2005 Finding Aids Fair Celebrating Scope and Content: Innovative uses of narratives in Finding Aids Sponsored by the Description Section
	This year's finding aids fair seeks to celebrate the use of narrative in finding aids in an effort to demonstrate the innovative ways that archivists use this tool to provide information for researchers and patrons. Narrative portions come in a variety of shapes and sizes, crafted to assist users in understanding the contents of a collection. Archivists have used the narrative to tell the story of the materials, to highlight the collection's significance, and to create tools that assist users in assessing relevance and enhancing their interaction with the materials themselves.

Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke University
Outdoor Advertising Association of America (OAAA) Archives, 1885-1990s

Link: http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/dynaweb/findaids/oaaaarchives/@Generic__BookView?DwebQuery=oaaa

The OAAA Archives is a large collection (227 linear feet) that documents over a century of operations of the outdoor advertising industry's main trade organization. Processing took over three years of full-time staff effort, with an additional year devoted to finalizing the collection description and finding aid.

The collection was organized into 23 series that covered the full range of OAAA activities, from membership and meeting minutes to engineering standards. The complexity of the collection and the sheer number of series presented additional problems when it came to describing the collection in an overview that would satisfy the requirements of catalog description and still provide a useful overview to prospective researchers. An alternative arrangement was needed that would not cause further physical processing, and after several schemes were attempted, it was decided to adopt a nested, parent-child cataloging scheme. This scheme in turn led to the 23 series being arranged into five broad, topical categories, and each category would receive both its own overview paragraph and a unique set of subject headings as access points.

Prepared by: Rick Collier
Archivist

City of Boston
Desegregation-era Records Collection, 1952 - 1996; bulk: 1976 - 1985

Link: http://www.cityofboston.gov/archivesandrecords/desegregation/findingaids/

Created for an NHPRC funded project to arrange and describe the Desegregation-era Records of the Boston Public Schools, the finding aids provide a comprehensive history of Boston desegregation and the agencies created by court order to oversee the process. Much research went into writing the finding aid narratives, and the follow-up grant that resulted from the discovery of additional desegregation-era materials dispersed throughout various agencies.

A main finding aid, the "Desegregation-Era Records Finding Aid," was created to describe the overall collection and to provide an historical overview of the period. Finding aids for each agency (The Department of Implementation, The Citywide Parents Council and The Office of General Counsel), were then created depicting the individual history of that agency within the context of the period. This approach will allow us to provide links to other collections described in the follow-up grant, and to the main finding aid. In this way, information will not be duplicated or presented in one unwieldy finding aid that will be difficult to navigate online.

A follow-up grant secured from the NHPRC will enable the City of Boston Archives to create finding aids for additional Department of Implementation and Citywide Parents Council records that were discovered during the course of the first grant. These records will be added to the scope note of the Desegregation-era Records main finding aid and a box list and scope note to them will be linked to the original finding aids of those agencies.

Prepared by: Sheila Spalding
Project Archivist & Records Administrator

John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum
Catalog of the Ernest Hemingway Collection at the John F. Kennedy Library: Introduction

Link: http://www.jfklibrary.org/fa_ehcat_intro.html

Over the past 4 years a 2-volume catalog has been converted for online use. While the descriptions haven't been updated, we have used the web to connect related materials (especially between the manuscripts.)

"During the Kennedy administration, Mary Hemingway was permitted to return to Castro's Cuba to remove some of her husband's papers from their abandoned home, the Finca Vigia, in Havana. Kennedy honored Hemingway at the White House dinner for the Nobel Prize winners in April, 1962.... At the dedication of the Hemingway Room on July 18, 1980, celebrants experienced the excitement of the Kennedy White House cultural events. Director of the Library, Dan H. Fenn, addressed the guests: 'Tonight we unite art and politics under one roof as a tangible and permanent reminder of President Kennedy's conviction that neither is whole and true without the other.'... Although the setting of the Hemingway Room of the Kennedy Library is impressive, it is of course the collection itself that draws attention from literary scholars. Mary Hemingway started depositing papers in the Library in 1972. The first materials to arrive were two boxes of miscellaneous and fragmentary manuscripts. From that point until 1980, papers continued to arrive at the Library."

"This catalog includes all material available to researchers at the Kennedy Library as of September 1981.... Scholars using the Hemingway Collection are urged to study the catalog. Like a good librarian it strives to be thorough, objective, and easy to understand. Like the librarian who designed it, it may be now and then inconsistent or even whimsical. It is intended to offer the scholar an understanding of what the papers are, and how to get into them, but also to leave to the researcher the thrill of discovery. It does not try to be a bibliography of Hemingway's writing nor a comprehensive listing of all Hemingway primary resources. It is a descriptive listing and finding aid to the materials in the Hemingway Collection at the Kennedy Library." Susan Wrynn is Curator for the Hemingway Collection.

