Applying DACS to Single-Item Manuscript Cataloging

Travel diaries, account books, commonplace books, ships’ logs, sermon notes, scrapbooks and autograph albums, and single letters and poems… As we all know, many of these single items possess great subject interest or notable authors, and many attract researchers across disciplines and have teaching and exhibit potential. For the archivist, however, they are too often confusing, time-consuming, and challenging to identify and to describe. Add to an artificial collection? Subject file? MARC 21 record? How do you write a DACS -compliant MARC record for a diary, anyway?

This workshop will present criteria for undertaking description of single-item modern manuscripts and the choices available to the archivist; briefly review related standards, including AACR2 and AMREMM; and focus on the creation of full MARC 21 descriptions in compliance with Describing Archives: A Content Standard. Emphasis in both the lecture and hands-on portions of the workshop will be on the identification and description of a wide variety of single-item textual manuscripts, with some attention to subject analysis and the determination of access points. 

This workshop includes lecture and discussion components, as well as hands-on cataloging exercises. Based on examples of 17th-20th century textual manuscripts, this workshop will prepare you to tackle that pile of odd volumes at the back of your backlog.