French Pamphlets

The Independent Research Libraries Association (IRLA) held a meeting for representatives from their member institutions at the Newberry today.  The final portion of their visit included a sort of show and tell with examples of recent acquisitions and projects from of our various collections, including the French pamphlet collections.  The setup was fun in that each Newberry staff member representing a particular collection or area was stationed at a table in one of the reading rooms, with each table containing some items for display and discussion.  Much like one would do at a poster session, the guests were able to simply walk from table to table in any order to see the examples from our collections and ask questions.  We had items representing the several pamphlet collections that officially comprise the work of the CLIR grant: the French Revolution Collection (FRC); Louis XVI Trial and Execution Collection; Saint-Sulpice Collection; and Collection of publishers’ prospectuses, catalogs, and other materials.  The visit provided a great opportunity to talk about the collections and the work we’ve done so far.

You might wonder why, five months into the project, I am now creating a post about the project workflow for the French Revolution Collection (FRC).  In part, I’m finally feeling caught up as the Project Cataloging Assistants are working rather independently, with less input from me at this point.  Partly, it’s because it’s taken a while and some tinkering to arrive at a workflow that has addressed some of the bumps in the road.  We’ve found the glitches, we’ve dealt with the unexpected, and we have come up with ways to handle future surprises.

The collection is already housed in the stacks, divided into portfolios containing 25-40 pamphlets, give or take depending on the size of the respective pamphlets.  The portfolios are signed out of the stacks when they are brought to the department for cataloging; this will allow Special Collections to know which ones we have and which have been returned to the stacks… that will hopefully eliminate any confusion or running around if a patron requests a pamphlet or a portfolio.  Because the Project Cataloging Assistants work different schedules, with some full and some part-time, we decided that the process of assigning call numbers would fall to the full time assistants.  The reason for assigning call numbers in advance means that the portfolios will thus be ready to go without the risk of confusion, duplicate or skipped numbers, which would be more likely if various people had to number a portfolio’s contents each time a new one was taken to catalog.  This will also preserve the order in which they were previously shelved, which may be of help especially to individuals who may have worked with the pamphlets already.

After the preliminary gathering and organizing of the portfolios, they are ready for the Project Cataloging Assistants to catalog.  There are several steps to the cataloging process in terms of creating records, review, and completing any necessary revision.  As we got in to the project, it became clear that there were too many pamphlets for me to review each newly created or edited record, as was our original plan.  To help speed up the review process, we’ve instituted a peer review process, in which a Project Cataloging Assistant will give the complete portfolio to another assistant for an initial review.  This step helped identify errors in transcription and description.  Once the cataloger revised anything pointed out by the peer review, I would do a final review.  This final review involved focusing on particular areas of the records that were perhaps more complex, depending on the particular pamphlet.  Also, I would especially focus on subject headings at this point.  The portfolios are then returned to the cataloger for any final revisions and then the records are produced in OCLC.

The final step is for the Project Cataloging Assistant to verify that the records have been correctly imported into our local catalog, after which the pamphlets receive our ownership stamp and the portfolio is labeled with the call number range for its contents.  Those pamphlets are returned to the stacks, while in the meantime the process has been continuing with other portfolios… and it’s been moving along smoothly.

Another note about the process, is that I have regularly-scheduled times to meet with each Project Cataloging Assistant individually to address particular questions they have — either about the cataloging process in general, or about specific examples from among the pamphlets they are working on.  These conversations have been a great way to address specific concerns of the individual, focus on training in areas particularly helpful to the Project Cataloging Assistant, as well as identify trends or situations that can be discussed together in one of the regular team meetings.

I am pleased to announce that the CLIR project staff loaded the first 322 French Revolution Collection (FRC) records into the Newberry’s online catalog this week. During the past few months, we have  been busy training, making cataloging decisions, cataloging, and revising. We’ve now entered the production stage of the project!

The Collection of publishers’ prospectuses, catalogs, and other materials at the Newberry Library contains, not unsurprisingly, a large number of book prospectuses.  A book prospectus is a description or advertisement with which a bookseller or publisher hopes to generate interest in a book that he or she proposes to publish.

The Newberry’s collection is comprised mostly of 18^th-century French prospectuses, published during a time in which many booksellers and publishers offered books via subscription.  In some cases, the proposed work was never published, whether because of lack of interest or insufficient funds, or simply because it was never written.

Case Wing Z 45 .18 ser. 1a no. 6

Jean Bouillet’s Histoire generale des maladies, described in a 1737 prospectus entitled Plan d’une Histoire generale des maladies (Case Wing Z 45 .18 ser. 1a no. 6), is one such example of a work never completed by its author.  (Cf. Michaud, J.F. Biographie universelle ancienne et moderne (Nouv. éd), V, p. 216.)

Some prospectuses have become complete works in themselves.  French geologist, diplomat, and historian Jean-Louis Soulavie published his Histoire philosophique du progrès des sciences en France (Case Wing Z 45 .18 ser. 1c no. 69) in 1783.

Case Wing Z 45 .18 ser. 1c no. 69

Intended to be a somewhat lengthy (37 p.) prospectus for a work that was eventually never published, it contains an introduction and summaries of the three parts of the proposed work.  A cursory Google search reveals that this prospectus has been cited many times, both in bibliographies on the Enlightenment and in scholarly works on the history or science in 18^th-century France.

