We have some wonderful treasures in the BDC to share with the community. Our goal has always been to get up records describing all our holdings into the catalog and/or online for potential customers to discover.
Our quandary is to try to make access (physical, archival photocopy, or digital) as customer friendly as possible
yet stay within budget and time constraints
while simultaneously protecting the materials for the future.
No small order, is it? The standard way of letting library customers know what is available is to add the item or group of records into the library's catalog. Our problem is getting what we own in the BDC into the SC LENDS catalog according to national and international standards for special collections material. One of the tasks we worked diligently on during the Research Room shutdown (and continue to work on)is getting better control of our map collection. Because of the Technical Services department's hard work, we are in a much better position this afternoon than we've ever been.
We had several very basic inventories available inside the Research Room for our map, plat, blueprint, 19th century periodical illustration images, and other graphic materials.
(And, we'll still have some because we couldn't manage to get every uncataloged item done in the time allotted). You couldn't get to those inventories online from your home or office. You'd have to come and ask to see those inventory lists -- and I'd have to remember where I last put the inventory list for that format in what was at best the barely managed chaos of the downstairs overcrowded, every surface covered, BDC room. It was ocassionally a rather dicey proposition, and most definitely not an optimal situation.
The crucial question became:
What can we do to improve access to our holdings within our constraints? The answer came from balancing customer requests for specific types of materials against what staff could reasonably get done.
I like to think that the BDC makes the biggest splashes from the smallest impacts. In the BDC we get requests most often about our map and photographic holdings. The number of maps we hold in trust are far more manageable (less than 1000
-- even counting the heretofore unknown by me box of mid-1980s flood maps that Kathy Mitchell discovered in the 2nd floor library storage area in the back of the building on 21 September) than the still yet to be totally counted number of photographs we hold.
(The Lucille Hasell Culp collection is massive -- even after all the partial processing we've done through the SC SHRAB grant. As soon as we get settled upstairs, we'll get to the behind-the-scenes prepartion work for the "300 for the 300th" digital Lucille Hasell Culp collection project. More about that in the future). Therefore, Jan O'Rourke, my supervisor and the Library's Assistant Director, Wlodek Zaryczny, Library Director, and Rosa Cummings, Technical Services Coordinator and I decided to make cataloging the maps first priority during the shutdown.
Warning: From this point, I get pretty deep into library behind-the-scenes "stuff" but in case you would like to know more about what goes into preparing a cataloging record, read on. If not, then just drop down to the final paragrah. Here's an example of what we did to catalog the map we own in photocopy form of an original map held by National Archives. (The image of the National Archives map illustrates this entry).
A couple of years ago, Robert Cuthbert, co-editor of
Northern Money, Southern Land, gave us an archival photocopy of the "Map of Rebel Lines of the Pocotaligo, Combahee, and Ashepoo....," a map from Record Group 77: Records of the Office of the Chief of Engineers, 1789 - 1999 at the United States National Archives.
Cuthbert's donation has been on our inside-the-BDC Map inventory list since it arrived. This map appears in the inventory list as:
OV 642 Map of Rebel Lines of the Pocotaligo, Combahee, Ashepoo 1863 N'tl Archives I-53-1 map case. Because I made the inventory, I can interpret what the various segments of information means and where to find the item. A basic map inventory works at a rudimentary level, but it's certainly not customer friendly or very descriptive. If you had done a search for "Civil War maps" or even if you did a keyword search for "Pocotaligo" in the SC LENDS catalog in July, you couldn't find it.
If you had contacted me, I could have told you this map was here. But odds are you would not know to ask me about this particular map and
I would not know to offer you the information unless you asked me about the Civil War maps of this area, or even more specifically, unless you asked about maps relating to the Battle of Pocotaligo.
For the most part, I do tend to have encyclopedic recall of what's in the BDC but let's face it: I could drop dead any minute or have a stroke, or get a job offer elsewhere that is simply too good to refuse. Filing and organizing systems only in my head are not optimal. Plus, the BDC has grown tremendously over the past decade. My memory of what we hold in trust and/or just an inventory of some of the materials we hold in trust just isn't good enough. We outgrew that closet years ago. Bottom line: All materials must get cataloged because 1) BDC materials are county assets; 2) customers need to know what we have for them to come see; 3) and we must maintain an accurate record of what we hold in trust in case of catastrophe and subsequent insurance claims.
During the shutdown with Brenda Beasley-Forrest and Valerie Lesesne of the Technical Services department have worked very hard adding records of the BDC map holdings for the SC LENDS database.
