I haven't been working with Special Collections long, but I've learned a lot of things and foresee lots of work ahead of me and my colleagues. Here is a list of things I can think of right now:
1. We don't wear white gloves. It turns out they can do as much damage as our hands can. We just have to be gentile and clean.
2. Everything is priceless. Even if an item was purchased for the collection--it is priceless. Once I thought about that it makes sense. And really it is true.
3. Pamphlets have THE LONGEST TITLES EVER. It is ridiculous how long some of them are. Sometimes it takes so long to read the title and it's so descriptive that I feel like there's no point on reading the actual pamphlet. I know that's not true, but geez! Leave some surprise!
4. Everything is inconsistent. Some of this has to do with how things were cataloged (or not) in the past, but it also has to do with the way things on the pamphlet were printed. Some of them have really descriptive covers/title pages. Some have almost nothing. Sometimes a publisher writes their name one way, yet on another pamphlet the same publisher may print their name differently. What a nightmare!
5. When cataloging you always need a ruler. And they use the metric system like a normal system! Yay! We discovered a disparity from our OCLC record of a pamphlet and the pamphlet in front of us. We could plainly see we had 38 pages, but the record (that was cataloged by the Library of Congress) said 36 pages. It turned out ours was not as tall, hence the slightly longer pamphlet. That was really interesting! This also showed me that it is important to have the pamphlet in front of me when I check the cataloging and check for a digitized version. While a different digitized version may have the same content, we're only interested in digital copies that are the same as the pamphlets we have.
So I have barely started this project, but there's already lots of things I've learned to look at.
Until next time, Kait
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