni­ver­sity Archives acces­sioned 162 col­lec­tions or items, a total 185.11 lin­ear feet of records. High­lights include:
All acces­sions received in FY2011 have been for­mally acces­sioned, but descrip­tion of Uni­ver­sity Archives acces­sions fell sev­eral months behind in 2011 due to staffing lev­els. We have devel­oped a plan that will allow for the descrip­tion of all 2011 Uni­ver­sity Archives acces­sions by fall 2011.
Lynn Dur­gin also cre­ated a greatly expanded sec­tion on the Mudd web­site regard­ing trans­fers and dona­tions to the Uni­ver­sity Archives includ­ing new inven­tory templates.
Stay tuned for fur­ther dis­cus­sion of our 2011 work involv­ing other tech­ni­cal ser­vices activ­i­ties, dig­i­tal projects, records man­age­ment, col­lec­tion devel­op­ment, exhi­bi­tions, and more.

Annual Report 2011: Major Activities in Accessioning of Public Policy Papers

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As a con­tin­u­a­tion of our series on our 2011 Annual Report, please see a descrip­tion of major activ­i­ties in acces­sion­ing of Pub­lic Pol­icy Papers:

The Pub­lic Pol­icy Papers processed 40 acces­sions (227 lin­ear feet) in FY11. High­lights include:
Our revised acces­sion­ing pro­ce­dures, begun in 2008, con­tinue to be employed. This requires a base­line level of pro­cess­ing for every­thing received at the library and con­tin­ues to require a sub­stan­tial amount of work on acces­sion­ing new mate­r­ial. As such, we con­tinue to count the lin­ear footage total above as processed material.
Stay tuned for fur­ther dis­cus­sion of our 2011 work involv­ing acces­sion­ing of Uni­ver­sity Archives, dig­i­tal projects, records man­age­ment, col­lec­tion devel­op­ment, exhi­bi­tions, and more.

Annual Report 2011: Major Activities in Processing of the University Archives

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As a con­tin­u­a­tion of our series on our 2011 Annual Report, please see a descrip­tion of our major activ­i­ties in the pro­cess­ing of the Uni­ver­sity Archives:

  • Uni­ver­sity Archives pro­cess­ing had a strong year due to the hir­ing of Christie Peter­son as Uni­ver­sity Archives Project Archivist. Since her start in mid-September 2010,Peterson has sur­veyed all Uni­ver­sity Archives col­lec­tions, and for­mu­lated a pro­cess­ing plan to ensure that all find­ing aids for Uni­ver­sity Archives col­lec­tions larger than 2 lin­ear feet will include inven­to­ries by the end of 2012.
  • Major col­lec­tions and groups of col­lec­tions addressed in 2010 include addi­tions to the the­ater col­lec­tions, eat­ing club records, and over­size mate­r­ial. A total of 69 col­lec­tions and 811 lin­ear feet were addressed in some form in FY2011.
Stay tuned for fur­ther dis­cus­sion of our 2011 work involv­ing acces­sion­ing, dig­i­tal projects, records man­age­ment, col­lec­tion devel­op­ment, exhi­bi­tions, and more.

Annual Report 2011: Major Activities in Processing of the Public Policy Papers

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As a con­tin­u­a­tion of our series on our 2011 Annual Report, please see a descrip­tion of major activ­i­ties in pro­cess­ing of the Pub­lic Pol­icy Papers:

The main focus of Pub­lic Pol­icy Papers pro­cess­ing in FY2011 was the NHPRC-funded ACLU grant project, led by Adri­ane Han­son, which is on sched­ule for com­ple­tion by the end of June 2012. The entire group of records, more than 2,400 lin­ear feet has been sur­veyed, and described at the box level. The first round of inven­to­ries for the project (Series 2, 3, 5 and 6; a total of 1,123 lin­ear feet) is com­plete. Inven­to­ries are a mix of box and folder level descrip­tion. Since the project was sub­stan­tially ahead of sched­ule, we then ana­lyzed the inven­to­ries and iden­ti­fied 100 lin­ear feet that had been inven­to­ried at the box level but have bet­ter sub­ject access if inven­to­ried at the folder level. The stu­dents have cre­ated folder lists for half of these boxes, and the work will be fin­ished in August 2011.
Other Pol­icy pro­cess­ing projects include the Harold Med­ina papers, which were recalled from ReCAP with a plan for pro­cess­ing devel­oped by Mau­reen Calla­han; pro­cess­ing is sched­uled for com­ple­tion in fall 2011. The Harold Hoskins and Leo Crespi papers will also be final­ized by Dulles Fel­low Kate Dun­don by the end of sum­mer 2011.
Stay tuned for fur­ther dis­cus­sion of our 2011 work involv­ing pro­cess­ing of the Uni­ver­sity Archives, acces­sion­ing, dig­i­tal projects, records man­age­ment, col­lec­tion devel­op­ment, exhi­bi­tions, and more.

