Special Collections Visit

On August 4th, I visited the Special Collections & University Archives department. I got an extensive tour, seeing all the different types of material in the collection. The chance to look at these things was interesting on it's own. So many of them have interesting stories and are just looking at them is often fascinating.

I also talked to the librarian their about the different roles people have in the department, so that I now have a better idea of what sort of positions are in a special collections department. We also talked about how people discover what's available in special collections. Much of this work seems to be done by the special collections website and people finding the material via Google. Some items are listed in the catalog, but it's not as complete as one would hope, even in the books.

On the subject of cataloging, since that's the theme of my DFW, on interesting note was that sometimes items in special collections have unusual subject terms attached to them. For example, a codex with good examples of Russian iconography may have "Russian iconography" listed as a subject term - even though it's not about iconography. Indeed, the actual subject of the codex may be seen as of less importance if it's believed that someone would primarily be interested in it for the iconography.