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Re: Martin Luther King and Encarta



Dean raises an interesting problem in his second paragraph. What he touches
on here is something I have to deal with in nearly all our collections, as
our whole focus is the history of the manufacturers and users of
construction, dredging and surface mining equipment. Unscrambling and
documenting the maze of buyouts, downsizings, spinoffs, mergers, name
changes, sell-offs of product lines and other transactions for the
1,500-plus companies represented in our collections is enough to make me
wander out the door gibbering unintelligibly at the end of a day.

My approach has been to identify the connections through both printed guides
to the collections and in a database designed for that purpose. One huge
help has been the recent publication of a couple of books that discuss in a
semi-encyclopedic format the histories of many of these companies. What's
not yet documented in the guides, database or books has to come either from
my addled head or from a lot of extra digging by the researcher. And I can
see the validity of Dean's statement about information made avilable beyond
the archive; there is no substitute for the help of someone knowledgeable in
a given field to help make sense of the information gathered about that
field.

Best wishes to all for the weekend,

Thomas Berry, Archivist
Historical Construction Equipment Association
Bowling Green, OH

On Tue, 18 Jan 2000 08:02:11 -0600, Dean DeBolt <ddebolt@MAIL.UWF.EDU>
wrote:

Our reference library staff have argued that in-person use has been sharply
declining for two years because more and more of our indexes are now
available online to our students and faculty who can easily access them from
home and work.   Since most of our archival collections are not online, I
cannot provide similar figures.  The question however is not an easy one to
answer, for it depends on the inclination of the researcher to go beyond
what is readily available.
>
Using an example, say one year you get the records of John Smith, a
lumberman and entrepreneur. Then ten years later, you get the records of
Bill Jones, another lumberman, and who it turns out, bought out the John
Smith Lumber Company, renamed it the Bill Smith Lumber Company and kept it
going. We have tried here to make our indexes cross-index so a researcher
working on one lumber company will be led also to its previous name and
owner, for after all, the building sites, lumber operations, even the
personnel may have remained the same. Even if our finding aids fail to make
an implicit connection, often the staff "know" this and will impart the
information to the user. Once materials are scanned or fixed in some medium,
such as microfilm, and available beyond the archives, it is increasingly
difficult to show users these connections. Our Panton, Leslie and Company
Papers were microfilmed onto 26-reels of microfilm and sold through Primary
Source Media. In the 15 years since, we have turned up enough new records to
create possibly two new reels of film.   Some people do contact us for more
information, but I suspect that untold numbers do not. Again I have no idea
of how many folks are "using our records" through the microfilm at various
repositories.
>
>Dean DeBolt
>University Librarian
>Special Collections and West Florida Archives
>John C. Pace Library
>University of West Florida
>11000 University Parkway
>Pensacola, FL  32514-5750
>Tele:  850-474-2213;   Fax:  850-474-3338
>

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