Deborah's note raises an important issue and one which we have been looking
at in relation to Calm 2000 over the past year here at Shropshire Records
and Research. We have been using Calm 2000 to catalogue a variety of
collections, including the input of both new and existing catalogues. We
have not yet tackled the County Council records but have crated database
catalogues for the records of both private and official bodies. Here are
some thoughts from David Jones, supervisor of the current cataloguing
project:
1. The issue of setting the fonds level is not created by CALM: it exists
both as a philosophical problem and as a practical matter of storing and
documenting real archives; more than one solution can be made to work in
CALM.
2. "Oranges are not the only fruit": CALM can retrieve information in
ways other than by displaying the tree structure. E.g. if the fondstitles
contain consistent keywords, a 'hitlist' of all relevant fonds could be
retrieved by searching for 'County Primary School' in Title with the Level
of Description set to 'Collection'. Similarly, Management Group and
Sub-Group titles can be used for wide-sweeping searches irrespective of
reference codes.
3. My own simplistic perception is that the public cope with lots of
little fonds, each with perhaps three levels of description, better than
with a single mammoth fonds having five or six levels of hierarchy.
Arguably, if a body such as a school or a Social Services Area Office had
independence enough to create, accumulate and manage a set of records -
it's a fonds, although maybe only a short-lived one.
4. True enough, CALM does require alphanumeric codes in the RefNo field,
with forward slashes as change of level indicators, to operate the tree
structure. These can be applied to the documents as classified references
(Shropshire has done this with many official collections and also with
parish records) but if preferred they can be all but hidden from the user.
The Alt[ernative]Ref field can be used for the reference actually applied
to the document and this may contain any text characters; just numerics; an
accession number/item number; or the reference of a surrogate e.g. a
microfilm that you want the user to consult. A nominal, classified RefNo
must be created and rumbles away in the background controlling the tree
display, but it is the AltRef (in Shropshire we label it "Finding No" which
appears big and bold on the search screen and also prints out in the
hard-copy catalogues.
David Jones.
Hope this is useful.
Samantha Mager
Shropshire Records and Research
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