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Re: Small Collections



On Tue, 25 Jul 2000, Joy Kingsolver wrote:

> I know it's easy to criticize, but it's really not a catalog-worthiness issue,
> it's a time & staff issue. I'm certainly not the only one
> facing these issues, as responses so far have shown.

Well, it sort of seems to me like you're mixing apples and oranges here.
Your first post posed this "when to MARC catalog, when not to MARC
catalog" quandry and posited a size-based solution. I can't speak for Lee,
but my response was that appraisal of the value of the information content
of a particular collection is a much better analysis on which to base your
MARC/no MARC decision than size.

Staff and time are factors regardless of whether you base your decision to
create a MARC catalog record for a particular collection on appraisal or
size. Don't know about anyone else, but we have some sizeable collections
of drivel that I would put much further back in my catalog queue than some
very small but information-rich collections. Time and staff are issues
regardless of whether you're a 1-person shop or a 10-person shop. Deciding
on what order to tackle your cataloging backlog, however large or small
that backlog is and how ever many people you have to actually do the work,
seems more soundly based on appraisal of informational and other values
than on size of collection.

If this is a "let's complain about how we don't have enough staff" game,
have I got a story for you .... ;-)

--
Bill Landis__________________________|_____________________blandis@uci.edu
Manuscripts Librarian                |                   The UCI Libraries
Department of Special Collections    |            University of California
949 824.3113                         |                      P.O. Box 19557
949 824.2472 FAX                     |              Irvine, CA  92623-9557

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