Librarians have long recognized the importance of rare and valuable materials to their collections. At Cornell, that recognition stretches back to the very earliest days of the university, when Andrew Dickson White, the university’s first president and Daniel Willard Fiske, the first librarian, sought out significant scholarly collections from around the world. Some items did not have so far to travel. Fiske donated his own substantial collections of materials on Dante, Petrarch to the library as well as the Icelandic collection that still bears his name today. Bibliographers and curators have carried on Fiske’s work to the present, building unique and rich collections on such diverse topics as witchcraft, human sexuality, the history of science, and literature and theatre in the process.
Unfortunately, many of these treasures are difficult for researchers to access and use. Their great material and intellectual value naturally requires them to be physically safeguarded, but even discovering them intellectually has often been a challenge. Many materials were cataloged only in brief and only on cards keep hidden away in drawers in the library. Other items were never truly cataloged at all; awareness of them has been limited to the curators and those who may already have used them, not to scholars whose research could be enhanced by consulting their contents but who are not necessarily aware of their whereabouts or even their existence.
Since the integration of technical services in 2005, LTS catalogers have been working to change that. Four catalogers have been working part time to supplement the efforts of the two dedicated rare materials tech services staff members. Their efforts have made unique resources like 19th century city directories and a valuable collection of pre-Soviet books of Russian fables visible through the library catalog. Indeed, before the directory cataloging was complete, a researcher was already asking to use them after having discovered records in the CUL database for those that had been processed.
A new push has recently begun to reduce the backlog of rare items not yet represented in the library’s online catalog. In part, the effort has been sparked by CUL’s participation in the large-scale digitization project with Microsoft (see related story in this issue). Some of the items being converted to digital format are in the Cornell Wordsworth collection, the second-largest collection of materials in the world on the great romantic poet. But not all of those items were accessible to catalog searchers. By the end of 2007, they should be, and will be soon joined by digital versions available on the open Web through Microsoft’s LiveSearch. In 2008, LTS will add an additional 10 hours a week of cataloger time to help process other rare items in the collection, making treasure hunting that much easier. |
