Card Catalog Conversion Project Completed
One of the enjoyable experiences in my career at various institutions has been encountering treasures of uncataloged materials. This situation has certainly been true of archival collections where every American institution has a large inventory of hidden collections. However, it is quite unique to discover such a large quantity of print material either uncataloged or only discoverable via a card catalog. Such was the case in Special Collections when I arrived in 2016.
Most Universities had tackled this problem in the 1960’s and 1970’s using external grant funding to perform a retrospective conversion of their analog card catalogs. When I arrived at Harvard in 1987, for example, they had just completed their conversion of the Harvard Libraries card catalog. It was an enormous, lengthy process because they oversee 100 libraries. I should say a national controversy arose after the project’s completion about what to do with the card catalog itself. Faculty demanded it be retained and it was moved into the subterranean tunnels, which were used during the winter months for easy movement from one building to the next.
Although my career has mainly focused on the management of archival collections, I know a great rare book library when I see one. My exposure at Harvard and Berkeley have given me both an understanding and an appreciation of those collections. UO has a great rare book collection. It is one of the largest collections on the West Coast, in the company of the Huntington, UC Berkeley, UCLA and Stanford.
We have been blessed by the hard work of UO librarians who came before us. It’s not easy to convince a book collector to donate their personal library. It often takes years of sensitive negotiations and a commitment to build a personal relationship with the donor. You must demonstrate that your institution is worthy of the donation. In that respect, UO has been quite fortunate to have had librarians with those very talents and expertise.
Special Collections was formally created in 1947 as a library department to acquire manuscript, book, and photograph collections under the leadership of Curator of Special Collection, Martin Schmitt. He was the recipient of the 1972 Society of American Archivists Waldo Gifford Leland Prize for the Catalogue of Manuscripts in the University of Oregon Library. This volume is still considered one of the most comprehensive and detailed catalogs of literary and historical manuscripts ever published. Schmitt found an ardent partner in Edward Kemp, Acquisitions Librarian, to acquire manuscript and book collections from individuals around the world. Kemp’s work, Manuscript Solicitation for Libraries, Special Collections, Museums, and Archives (1978) laid out the first systematic approach to acquiring rare books and manuscripts for institutional collections. Kenneth Duckett, the renowned manuscripts librarian and then director of SCUA, wrote an award-winning work titled, Modern Manuscripts: A Practical Manual for their Management, Care and Use (1975). These were required readings in my own graduate study at Simmons College.
I am continually impressed by the scope and substance of the UO collection. We have the fourth largest Medieval and Renaissance collection of hand-written books on the West Coast with over 115 titles, the earliest dating to the 12th Century. We have over 100 Incunabula, books printed 1440 – 1501. Given there are only 28,395 incunabula known to exist in the world, it is quite amazing to find so many in Eugene.
It is also truly wonderful to discover what treasures we have. Many months ago, when rummaging through the rare books temporarily stored in a sub-basement of the Library, I stumbled upon a first edition of Newton’s foundational work on Calculus (1711). This past month, I received a rare book dealer’s catalog focused on Emblem Books, which were quite the rave in the late Medieval–early Renaissance period. Now that our books are fully cataloged, I discovered we had most of what was on his list for sale. This has been true of modern titles as well: we hold examples of almost every hand-press in Europe and America.
In 2019, we received funding from the State Library’s LSTA grant program to perform a retrospective conversion of our rare book card catalog. We hired the vendor, BackStage, to perform the conversion. We also asked BackStage to create barcodes and labels for all the volumes. The work is now wrapping up this month, August 2020. The project has produced MARC records entered into OCLC, which are now downloaded to our local consortium online catalog. Here are some stats:
- Rare book titles created from the cards: 4,655 titles
- Rare serial titles created from the cards: 683 titles
- Zines cataloged: 766 records, all reclassed in LC classification
- Utopian titles cataloged: 790 records
- Labels and barcodes created: 11,000 barcodes, 22,000 labels
- Other work completed:
–Searching of cards for records already created (de-duping): 3,500 cards
–Authority work for titles printed before 1755
Total NEW Records: 6,895 now in the online catalog
There is still much work to be done. All of the labels (and related barcodes) were placed on acid-free flags and have to be placed in the volumes. All of the volumes are now assigned call numbers in the Library of Congress classification system (not Dewey). A huge shifting project will commence in the stacks as we never had a single, unified classification system applied to the books. Once that work is completed, we will perform a shelf inventory to see if anything is missing or wasn’t included in the project. The serials will need fuller cataloging to identify volume and issue numbers and dates. We will likely uncover more titles that need original cataloging or enhancements to the new records.
Our users can now discover and access the majority of our printed holdings through the Library’s online catalog. We expect to see a significant increase in the use of the collection. Now that library staff can more easily discover what we have, with the assistance of UO graduate students, we will turn our attention to create topical and genre pathways to showcase the strengths in the collection: LibGuides will break out the collection by topics rather than only by provenance; Blog entries will continue to focus on new acquisitions and pertinent, current topics found in the collection; and we will strengthen the analysis of themes and important events using our online exhibit platform, SpotLight.
This milestone doesn’t mean we will stop collecting. We have some fundamental gaps in the rare book collection, especially for underrepresented populations, for example: women in the book trade, works by and about African Americans, works published in Mexico and Spain, works in Hebrew, to name a few.
I want to express high praise and sincere thanks to the many library colleagues who helped make this project possible and such a success. This is a monumental achievement and we are very fortunate to have such talented colleagues.
David de Lorenzo, Director, SCUA
