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Re: Student papers



Edited version of what ai sent to Cindy--remarks about my boss and his
Stetson cowboy hat have been deleted.

One approach is to view it as more of an "archival" collection than a
"personal" collection of papers.  This would make it easier to see the
student papers as more of a sub-group of a record group.  (Much of this would
depend on how your institution organizes faculty papers--are they a record
group of the institution or a collection of personal papers?  It should work
either way, though.  It's just easier for me to "visualise" sub-groups in an
archival perspective.)  Rather than seperating the student papers into a
seperate collection within themselves, make the student papers a subset of
the professor's collection, whether archival oe personal.  The nice thing
about making them "archival" is that when you index them (by student name,
course, etc.) you can also build the index of student names to include names
from student papers from other faculty collections and maintain the "purity"
of the index to cite only portions of the institutional archives, as opposed
to the index citing names from different personal collections.  Not that
archival stuff ever stays truly "pure," but hey, I _do_ like to try!  But if
they are personal papers according to your institution's collection
organisation then make the index include names from diverse collections of
faculty papers.  (If you don't have student papers in other faculty papers
yet, you will eventually!)  Then place the restrictions on the sub-group and
note accordingly in the collection's catalogue record.  (Use a subfield 3 in
the 506 field to specify restrictions on the sub-group; you can also specify
that there is an index to the subgroup by using the subfield 3 in the 555
note for finding aids.  If you have a finding aid for the whole
collection--which you'll likely end up doing, as we all know--don't fret,
'cause 555 is repeatable, as is the 506 tag.)

As I reviewed the description of the 506 note in my (old) OCLC MARC:AMC
manual I noticed in an example that one restriction noted that material may
be accessible with written permission, something you may want to consider--if
your alumni office is willing to work with you on keeping track of/forwarding
requests to students, that is.  If they're not into that kinda thing, I
wouldn't try to deal with it, or even mention it.

_______________

One thing I'll add--if you make the student papers a "subset" of the faculty
member's collection you may want to organize the papers according to course
number (another advantage of making this "archival" since it would follow the
scheme of the institutional records more closely (well, sorta) and then you
would index the names by citing course number and date, which could be built
upon when you include student papers from other faculty members' collections.
 You would create subsets of restricted portions of different record
groups/subgroups but the index could supply a cross-indexed list of where a
student's papers would be regardless of professor.

Holly Hodges

P.S. I was talking to Beth Harris, Hollins University, the other day and she
was telling me about a MARAC program about collecting faculty papers this
fall in Richmond... should anyone want to find a forum for further discussion
on these issues.

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