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.

Friends

I am very excited to say that we were invited to join the Quaker Meeting Libraries Group on LibraryThing! I hope that we will be able to share practices as well as form a community for Quaker readers around the world. Right now, 2 of the libraries in the group are in Australia; the rest are in the U.S.

I haven’t seen Mary in a few weeks because I was on vacation two weeks ago, and she was away last week, but I hope to see her this week and figure out if we will indeed be upgrading our account so we can put our whole library on LibraryThing.

In other (non-)news, we are plugging away at getting all of the books in the Surpass catalog; the volunteers have worked their way almost through the J’s! (Our classification system is A-J.) However, we had initially skipped over A’s (Quakerism) and B’s (Biographies) because of anticipated difficulty with copy-cataloging. So I have been working on the A’s, and I think the volunteers are ready to tackle the B’s.

I would love to see the catalog complete and visible on LibraryThing before I’m done, except… when am I done? Clearly my field placement is long over, and I’m now another volunteer. I expressed to Mary my desire to keep working with the library, but I don’t know how that works, if I’m not a Friend. Of course, Friends are very welcoming, and it’s doubtful they would turn away someone who wants to help.

17 July 2008 (on site): 1:30pm-4:30pm
24 July 2008 (on site): 1:30pm-5:30pm
31 July 2008 (on site): 1:30pm-4:30pm
14 August 2008 (on site): 10:00pm-3:00pm

Friendly Things

More Quaker libraries on LibraryThing:

• Henry J. Cadbury Library of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting
• Newtown (PA) Monthly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends
• Milwaukee Friends Library
• Frankford (PA) Monthly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends
• Perry City (NY) Monthly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends
• North Seattle Monthly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Part of Northwest Yearly Meeting)
• Strawberry Creek (CA) Monthly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends
• New Market (TN) Monthly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (part of Wilmington Yearly Meeting)
• Twin Cities Monthly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends
• Harrisburg (PA) Monthly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends
• Moorestown (NJ) Monthly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends
• Williamsburg (VA) Monthly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends
• Richland (PA) Monthly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends
• (Not sure who this is yet: the name is “LR_Friends”)
• Lancaster Monthly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends

10 July 2008 (on site): 1:30pm-3:30pm
10 July 2008 (on site): 6:00pm-9:00pm (Library Committee meeting)