I hope that you're planning to attend the SAA Annual Meeting in Orlando this year. There are many things happening in the area of archival description, and the annual meeting is a good place to hear all about the latest developments. The Description Section will be meeting on Thursday, September 3, 1998, from 10:30 am until 12:30 pm. For those of you who remember last year's meeting at 8:00 am on Saturday, this should be a better time slot!
The agenda for this year's meeting is:
1. Reports from SAA Committees and SAA Representatives
4. Proposals
Updated information on the annual meeting agenda will be posted on the Section web site. Be sure to drop by and check the web site before you head off to Orlando at the end of August. The address is http://www.library.yale.edu/~dsmith/saa/saadescr.htm.
If you have a finding aid, or finding aid tool (e.g., thesaurus, description manual) that you would like to share, please let me know by e-mail at heywood@unhcr.ch.; If you will be attending the annual meeting, bring a copy of the finding aid to the display booth at 10:00 am on Friday. Finding aids can also be submitted via U.S. mail to: Ann Hodges, UTA Libraries, Special Collections Division, P.O. Box 19497, Arlington, Texas 76019. Include your name, address, phone number, e-mail address, and institution name.
P.S. Do you want more sessions dealing with descriptive issues? Is there some issue that you want to know more about? Then put on your thinking cap and come to Thursday's Section meeting armed with ideas for session proposals for the 1999 SAA Annual Meeting.
Heather Heywood
The Chair serves for one year and is responsible for implementing the Section's program, organizing the annual Section meeting, and reporting to the Section membership, SAA membership, and SAA Council on pertinent activities. At present, the program for the 1998/1999 year includes finalizing the mission statement and bylaws for the Section. Apart from that task, the program is open for new ideas and initiatives. Usually, the Vice-Chair steps up to become the Chair, but this will not be possible for 1998/1999 due to unforeseen circumstances.
The Vice-Chair should be willing to organize the Finding Aids Fair for next year's SAA Annual Meeting, and generally assist the Chair in planning and implementing the Section's program. The Vice-Chair will become the Chair next year.
Elections for both Chair and Vice-Chair will be held at the Section's meeting during SAA's Annual Meeting in Orlando. While it would be great if you were at the meeting, you don't have to be there to be elected.
If you are interested, know someone who is interested, or just have questions, please contact the current Chair, Heather Heywood, by e-mail at heywood@unhcr.ch.
Comments from CAIE Kris Kiesling
By the time you receive this newsletter, EAD Version 1.0 will have been released. I reported in the last issue of Descriptive Notes that the EAD Working Group met at the end of October to discuss comments and suggestions for change that had been submitted last summer to the EAD listserv (EAD@loc.gov). After those changes were incorporated into the document type definition, the DTD had to be tested. The release of V1.0 was delayed a bit by developments in XML (Extensible Markup Language) specifications that needed to be incorporated as well. (XML is the emerging new standard for delivering documents on the Web. EAD is XML-compliant.) The new DTD is to be released in late June (EAD Technical Document 1), along with an online version of the Tag Library (Technical Document 2), which defines all the EAD elements and attributes and provides other useful information. In addition, SAA is publishing the Tag Library in hard copy, which will be available for purchase at the annual meeting.
For those of you who just can't get enough information about EAD, the next two issues of the American Archivist will be devoted to that topic. Edited by Jackie Dooley, the first issue contains six papers that explore "the context within which EAD was developed, the essentials of its structured approach to encoding finding aid data, and the role that EAD is meant to play in individual repositories and for the profession as a whole." The second issue contains six case studies on EAD implementation from repositories both large and small. Both issues are scheduled to be mailed in August.
At its June meeting Council approved the formation of an EAD Roundtable. The Roundtable is intended to be an open forum for discussion of all aspects of EAD -- from basic tagging to publishing finding aids on the Web. The inaugural meeting will be on Friday, September 4, from 3:45-5:45 p.m. (during the regular roundtable meeting slot). It will be partly an organizational meeting, but there should be plenty of time to discuss some EAD issues as well. Check the pocket program for the location.
Other Council actions affecting CAIE include the disbanding of both
the Standards Board and CAIE, and the creation of a new Standards Committee
that will have technical subcommittees, of which a new iteration of CAIE,
possibly called the Technical Subcommittee on Descriptive Standards, will
be one. If you are arriving in Orlando a bit early but don't want
to rush out to meet Mickey, please drop in on the CAIE meeting on Wednesday,
September 2, 8:30-3:00. As we discuss our new charge, the subject
of the Committee's relationship with the Description Section will surely
be raised. Input is welcome!
