Making Special Collections Accessible to Users: Finding Aids

2018 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-38 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clayton McGahee

Good afternoon, thank you for having me. My name is Clayton McGahee and I am the Archives Manager for Emory. My colleagues refer to me as the “Roving Archivist” in that I currently work in four archival repositories throughout Emory each week. These four areas consist of the Woodruff Health Sciences Library, Oxford College Library, Pitts Theology Library, and the MacMillan Law Library. I've been at Emory since 2013, and among my duties is that I am responsible for the creation and upload of finding aids for WHSCL, Law, and Oxford College archives.

2015 ◽  
Vol 116 (5/6) ◽  
pp. 289-301
Author(s):  
Lorraine M Nero

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the indexing method used by Caribbean libraries to describe special collections and manuscripts. Design/methodology/approach – Various types of finding aids spanning 1960-2014 are used to show the pattern of descriptions adopted by the librarians. At the same time, the factors which have sustained the approach at national libraries and university libraries are highlighted. Findings – The paper concludes that while the indexing approach may be labour-intensive, this practice is perceived as developing a national and regional documentary heritage. The materials used for this study are primarily accessible to the public inclusive of published guides and online databases. Originality/value – The literature is replete with theories and cases from places such as the UK, the USA and Australia, this paper presents a perspective on the development of archival description in the Caribbean.


Author(s):  
Marlene Manoff

Archives and libraries operate within a complex web of social, political, and economic forces. The explosion of digital technologies, globalization, economic instability, consolidation within the publishing industry, increasing corporate control of the scholarly record, and the shifting copyright landscape are just some of the myriad forces shaping their evolution. Libraries and archives in turn have shaped the production of knowledge, participating in transformations in scholarship, publishing, and the nature of access to current and historical materials. Librarians and archivists increasingly recognize that they exist within institutional systems of power. Questioning long-held assumptions about library and archival neutrality and objectivity, they are working to expand access to previously marginalized materials, to educate users about the social and economic forces shaping their access to information, to raise awareness about bias in information tools and systems, and to empower disenfranchised communities. New technologies are transforming the practices of librarians and archivists as they restructure bibliographic systems for collecting, storing, and accessing information. Digitization has vastly expanded the volume of material libraries and archives make available to their communities. It has enabled the creation of tools to read or decipher material thought to have been damaged beyond repair as well as tools to annotate, manipulate, map, and mine a wide variety of textual and visual resources. Digitization has enhanced scholarship by expanding opportunities for collaboration and by altering the scale of potential research. Scholars have the ability to perform computational analyses on immense numbers of images and texts. Nevertheless, new technologies have also presaged a greater commodification of information, a worsening of the crisis in scholarly communication, the creation of platforms rife with hidden bias, fake news, plagiarism, surveillance, harassment, and security breaches. Moreover, the digital record is less stable than the printed record, complicating the development of systems for organizing and preserving information. Archivists and librarians are addressing these issues by acquiring new technical competencies, by undertaking a range of social and materialist critiques, and by promoting new information literacies to enable users to think critically about the political and social contexts of information production. In most 21st-century archives and libraries, traditional systems for stewarding analog materials coexist with newly developing methods for acquiring and preserving a range of digital formats and genres. Libraries provide access to printed books, journals, magazines, e-books, e-journals, databases, data sets, audiobooks, streaming audio and video files, as well as various other digital formats. Archives and special collections house rare and unique books and artifacts, paper and manuscript collections as well as their digital equivalents. Archives focus on permanently valuable records, including accounts, reports, letters, and photographs that may be of continuing value to the organizations that have created them or to other potential users.


2014 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 84-96 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ed Galloway ◽  
Cassandra DellaCorte

During the Fall 2013 academic semester at the University of Pittsburgh, two undergraduate history majors performed a Wikipedia internship in the University Library System’s Archives Service Center and Special Collections Department. The purpose was to enhance the discoverability of Pitt’s digital collections and finding aids by creating links from Wikipedia articles to relevant content held by the library’s specialized collection units as well as to generally improve the quality of articles by adding additional information. By editing nearly 100 articles in Wikipedia, the interns developed their own effective strategies to perform this work and learned how to use and edit Wikipedia efficiently, how to navigate library resources effectively, how to decide what types of content would be valuable to add, and how to present new and respectable information. As a result, usage of Pitt’s online digitized collections and finding aids appears to have increased.


