C.F.W. Coker Award: Susan P. Waide

Susan P. Waide, from Special Collections Processing at the New York Public Library, is the 2024 recipient of the C.F.W. Coker Award from the Society of American Archivists (SAA) for her work on the Abraham Yates Jr. Papers finding aid. The award recognizes finding aids, finding aid systems, innovative developments in archival description, or descriptive tools that enable archivists to produce more effective finding aids. To merit consideration for the award, nominees must set national standards, represent a model for archives description, or otherwise have a substantial impact on national descriptive practice.

The Abraham Yates Jr. Papers, acquired by The New York Public Library in 1919 and held by the Manuscripts and Archives Division, represent a large volume of work from Abraham Yates Jr. (1724–1796), an Albany politician whose political career spanned the colonial, revolutionary, constitutional, and early national periods in United States and New York State history. While the collection’s series of correspondence was described in the twentieth century and digitized in 2016, Yates’s journals, writings, research materials, and later transcripts still carried box-level descriptions. At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Waide initiated the creation of a new finding aid for the collection, specifically applying Descriptive Cataloging of Rare Materials (Manuscripts), or DCRM(MSS). This descriptive standard provides guidelines for individual manuscript volumes and other items contained within a legacy archival collection. The use of DCRM(MSS) standards in this finding aid resulted in enhanced access to the materials, which were acquired over one hundred years prior. Not only did the project allow researchers to better understand the collection's contents, but it also maintained continuity with existing digital access and scholarly citations.

This project is a notable example of using DCRM(MSS) to describe the individuality of physical materials. Increasingly, there is an overlap within the world of special collections between archivists and librarians. While Describing Archives: A Content Standard (DACS) is focused on manuscript collections, DCRM(MSS) provides guidance for the cataloguing of individual manuscripts. This project illustrates a novel approach to applying the guidelines to multiple individual manuscripts within a finding aid. It serves as a strong example for other repositories seeking to complete similar projects.

Established in 1984, the award honors SAA Fellow C.F.W. Coker.