We are very pleased to announce that the Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Library’s Archival Descrip­tion work­ing group has been awarded the 2012 Fred­eric M. Miller Find­ing Aid Award by the Mid Atlantic Regional Archives Con­fer­ence (MARAC). The award rec­og­nizes out­stand­ing find­ing aids and find­ing aid sys­tems in the Mid Atlantic region. Sub­mis­sions are eval­u­ated in the areas of con­tent, design, inno­va­tion, and adher­ence to descrip­tive standards.

Main Page for the new find­ing aids site

Princeton’s archival descrip­tion work­ing group includes two Mudd staff mem­bers: Mau­reen Calla­han and Dan San­ta­maria, who serves as chair of the group. For­mer Mudd staff mem­ber Regine Heber­lein is also a key mem­ber of the group, as are Don Thorn­bury and John Delaney from Fire­stone Library’s Depart­ment of Rare Books and Spe­cial Col­lec­tions and Jon Stroop and Shaun Ellis of the library’s dig­i­tal ini­tia­tives group.

The group was awarded first prize in the 2012 com­pe­ti­tion for findingaids.princeton.edu, the redesigned find­ing aids inter­face for descrip­tions of Princeton’s archives and man­u­scripts col­lec­tions. The new inter­face was the result of more than a year of close col­lab­o­ra­tion between Depart­ment of Rare Books and Spe­cial Col­lec­tions and Dig­i­tal Ini­tia­tives staff. The site con­tains descrip­tions of all of the archival and man­u­script col­lec­tions held at Prince­ton and includes a num­ber of inno­va­tions including:

Images of the col­lec­tion in the con­text of the find­ing aid

• Deliv­ery of images of actual col­lec­tions mate­r­ial directly from the find­ing aid interface

• Con­tents lists that are sortable by title, date, or phys­i­cal loca­tion in the collection

• Enhanced topic fea­tures, list­ing col­lec­tions related to our col­lect­ing strengths

• Bet­ter options for users to con­tact the library and con­nect with each other, includ­ing “Ask a Ques­tion” but­tons for ref­er­ence requests and com­ment­ing fea­tures for users wish­ing to request a descrip­tion enhance­ment or share infor­ma­tion within their own social networks

• Auto­mated request­ing of col­lec­tions mate­r­ial from all con­tents lists

• Direct access to com­po­nents of col­lec­tions (often boxes and fold­ers) from search results and Faceting and brows­ing options from search results.

In addi­tion to the work of the team that devel­oped the find­ing aids site, it should be noted the site is built on data cre­ated by dozens of library staff over the last sev­eral years. The inno­va­tions described above would not be pos­si­ble with­out the work of these staff mem­bers in pro­cess­ing and describ­ing our collections.

The award comes with a small mon­e­tary prize, which will be donated to a small his­tor­i­cal soci­ety in New Jer­sey. While use of the find­ing aids by our patrons is our biggest reward, it’s great to receive recog­ni­tion for the hard work that went into devel­op­ing the site. Con­grat­u­la­tions to every­one involved!