Mudd Manuscript Library Blog

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.

I am pleased to announce that four Mudd finding aids have been awarded MARAC's 2008 Fredric M. Miller Finding Aid Award. The award, which comes with a $250 cash prize, has been given to the Mudd finding aids as a group and was presented at the Spring MARAC meeting last week. I submitted a representative sample for each of Mudd's major processing projects in 2007 - a list of the finding aids and projects is below. Please join me in congratulating the winners: Casey Babcock, Adriane Hanson, Jennie Cole, Dan Brennan, Rosalba Varallo, and Christie Lutz. This is also a nice bit of recognition for the last several years of work on EAD and finding aids that involved many of us in RBSC Technical Services, especially Cristela Garcia-Spitz and Don Thornbury and John Delaney in Firestone.

Finding Aid Award Winners:

NHPRC Economics Papers Processing Project:

W. Arthur Lewis Papers: processing and finding aid by Adriane Hanson.

New Jersey Historical Commission General Operating Support Grant:

H. Alexander Smith Papers: processing and finding aid by Casey Babcock.

Council on Foreign Relations Processing and Digitization Project:

Council on Foreign Relations Digital Sound Recordings: processing, finding aid, and project management by Jennie Cole.

Princeton University Archives Processing Project:

Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs Records: processing and finding aid by Dan Brennan and Rosalba Varallo, processing supervision by Christie Lutz.