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Considering court records cataloguing
This past week I've had occasion to discuss the description of court records
with several individuals. It has been some time since I've worked
extensively with (local) court records and my brain has been running round in
circles and cycles over several issues that keep coming back into my
thoughts. I thought I'd throw them out to the list for comment, and perhaps
some of y'all can give me an idea as to current thinking is re: description
of court records. Please note that these are wandering thoughts that have
wandered for quite a while and quite a ways.
Cataloguing of court records in USMARC
In theory, one should be able to create MARC records for various record
groups (and series) within a court system. Generally (local) courthouses do
not use library management systems, and rarely do they create and maintain a
body of catalogue records. Has anyone encountered a situation in which
records of a local court were described in MARC and the records loaded into
the local public library? Presumably an 852 would be employed to note the
location of the courthouse, in order to ensure that users would be able to
tell that the material described was in the courthouse, instead of the public
library.
A search of LC's new online database, MARC Code List for Organizations (at
http://lcweb.loc.gov/marc/organizations/ ), shows that a number of
courthouses in Iowa have applied for such codes, and my take on it is that
they would be using them in MARC records to code the 85x's. I'm aware that a
number of state libraries and archives employ such a system, but does anyone
know of anyone doing this at the local. Can someone tell me if this is what
happening in Iowa, or anywhere else?
I do expect to get responses from state libraries saying they discourage such
programs of local government records cataloguing preferring to encourage
local governments and courthouses to transfer local records to the state's
designated repository. But does the existence of a cataloguing record at a
local level prevent same from later being "transferred" to the state level
when the records are transferred?
Realising that this opens the Pandora's box re: transfer of records
(acceptable for records management, but among archivists the concern is
generally that records that reach an archival repository are a permanent
thing), I suppose one could argue that cataloguing local records that are not
yet in an archival repository should not be considered an appropriate object
for the APPM descriptive standard.* But the presence of the 583 field in the
now superseded MARC AMC format (was Format Integration in 1995? I don't
recall…) and the 851 would make this a possibility, i.e. that the 583 would
be used to note transfer of records as an action (didn't the idea that there
could be a thesaurus of standard terms for "actions" come up last year
sometime?) and the (current) location of the records in the 851 allow for
such description?
And re: a thesaurus of standard archival actions-does someone out there in
MARBI land know if this has come up for discussion?
* By this I mean a literal interpretation of APPM, or Archives Personal
Papers and Manuscripts. According to APPM's indication (2nd edition, SAA,
1989) in the preface (p. vi), the definition of archival material generally
considered textual formats in its original edition, while in the second
edition APPM considered archival material in a broader scope-a greater
variety of formats. But the prefatory comments seem to refer to physical
format, as opposed to (intellectual) genre. Are records that have not yet
reached the archival stage of their life cycle also being considered for
treatment in APPM? I feel like I'm splitting hairs on this point… perhaps
someone should tell me to lighten up!
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