Unfortunately, we don't have them all in yet, but we have gone from less than 10 maps with catalog records to almost 300!To facilitate the creation of records for the maps we have in the BDC, I updated the bare bones map inventory to include "Reference Hints" for the catalogers. The supplemented version of the Map Inventory for the catalogers looked like this:
OV 642 Map of Rebel Lines of the Pocotaligo, Combahee, Ashepoo; South Carolina : to illustrate the operations of the Army, under command of Maj Gen W.T. Sherman, com[manding] Mill. Div. Of the Miss. From captured Rebel maps, and from surveys made under direction of Col. O.M. Poe, Capt. Engrs. Mill. Div. of the Miss. during the Savannah-Goldsboro Campaign. : 1865 R (for reproduction) 1865 (date of publication) N'tl Archives I-53-1; Civil War - Reconstruction; ARC Indentifier 305622; signed by E.M Poe Sept. 25th, 1866; you can find the ARC catalog at http://www.archives.gov/research/arc/. (Reference Hints). Brenda and Valerie took over at this point. They scoured the usual library cataloging utilities such as OCLC and the catalogs of some of the original sources of the maps we hold in reproduction for matching records.
(It's always quicker to "fix" a standing record rather than to make one from scratch. I don't want to bore you with the ins-and-outs of technical services and cataloging nor the differences between archival descriptions and library cataloging, but as the post of 13 August pointed out these are different processes. Just suffice it to say that these tasks require quiet, attention to detail, and considerable time to put together.) They found a record for this item in the National Archives
ARC (short for "Archival Description Catalog") and used it to create a record for the SC LENDS catalog. The new SC LENDS catalog
record contains accurate information about this particular map.
Hurray! You search on the keywords "Pocotaligo," "Combahee," or the title, and you can see that the BDC has the map in its holdings.
If you want to see a digital version of the original "Map of the Rebel Lines of the Pocotaligo, Combahee & Ashepoo [Rivers], South Carolina, To illustrate the operations of the Army under command of Maj. Gen. W. T. Sherman, comdng. Mill. Div. of the Miss. From captured Rebel maps and from surveys made under direction of Brvt. Col. O. M. Poe, Capt. Engrs., Mill. Div. of the Miss., during the Savannah-Goldsboro Campaign. 1865, ca. 09/25/1866" go to the ARC. Plug in the ARC Identifier 305622 or Local Identifier 77-CWMF-I53(1) to get to the record and link to the digital images. Please note: the digital version is in two pieces; the photocopy that we were gifted corresponds to digital copy 1 as is the National Archives image that leads off this entry. I wish we could provide a direct link from the SC LENDS catalog to the digital image online, but alas, we cannot -- yet.
If you click on the MARC Record tab on the new record for this map in the SC LENDS catalog, here's what you'll see:
LDR 01146nem 2200241Ia 4500
001 ocn656605754
003 OCoLC
005 20100901191252.0
008 100818r19601866dcu a 0 eng d
040 . ‡aZJI ‡cZJI
035 . ‡a(OCoLC)656605754
049 . ‡aZJIA
092 . ‡aSC MAP #642
245 0 0. ‡aMap of Rebel Lines of the Pocotaligo, Combahee, Ashepoo; South Carolina : ‡bto illustrate the operations of the Army, under command of Maj Gen W. T. Sherman, com[manding] Mill. Div. Of the Miss. From captured Rebel maps, and from surveys made under direction of Col. O. M. Poe, Capt. Engrs. Mill. Div. of the Miss. during the Savannah-Goldsboro Campaign. : 1865.
250 . ‡aMap
255 . ‡aScale: 1 in. = 1 mi.
260 . ‡aWashington, D.C. : ‡bNational Archives, ‡c[196-?], 1866r.
300 . ‡a1 map : ‡bb&w photoreproduction, ‡c52 x 123 cm., on sheet 62 x 123 cm.
440 0. ‡aCopy from the National Archives ; ‡vI-53-I
500 . ‡aSigned by Poe, 1866.
520 . ‡aCompare with SC MAP #643.
600 1 0. ‡aPoe, O. M. ‡q(Orlando Metcalfe), ‡d1832-1895.
650 0. ‡aSherman's March to the Sea ‡zSouth Carolina ‡vMaps.
651 0. ‡aSouth Carolina ‡xHistory ‡yCivil War, 1861-1865 ‡vMaps.
651 0. ‡aBeaufort County (S.C.) ‡xHistory ‡yCivil War, 1861-1865 ‡vMaps.
(I know that this may look like goobledy gook to the non-librarians out there, but to us it's a piece of solid gold work!) You, our customer, can find out that the Beaufort County Library has this map (and about 274 more)for you to come see in the Beaufort District Collection.
Hurray for Customers! Hurray for Technical Services! Hurray for me! Finally my brain can rest a little bit at night -- not always fretting about what maps I may be forgetting about. Being a steward of historical and cultural materials can be quite a burden.
