Management of Manuscripts

and Personal Papers (IMR659)

INTELLECTUAL CONTROL OF
MANUSCRIPTS
 Learning outcome
• At the end of this chapter, students should
be able to :-
– Understand the intellectual control of
manuscripts and finding aids.
 Finding Aids
• Having settled upon a system of
arrangement, the curator now must
describe the collection on one or more of
the commonly used types of finding aids-
calendar, name index, register, inventory
or card catalog.
• The calendar is little used by modern manuscript
curators because the labor involved has priced it out of
the market.

• Occasionally, they are prepared for small, rich

collections especially literary and the arterial collections
which may contain a high preponderance of letters of
well known persons.
• As it name implies, the calendar is a list of
descriptions of every document in a
collection arranged in chronological or
calendar order. Calendars were prepared
in the past in lieu of editing and printing
documents, but today microfilm editions
have largely superseded them.
 Example of calender
James Burrill Angell Papers:
Sept 3, 1869 E.C Walker, Detroit to James B.
Angell, Vermont Univeristy.
Invites Angell to accept the presidency of the University
of Michigan; explains the presidency was first offered to
J.H Seelye of Amherst who suggested Angell; salary
mentioned.
 
A.L.S
 The general catalog
• Most manuscript libraries will find the
general catalog their most efficient finding
aids
• After a collection is sorted, arranged and
boxed, it should be read by a member of
the staff with adequate training in the
subject fields in which the library
collections. .
 Examples of rough notes
Giddings, Orrin N, 1814-
Several letters, 1854, 1855, 1856, 1857,
mostly land purchases
• If rough notes are made on 3 x 5inch slips, those to
a single individual, place or subject can be more
easily put together later on a single added entry
card.
• Noting the date of a letter (or the years when a large
body of correspondence from a single individual or
on a single subject appears) makes it easier for the
researcher to judge it will be useful to him and also
easier for the staff member to locate.
 Examples of catalog card
• Refer notes
 Items search
• Format
• Title
• Creator
• Subject
• Keywords
• Types
• Alphabetically
• In general, each finding aid includes:
– Background information on the creator or
theme of the collection
– A description of the collections overall content
and organization
– A breakdown of the collection's contents
 Manuscript Collection Finding Aids
• Standard machine-readable format for
manuscript collection finding aids
• Widely used in the United States, England,
Canada, and Australia.
• To locate manuscript materials in repositories
users may search the RLIN (Research Library
Information Network) database of over 500,000
records.
• Maintained by the Library of Congress.
 OCLC
• Four search forms for the OCLC (Online Computer
Library Center)
Manuscript materials
• Simple Search Form (word list) -- titles, notes, and
subject fields
• Simple Search Form (word list) -- all names fields
• Simple Search Form (left-anchored phrase) -- all names
fields
• Advanced Search Form
• OCLC and its member libraries
cooperatively produce and maintain
WorldCat - the OCLC Online Union
Catalog, the largest Online Public
Access Catalog (OPAC) in the world
• This database contains records in Machine
Readable Cataloging (MARC) format
contributed by library catalogers worldwide
who use OCLC as a cataloging tool and it is
known as WorldCat.
• text articles.
• OCLC is a bibliographic utility that
encourages participation in a local
network. This utility benefits the users by
providing access include graphical user
interface, capability to e-mail search
results and full
 National Union Catalog of
Manuscript Collections (NUCMC)
• NUCMC, or the National Union Catalog of Manuscript
Collections, is a free-of-charge cooperative cataloging
program operated by the Library of Congress.
• The Library of Congress provides a gateway for
searching OCLC WorldCat (Manuscript materials) --
nearly 1.5 million catalog records describing archival and
manuscript collections and individual manuscripts in
public, college and university, and special libraries
located throughout North America and around the world.
THE END