2008 marked many milestones: an historic presidential campaign and election, an economic meltdown, and the final game at old Yankee Stadium. Probably nothing Cornell’s Library Technical Services (LTS) staff do rises to quite the same importance as those events, but researchers and staff alike nevertheless had reason to record 2008 as particularly memorable in at least one sense. Why? Because in the spring of 2008, after many years of effort, the cataloging of CUL’s Harris collection was finally completed.
The Harris collection was named for George Harris, Cornell’s second librarian. Many of the Harris books were part of the great collections that comprised the early Cornell University Library, donated by Andrew Dickson White and other nineteenth-century scholarly benefactors such as Charles Anthon, Goldwin Smith, Jared Sparks, and Willard Fiske. Little-known nineteenth-century primary sources in European history, American history, classics, English literature, and linguistics are among its many treasures. The Raeto-Romanic titles (works in a small group of languages spoken in the Engadine region of Switzerland and parts of northern Italy) are particularly rare. Also included were a group of several dozen posters and broadsides documenting the 1871 Paris Commune, a collection of early pamphlets on the formation and development of American libraries, and a collection of photographs of antiquities and scenes of everyday life in late nineteenth-century Egypt.
But the collection’s singularity was not limited to its intellectual value. Created at a time when each successive university librarian would typically devise his or her own classification scheme, these books were classified according to a system set up by George Harris. The classification arranged titles numerically by subject and, within each subject, by author, title, or both. The unique contents and classification scheme meant that standard LC cards were not available (or not used); thus, many of the Harris catalog cards were handwritten. In the 1940s and 1950s, as CUL converted its holdings to the Library of Congress Classification system, Harris books were set aside. Indeed, for many years they were not even represented in the Library’s union card catalog, but only in a separate file. Although thousands of Harris books were eventually reclassified in LC, a core of books remained to be processed. They represented cataloging conundrums or were in unusual formats such as matted photographs. A sizeable number consisted of many unrelated titles bound together, a headache for catalogers and modern circulation systems alike.
We are grateful to Liz Muller for finally closing the book (as it were) on this seemingly endless project. But Liz was only the last of a cadre of CUL staff who have worked to bring these items under more-standard bibliographic control. The most recent push to clear the final vestiges of the Harris collection began a few years ago, when Marge Robinson put most of the remaining Rare Harris titles online. A few shelves of stubborn “problem books” remained and were finally cataloged by Cecilia Sercan and Roswitha Clark. Liz stepped in to complete one of the messiest parts of the project, the “bound-with” volumes. Congratulations to her and to all CUL staff, both past and present, who have helped bring awareness of these riches to the Cornell community and the world.
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