Tufts University is pleased to announce the receipt of a gift from Winslow Duke (Tufts 1953) to process and make available the papers of John Holmes. Holmes (1904-62) was a poet and professor of English at Tufts University for 28 years. A native of nearby Somerville, Massachusetts, he was a Tufts graduate (class of 1929), author of 11 books, and regular contributor to such magazines as Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, Saturday Review, and the New Yorker.
Holmes bequeathed his personal papers to Tufts. The papers and some 700 books from his personal library were transferred to Tufts in late 1962 and are now part of the University Archives. It is these papers that form the bulk of the collection. Additions to the collection have included Holmes' collection of books by Robert Frost, whom Holmes knew well, and correspondence between Holmes and Dorothy Gordon, May Sarton and others.
Winslow Duke's gift will support the work of a project archivist to arrange and describe the manuscript material in the collection, and to develop an interactive, multimedia web site that will create full-text, searchable access to the more than 500 manuscript poems. John Holmes felt strongly that his poetry "no matter what it looks like on the printed page ... will be found to have a deliberate and carefully-wrought structure in terms of sound." The relationship between the sound and the printed word inspired Holmes, in 1943, to record some of his own poetry to accompany the publication of his book, Map of My Country. Holmes hoped that "in the years to come, the double publication of book and recording will be familiar" to everyone.
Unfortunately, this prediction did not come true, but, in keeping with
that spirit, one goal of the project is to present as many poems as possible
in both full-text and audio file format. Only those few he recorded
in 1943 will be read by Holmes himself, the rest will be recorded by former
students of Holmes, and current Tufts students interested in the sound
of poetry.
African American Photography Archive
A second NHPRC grant has been awarded to the Regional Archivist Program of the Texas African American Photography Archive to arrange, describe, catalog, and rehouse collections totaling over 16,000 prints and negatives. The grant will also provide funding for a project archivist to appraise, rehouse, and conduct preliminary arrangement and description for collections at the African American Museum of Dallas and at Wiley College and Jarvis Christian College, two historically black colleges in East Texas.
The TAAP Archive focuses on the growth and development of vernacular
and community photography among African Americans in Texas.
It provides a broad overview of African American photography in the urban
and rural areas of Texas, spanning the period from the 1870s to the present
and representing a variety of processes and makers. It consists of
over 32,000 photographic negatives and prints and more than 20 oral histories
collected from African American photographers. The TAAP Archive's
web site is at www.docarts.com.
New Archives in New Orleans
The Hermann-Grima and Gallier historic house museums in New Orleans
are undertaking a project to establish an archives. The project archivist
will appraise, arrange, describe, and inventory the collections, and will
also create a records management program and assume responsibility for
identifying and accessioning records of permanent value from various institutional
departments and committees.
Guide to Jewish Community in New Orleans
Greater New Orleans Archivists received a grant from the Southern
Jewish Historical Society toward the printing of an archival guide to the
Jewish community in New Orleans. The guide was begun in 1994 by Andrew
Simons at the Amistad Research Center. Although Mr. Simons has since
moved on to the British Library, his research has been expanded and edited.
When the guide is completed in 1998, it will include information from 23
institutions as well as a brief history of the Jewish in New Orleans.
Evanston Historical Society Gets Grant
The Evanston Historical Society has received an NHPRC grant to arrange, describe, and make available for use 1,000 linear feet of archival collections documenting education, churches, civic and social organizations, businesses, and residents of the city of Evanston, Illinois. The collections comprise records, papers, photographs, slides, maps, atlases, city and telephone directories, local newspapers, clippings files, biographies of residents, histories of Evanston homes, and books and publications by Evanston authors or relating to Evanston.
The Society's Collections Manager and Project Archivist will work closely with the Illinois State Archives and the Cook County Local Records Commission to coordinate management of 250 feet of noncurrent public records (dating from the 1840s) of the City of Evanston and Ridgeville Township. The Society also holds 750 feet of personal papers and organizational records documenting the history of Evanston since the mid-nineteenth century. These include approximately 180 feet relating to individual Evanston houses, as well as records of women's clubs and other civic organizations and papers reflecting the political life of Evanston.
Lincoln Inaugurated at N.I.U.
On April 1, Drew VandeCreek began work on the new Abraham Lincoln Historical Digitization Project at Northern Illinois University's Founders Library. Supported by a generous grant from the Illinois State Library, the Lincoln Project is a consortium of public and private Illinois libraries, museums, historical societies and archives that will cooperate to produce digital copies of their collected Lincoln historical materials. Beginning in the summer of 1998, these materials will be displayed on a free-use web site at http://lincoln.lib.niu.edu.
The site will present Lincoln's life through primary materials, such as letters, legal briefs, newspaper clippings, and three-dimensional articles like clothing and furniture, that are held in the collections of its partner institutions. The project will present the materials in an interpretive context with brief historical summaries, timelines and analyses, but the main thrust of the site will be to allow visitors to explore their own historical questions and forge their own interpretations of events.
The site will incorporate new multimedia techniques to give students, scholars and Lincoln enthusiasts around the world a new perspective on the sources. The digital materials will comprise a large database available for users to search by subject or theme, thus pulling together divergent materials in new ways. This approach makes the site a prime resource for student research papers and scholarly investigations.
Members in the Lincoln Project include the University of Chicago, the
Chicago Historical Society, the Illinois State Archives, the University
of Illinois, Illinois State University, Southern Illinois University, the
Knox College Lincoln Studies Center, the Lincoln Legal Papers Project and
DePaul University. Northern Illinois University will act as the project's
official host institution, and an advisory board of leading historians
and scholars in the fields of humanities computing and digital education
will meet biannually in DeKalb.
Historic Charleston Foundation Project
Historic Charleston Foundation has received funding for a seven-month
project to arrange, describe, catalog, and rehouse its manuscript and photograph
collections. Partial funding for the project, scheduled to begin
in August 1998, is being provided by South Carolina's State Historical
Records Advisory Board. The collections are primarily the organizational
records of Historic Charleston Foundation from its birth in 1947 to the
present, reflecting the history of the preservation movement in America.
The materials also contain an abundance of information on the buildings
of Charleston and the Carolina Lowcountry.
Bill Bradley Papers
The Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library at Princeton University
began on June 1 a two-year project to survey, appraise, preserve, arrange
and describe the papers of Senator Bill Bradley (D-NJ). The collection
primarily documents the senator's 18-year tenure in Congress, but also
reflects his career with the New York Knicks. Project archivist Kristen
Turner and her staff will produce a finding aid describing the 2,100 linear
foot collection at the folder level.
New Directions Publishing Company
The Houghton Library at Harvard University is undertaking
a two-year project to survey, appraise, arrange, and catalog the archive
of New Directions Publishing Company (1936-), the premier American publisher
of modern literature. The archive consists primarily of 170 cartons
of correspondence between the firm's owner, James Laughlin IV, and the
authors he published, including Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos
Williams, H.D., Elizabeth Bishop, and many others; some 150 cartons of
proofs; financial records; photographs; and other materials. The
project is funded in part by a bequest from the Laughlin estate, with the
remaining funding coming from a variety of private donors. Under
the terms of the bequest the collection must be cataloged within 2-1/2
years of its arrival at Harvard; for that reason, the collection will be
closed until cataloging is completed.
Roger Williams Park Photographic Archives
The Rhode Island Committee for the Humanities has awarded a grant to
the Museum of Natural History, Roger Williams Park, in Providence.
The grant will support the inventory, arrangement, cataloging, and preservation
rehousing of the museum's photographic collection, as well as the preparation
of a procedures manual and the generation of a computerized finding aid
to the collection. When completed, the finding aid and procedures
manual will be available via the museum's web site at http://www.osfn.org/museum/.
The museum's photographic archives include a century of mixed format photographic
images whose main emphasis is the landscape and use of Roger Williams Park
and its associated features. Also in the collection are images of
cultural events sponsored by the City of Providence, and a wealth of antiquarian
lantern slides once used in museum programs.
Berkeley Environmental Design Project
The University of California at Berkeley is undertaking a two-year
project to assess, arrange, describe, and provide access to materials in
its College of Environmental Design (CED) Documents Collection. The
CED is an archives of more than 5,000,000 items and is the most extensive
source of written and visual information on the development of Bay Area
and Northern California architecture and landscape architecture.
Its holdings, dating from 1890 to the present, encompass drawings, plans,
specifications, photographs, tapes, personal and business records, furniture,
and architectural fragments from more than 150 architects and firms.
The project will result in the creation of EAD-conforming finding aids
and online catalog records with full USMARC collection level records.
Grant funding is being provided by the Getty Foundation.
