French Pamphlets

Jennifer and I will attend the CLIR Hidden Collections Program Symposium in Washington, D.C., March 29-30.  The program looks good, promising to provide speakers, and break-out sessions in which we’ll get to hear how others have or will be managing their grant-funded projects for hidden collections.  Obviously, we’ll have a chance to share our own plan and experiences thus-far.  I’m looking forward to seeing what kinds of collections other institutions are processing.  For the symposium, we’ve created a poster representing the French pamphlet project — it’s a fun motif that resembles in type, illustration and layout many of the pamphlet’s we’re working on.  Kudos to Jennifer for the idea.  Jennifer and I will also be presenting a session entitled:  Parlez-vous français?  Finding and training subject specialists to catalog 18th century French pamphlets, describing our experience in hiring Project Cataloging Assistants, the use of the wiki in training and communication, among other aspects of the project.

Below find our abstract for the presentation:

Parlez-vous français? Finding and training subject specialists to
catalog 18th century French pamphlets

The Newberry Library has a 2009 grant to catalog four French pamphlet
collections, most from the period of the French Revolution. Cataloging
Assistants will create 22,000 item-level, MARC records that provide
sufficient detail for research, adhere to recognized bibliographic
standards, and will be web-accessible and sustainable.

The Cataloging Assistants must have a fluent reading knowledge of
French and be able to work with 18th century, political documents that
may have idiosyncratic spelling, grammar and vocabulary. Some of the
Cataloging Assistants will have little or no library cataloging
experience but must quickly learn to use Connexion and MARC format if
we are to meet production goals.

Several University Libraries have successfully implemented this model
of hiring subject and language specialists to do rapid, hidden
collections cataloging but it will be new for the Newberry. As an
independent research library, the Newberry has no formal connection
with the graduate programs from which we hope to find Cataloging
Assistants and as a small technical services department this grant
will double the size of our cataloging staff.

Jennifer Thom and Eric Nygren will share their experiences,
observations and anxieties in getting this ambitious project up and
running.

A challenge for me personally will be training new Project Cataloging Assistants in the… art?… science?… of subject analysis.  Having a controlled vocabulary with which to describe the subject of an item is helpful, in that it potentially eliminates too many variables in describing a subject, helping numerous individuals cataloging items and, later, individuals searching for them to do so using the same terms.  The idea is that by having a collections of preferred or approved terms, with cross references to the non-preferred terms, people can be more easily led to the same terms in describing and accessing material by subject.  Maybe it’s due to the rich complexity of the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), or maybe it’s because I often find myself having to assign subject headings to materials in on subject with which I am less familiar, but I find subject analysis the most challenging part of my own work as a cataloger.  I will admit that the thought of teaching new Project Cataloging Assistants to do subject analysis is a daunting one.  It seems like this is becoming my mantra for the project, but I’m betting I’ll learn a lot about this as I try to teach others how to do it.  18th century French legal terms, anyone?

This month I joined the French pamphlet project, where I will be principally responsible for cataloging the Newberry‘s Collection of publishers’ prospectuses, catalogs, and other materials.  I have worked as a Cataloging Project Librarian at the Newberry Library since 2008.  I am adding this collection to two others that I am currently working on, one mostly cartographic and the other mostly theological.

Case Wing Z 45 .18

This collection consists of several hundred pieces of ephemera (prospectuses, catalogs, manuscripts, etc.) related to bookselling and publishing, mostly in 18th-century France. Cataloging such ephemeral objects is a special challenge. Authorship and publication information are not always readily apparent. I have been investigating the online catalogs of a few special collections libraries like the American Antiquarian Society to see how other libraries handle the subject analysis of publishers’ catalogs and prospectuses.  Once I have drafted a workflow and template records for myself, I will meet with curatorial staff specializing in printing history to ensure that I’m capturing information that will be useful to users of our collections and online catalog.

It’s been interesting to see the type of candidates that have applied for the Project Cataloging Assistant positions, and interesting to see which of those candidates have been offered positions and have accepted them.  Perhaps having to do with the opportunity this project gives in terms of professional cataloging experiences, there have been a number of candidates having, or nearly finishing, degrees in library science.  This will be helpful to the project in that many aspects of the work will be familiar to them, perhaps making the training process progress more rapidly.  At the same time, we have several strong candidates who do not have library backgrounds, and they bring their own particular strengths to the project.  All possess excellent French skills which, as we’ve discussed, is a must.  All are bright and eager to participate in the project.  It’s exciting to imagine a team of Project Cataloging Assistants that will be able to work collaboratively, each sharing from their own particular knowledge base — be it cataloging skills, or French language skills and a knowledge of French history and culture.  No doubt we’ll all have a lot to learn as we go along, and hopefully we’ll all be able to learn a thing or two from each other.

The Newberry Newlsetter (#83, Spring-Summer 2010) has a nice article about the French pamphlet collections and project on page 3.

