In May our colleagues in Technical Services and Cataloging added 230 items to the Center for Restoration Studies, University Archives, and Rare Books collections. Among them are books, periodical issues (both bound volumes and many boxes of unbound issues), and a few A/V items in various formats. Most of the additions this months to ‘unbound periodicals’ are publications by a single congregation, yet the bulletin was intended for wider distribution than the local congregation and contained teaching content rather than strictly news information. Like last month, nearly all items added in May are not only new to us, the work performed on them reflects original cataloging, which is a tremendous contribution to knowledge about information resources from and about the Stone-Campbell Movement.
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.
230 new items…cataloged, shelved, and ready for research: Continue reading