Archives for Research on Women and Gender
The University of Texas at San Antonio has received a two-year
NHPRC grant for the Center for the Study of Women and Gender and the Special
Collections and Archives Department's cooperative project, the Archives
for Research on Women and Gender. The project staff will arrange
and describe manuscript materials documenting the history of women and
gender in South Texas, specifically women's voluntary organizations.
The project will result in the creation of online EAD finding aids, MARC
records, and an archival collections subject guide. Information is
available at www.lib.utsa.edu/Archives/index.htm.
Ozarks Labor Union Archives
Southwest Missouri State University received an 18-month grant
which will fund the processing of 18 collections in the Ozarks Labor Union
Archives (OLUA). Arrangement and description activities will include
compilation of finding aids, creation of collection-level USMARC records,
and mark-up of finding aids in SGML/HTML format for distribution on the
World Wide Web. OLUA contains over 1,500 linear feet of materials
and is Missouri's leading repository of records documenting over 125 years
of labor union history in the Ozarks. Its web site is at http://www.smsu.edu/contrib/library/olua1.htm.
Southwest Studies Special Collections Online
If you want to find something in one of the nearly 500 separate collections
that reside in the Center of Southwest Studies, you may now find
it through the Fort Lewis College Library's new Innopac System.
The Center received a $28,779 federal grant from the Library Services and
Construction Act administered by the Colorado State Library to move descriptions
of its
thousands of holdings from its hand-written catalog card file
and isolated collections management database to the computerized search
system. "This is a vast improvement over the original system, especially
for accessing the three-dimensional artifacts," said FLC Archivist Todd
Ellison. Now, researchers around the world can locate all formats of material
in the Center through the World Wide Web and the library's OPAC.
The center's web address is www.fortlewis.edu/acad-aff/swcenter/.
The searchable catalog may be found at opac.fortlewis.edu/search/.
New Guide to Great Depression Sources
The Carl Albert Center at the University of Oklahoma announces a new guide: Archival Resources on the Great Depression at the Carl Albert Center Congressional Archives. The 34-page guide describes the way the Center's archival collections document a variety of topics on the 1930s, including drought relief and soil conservation, banking, public works projects, Prohibition, and veterans' bonus legislation.
The Center's congressional papers contain a substantial amount of material on the legislation that created the New Deal work projects and social programs that affected much of the country and Oklahoma. They also provide insight into national and Oklahoma politics of the era. There are thousands of letters from constituents who, while asking for jobs, money, and relief, reveal the conditions that people lived through and the concerns they had about the national government and economy.
The guide is available free of charge. For a copy, please contact
the Carl Albert Center, University of Oklahoma, 630 Parrington Oval, Rm
101, Norman, OK 73019, phone: (405) 325-5401, fax: (405) 325-6419,
e-mail: kosmerick@ou.edu.
North Carolina Governor's Records
The North Carolina State Archives announces the arrangement and
description of these records in the Governor's Records Sub-unit:
Governor James G. Martin, Communications Office, Audio-Video Tapes, 1985-1993,
21 boxes; Governor James G. Martin, Office of the Governor, Papers of James
C. Green, Special Assistant to the Governor, 1988-1991, 4 boxes; Governor
James G. Martin, Office of the Governor, Office of General Counsel, Papers
of James R. Trotter, 1985-1993, 90 boxes.
Tower Guide at Southwestern
The guide to Senator John G. Tower's papers is now available on Southwestern
University Library's home page at
www.southwestern.edu/library/tower/tower.htm.
John Goodwin Tower, a Southwestern University alumnus, represented Texas
in the United States Senate from 1961 through 1984. Before his retirement,
he named Southwestern University as the official repository for his papers.
The 800 linear feet of materials primarily reflect his Senate activities
and include records and documents, legislative files, correspondence, speeches,
campaign items, photographs, memorabilia, books, and audiovisual tapes
and film. Materials from before the beginning of his Senate career
concern his family, education, and teaching career. Later items document
his writings and his post-Senate appointments, including his nomination
as Secretary of Defense and his appointment as ambassador to the Strategic
Arms Limitation Talks in Geneva. The library also holds several smaller
related accessions, including the papers of political consultant and writer
John Knaggs and those of Senator Tower's legislative aide, J. French Hill.
HemisFair '68 Collection Processed
The University of Texas at San Antonio Libraries Special Collections and Archives Department recently finished processing the records of the San Antonio Fair, Inc., popularly known as the HemisFair '68 collection.