Annual Report 2011: Major Activities in Technical Services

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As a con­tin­u­a­tion of our series on our 2011 Annual Report, please see a descrip­tion of major activ­i­ties in tech­ni­cal services:

  • Fis­cal Year 2010 was a tran­si­tional year in Mudd Library Tech­ni­cal Ser­vices, with Christie Peter­son and Mau­reen Calla­han hired in Sep­tem­ber and Feb­ru­ary respec­tively to fill open posi­tions and with Lynn Dur­gin tak­ing and return­ing from fam­ily leave.
  • April marked the first time that all Mudd Library Tech­ni­cal Ser­vices posi­tions were filled with full-time staff mem­bers since 2008. A search for an SCAII to assist with the ACLU pro­cess­ing project also began in late spring 2011.
  • Despite staffing issues, well over 1,000 lin­ear feet was processed and described with online records and find­ing aids in FY2011, with another 1,123 lin­ear feet addressed by the ACLU pro­cess­ing project that will be avail­able by the end of FY2012.

Stay tuned for fur­ther dis­cus­sion of our 2011 work involv­ing pro­cess­ing, acces­sion­ing, dig­i­tal projects, records man­age­ment, col­lec­tion devel­op­ment, exhi­bi­tions, and more.

Annual Report 2011: Major Activities in Public Services

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As a con­tin­u­a­tion of our series on our 2011 Annual Report, please see a descrip­tion of our major activ­i­ties in pub­lic services:

In the past year, the staff of the Mudd Man­u­script Library served 1,934 patrons, 212 of whom had vis­ited Mudd prior to FY11 and 777 who were new researchers. We cir­cu­lated 9,586 items (3,141 Uni­ver­sity Archives boxes/items, 6,350 Pub­lic Pol­icy Papers boxes/items, 93 Gest rare books and 2 other items). Staff also filled 398 pho­to­copy orders total­ing 45,253 pages, of which 232 orders were deliv­ered as PDF files total­ing 28,128 pages and 166 orders were ful­filled on paper, total­ing 17,125 pages. This was our first full year offer­ing PDFs in lieu of paper and it is not sur­pris­ing that it is the pre­ferred method for the major­ity of our users. Scan­ning con­tin­ues to be the default method by which we pro­vide images for patrons and last year we filled 105 orders for 383 scans.
We responded to over 1,795 pieces of cor­re­spon­dence (includ­ing 1,214 per­tain­ing to the Uni­ver­sity Archives and 550 to the Pub­lic Pol­icy Papers; 28 requests for per­mis­sion to quote) which arrived as fol­lows: 1,452 e-mail; 298 tele­phone; 37 sur­face mail; 4 via fax, and 4 oral inquiries.
The staff also responded to more than 640 brief tele­phone calls.
Col­lec­tively, the staff worked with 14 dif­fer­ent classes relat­ing to junior papers and other research/writing projects with a total of 198 attendees.
In addi­tion, quite a num­ber of vis­i­tors took advan­tage of Mudd’s dig­i­tal cam­era pro­gram as 262 patrons pho­tographed 5,582 items from our col­lec­tions, total­ing approx­i­mately 117,800 images.
It should be noted that while these num­bers are on par with other years, the pub­lic ser­vices oper­a­tion under­went sig­nif­i­cant stresses dur­ing the year. Amanda Hawk, who, like her last name implies, was fast and keen-eyed in deal­ing with her ref­er­ence duties, left us in August to attend grad­u­ate school, just before Christie Lutz took an unplanned med­ical leave. For­tu­nately, Hawk’s replace­ment, Amanda Pike, started at just about that time. We were happy with both Pike’s tim­ing as well as the fact that she brought her own thor­ough and pro­fes­sional nature to the posi­tion. Until Christie’s return in Jan­u­ary, Amanda ably over­saw the Mudd email account, a siz­able task for any­one, but espe­cially for some­one new to Mudd’s oper­a­tions. Through­out the year, we received acco­lades from patrons for the qual­ity of the ref­er­ence ser­vices we provided.
Stay tuned for fur­ther dis­cus­sion of our 2011 work involv­ing tech­ni­cal ser­vices, pro­cess­ing, acces­sion­ing, dig­i­tal projects, records man­age­ment, col­lec­tion devel­op­ment, exhi­bi­tions, and more.

Annual Report 2011: Introduction and Summary

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As part of our ongo­ing effort to improve access to our col­lec­tions and pro­mote aware­ness of the Mudd Man­u­script Library, we are pleased share a series of blog posts drawn from our annual report for fis­cal year 2011 (which ran from July 1, 2010 to June 30, 2011). We share our accom­plish­ments with the hope that this will encour­age a bet­ter under­stand­ing of Mudd’s work, as well as fos­ter an envi­ron­ment of trans­parency in the archival field. We begin this series with a sum­mary of our activ­i­ties in 2011.