Here are some more online resources from the wiki to help in the work of cataloging the pamphlets:

Place names

• Noms des communes sur la révolution – A list of those places where names were changed during the revolution and their modern equivalents.

Name Authority Resources

• BNF Catalog générale may be useful in resolving unqualified names when M&W isn’t. Under Recherches avancées, search Dans les index, which allows you to browse an index by Auteur (among others). Some names have authority records linked.
• ETANOT : ETat des NOTaires de Paris – Searchable database maintained by the Centre historique des Archives nationales containing biographical details and addresses of public notaries in France from the 15th century to the present.
• List of Convention nationale members – A convenient list of members of the Convention nationale, organised by département – useful for finding the right AF.
• Scholarly Societies Project – Sponsored by the University of Waterloo Library, this project concisely documents the histories, activities, and various names changes of scholarly societies throughout the world with a focus on societies in North America and Europe.  Nearly 200 French societies are included.  This site is helpful for dating pamphlets and for authority control.

Dictionaries and Grammar

• Le conjugueur – A convenient online tool for conjugating any French verb, or finding the root verb of a strange conjugation.
• Dictionnaire de l’Académie Française
• Dictionnaire des difficultés de la langue française – Dana kindly lent her copy to the project; at the island with the other dictionaries, etc.
• Dictionnaire des calembours et des jeux de mots, lazzis, coqs-à-l’âne, quolibets, quiproquos, amphigouris, etc. – a 19th century dictionary of French puns. Useful for figuring out some of the more obscure poetry, satire, etc.
• Le Nouveau dictionnaire complet du jargon de l’argot ou Le Langage des voleurs dévoilé (HTML version here) – a 19th century slang dictionary, useful for finding archaic slang

Legalese — I’ve found a couple of resources helpful in determining dates of laws and resolutions; search by month, date and key words of law or resolution.  Helpful when you don’t have year of publication.  Both are full text on Google books:

• Répertoire méthodique et alphabétique de législation, de doctrine et de jurisprudence en matière de droit civil, commercial, criminel, administratif, de droit des gens et de droit public
• Collection complète des lois, décrets d’intérêe général, traités internationaux, arrêtés, circulaires, instructions, etc.
• Code des délits et peines The full text of the criminal code published on 3 brumaire an 4. Useful for pamphlets that only refer to specific articles, etc.

Digitized Pamphlet Collections

• Gallica: French Digital Library – contains digitized versions of some of our FRC pamphlets.

In addition to Cataloger’s Desktop and Classification Web, both from Library of Congress, here some other online tools we’ve identified as potentially useful to Project Cataloging Assistants  as they work on the project:

AACR2 abbreviations (Yale)
End-of-Field punctuation in MARC (U FL)
MARC format for Bibliographic data (LC)
MARC subfield and punctuation guide (Auburn)
OCLC Bibformats (OCLC)
Order of notes in the MARC record (BYU)

We’ve also added a page for tools to convert between the Gregorian and French Republican calendars:

Because the grant was structured in a way that we would be able to hire some students to work part time on the project, we needed to find a way to share information among the various Project Cataloging Assistants that would allow for a variety of work schedules.  One good way of addressing it seemed to be the establishment of a project wiki in which anyone involved in the project could share news or announcements affecting the project or the Project Cataloging Assistants.  It also would provide a space to ask questions about the project workflow, cataloging rules and application, and subject analysis–and allow the answers to be visible not only to all the current cataloging assistants, but any future assistants joining the project staff at a later date.  The wiki was started in early March, with a space for announcements, staff information and job descriptions, online resources to assist in cataloging, information about bibliographies, dictionaries, and other useful printed tools in the department.  After a month, I’m finding the wiki to be a bit of a challenge in terms of the Q&A page.  Essentially, questions are just added to the end of the page, so the organization is more chronological than topical.  The challenge to topical organization, however, is what to do with those questions that may be about more than one thing — a question may address cataloging rules AND subject analysis AND also touch on project workflow.  For now, the Q&A entries continue to simply be in chronological order.  Fortunately there is a search function in the wiki, so it is possible to search entries by key words.

One method that is helping teach the concept of subject analysis is having the Project Cataloging Assistants assign subjects to their records using natural language.  This will allow me at first to add subject headings to some records during my review, while still allowing the them to get through records before mastering Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH).  It will also help teach the concepts of identifying what something is truly about without getting bogged down on the controlled vocabulary of LCSH.  Once the Project Cataloging Assistants are used to thinking in terms of what things are truly about, we can then take those natural language terms and begin translating them into LCSH terms.

The CLIR Hidden Collections Program Symposium was a successful experience — in terms of our presentation of the French pamphlet project, as well as what we were able to learn from the other participants and speakers.  It was gratifying to have so many people interested in the project and to have so many good questions posed to us — many of which we could answer, and some which will give us some good things to consider moving forward.  There was a lot of interest in finding candidates who possessed the linguistic abilities and the aptitude to learn cataloging, especially when it came to filling the part-time positions.  There was also interest and perhaps some surprise that we were creating full catalog records and including thorough subject analysis.  The impression seemed to be that that would make it hard to achieve our production goals for the grant; I believe we’ll be able to achieve the goals.  Time will tell.  I was interested to see how many projects were for archival collections, rather than library collections (monographs, etc.).  I should say the presenters included an equal mix of grant recipients who were nearing completion of their project, as well as those just beginning the project.  Again, it was nice to feel that there was great interest in what we’re doing.

Oh, and Jennifer’s poster was a hit!