To begin to develop basic descriptive cataloging skills, the Project Cataloging Assistants will work at cataloging more recently published English-language books using standard cataloging rules and taking into account local practice.  They will learn how to transcribe title, author, and publisher information and to make physical descriptions of books and pamphlets.  Because modern books have fewer publishing idiosyncrasies compared to 18th-century pamphlets, the Project Cataloging Assistants will be able to learn the bare essentials of identifying the important aspects of a book or pamphlet.  Also, the set of books chosen for the training process all have some copy in OCLC, which means they’ll be working with and interpreting records that already exist, rather than creating new records from scratch.  Once the Project Cataloging Assistants are able to create catalog records for these “training books” they will begin working with the pamphlets, transferring what they learned in cataloging recent, English-language books onto the French language pamphlets from the collection.  As the Project Cataloging Assistants create consistently thorough and accurate descriptions of the pamphlets, they will slowly be introduced to subject analysis.

As we continue to plan for the CLIR grant project how much having the pamphlets cataloged will both impact the workflows of others in the library, as well as require their input and expertise.  The collections being cataloged form part of our Special Collections, and we will need staff input from the department on how the pamphlets are currently being accessed, and how having large numbers of pamphlets missing from the stacks can be managed when some of those items are requested by our readers.  What’s the best way to let them know which pamphlets are in our department for cataloging, that allows us to efficiently move uncataloged pamphlets out of the stacks and replace them with newly cataloged items, which at the same time allows Special Collections staff to easily find requested items–even those that are currently out being cataloged?

The Martin & Walter bibliography will need to be on hand for the Project Cataloging Assistants as they work with the pamphlets, verifying that the attributed entry to Martin & Walter is indeed correct when entered into the new catalog record.  This creates a bit of a challenge for us in that it has been useful in the Reference area as patrons have used it as the only currently available tool to access the pamphlets.  There is another copy of the bibliography in Special Collections, so patrons will have access to the bibliography, but they will need to be directed there by Reference staff, creating extra steps for both staff and patrons.  However, it’s hoped the ease of access that will eventually be afforded by this project will make the temporary loss of the Reference copy of Martin & Walter worth the hassle.

Conservation as well is involved in the project in as much as when Project Cataloging Assistants believe there is a conservation issue to be addressed, Conservation needs to be notified so that they can do an evaluation and treatment, if necessary.  The challenge will be how to manage these potential exceptions for Conservation while maintaining a steady workflow free of too many exceptions or complications.

Crain’s Chicago Business published an interview with Paul Saenger, George A. Poole III Curator of Rare Books and Collection Development Librarian, about our French pamphlet collections and the CLIR cataloging grant:

The Grants and Acquisitions section of College & Research Libraries News (January 2010, 71:46-47)  had a blurb about our grant and project:

The Newberry Library has received a $488,179 three-year grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) to catalog approximately 22,000 French pamphlets from four of its collections. The Newberry’s project is one of 14 selected out of 91 proposals in this year’s CLIR Cataloging Hidden Special Collections and Archives initiative. The four Newberry collection include, 1) French Revolution Collection: more than 30,000 pamphlets and 180 periodicals published between 1780 and 1810. The periodicals and 12,000 anonymously authored pamphlets have already been cataloged, and 18,000 pamphlets with known authors will be cataloged through this grant. 2) Recueil de pieces historiques: At the end of the 18th century in Paris, the religious order of Saint-Sulpice at its headquarters assembled this collection of more than 2,600 biographical pamphlets to serve as an archive of primary source—printed and manuscript—material. Funeral sermons, orations, commemorative discourses, and verses dating from the 16th to the early 19th century were included. Among these are rare first editions of short works by Bude, Pascal, and Moliere. 3) Publishers’ prospectuses and catalogs: Parisian and rare provincial publishers are represented in this unique assemblage of publicity and advertisements for French printing and publishing from 1700–1850. The collection consists of more than 700 pamphlets. 4) Trial and execution of Louis XVI: This contemporary collection of more than 600 rare government pamphlets published at the time of the trial provides information on the collection of evidence, the defense by de Seze, public opinion (including a French tract of American Tom Paine), moral and political reflections on judging and executing the king, and opinions of Convention deputies (e.g., Marat, Saint-Just, Robespierre). The pamphlets are preserved in their original etui binding. Learn more about the program at www.clir.org/hiddencollections/index.html.

To catalog this many pamphlets efficiently and accurately in the allotted time of the grant, we need to be able to select Project Cataloging Assistants with a real ability to read and comprehend French well enough to be able to work with 18th-century French with its variations from modern French. In order to select these candidates, a reading comprehension exercise will be incorporated into the interview process. Using a pamphlet from the collection — one that includes spelling, grammatical, and typographical elements typical to the period and collection — candidates will read the pamphlet, summarize the text, and translate a portion of it into English. In summarizing the text, candidates will have the opportunity to demonstrate their ability to quickly read through and understand a text, which will imitate the kind of “reading” they will do when creating catalog records. Additionally, interview questions will draw on the candidate’s experience of this reading exercise.  How difficult was it to read the pamphlet? What stood out in the text or in the physical piece? How it will be to work with this type of material and balance a helpful intellectual curiosity about the material with a need to produce good records at an acceptable rate?  Hmm… I wonder how I’d do with an exercise like this. Hopefully, I’ll be able to keep that in mind — creating a reading exercise that gives us a good picture of the candidate’s abilities without being unnecessarily grueling!