Wednesday, April 30, 2014

New Finding Aids (special edition)

An announcement from our Collections Manager
Matt Francis

 Welcome to a very special edition of the "New/Updated Finding Aids" emails.  While we are continuing to crank out new finding aids, I want to take a moment to highlight six recent finding aids that all involve "something new" for our Special Collections Library.
Finding Aid for a Hybrid Collection (analog and born-digital):

As everyone is already aware we are beginning to receive more and more born-digital records along with traditional analog materials.  With this in mind we have recently published a finding aid that arranges and describes analog materials along with web-captured and fixed media born-digital records.  All of the materials are intellectually integrated together, so for example there is a publication series that contains digital and analog materials, as opposed to creating separate analog and born-digital series which would both contain publications.  I am hoping that this finding aid will serve as a useful example for future hybrid collection work. 

PSUA 8428 Pennsylvania College of Technology records - Located in Williamsport, Pennsylvania College of Technology (Penn College) is a special mission affiliate of The Pennsylvania State University, providing applied technology education. Penn College became an affiliate of the university in 1989, after establishing a national reputation for education supporting workforce development, first as a technical institute and later as a community college.

Directly linking from inventory description to digital surrogates:

Somewhat related to the above finding aid, we have republished the Thomas Benson papers finding aid so that it not only contains description for 30 linear feet of new materials, but also provides direct links to digitized materials from the inventory.  These links should increase use of materials (via remote users), help preserve the original items, and save on staff retrieval time.  I am hoping that as we increase our project digitization work that we will begin producing more finding aids such as this.

PSUA 6352 Thomas Benson papersThis collection contains materials from former Pennsylvania State University professor Thomas Benson, and document his academic work on political rhetoric, film criticism, rhetorical theory, freedom of speech, nonverbal communication, and the rhetoric of contemporary conflict. Of interest, the collection includes a large set of protest posters from the late 1960s and 1970s.

PSU Fayette - Coal & Coke Heritage Center Finding Aids now available:

Thanks to Julie's hard work down at Fayette, we now have three EAD finding aids published for three collections at the Coal & Coke Heritage Center.  The finding aids are discoverable through our finding aid portal (both the google search bar and the a-z> list), and contain data informing users that the collections are housed at Fayette.  To my knowledge this is the first time that we have integrated EAD finding aids from one of our other geographic locations into our web infrastructure, and we all owe Julie a big thank you for her processing work on these collections!

CCHC 1 USX Corporation records The USX Corporation records were given to the Coal and Coke Heritage Center upon the closure of a local USX office. Most of the materials include the name of the Corporation's partner: H.C. Frick Company. And, some items may include the Corporation's previous and current name: U.S. Steel. The collection spans the company's activities from 1840-1983.

CCHC 4 John A. Enman papersThe collection consists of three series, Collectibles; Research materials; and Writing and Publications. As the collection consists of both materials generated by Dr. Enman and resources used to research his work, it contains items dated from 1884 through 2013.

CCHC 5 Reid Moser photographsThe collection is comprised of 154 photographs taken between 1942 and 1945. They document construction and structural changes at Dearth Mine, Juniata, Leisenring #1, Leisenring #2, Leisenring #3, Robena, Shoaf, and Trotter Water Company Plant A.

No comments:

Post a Comment