The staff at Mudd Library had a very suc­cess­ful year in 2011 with notable high­lights that include:
  • Hired one project archivist for the Uni­ver­sity Archives project and another for the Pub­lic Pol­icy Papers
  • Uni­ver­sity Records Man­ager hired in Jan­u­ary and among many things, with other staff, began plan­ning for an elec­tronic records man­age­ment program
  • Hired an SCAV for pub­lic ser­vices to replace the depart­ing SCAV
  • ACLU project com­mences and addresses more than 1,100 lin­ear feet of records as part of NHPRC-funded pro­cess­ing project
  • Fundrais­ing for The Daily Prince­ton­ian dig­i­ti­za­tion com­pleted and the project winds down with 18 of 19 batches scanned and almost all years from 1876–2002 now online
  • Uni­ver­sity Archives audio­vi­sual mate­ri­als made avail­able via the web on a new blog, The Reel Mudd
  • More than 1,000 lin­ear feet processed and described with online records and find­ing aids
  • A record 202 acces­sions of over 400 lin­ear feet received, includ­ing the long awaited Mar­garet Tutwiler journals
  • Con­tin­ued high level of use of col­lec­tions, both in-house and remote, with great degree of patron sat­is­fac­tion, with PDF requests sur­pass­ing paper copies.
Stay tuned for fur­ther dis­cus­sion of our 2011 work involv­ing pub­lic ser­vices, tech­ni­cal ser­vices, pro­cess­ing, acces­sion­ing, dig­i­tal projects, records man­age­ment, exhi­bi­tions, and more.
You may also read the FY2011 Annual Report in its entirety here.

Lobby Case Exhibition on Moe Berg

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Update — Back by pop­u­lar demand! The Moe Berg Lobby Case Exhi­bi­tion can be once again viewed in the lobby of the See­ley G. Mudd Man­u­script Library through August 31st, 2012.

Pri­mar­ily known as a Major League catcher and coach, Mor­ris “Moe” Berg was also a spy for the Office of Strate­gic Ser­vices (OSS) in World War II, as well as a lawyer, lin­guist, and Prince­ton grad­u­ate. As a mem­ber of the class of 1923, Berg excelled scholas­ti­cally and ath­let­i­cally by grad­u­at­ing with hon­ors in Mod­ern Lan­guages (he stud­ied Greek, French, Span­ish, Ital­ian, Ger­man, and San­skrit), and play­ing first base and short­stop for the Prince­ton Tigers. While his bat­ting aver­age was low– Berg inspired a Major League scout to utter the phrase, “Good field, no hit”- he was known at Prince­ton for his strong arm and sound base­ball instincts.

The exhibit high­lights the var­ied roles of Berg in its pre­sen­ta­tion of Prince­ton mem­o­ra­bilia from the class of 1923, Berg base­ball cards, and other mate­r­ial culled from Mudd’s two col­lec­tions on Moe Berg: The Moe Berg Col­lec­tion (1937–2007), and the newly acquired Dr. and Mrs. Arnold Bre­it­bart Col­lec­tion on Moe Berg (1934–1933). Also on dis­play is a 1959 base­ball signed by Berg and other Major League play­ers, on loan from Arnold Bre­it­bart. The Moe Berg exhibit can be located in the lobby of the See­ley G. Mudd Man­u­script Library, and was orig­i­nally on dis­play until August 31, 2011.

[i] Daw­id­off, Nicholas. The Catcher Was a Spy: The Mys­te­ri­ous Life of Moe Berg. New York: Pan­theon, 1994.

Recent History of the Princeton University Library Catalog

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The fol­low­ing essay by Richard J. Schulz, Asso­ciate Uni­ver­sity Librar­ian for Tech­ni­cal Ser­vices, was pre­pared in con­junc­tion with the announce­ment that Fire­stone Library’s card cat­a­log will be dis­as­sem­bled this sum­mer. As the Uni­ver­sity Archives main­tains the his­tor­i­cal records of the Uni­ver­sity Library, we offer this for our patrons’ edi­fi­ca­tion with thanks to the author for his per­mis­sion in post­ing it.
The Card Cat­a­log served as Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Library’s pri­mary data­base of acquired hold­ings until it was closed in 1981 when a major change in cat­a­loging rules (AACR2) was adopted by the Library of Con­gress and all major research libraries in North Amer­ica, Great Britain and many other libraries world-wide. As of 1981, no new cat­a­loging was added to the Card Cat­a­log. Updat­ing of penciled-in bound vol­ume hold­ing nota­tions to the records for exist­ing ser­ial and book-set titles con­tin­ued to be made until 1989, when a project to ret­ro­spec­tively con­vert all active card ser­ial and set titles was con­sum­mated. After 1989, there­fore, the Card Cat­a­log became a sta­tic par­tial rep­re­sen­ta­tion of titles which the Library had acquired prior to 1981; in the ter­mi­nol­ogy of the period, its sta­tus had changed from being “closed” to being “dead.”
In 1969, a micro­film copy was made of the pre-AACR2 Card Cat­a­log as a backup for secu­rity rea­sons. This film copy is stored at the Library’s remote book shelv­ing facil­ity (ReCAP). A large num­ber of the older hand-written card files in the Card Cat­a­log had, at some ear­lier time, been re-typed, likely as a preser­va­tion mea­sure. Doc­u­men­ta­tion describ­ing when this deci­sion was made, and the extent to which it was applied, has been lost.

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