On the Shelf: 2023 Year in Review

Each month I check in here to provide updates about the growth and development of our print collections.  We steward several print collections of books, periodicals (both bound and loose issues), tracts, and pamphlets.  We also catalog audio, video, and digital materials in several formats which were/are published or otherwise widely distributed; nearly all of them are either produced by the University or are Stone-Campbell-related.  These are discoverable through the online library catalog.  As an aside, we have tens of thousands of A/V items (reels and cassettes, mostly) in our archival collections.  These items are usually not published or mass-produced, such as sermons delivered at congregations.  These are discoverable, in varying degrees, through the finding aids we create for each collection.

Library, Abilene Christian College, 1917. The library was in the Administration Building on the old downtown campus. The Prickly Pear Yearbook for 1917 is available at: https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth39970/m1/44/

In nearly every case, when we add items to print collections, the new catalog records are also pushed over to Worldcat so they are globally discoverable.  Many of the Stone-Campbell items we preserve have never been cataloged before, so each month in my blog posts I call attention to how original cataloging is a tremendous contribution to knowledge about information resources from and about the Stone-Campbell Movement.  Additionally, I am always looking out for variant editions and printings of Stone-Campbell items so our collection represents the full breadth of our publishing activities.  These variations are also noted in the catalog records.

As we begin 2024, with great thanks to our colleagues and student workers in Technical Services, we can reflect on the addition of 2055 items* to our print collections. Thank you to Shan Martinez and Susannah Barrington who created hundreds of original records, did–or supervised students in doing–copy cataloging for multiple hundreds of records and supervised several student employees to make sure the cataloging tasks were completed accurately and in a timely way.  Shan’s work in 2023 is especially significant in that she–again– cataloged box upon box of unbound periodicals this past year, and led a team of student workers to get everything processed, labelled, verified, and ready for our shelves.

*Some of these ‘items’ in my monthly lists are in reality only the titles of items which in the case of loose periodical issues represent many, many (many) more ‘items’ than might be readily apparent.  Some ‘items’ are titles of periodicals for which there could be one or one-thousand issues, multi-part video sets or multi-volume sets of books, but to keep the already-long monthly lists a bit more manageable, I edit out the duplicative titles. However, each physical item (except for single issues of periodicals) gets a barcode and call number, so there is considerably more work going on than meets the eye, even with such a large quantity of items as is listed.  For example, unbound periodical issues present a storage and cataloging challenge.  We store them in boxes (often multiple titles in a single box when we only have a few issues of a title), number the boxes, and when the box contents are cataloged, these box numbers function like a call number.  The boxes vary in size from custom archival boxes (about 10 x 13 x 4 in thick) to standard-sized bankers boxes with a few larger boxes here and there.  The cataloging work involves collation, arrangement, storage, and description, so there is quite a bit more work to cataloging these than you might realize.  Mac and student workers accomplished some of this, but Shan’s work at the point of cataloging is an added layer of verification of arrangement and description.  In 2022 we began at box 824 and now are filling box 831 for the cataloged titles.  This has been a years-long project that looks like we will complete in 2023…at least we will probably complete the backlog of uncataloged items.  By the way. some bulletins (single issues especially) are not cataloged but are filed in the Congregational Vertical File.  Of course, we hope to acquire more and are perfectly content knowing the work will never truly be ‘finished.’

Here are the breakdowns of the number of items added by month in 2023.  If you’d like to see the titles and authors, browse these lists.

January: 73

February: 198

March: 377

April: 154

May: 238

June: 203

July: 235

August: 83

September: 153

October: 191

November: 90

December: 60

In order to prepare new items for our colleagues in Technical Services, I determine whether the item is within our collecting scope.  If not it goes to our colleagues for evaluation for possible addition to the circulating collection.  But if it is in scope, a student worker (I do this often, too) verifies whether we have the item already cataloged.  If not, we add it to the workflow to be cataloged.  If we already have a copy I compare its condition against the one on the shelf.  I also look for variant editions, printings, bindings, or other features (such as an author’s signature or gift inscription) that merit inclusion in a special note.   If the new book is in better condition that the shelved copy, I replace the worn copy.  If it is in comparable condition, it might go in the queue for scanning or digitization or I offer it for the circulating collection, or trade to another library.  We then take the items upstairs to Technical Services along with instructions for catalogers: where it should be cataloged (into the CRS collection or another sub-collection within rare books), who the donor is, and whether cataloging should make special note of any edition or printing or provenance.  When the catalogers finish, our student workers lead the way in making sure items are shelved, and I assist when needed.

