Tonight is Bookseller Night at RBS. Most booksellers, and there are quite a few here, stay open late for RBS students. Downtown is just a mile away and I walked with a friend I met here last year. I guess you could say we're serial RBS students. Both of us are attending for the third time. We had a great time strolling downtown, poping in and out fo shops, seeing classmates everywhere we went. We stopped for dinner at Basil on the way back. I love that place. After a week loaded with carbs it's pure delight to have one of their incredible salads!
I'm taking a few books back home with me. I was pleased to find a bright first edition of Gordon Keith, by Thomas Nelson Page, in the binding designed by Margaret Armstrong. Bindings by Miss Armstrong are the strength of my personal collection. I hope to find all 345 bindings designed by her. I'll add this one to the entry I'm preparing for USC's Student Book Collector's contest next spring.
But enough about that. It's time to return to work and the day's work was exhilierating. The discussion began with donor relations. It can be a tricky business, dealing with donors. Personal collections are just that, personal. A collection is representative of a person's point of view, their own take on what' s important and that can make donor relationships challenging. It was said that the number one reason donors give their collections to institutions is to keep them together, in tact and away from the children. Yes, donors have the most to fear from their own children. After all, it's not their collection and they're more than likely to break it up and sell it. Shivers!
Security was a big issue as well. Discussion centered on several easy solutions to common problems that could enhance security in reading rooms including:
- Registration: Know who's using your collection.
- Keys: Sign in and out, know who has what key and when.
- Item requests: limit the number of items a patron can request.
- Enclosures: Remove all items from boxes to prevent theft.
- Folders: Archival materials should be dispensed one folder at a time.
- Marking: All items must bear marks of ownership.
- Inventory control: Know what you have and you'll know if it's missing.
- Detailed records: Should theft occur, detailed records will help in identification.
The afternoon session was packed with presentations, exercises and a visit to the digitization center. After viewing the digitizing facility I believe all of us came away with what has been referred to among some students as "equipment envy." A 24 foot long flatbed scanner called the Cruse scanner was designed for maps. Two fine Digibook scanners were facing retirement due to incoming upgrades. There was also a terrific digital camera set up and yes, a couple of standard table top flat bed scanners.
With all this equipment the digitizing center is able to produce 3 - 400,000 images a year. It's not all online though. There is a roadblock to their progress and it's called metadata. This is somethiing that they're still working on and conversations about this subject tended toward the revolutionary. According to our host, cataloging will take up the metadata work for scanned images but the detail level of records will be greatly reduced in an effort to get the material online. This is their prediction for the future, all records will be at a minimum level for all materials, print included. It's going to be a different world.
There was also lots of discussion about digital repositories for managing digital images. Fedora is used here at UVA.
The afternoon was all about archives after that. Jackie Dooley at UC Irvine, who teaches a new course this year, Archives for Rare Book Librarians, discussed tools and processing. I found this conversation to be very interesting. I haven't had any experience with archives and was unclear about the means of processing a collection. Jackie did an excellent job explaining the process to non-archivists. I'm moving her class to the top of my RBS class list.
We closed the class day with an exercise. Jackie's class joined ours and we divided into groups of three. We were given three web sites and a specific item to search for at each site. The next step was to rank the sites for ease of use, define the best features in three short sentences and then draw a wireframe representing our design for the interface. Lots of fun and very helpful when considering usability studies for university sites.
Tomorrow's our final class day. Soon we'll head back to our lives, our work and our familiies. But we won't leave empty handed, we'll be taking so much back with us.
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