It can:Many archives have their own cataloguing guidelines which give information about that archive’s approach and their work leading up to this point. The first image illustrates how a collection looks once it has been catalogued using the Manage Your Collections Excel template. Description: This six-week online course is a basic primer for library cataloging concepts and practices. Catalogers Learning Workshop (CLW) provides information professionals with access to training resources in issues related to the organization and classification of bibliographic information. Please feel free to email us if you think a blog should be added to or removed from this list. The standard for bibliographic materials in English-speaking countries is Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules. The National Archives is the UK government's official archive. Guidelines may give procedural guidance as well as information about which archival standards are used and how to apply them.The Archives and Records Association provides a helpful Depending on the collections you manage, it may not be appropriate or viable for you to invest in a cataloguing system. You can use the comments section below, or reach us on social media. Encoded Archival Description (EAD) is an XML standard for encoding archival finding aids and can be used as an alternative means of publishing archival catalogues.The Archives Hub have produced a useful, bite size list of tips for cataloguing.As archive collections are hierarchical, one challenge in using Excel to catalogue collections can be that the collection looks ‘flat’ in the spreadsheet, lacking the tree view that is more illustrative of what an archive collection looks like when viewed online.To demonstrate this, below are three images.
Catalogues go from the very broad to the narrow, with ‘fonds’ being the broadest and ‘item’ being the narrowest.The fonds level is the highest level of description in an archive catalogue where you describe the person or institution that created the records.
This level of the catalogue relates to a particular activity or type of record, for example ‘correspondence’ or ‘research work’. Cataloguing is an important aspect of documenting collections. Contact us with your feedback. Library - Library - Cataloging: However careful and scholarly the methods used in building a collection, without expert guidance to its access and use, the collection remains difficult to approach. Planet Cataloging is an automatically-generated aggregation of blogs related to cataloging and metadata designed and maintained by Jennifer W. Baxmeyer and Kevin S. Clarke. You can see the more hierarchical view of the fonds and series levels (the second image) and the series and file levels (third image).Image one: An archive collection can lack the visual hierarchical view in Excel.Image two: The fonds and series level in Discovery.Image three: The series and files levels in Discovery.Subscribe now for regular news, updates and priority booking for events. The fonds allows the researcher to get an overview of the entire collection.The next level is the series.
Cataloging and classification, well-tried disciplines often combined under the general heading of “indexing,” provide the needed guidance.
Catalog definition is - list, register. Subject Cataloging (or Subject Cataloguing) involves the subject analysis of the resource and providing corresponding subject headings from a controlled vocabulary or subject heading list, such as Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), Medical Subject Headings (MESH) and assignment of classification numbers using schemes such as Library of Congress Classification (LCC) or Dewey …
The equivalent Canadian standard is Rules for Archival Description. These blog posts detail the nature of this intellectual work, which includes understanding what you have and how it fits together.These resources below give an overview of ISAD(G) and how you can use the standard to construct an archival catalogue.Different archives can have slightly different cataloguing needs due to differing record types:The Group for Literary Archives and Manuscripts (GLAM) have developed Many people who are not professional archivists create archive catalogues, particularly within community archives.
Descriptions will be more detailed the further down an archive catalogue you go.These blog posts detail the archival catalogue hierarchy with some real world examples, including an example of the More Product, Less Processing (Before you input any catalogue data into a spreadsheet or database, a lot of intellectual work is often undertaken to understand a collection. For alternative options, you can read our guidance The resources listed here give a useful introduction archival cataloguing, why we do it and the benefits it can have in widening access to collections.Archive catalogues have a hierarchical structure, which simply means that things are arranged in levels. The second and third images show what the collection looks like in Discovery once it has been uploaded using Manage Your Collections. Subject cataloging is the phase of the cataloging process which is concerned with determining and describing the intellectual or artistic content and the genre/form characteristics of a resource, and translating that understanding into subject headings and classification notations.Janis L. Young and Daniel N. Joudrey¹ describe Subject Cataloging as below:1. The Community Archives and Heritage Group have developed The number of volunteers working in the archive sector is significant and growing. Cataloguing is a vital step in opening up access to a collection. Our main duties are to preserve Government records and to set standards in information management and re-use. The United States data content standard for cataloging archival collections is Archives, Personal Papers, and Manuscripts.