HemisFair '68 was the first world's fair ever held in the Southern part of the United States to be officially recognized by the Paris-based Bureau of International Expositions (B.I.E). The theme of the fair, "The Confluence of Civilizations in the Americas," celebrated the shared cultural heritage of the United States and countries in Latin America, and the convergence of migrants from all around the world in the Western Hemisphere.
The records documenting HemisFair '68 exceed 300 linear feet and reveal
the details of the planning, funding and hosting of the fair. The
bulk of the records are working papers from numerous San Antonio Fair,
Inc. committees and many individuals involved in planning and organizing
HemisFair '68. An exhibit celebrating the 30th anniversary
of HemisFair '68 is at www.lib.utsa.edu/
Special_Collections/hfair. htm.
Proposal No. 98-1
Redefinition of Field 210 (Abbreviated Key Title) in the USMARC Bibliographic
Format
Passed as proposed.
Proposal No. 98-2
Definition of fields 541, 561, and 562 in the USMARC Holdings Format
Passed with no vote on the use of $8 code h (to link to a particular
holding or copy). While this proposal was passed, it was also mentioned
that these holdings fields may be made obsolete in the bibliographic format
sometime in the future. The reasoning was that by continuing to maintain
these holdings fields in the bibliographic format, we are continuing ambiguity
not increasing flexibility. There were some who thought that they
should be made obsolete now because they can be imbedded in any bibliographic
record. So, for the time being, archivists who use these in the bibliographic
format should continue. We will monitor the situation and, should
it come up again, will ask for written comments from practitioners when
we need them.
N.B. Rebecca Guenther of the Library of Congress interpreted the discussion as follows: A few comments on this discussion of making these fields obsolete in the bibliographic format: I interpreted this as a generally theoretical discussion about the nature of the fields as copy specific, and thus only theoretically appropriate in the holdings format. Since holdings fields can be embedded in the bibliographic record, the results would be the same. The point was that if a system strips holdings fields from bibliographic records if so received and puts them in a holdings record, that it be clear which fields that are defined in both formats refer to holdings information and which to bibliographic. So if these fields were only defined in holdings, a system that does that would know they belong in a holdings record if applicable. Practically speaking I don't see that it would change the current practice of recording these fields in the bibliographic record when desired.
Proposal No. 98-3
Expanding the use of field 028 (Publisher Number)
Passed with minor changes.
Proposal No. 98-4
Elimination of tag conflicts in the USMARC Bibliographic, Community
Information, and Holdings formats
Passed as proposed.
Proposal No. 98-5
Additional definition of field 080 (UDC)
Passed as proposed.
Proposal No. 98-6
Definition of value s (Electronic) in 008 character positions
Passed using Option 1. This proposal was presented by OCLC to
deal with the problems they encountered trying to implement Proposal 97-3R,
which was approved by MARBI and proposed making 007 mandatory for items
whose physical carrier is a computer file. The archives community
has been watching this proposal to use as a possible model to code "manuscriptness."
What was approved this time (adding value s = electronic to 006/12 Form
of Item and 008/29 Form of Item) does not exactly parallel our situation.
CAIE (or Standards Board) will need to bring a proposal back to MARBI this
summer which will address the content vs. carrier issue and, at the same
time, take into account the concerns of those repositories which have numerous
single manuscripts not cataloged using APPM.
Discussion Paper No. 104
Definition of Field 007 (Physical Description Fixed Field) for tactile
materials in the USMARC Bibliographic and Holdings formats
Proposal requested.
Discussion Paper No. 105
Reading program information
Proposal requested.
Discussion Paper No. 106
New Type of Date code
Further discussion of dates before proposal request.
Discussion Paper No. 107
Defining Field 856 in the USMARC Authorities Format
Proposal requested.
The section's web site has been up and running since early December
and is located at http://www.library.yale.edu/~dsmith/saa/saadescr.htm.
The site contains information on the section leadership, membership, and
charge, and carries current as well as past issues of Descriptive Notes
(back to summer 1992), minutes from last year's Description Section meeting,
and information and documentation on descriptive standards. The site
is maintained by Diana Smith, a member of the Manuscript Unit at the Beinecke
Library at Yale. She welcomes suggestions for enhancements to the
site and may be e-mailed at diana.smith@yale.edu.
Many thanks to those who contributed to this issue. Please submit items for future issues to Hodges@library.uta.edu, or to:
Ann Hodges
The University of Texas at Arlington
University Libraries, Special Collections Division
P.O. Box 19497
Arlington, Texas 76019-0497
Fax: (817) 272-3360
Phone: (817) 272-3000 ext. 4963