The Great Cory Library Fieldtrip! Blog 21, Collections and items

Tuesday 5 Aug: Working in the Cory Library is in most respects a joy, with its outstanding collections and wonderful staff. But there is also something unusual about its organisation in the sense of how its collections are curated. One instance – looking in the card catalogue regarding Mary Moffat and Elizabeth (Bessie) Price, or others such as John Brownlee, Charles Brownlee, Charles Lennox Stretch and John Ross, shows something fascinating and unusual. Rather than being classified per collection (papers of collection of said Ross), they are listed per writer and per item to someone (eg. individual letters etc to said Ross). What this means is that it is almost impossible to tell if you’ve looked at all relevant material – the Mary Moffat or the John Ross papers – without going through gymnastics, for apart from exceptionally there is no meta level of information that describes and delineates the collections. And reading the Lists of Accessions (bound annual volumes) repeats the pattern, certainly for those collections hailing from the 1940s up to fairly recently and may do so universally. The Gold Fields collection does, however, have a meta-level inventory – and scanning through it shows the pattern repeated, with its contents listed per item. RossblogAnd while the card catalogue is a thing of use as well as beauty, it holds distinct, item by tiny item, terrors, as the photograph may convey. How then to be thorough? And even more puzzling, how then to get an overview of the shape or structure of a set or collection? More on this matter to come later.

 

Last updated: 5 Aug 2014


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