I think that the contributions to the list about 'single item manuscripts'
and 'mixed media collections' are raising some important issues which the
custodial professions have not been able to resolve.
Of course Michael is right in saying that it is the context of an item, as
the outcome of some activity, which makes it 'archival'. Particularly where
single manuscripts are literary works, the librarian has a reasonable claim
to their custody. On the other hand all manuscript items directly reflect
the activity of the author or copyist who wrote them, and to this extent I
think they are intrinsically different to printed books which are merely
mechanical copies of a text. Hence the dilemma.
A similar issue arises when published items, or museum objects, are found as
part of an archival accumulation. The librarian or curator will probably
want to extract the items which interest them and catalogue them to library
or museum standards, while the archivist will want their archival provenance
to be fully documented.
The issue here is not that one profession is 'right' and another is 'wrong'.
Rather, the problem is that none of the professions has satisfactorily
grasped the nettle of describing materials which cross the professional
boundaries. Automated systems might be expected to provide us with a
solution, but to date most systems have been developed to meet the perceived
needs of a single profession, and the opportunity to address the wider issue
has been largely ignored.
A couple of years ago I briefly explored the possibility of using an
item-level catalogue structured to the SPECTRUM museums standard, within the
wider context of an archival hierarchy of descriptive levels. I didn't
pursue this very far, but there is clearly scope for further research here.
In the longer run, all three professions need to seek areas of convergence
in their cataloguing standards (not just at the broad level of the Dublin
Core, but in terms of deeper description also). A common standard, if it
could be developed, would allow the inclusion of bibliographic, curatorial
and contextual information in a single catalogue record, which could be
re-used as necessary in different professional environments. The issue of
where the item is physically stored would then become much less important,
provided its preservation needs are met.
Our users probably wonder why we are not doing this already. However I
suspect that it would be up to the archivists to initiate such a move, if
only because we are likely to be the ones with most to lose if nothing is
done.
Geoffrey Yeo
Freelance Archivist/Records Manager
Tel: 020 8446 4768
[log in to unmask]
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
|