In April our colleagues in Technical Services and Cataloging added 182 items to Special Collections holdings.  About 130 items fed into the main print collection (which we call REST), plus some hymnals for the Taylor Collection and a few items in ACU Authors and ACU Archive.  Yet another batch of rare Bibles (about 50) came into our general rare books collection.  Most of the additions to REST are tracts and pamphlets, though we added several monographs, and many A/V items this month, too.  Some of the additions are newly published, others are new-to-us, and still others represent a second copy or a new-to-us edition or printing.  The tract project continues with most of new entries for REST coming in the form of newly-processed tracts, booklets and pamphlets.  We will have a fine set of tracts, all cataloged, when this project is complete.  I hope it might be complete, that is…backlog eliminated….by the end of the school year, but it will continue into the summer and all.  No worries, in a very real way the work is never complete.  The backlog will probably be mostly eliminated, but a growing collection means there is always work to do (and we much prefer work done well to work done quickly).   So, the project continues.  We are already anticipating resuming work on unbound, loose periodical issues as a summer project.

Callie Faye Milliken (Special Collections Librarian) and Dr. John Stevens (President) at the beginning of the transfer of books from the ‘old’ library in Chambers Hall to the ‘new’ Brown Library. Dr. Stevens, holding a rare copy of Biblia Sacra, led a procession of students and faculty carrying volumes into the new facility. From https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth597528/?q=books

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.

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