2021 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-52
Author(s):  
Angelė Rudžianskaitė ◽  
Anita Dabužinskienė ◽  
Lena Green ◽  
Vega Kriaučiūnienė

Professor August Rauber (1841–1917) created the most important school of anatomy in the Baltic region. His students continued his educational and research work in their native countries. One of them was Professor Jurgis Žilinskas (1885–1957) who laid the foundation to Lithuanian anatomy and anthropology. From 1906–1912, he studied medicine at the University of Yuryev (Tartu) where Prof. A. Rauber worked for 25 years as Head of the Institute of Anatomy. In 1890, A. Rauber opened the Anatomy Museum there. In the university, J. Žilinskas maintained close contacts with Professors A. Rauber (1841–1917), N. N. Burdenko (1876–1946), W. Zoege-Manteuffel (1857–1926) and E. Landau (1878–1959). After graduation from the university, J. Žilinskas as a talented student was invited to work as an assistant at the Department of Hospital Surgery at Yuryev University. After Lithuania restored its independence on 16 February 1918, Prof. J. Žilinskas participated actively in the organization of medical studies in Lithuania (1922–1940) and was one of the creators and the principal patron of the Museum of Anatomy. Returning to Lithuania, J. Žilinskas brought along the most advanced ideas of his professors, especially of his honoured Prof. A. Rauber. During this period, the collection of the museum increased to 3,890 specimens. Osteological specimens comprised 1,925 (around 50%) of the specimens, wet specimens – 753 (19.3%), corrosion specimens – 467 (12%), transparent specimens – 201 (5.2%), dry specimens – 107 (2.8%) and models – 437. Professor J. Žilinskas’ collection constitutes 50% of the present exhibits at the Anatomy Museum of the Lithuanian University of Health Sciences.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Danielle McAllister

Among the various collections housed in the Archival & Special Collections CASC) at the University of Guelph is a group of photographic material that exhibits the integral role photography played in Scotland's tourism industry from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Photographic publishing firms such as G.W. Wilson & Co. and Valentine & Sons, Ltd. incorporated photography into their commercial repertoires and both helped to create and capitalize on Scotland's vibrant tourism industry during this period. This thesis focuses on this specific group of material that includes four bound albums, five opalines, seven travel view books, and over four hundred stereographs, and additionally looks at how institutions such as the ASC use descriptive tools like finding aids to provide access to and information about their collections. This thesis project reevaluates the structure and role of the finding aid as applied to photographic material in archival collections. Additional components such as a biographical sketches, a glossary of photographic terms, a geographic index, and a historical overview, have been incorporated to further demonstrate how a finding aid can build a greater web of connections and narratives for such collections.


2011 ◽  
Vol 68 (2) ◽  
pp. 2
Author(s):  
Jonathan Dembo ◽  
Mark Custer

The authors, Prof. Jonathan Dembo and Prof. Mark Custer have used Unique Page Views generated by Google Analytics to identify and track ten of the least used online manuscript finding aids on the Special Collections Department home page of the J. Y. Joyner Library website at East Carolina University.  The authors are unaware of previous attempts to use online access statistics to identify and select archival finding aids for experimental purposes.  They are also unaware of any previous attempt to use online access statistics, Unique Page Views (UPV's) or Google Analytics to track and assess the results of finding aid revision experiments. In their experiment, Prof. Custer first generated reports showing Unique Page Views of each online finding aid.  Prof. Dembo then revised the finding aids to add information to selected elements, including biographical / historical notes, scope notes, accession information, and inventories. He then tracked the changes in unique page views over more than a year.  The authors' findings demonstrate that increasing detail to the finding aids had a dramatic impact on unique page views received.  Comparable finding aids selected as a control sample increased at a fraction of the rate of the revised finding aids.  Moreover, the authors provide evidence to show that revisions to specific online finding aid elements significantly impacted the relative ranking of the finding aids on the website.  Prof. Custer who developed Google Analytics as a research tool at Joyner Library has provided Notes on Technical and Statistical Methods.  The authors have also provided five tables illustrating the results and providing web addresses for all the finding aids included in the experiment. 


2017 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 19
Author(s):  
Nancy P. O'Brien

In summer, 2002, the Education Division of the Special Libraries Association held a panel presentation on "Historical and Archival Collections in Education." From that session developed this article which discusses the need for finding aids, publicity, creative uses of the web, and collaborative ways to deal withthese issues. Specific references to finding aids and web sites of interest to education historians and librarians, and brief descriptions of several special collections of historical education materials are included. Also highlighted is a new service, an exchange registry, which offers institutions a way to placematerials where they are most needed. 


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