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Cataloging archival materials: Title field added entries?



True, this added 246 is not useful if you're thinking of the
online catalog only serving patrons, who mostly use keyword
searching, but providing access to the patrons is only part
of what I'm doing.

I'm in a new position, and to a lot of the
curators/archivists I work with, cataloging online is a new
thing, often not really trusted to be that useful. They've
been having students type little cards for decades and if
anybody wants to know what we have on a topic, they can just
ask the curator. There's a continued reliance on the curator
as a gatekeeper for information. As a cataloger of archival
and special collections materials, I'm trying to make
information access more oriented to an online environment,
which I feel in this world of shortening resources, glut of
information, and ever widening demands on all our time is a
necessity. So I try to overwhelm the curators with how
wonderful it is to have the collections cataloged, and am
busily scanning and using OCR to make finding aids to be
posting on the web, adding search engines to the website,
and adding lots of access points to cataloging records.

In this particular case, this collection had been
rudimentarily cataloged under the "Papers of" title, and in
recataloging this collection, I didn't want to "lose"
anybody who was used to calling it up by that title. But I'm
willing to admit that it's overkill!

>"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.

Ms. Georgen Gilliam
Special Materials Cataloger
Utah State University Libraries
geogil@ngw.lib.usu.edu

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