{"id":2862,"date":"2017-06-07T16:10:21","date_gmt":"2017-06-08T00:10:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.tavbooks.com\/?p=2862"},"modified":"2017-06-08T23:07:42","modified_gmt":"2017-06-09T07:07:42","slug":"archival-cataloguing-for-booksellers-part-ii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.tavbooks.com\/?p=2862","title":{"rendered":"Archival Cataloguing for Booksellers, Part II"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Kate Mitas<\/p>\n

Getting to Know Your Archive<\/h2>\n

Now that you know your archive is about, say, Alaskan beauty pageant contestants or Italian motor scooters (to use two of Lorne Bair\u2019s examples from the last blog in this series), it\u2019s time to write up a snazzy description and send the archive out into the world, right?<\/p>\n

Well, no.<\/p>\n

As with anything else, first impressions can carry a lot of weight, but they exist to be refined, deepened, and, in some cases, overturned completely by later information. This is especially important to keep in mind when you\u2019re dealing with archives: unlike books, whose (expected) contents are often already known by your customer and documented in bibliographical references, archives, in a sense, don\u2019t really exist until they\u2019re catalogued. Cataloguing an archive defines, as well as describes, its contents for a potential customer. That\u2019s part of what makes archives so exciting to work with, but it also increases the risk of misleading your client (and\/or yourself) by imposing a narrative, rather than letting the narrative be dictated by the material.<\/p>\n

Physical Content<\/b><\/p>\n

First things first, to borrow from Brian Cassidy\u2019s oft-repeated maxim at CABS: Look. At. The. Archive.<\/p>\n

\"An

An archive in progress — stay tuned!<\/p><\/div>\n

It can be easy to skip over an archive\u2019s physical content and dive right into those letters, or diaries, or photographs \u2014 after all, that\u2019s the fun part, when you get to read on the job(!), hunt for clues, do research, and, in general, be utterly and exquisitely nerdy.\u00a0 In contrast, cataloguing the physical content of an archive is tedious, sometimes mind-numbingly so: you count the different things in the archive, and you figure out what they\u2019re made of and how big they are, and, if you\u2019re like me, you also probably recount something at least once, because the phone rang in the middle and\u00a0you want to make absolutely sure you’ve gotten it right.\u00a0 So what\u2019s the big deal about physical content?<\/p>\n

Put simply: everything in an archive is a function of its physical content. It\u2019s impossible to draw accurate conclusions about an archive\u2019s intellectual content without knowing its actual composition, and, consequently, to determine a commercial value based on those factors. (Note the qualifiers, here. Sometimes it\u2019s far more practical to slap a price on a minimally-catalogued archive and send it on to another bookseller who knows more about the subject. More on this later.)<\/p>\n

Take those photographs of Alaskan beauty pageant contestants, for example. They might be the most interesting subsection of Alaskan life you\u2019ve ever seen, but what if they\u2019re real photo postcards instead of photographs, issued as souvenirs at an annual fair in downtown Anchorage? Or worse, half-tone reproductions? Conversely, what if your Alaskan pageant contestants are only in ten photographs in an album of 300, all featuring contestants at beauty pageants held around the country during a 20 year period (which would be a pretty kick-ass archive, by the way)? And what if those ten Alaskans are scattered throughout the album, rather than grouped together?<\/p>\n

You get my point: establishing an archive\u2019s physical content is a way of applying quantifiers to aspects of valuation like rarity and significance, as well as forcing you to reconcile the parts of an archive you found interesting (Alaskan beauty pageant contestants) with the likely intent of the person who formed the archive (beauty pageant contestants). It\u2019s a way of grounding your enthusiasm and, ultimately, making you focus on what an archive actually is, rather than what you might want it to be.<\/p>\n

Not everyone includes the same amount and kinds of information when describing an archive\u2019s physical contents. Nevertheless, here is a list of general factors that we include at Tavistock, and which I\u2019ve found to be helpful:<\/p>\n

For textual material:<\/p>\n