Alison Scott wrote:

> I am the archivist in a team with two librarians and I have not been long in
> the post.  The division between the archival and library collections is
> mostly straightforward but at a recent meeting this issue was raised. How
> much marginalia did a book have to have before it became an archive? I felt
> it was more to do with context, whether the book had associated papers etc,
> but wondered whether there are any thoughts on this? 
 >

I think it's useful for you all (the archivist & the librarians) to stop and
ask yourselves why you need to answer this question. There are good and
bad reasons for it. Another way of thinking about the question is this:
depending on the answer, what will happen differently ? And of those
things, which of them really matter ?

Amongst the things I can think of are this:

* The book will get shelved in a different place
* The book will be catalogued using a different descriptive standard
* The book will be findable using a different system (archive vs
     library catalogue, for instance)
* The book will be subject to different conservation standards
* The book will be available to a different set of users, or under
    different conditions
* A future decision on retention or disposal will be taken differently
* Different staff members will be involved in the book's accessioning
* Different workflows or processed will be employed to deal with the book

I'm sure there are more potential differences; these are just examples.

In many contexts, some of those differences above just don't matter.
To tell which of them do you also need to think about why your institution
wants to have the book and what the needs and habits of your users are.

Picking one (extreme) example may help here. Let's say you have a very
common book - a bible, or an Oxford English Dictionary. It's in relatively
poor condition, but it contains extensive annotations by an interesting
person. Your institution's interest in keeping it is clearly not for
the value of the work (in FRBR terms) because normally you would discard
a worn, common book and replace it. Your interest is because of the value
of this particular instance of it. So things like conservation standards
and retention policy matter; the other things not so much. If you shelve
it with dictionaries then that's almost certain to be unhelpful; you
want to place it near other things that are similar to it in some more
useful way.

But if you have many rare and unusual books, and some of them also have
marginalia, then the decisions are different. You're going to keep them
anyway and the marginalia don't set one item apart from others in the
collection.

I expect you know all that. What really matters, to my mind, is what
your institution will do with the material, now and in the future,
and whether potential users looking for the material will find it
no matter what the starting point of their search. Those looking for
the work should be able to find it; those looking for material connected
with the author of the marginalia should also be able to find it, even
without knowing that they were going to find a book.

What you don't want is a situation like this (which comes from a real
example.) Institution X has a library; in the library there are special
collections, which include things like personal papers of notable
individuals. Institution X also has a records management function and
associated archive; it includes things like personal papers of
notable individuals *who have worked at the institution.* Both systems
(library and archive) are searchable by patrons, but they don't interoperate.
That is just wrong.


Caveat: I am neither an archivist nor a librarian but I've spent a good
deal of time working with both and have a working interest in discovery
systems (that help you find stuff) and description standards.


-- 
Kevin Ashley. Director, Digital Curation Centre         http://www.dcc.ac.uk/
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