As of June 30, 2009, Special Collections completed cataloging of all the manuscript collections in the Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, which was previously only cataloged in the paper card catalog located at Hill Memorial Library. As a result, Special Collections’ manuscript holdings are now more accessible not only in our local catalog, iLink, but also through the union database WorldCat, which scholars around the world may access. Links to online finding aids are included in the records.

The Library stopped adding cards to the card catalog in the early 1990s, when collections began to be entered into the online catalog instead  . Manuscripts processing staff chipped away at the task of adding the information from the paper file to the OPAC, but no programmatic effort to recon the old card catalog was made until June of 2006, when Special Collections Cataloger Hans Rasmussen was hired. Rasmussen focused his efforts on the project; Cataloger Joseph Nicholson and Luana Henderson, Library Associate in Manuscripts Processing, also contributed. Together they added approximately 1,839 records, bringing the total number of historical manuscript collections described in the online catalog to 4,414, which represents all of Special Collections’ processed manuscript holdings.

Click here to access the catalog.

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Posted Thursday, July 2nd, 2009 at 12:08 pm Leave a response