Hello All (apologies for cross posting),
My institution recently acquired a large collection of microfilmed newspapers and I am trying to decide how to catalog them. My background is in museum collections management and I am less versed in managing an archive (I know just enough to be dangerous), so I am looking for advice on how to go about this. My first thought was to process the gift as a standard manuscript collection but this poses the following access issues:
- There are some titles in the gift that we have additional editions of in past gifts. We'd like to keep the publications together for ease of research. Would you recommend making a manuscript collection that contains multiple accession numbers or cataloging the individual films as objects and not the whole collection as an archive?
- There are some films we want to keep out in our research library for users to browse while keeping the majority stored in archives. (Specifically we plan to store the films that are also available digitally and encourage users to access the digital copies instead). Again, we feel like it is better to keep each publication all together even if some of the editions are online and some are not. I'm thinking there we do separated material sheets for the archive and maybe just note in the finding aid which films are in the library and which are stored? Thoughts?
For additional context/specific details, we now have a total of 1120 rolls of film spanning 49 publications and 6 accessions. Half of this number (552 rolls) comes from the new gift alone. There are at least 5 titles that have editions in more than one accession. Fortunately(?), the past gifts were never really cataloged beyond recording the accession so we can pretty much start from scratch on those as well.
Any advice on either best practices or what you've found works would be appreciated. Please let me know if more details about the situation is needed. Thank you!
Sincerely,
Michelle
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Michelle Nash
Curator of Collections
Elkhart County Historical Museum
Bristol IN
Curator of Collections
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