In January our colleagues in Technical Services and Cataloging added 888 items to Special Collections holdings.  We added about a dozen titles to the ACU Authors Collection, another dozen hymnals to the Taylor Hymnal Collection.  The major focus was on working through a backlog of monographs and tracts for the REST Collection.  Most of the monographs were much-needed second copies while nearly all of this month’s tracts are totally new to us.

Photograph of two young women sitting on the roof of a building in chairs reading and studying. Handwritten note in the bottom margin reads, “Very studious.” This was likely taken on the old campus of Abilene Christian College in downtown Abilene.  Ca. 1910-1920s. From Jesse P. Sewell Photograph Collection. https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth597580/

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.

888 new items…cataloged, shelved, and ready for research: