The catalog records that a library user sees in the course of searching often belie a considerable underlying complexity. At AAS, maximizing access to our collections through the creation of accurate, clear and concise catalog records is a high priority. However, the true extent of the effort required to create and maintain these records may ...
Tag: cataloging mysteries
A bibliographic coincidence, or Does anyone know what these are?
PART I, by Doris O’Keefe, AAS Senior Cataloger Several weeks ago Brenna Bychowski, one of the Society’s former catalogers who is now at the Beinecke Library at Yale, posted a short video on Facebook and described a book she had recently cataloged: Two volumes of a James Fenimore Cooper novel (The spy: a tale of the neutral ...
It started with a passport and ended with a duel…
Early in the summer, AAS received a generous donation of graphic arts materials from one of the Society’s members, Jim Heald, via the Worcester Art Museum. Among these items nestled on the acquisitions table was a mid-nineteenth-century passport, which stood out for two reasons. Primarily, until that moment, it had not occurred to me that ...
The missing wrapper; or, The unknown dime novel. A tale of cataloging at AAS.
In a post last January about the difficulty of cataloging dime novels, I discussed how much valuable information is lost when a novel no longer has its wrapper (paper cover). One of the most important kinds of information lost is series information. Knowing that a novel was in a specific series is one of the ...