Prepared by: James Roth
Archivist

Rutgers University Libraries, Special Collections and University Archives
Guide to the Richard P. McCormick Papers

Link: http://www2.scc.rutgers.edu/ead/uarchives/mccormickf.html

McCormick, (Rutgers graduate Class of 1938) is a professor emeritus of history, university historian, "father" of New Jersey historical studies, and a well known American political historian who also happens to be the father of our current president (and also a historian, Richard L. McCormick). I tell you all of this to provide some context to the political as well as historical value of this collection. We had a special event to honor him and "officially" open the collection that was well attended and included remarks from several of his former students who are now emeritus. In McCormick's remarks at the end he informed the audience that he had bad news -- there are an additional 4 cubic feet to add to the collection that is at home.

In developing the guide we attempted to create extensive scope and content notes and series descriptions and make connections between his research, publications, and his various roles at Rutgers (he also served as dean for a time). The link will take you to the EAD finding aid online.

Prepared by: Thomas J. Frusciano
University Archivist

Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin
R. L. Moore Papers

Link: http://www.lib.utexas.edu/taro/utcah/00304/cah-00304.html

One of the keystone collections of the Center for American History's Archives of American Mathematics at the University of Texas at Austin is the R. L. Moore Papers. We have encoded this finding aid in EAD and mounted it on the Texas Archival Resources Online (TARO) site. I believe it shows innovation in its narrative structure because, in addition to the detailed biographical and scope and contents notes and linked table of contents, we have included links to PDF files of appendices to the finding aid. These appendices include a chronological list of Moore's publications, a cross-index to the over 100 notebooks kept by Moore, and a reference list of Moore's fifty graduate students and their graduation dates. The links can be found at the end of the scope and content note.

For more information on the Archives of American Mathematics, visit: http://www.cah.utexas.edu/collectioncomponents/math.html

Prepared by: Kristy Sorensen
Archivist of the Archives of American Mathematics

Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke University
Duke University Libraries Collection of Haggadot, 1200-2003, bulk 1900-2003

Link: http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/dynaweb/findaids/haggadot/

This guide was created to provide overall, collection-level access to all the Haggadot held in the Duke University Libraries. Each Haggadah is listed three times--in one list by date (century or decade), in another list by creation location, and in a third list by the "purpose" for which the haggadah was written. However, users might be interested in other groupings (especially by size, other physical condition, or by commentator). Because the majority of the Haggadot have also been cataloged individually, the Collection Overview for the collection includes a section of "Processing and Searching Notes" on how to search the Duke University Libraries on-line catalog for these other categories.

Prepared by: Ruth Bryan
Head, Collections Processing and Accessioning Section, Technical Services Dept.

Duke University Medical Center Archives
Foundations of Excellence Archival Image Project

Link: http://archives.mc.duke.edu/foundations/index.htm

In a nutshell, we created c02 files for individual images, placed them within a larger c01 shell for each collection theme, and pulled the whole thing together in a project website. We re-used the metadata in the c02s to power searching, "canned" search browsing, and subject browsing. Finally, this project drove us to develop sets of controlled access terms and their encoding analogs to describe common themes in the project and encode more quickly.

On the grand scale, this whole project is an exercise in scope and content.

Prepared by: Emily Glenn
Technical Services Coordinator

The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley
The Bolton Family Papers, 1828-2000 (bulk 1885-1980)

Link: http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/kt8r29p928

In processing the Bolton Family Papers, I encountered many generations of the Bolton family, with same or similar names or nicknames. In order to keep all of the family members straight, I created three family tress and short biographies on the main players from information found within the collection. I was lucky to be able to have one of the descendants verify my information. This took quite a bit of time and I felt that this information was vital for researchers to understand how all of the pieces of the Bolton Family Papers fit together and to understand why I arranged the collection the way I did.

Many family paper collections include genealogical information but with research only having direct access to small amounts of the collection at a time this makes it difficult to refer to during use. Having the information in the finding aid makes it a handy reference tool.

The online version does not include the family tree but refers the patron to the paper copy. The logistics of coding the family tree was difficult and time consuming and was really more important for the researcher within the library to be able to use while working with the papers.

Submitted by: Alison E. Bridger
Manuscript Cataloger

New York City, Department of Records and Information Services, Municipal Archives
Fernando Ferrer, Borough President of the Bronx 1987-2001, Part 3

Not available online

The Bronx Borough President office received a New York State Local Government Records Management Improvement Fund Grant in 2003 and 2004 to arrange and describe the records of Borough President Fernando Ferrer, 1987-2001. The Bronx Historical Society hired the archivists, and the work was carried out at the Department of Records, New York City Municipal Archives Division. The 2003 grant produced a finding aid completed in 2004, bound in Part 1 and Part 2. The 2004 grant produced a finding aid completed in June 2005, titled Part 3. The narrative in Part 3 describes the earlier finding aids and also the cooperation between all involved in the projects. The appendix includes the table of contents for Part 1 and Part 2. The outside funding is provided on a year to year basis; we did not know if funding would be available for continuation of the work on Ferrer's records when Parts 1 and 2 were completed. Part 3, provides cohesion for the entire project through these narrative additions.

Submitted by: Leonora A. Gidlund
Director