Not only do these new (and new-to-us) titles represent the fine cataloging work of our colleagues and their staff, they represent dozens of donors who wanted to see the collection grow in scope, utility, breadth, and depth.  They believe in the power of library collections and have chipped in to make this collection a much better one.  We do not yet know how students and researchers will utilize these materials, but we look forward to the contribution they will make to our history.  And we look forward to what 2024 will bring to the shelves.

On the Shelf: New items added to Center for Restoration Studies collections, November 2023

In November our colleagues in Technical Services and Cataloging added 90 items to Special Collections holdings.  Continuing the work from summer, we added more language editions of Max Lucado’s books.  The Lucado team just sent us several more boxes of these editions, so there will be lots more coming into the collection soon.  (There are many, many of these titles that are also going into the circulating collection, giving us as an authoritative collection of Max’s books as can be found anywhere, in both Special Collections and in the circulating collections.)  Between tracts, bound periodicals, and monographs, the REST collection grew by about 70 items.  We added fourteen hymnals to the Taylor hymnal collection and the remainder went into the ACU Authors collection.

Meanwhile and in other news, to accommodate this growth our new students workers Emma and Hayley are working with Mac to shift some parts of the print collection.  Amanda has been processing manuscripts collections (look for announcements soon).  Erica has been fielding a lot of external research requests in addition to working with courses and professors to meet their reference needs.  Amanda and Erica have also been doing post-processing on audio files from Landon Saunders, generating transcriptions, and uploading them to DigitalCommons.  Mac’s work with HIST 353, Historical Methods, is almost complete for the semester.  We made excellent progress on processing the records of the Women for ACU.  It also seems like we have had more drop-in visitors and on-site researchers this summer and fall than we have had in recent memory.  It has been a full semester.

Library, Abilene Christian College, 1917. The library was in the Administration Building on the old downtown campus. The Prickly Pear Yearbook for 1917 is available at: https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth39970/m1/44/

Our goal is to build a comprehensive research-level collection of print materials by, for, and about the Stone-Campbell Restoration Movement.  But beyond assembly and preservation, a collection should be discoverable by those who need the information.  Collecting and preserving is only part of our task; those objects must be described and made available.  Thanks to the close and careful work of our colleagues upstairs, who describe our holdings, these materials are now discoverable. By discoverable I mean a patron can utilize our online catalog (such as by searching by author, or title, or subject) to find these materials.

90 new items…cataloged, shelved, and ready for research:  Continue reading

This Just In: Roy Osborne papers and tapes

A few days ago John Harp rolled in to Abilene with a load of sermon tapes (some on reels, most on cassette), files and books from Roy Osborne, longtime minister at Sunset Ridge Church of Christ in San Antonio, Texas.  Pictured below are John and Mac after we unloaded and finished a tour of Special Collections.

 

In 1964 J. D. Thomas and Biblical Research Press published a volume of Roy’s sermons in the ‘Great Preachers of Today’ series.  They reissued it under a new title in 1983.   The Osborne Papers contain tapes from a fairly wide span of Roy’s preaching.  The collection should prove exceedingly useful to historians and rhetoricians because of the time span covered by the reels and tapes, as well as providing a complementary audio version of the kind of preaching committed to print in Roy’s book.  As samples of the kind of preaching held forth as exemplary by J. D. Thomas, these sermons will provide a fine window into the changing shape of homiletics and theology in post-war and late twentieth-century Churches of Christ.

They are currently in the queue for processing.  We will publicize the finding aid when it is complete.