DESCRIBING WHAT'S THERE: TOWARD A DESCRIPTIVE FRAMEWORK FOR LEGACY LIBRARY COLLECTION DESCRIPTIONS

In the days when library catalogs consisted of card files, most research libraries housing “special” collections of material found ways to describe those collections in more detail than a MARC record could provide. “Collections,” broadly defined as groupings of discrete library items, originate for a variety of reasons: a scholar takes an interest in a topic and buys every relevant book; a bookseller decides that a genre or author text is more interesting in large quantities than in scattered instances, so he collects, for example 14,000 volumes of British poetry and sells them as a group to a research library; a small special library goes “out of business” and gives its’ collection of radical pamphlets larger library. In all these cases, groupings of books or pamphlets or photographs are often described in collection descriptions. The originating principle of the collection is known as its’ “provenance.” Collection descriptions are created by many different kinds of writer: booksellers, collectors, documentary editors, bibliographic scholars, librarians, archivists, and others. They serve as an aid to researchers in approaching and understanding a particular group of material. In library departments of special collections, they often replace the library catalog, as the main printed source of information about to the contents of a particular collection. Traditional printed collection descriptions vary widely. Sometimes, copies of card catalogs are produced together in book format and supplemented with commentary or introductory material. Sometimes, glossy collection descriptions are created for prospective donors. Sometimes, these descriptions consist of descriptive bibliography. Sometimes, as in exhibit catalogs, they are meant to serve as a surrogate, as a way of preserving an “artificial collection” brought together from many different libraries. Printed collection descriptions exist in great number, and form a significant percentage of the collection of every research library. While traditional printed collection descriptions do not describe each item in a collection exhaustively, they do provide a rich source of descriptive and bibliographic “finding” information to a researcher who may be considering whether or not to visit a particular library or archive. Increasingly, however, these storehouses of information gather dust, as students and scholars turn to online sources of information, often proceeding no further in their research efforts. Thus, there is a need to preserve and make accessible online these many historical or “legacy” printed collection descriptions. Clearly, such a text-base, were it encoded in such a way that it could be searched across repositories, would provide a rich and valuable resource for students and scholars seeking access to rare or primary materials. Current metadata collection descriptive frameworks such as METS, OAI, and RSLP do not provide descriptive elements adequate to capture the variety and complexity of these “legacy” printed collection descriptions. Based on the observation that the Encoded Archival Description, narrowly designed for a particular type of collection description, is now widely adapted for non-archival collections, the paper argues that there is need of a broader, more flexible, descriptive framework that could be used to encode both new and legacy collection descriptions that vary widely in their content and structure. EAD, while suited well for the encoding of a particular type of description, the archival finding aid, lacks basic bibliographic and structural elements necessary to encode complex texts. Because of its scope and descriptive granularity, the Text Encoding Initiative seems a promising candidate for such a descriptive scheme. But in order to ensure interoperability, the TEI encoding of legacy collection descriptions needs to be regularized. Indeed, we seek a solution that transcends the limits of the EAD, but constrains the possibilities of TEI. To begin to develop such a best practices framework, the author of the paper analyzed 50 legacy collection descriptions found on the shelves of the University of California, Davis Shields Library, chosen to represent the widest possible range of formats and types of collection. The paper presents a basic taxonomy of functional types of information in these legacy printed collection descriptions and proposes that the library community work to develop a “TEI-Like” dtd, best practices standards, and implementation guidelines to allow these and other descriptions to be encoded and made accessible. Finally, the paper argues that such a descriptive framework could be used as a guide for the creation of new online collection descriptions, and that the existence of such a framework would allow special
102
collections libraries and curators to create standard, familiar, and extensible user “web page” descriptions of their major collections. Such online descriptions could form part of a large, inter-operable text-base that included legacy collection descriptions, and could thus form the basis for a seamless bridge between our intellectual inheritance and future collections.