Hidden Treasures

The Poster Presentation will consist of the reasons and steps taken to reevaluate/reprocess the Holt-Atherton Special Collections book collection, and the results. When the project was first started, it was found that several of the books thought to be cataloged were actually not. Now that the project is drawing to a close all previous items not discoverable can now be found and are accessible to our patrons. The project also brought to light several “hidden treasures” that can now be used in classes given in Special Collections. For example a fore-edged painted book that was unknown is not cataloged as such and is used regularly in classes to demonstrate the rare and unique items that we have. Once the project is complete there will also be outreach to departments on campus who do not regularly use the archives with examples of previous uncatalogued or unknown items that they may be able to use in their classes. There will also be class instructional exercises created to assist students in understanding books as a primary resource. The purpose is to inform on what we have done with this project and to hopefully help other institutions begin a similar project by sharing out experience. At the beginning of the project there were 19,536 book records in the catalog and after extensive curation 16,504 remain. Books outside of the scope of HASCA and not of any historical significance were transferred to the Main Library Stacks or donated to Better World Books