January-March 2017

The Rare Book Team said a fond but sad goodbye to Karen.  The quarter was dominating by planning for Karen’s departure and developing workflows to handle the many tasks Karen performed, with all the Team stepping up to handle the steady and robust stream on new acquisitions.  Work continued on various cataloging projects, included 98TW-9, French operettas, Theatre promptbooks, Santo Domingo, and new acquisitions.  Work also began on the transition to Alma from Aleph as we entered “pre-implementation”, with involvement in Alma working groups exploring the new Resource Management and Analytics/Reporting modules in particular. The music catalogers also attended MLA (Music Library Association) and brought back a lot of new information to share with their colleagues.

 The Manuscript Section accessioned a number of small but important collections and manuscripts including material by and about James Baldwin, Eleanora Duse, Allen Ginsberg, and Robert O’Hearn. Finding aids were published for nine collections including the Ripley and Thayer family papers, the Peter Whitmer papers, a Castañé photograph collection, and a collection of Santo Domingo underground comics. A number of unprocessed collections were given finding aids utilizing existing description and with minimal processing efforts: the Susanne Langer papers, the Anthony Bailey papers, the Carl Peirce papers, and the Leonard Bernstein collection of correspondence and ephemera. The Frederic Woodbridge Wilson collection was readied for the Harvard Depository. The Section began in earnest to use ArchivesSpace to author finding aids and all participated in a day long training on Describing Archives: A Content Standard. Processing will commence on the Gore Vidal papers next quarter. Also beginning next quarter is the backlog survey of unprocessed collections.

 The Acquisitions and End-Processing team continued to process purchases, and provide bibliographical and logistical support for the library’s collections. Of particular note, are final processing of materials in Houghton’s vast John Updike, and Johnny Green collections, as well as processing of materials from the Gore Vidal and Lucia Berlin personal libraries.  New procedures were implemented for processing of the Woodberry Poetry Room’s born-digital collections, and for augmenting analog recordings with cataloging for digital surrogates. The Books End-Processing Manual was updated for ease of use by current and future student assistants. The section inaugurated weekly stand-up meetings and a Kanban board for increased team knowledge of immediate, projected, and anticipated activities.

 Along with the digitization of the Colonial North America Project, digitization for an important part of the Margaret Fuller collection, part of the 19^th-century American Digitization Project, finished.  Conservation and digitization reviews for two collaborative CLIR projects, Carlyle and Theodore Roosevelt, took place.  A conservation and digitization review of the Escoto collection happened; there is interest with Latin American faculty and the Widener Latin American bibliographer to find money to digitize the collection.