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Dear All I for one would rather like to read about the nitty gritty of using applications. This does help spread information about how these packages are being used and with what success. No doubt others will have opinions on this one. Regards Elizabeth Oxborrow-Cowan ----- Original Message ----- From: "Hilton ,Dr Christopher" <[log in to unmask]> To: <[log in to unmask]> Sent: Wednesday, June 08, 2005 11:38 AM Subject: Re: cataloguing large collections using CALM 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 [log in to unmask] 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. ======================================================================= 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]