I have just posted a reply to Charlotte on the CALM list, reasoning that people on this list who don't use CALM might not want to sit through a long slab of nitty-gritty on a particular application - but if anyone who doesn't get the CALM list is interested in the detail, contact me offlist and I'll send a copy of my answer.
Chris Hilton
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Dr. Christopher Hilton
Senior Archivist, Department of Archives and Manuscripts
Wellcome Library for the History & Understanding of Medicine
The Wellcome Trust
210 Euston Road
LONDON NW1 2BE
Tel.: (+44) 020 7611 8481
The Wellcome Trust is a registered charity, no. 210183.
Its sole Trustee is The Wellcome Trust Limited, a company
registered in England, no. 2711000, whose registered office
is 215 Euston Road, London NW1 2BE.
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Dear all,
We are currently looking at how to catalogue large collections from scratch on
CALM. Obviously the main attraction of using CALM is the hierarchical tree,
which shows all the different levels of description. However, in pilot
projects run here, the trees for large collections tend to get rather
complicated, with very long RefNos, which might be complex for readers (and
staff!) to grasp.
Is anyone out there willing to share their overall experiences of cataloguing
using CALM, perhaps using the following questions as a starting place?
1. Do people prefer to list items at file/series/item level first (giving
temporary reference numbers), sort into a coherent tree later and number up
last?
2. Or do people prefer to map out an anticipated tree first, list along the
way by fitting into and expanding the tree as necessary, and then to number up
at the end?
3. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to reduce the number of levels
used? Does anyone use a running sequence of numbers to reduce the number of
levels? If so, how do you insert additional items into this sequence at a
later date without doing lots of re-numbering?
4. What are people's experiences of using alpha-numeric systems to make
multiple levels easier to grasp? If you could choose the reference system you
use, would you opt to continue using an alpha-numeric system if this is what
you have inherited?
5. Does anyone use AltRefNo successfully to create an artificial retrieval
number, and to reduce confusion created by a very long CALM RefNo? If so, how
is this reflected in the catalogue which the reader uses, without losing the
importance of the AltRefNo in navigating around the tree?
6. Perhaps people might have had to adapt CALM to a inhouse listing style with
its own problems, who might be willing to share experiences of how they would
set up a cataloguing system from scratch without any such restrictions?
We don't have an existing listing style to go on here (as you can all probably
tell), so any responses in creating such a style from scratch would be much
appreciated.
Best wishes,
Charlotte
Charlotte Berry
Archivist
Special Collections
Old Library
University of Exeter
Prince of Wales Road
EXETER EX4 4SB
tel: 01392 262096 or direct 01392 263879
fax: 01392 263871
email: [log in to unmask]
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