Internal Database Training: Archives & Special Collections Catalog

Overview

• We pay for ArchiveIt service every year
• Traffic from international researchers
• Great way for people to find us on a google search and it brings them into a finding aid directly
  • Ex Google Search: Tim Johnson Anti-Horse Thief Association
  • Physical Materials
  • Digital Materials

Finding Aids

• Come from paper finding aids Amber has found – if you’re familiar with finding aids, that’s all been inputted manually (not as standardized as our regular catalog

To get there from homepage

• Collections > Special Collections & Archives > Research Tools Browse the Archives and Special Collections Catalog

Navigation Across the Top (Browse)

• Repositories
  • Differences between archives (21 collections – university history) and special collections (14 collections – external to university, children’s lit, military history, great plains history, stuff donors have given)
  • Search/browse within the repositories and collections
  • Sidebar filter
    • Date filter is pretty accurate
    • Subject filter is the type of object
• Collections
  • Combines archives and special collections together
    • Identifier # FL-SC = special collections; UA-FC = archives
• Digital materials
  • Probably shouldn’t be visible at the moment – might be confusion between scholars repository and digital materials
  • Collections in here that have born digital materials
    • Have to do some searching for it
    • Discoverable right now
    • Web crawling feature with archive it
    • Scholars repository is main house for digital materials
  • EX: Currey collection – Edward Lansdale interviews are recorded to tape/cassette. We have the option to share it with them
    • They couldn’t see that in the scholars repository
    • Depending on the collection, there are certain interviews that have been digitized and made it to scholars repository others can be digitized if requested
    • If it’s an international researcher – we have a way to share this with them (zoom consultation for them to play it for them during the session)
    • Some collections on tape have been digitized in scholars repository
• Unprocessed materials
  • More than 10 collections that are not processed … many more to add to this
  • Homegrown effort and we have the paper forms but haven’t yet posted unprocessed here
    • Lets researchers know we have it and that detailed records will soon be publicly available
  • Backlog = identifying what’s unprocessed and comparing to the processed collection
• Subjects
  • Manually input process, subject terms
  • LOC subject headings
  • Also Fort Hays, broad/specific subject terms
• Names
  • Correspondence with individuals within the community or donors
• Record Groups – perhaps removed from public view
  • A bit of a mess, but still helpful
  • Publicly available = doesn’t physically reflect what’s going on in the archives
  • Archives is organized organizationally (KBOR > president > Provost …)

For Researchers

• Local – come by and take a look, they can take photos (no flash)
  • If circulated for profit, look at licensing and fees
  • Fee schedule – hate that we charge, prohibits access
    • Not unusual to charge
    • Depends on how the material will be used
      • Am I going to have to pay fees or not?
      • May still charge individual scanning fee if they want hi-res for exhibit or display
      • We don’t charge students but more for external
      • Fill out a user agreement
    • Do they track when Forsyth stuff will show up in publication/for profit
      • We have the user agreements
      • We don’t track it in a spreadsheet for tracking but maybe we could
• Not-Local – zoom consultation confirms what they are looking at in finding aids would be helpful for research, then do a scan/digital version

Search Tips

• Use simple searches
  • Not super powerful metadata or a ton of things in here so the broader the better
  • It can do Boolean, but it won’t be as helpful for you because it’s a smaller collection with less metadata
• Tim Johnson and Currey Collection are most popular
  • EX: pioneer
• Recommended default “all record types” AND “keyword”
• Don’t limit to “digital materials” because there’s not too much there
• Use sidebar filter to organize by subject or region
  • That metadata has a hard focus on location and dates
• Collection view
  • Basic finding aid information is on this page
  • Box organization and folder level detail
  • Point of the finding aid points you to best bet the collections that are more relevant to you
  • To see folder level view is very helpful
• Use/Stats – not sure how many searches are done per year or what use of this tool is aside from getting inquiries