A Series of Unfortunate Events

Being new to archives, assigning series and subseries kind of throws me for a loop. My brain thinks “subject headings” and “classification” — “many” and “one” — describing an object and putting it in its place. The world of series and folders is sometimes confusing, even more so now that we’re creating records in the museum’s database, which is not created for — and not ideal for — archival material. For example, there is no established hierarchical relationship between box level records and objects/items, or between objects/items and their pieces. This relationship is demonstrated by the accession number, but the database design makes it difficult to apply consistent metadata to the objects. The problem with the series is that the database only allows for two levels, whereas our list of series and subseries — or categories and object headings — is a locally developed, multi-level vocabulary based on the AAT. We follow the rule of applying the narrowest heading possible. If I catalog a purse, I apply the subseries “purses (bags),” and it lives in the series “costume/personal accessories.” Under this series — between “costume/personal accessories” and “purses (bags)” — is also the subseries “bags.” However, if someone searches just for “bags,” the purse will not show up because the vocabulary and hierarchical structure is not built into the database. We need to look at the database more carefully to figure out if there is another way — hopefully a simple way — to create a combined search to take care of this. It may just come down to our friend Keyword.

Work Mark / Cutter / &c.

So, the fun of making up your own classification scheme? Deciding how to handle problems when there are no rules to consult! As I have mentioned before, there are 10 basic classification categories:
A: Quakerism
B: Biographies
[BC: Biography Collections / Collective Biographies]
C: Conduct of Life
D: Spiritual Life
E: The Bible
F: Religion & Theology (non-Quaker-specific)
G: Social Concerns & Society
H: History
I: Peace & Nonviolence
J: Literature & the Arts
K: Children & Young Adults (further broken down into KP–Picture Books, KN–Non-fiction, KF–Fiction, etc.)

Our call numbers go like this: X Abc, where X is the class number (A-KX) and Abc represents the first three letters of the main entry, except in biographies (our B class), where Abc represents the first three letters of the last name of the subject of the biography. Now, in various categories, we’ve had to add a fourth letter (SmiR and SmiJ to distinguish between Richard Smith and John Smith). The fun came in biographies when we had books about George Fox and Margaret Fox. FoxG and FoxM, right? We treat the biographical subject as we do the author in other categories (SmiR and SmiJ).

But what about two different biographies of Margaret Fox? Okay, FoxMJ for one written by Martha Jones; FoxMS for one written by John Smith. (If Harriet Jones wrote one, too, well, our readers will just have to distinguish the two on the shelf. The collection is just over 1,000 volumes.) And what of Margaret’s autobiography? Just plain FoxM. Whew!

Okay, now George Fox… only one of the most prolific Quaker writers ever. We’ve got the biography call numbers down, but what of the autobiographical works? We ended up doing FoxG 1uuu, where 1uuu is the year it was first published. If we have a few editions that haven’t been corrected or revised or enlarged, then we file them with their original publication date.

And what of a memorial publication to honor Rufus Jones (I think), assembled by Haverford College and containing various letters to Rufus Jones and pieces about him? B JonRH, and Haverford College is a 710 on the record. We already had a B JonRH for a biography by Harris or something, but we just let it go.

And that! is how you make up your own on-the-fly, small church library classification system.