The Area and Harris Collections
These are two of Cornell's oldest collections, comprising little-known 19th-century primary sources in American history,  European history, classics, English literature, the history of science, and linguistics.  Forming part of the great collections that made up the early Cornell Library, these books were donated by Andrew Dickson White, Cornell's first president, as well as by other 19th-century scholarly benefactors.  Owing to their age and their many languages, the Area and Harris books were set aside while the Library converted to the Library of Congress classification system in the 1940s and 1950s.  The Harris titles (named for Cornell's second librarian, George Harris) are not even represented in the Library's union catalog, but are found only in a separate card file.  Many of the Harris cards are handwritten and are often short on bibliographic information.

We adopted two different approaches to converting these collections. The Area card catalog records were converted by OCLC, Inc.  OCLC generated machine readable records and also provided the subsequent authority control.  A file of bibliographic records in MARC format returned to us monthly for loading in Voyager.  Barcoding  &  post-processing cleanup now follow.

For the titles in Harris, the dearth of bibliographic information on the cards made programmatic conversion by OCLC infeasible.  We are performing the work in-house, using temporary staff to search and process the more straightforward material (fastcatting the collection) and more experienced staff to input originally the remaining Harris titles.

Follow the processing progress on charts or graphs by using the Area & Harris links above.


Compiled by Hana Dedina (Database Management Services, LTS)
December 2004; upd. November 2005; upd. January 2006

Recon in Progress