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Re: ARCHIVES Digest - 25 Feb 2001 to 26 Feb 2001 (#2001-60)



Interesting discussion on MSS/archival cataloging.

Marsha Maguire mentions the APPM option to just record form of material (e.g., Records, Papers) as a supplied title. I can't figure out a rationale for this, as it is basically worthless both for retrieval and display purposes in an online catalog.  I guess I'm not much of a purist as regards recording duplicative information that doesn't really serve any purpose except to take up valuable bytes in our records (we catalog in OCLC and so are constrained by their archaic and inane field length and # restrictions).

Our practice is to follow the combined directives in APPM 1.1B3-5 and construct a single supplied title that contains meaningful information for retrieval and display about the unit of archival material being described. We use only a single 245 per record and no 246s, and do use a 245 first indicator of 1 for our supplied titles, unless there is no 1XX field in a record (e.g., for artificial collections created by the repository), in which case we use a 245 first indicator of 0 and explain the genesis of the collection in the 520 field.

Georgen Gilliam provides the following example

"This is the kind of thing that I might do:
 100 1  Brite, John Duncan, #d 1901-
 245 10 John Duncan Brite papers, #f 1878-1971 #g (bulk
 1955-1971) #h [manuscript]
 246 3  Papers of John Duncan Brite
 300    2 #f linear ft. (5 boxes)"

Her 245 is a great example of how we'd construct a supplied title. I'm not sure, though, of the value of an additional 246 that basically rearranges the same words as the 245?  Do others really think that most end users do exact title searches in our OPACs for known MSS or archives collections?  The overwhelming conclusions of research into use of OPACs seems to be that most end users do keyword searching when not looking for known items or authors. In our OPAC at least a keyword search is pretty much just a title keyword search. The above example would just net the end user a duplicate hit on the same collection. I guess I don't see much value in a varying form of title (246) field for archival collections unless you're providing a different set of title keywords.

--
| Bill Landis
| Manuscripts Librarian, Special Collections and Archives
| The UCI Libraries, University of California
| P.O. Box 19557, Irvine, CA 92623-9557
| 949 824.3113 Voice | 949 824.2472 Fax
| blandis@uci.edu

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