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Re: Business name changes and collection titles



My only point here was to note that there are standards established that
would be helpful in some situations.  I've most often worked in settings
where manuscripts and other archival materials had to co-exist in catalogs
with everything else, and following the existing standards has been useful
in providing consistency when it has been necessary to help patrons find
what they need.  I remember the bad old days before MARC.AMC format and
online catalogs and EAD, and I believe that standards have made it much
easier for people to find what they need, especially for patrons at a
distance. I teach mixed materials cataloging, and I'm NACO-trained, which
has made me perhaps overly sensitive to name formation!

Archives and archivists have been and will remain the squirrelist parts of
the library and information and records business, simply because each
separate archives has unique needs created by the collection itself, the
institution, its software (or lack thereof), and its users.  Everything we
do must be tailored to work in our particular situations.  But when there
are national and international standards that work, I try to follow them
until I have a good reason to depart.  That's all I'm saying and am not
attempting to be the listserv standards police!

We all call ourselves archivists, but what we do on a daily basis may be so
totally different that at times I'm still suprised that we can talk to each
other in any meaningful way at all! Dialogue like this is useful in helping
us all to recalibrate, and to understand the similarities and differences in
our work, and why we make the decisions we do.  The bottom line is that we
all want to protect our collections while making them physically and
intellectually accessible through the means that we best see fit.  But I do
think we have a professional obligation to use standards when they work for
our situations.

I will now get off my somewhat defensive soapbox and I thank you all for
your thoughtful consideration of the many facets of the issue at hand.

Best,

Sally Childs-Helton
Butler University

-----Original Message-----
From: Fred Lautzenheiser [mailto:LAUTZEF@CCF.ORG]
Sent: Friday, April 05, 2002 5:18 PM
To: ARCHIVES@LISTSERV.MUOHIO.EDU
Subject: Business name changes and collection titles


I agree with Kit Leary.  I would like to remind you gently that not all
members of this list are working in a university library.  A cataloging
entry is not specific enough for me to find what I am looking for in this
archives. A very large hospital/medical research facility with branches in
various geographic locations is more akin to a big corporation than a
university library, and the users of the finding aids are the archivists.
Executive administration , who are our end users, are not about to trek into
the archives to pore over finding aids, or even look them up on the
computer.  They call (actually, they have their secretaries call) for
information, and our mission is to find it quickly.  Cataloging is not a
top priority here, or even a priority, in a (OK, let's say it) business
situation.  Consistency is fine and would be ideal, but the archivist's
mission is to find the information, and quickly.  This means having finding
aids with every known variant of a name, and it doesn't matter much which
name you use as the official title of the collection, as long as you can get
from one to the other.   I too rely on rules when I need to, but
nomenclature is so fast-changing (both in the medical world and inside the
specific institution) that trying to keep it all under control is a major
and continual task and calls for all sorts of solutions.  What the
administrators and the legal department call something is vastly more
important than what the archivist thinks it should be called.  We too have
formerly independent institutions which have to be identified within our
present framework, and every one of them has several names (at least), some
of which are just word-of-mouth and not in the least official, but which
have to be points of access.  In a place like this, where employees are
coming and going with more frequency every year, we are more truly the
institutional memory the longer time goes on, and are expected to know
everything about everything, since people can no longer go to someone down
the hall and get particulars for anything more than a couple years old (if
that).  It seems we get further and further from the possibility of running
a perfect 'textbook' archives the way we were taught.

By the way, I too have a library degree - as well as an MA in history, from
the Case Western Reserve archival administration program (may it rest in
peace!).  What I learned in school is the basis of my work, but it has had
to be modified in all sorts of ways to fit the real world.

Fred Lautzenheiser
Cleveland Clinic Foundation

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A posting from the Archives & Archivists LISTSERV List!

To subscribe or unsubscribe, send e-mail to listserv@listserv.muohio.edu
      In body of message:  SUB ARCHIVES firstname lastname
                    *or*:  UNSUB ARCHIVES
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Or to do *anything* (and enjoy doing it!), use the web interface at
     http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/archives.html

Problems?  Send e-mail to Robert F Schmidt <rschmidt@lib.muohio.edu>