1. Maureen Callahan & Don Thornbury
Rare Books and Special Collections
Princeton University Library
ENUG 2011

2. 1. We believe in the possibilities of single
search.
2. But how do we represent special
collections materials?
3. And how do we make this play nicely
with Primo? (It won’t work out of the
box).
4. What are the implications of this change
and what are our next steps?

3. “Users can search Internet resources
through a single search engine query, yet
often the resources of a single cultural
institution or university campus are
segregated into silos, each with its own
dedicated search system.”
Single Search: The Quest for the Holy Grail – OCLC
Research Report by Leah Prescott and Ricky Erway, June
2011

4. Let’s say that you’re studying Orthodox Christians in Ethiopia…

5. So you’ll start with sources in the library collection.

15.  Books, articles, art, archives, sound
recordings, objects – the way we describe
these are all records with many similarities.
They all have some or all of the Dublin Core
fields.
 So let’s put what we can into Primo, so that
our researchers only have to learn one
opaque research system, instead of many.
 We decided to start with special collections
materials currently described in EAD.

16.  MARC – Henriette Avram, late 1960s
 EAD (Encoded Archival Description) –
UC Berkeley, 1993
 Before this (and currently, too, depending
on where you are): big, long essays
explaining the collection and big, long
paper lists of the contents of the
collections.
 Archival description in five minutes…

24.  We want each piece of valuable data in the
contents list to go into Primo, so that users
can find it in a institution-wide search.
 In fact, we’re not super nuts about the
current system – users having to scroll
through big-crazy-long finding aids (with
the help of Ctrl-F).
 We want users to be able to go straight to
the part of the collection that has the
information they seek.

25.  Our content standard (DACS) tells us the
requirement for single-level records.
 DACS doesn’t care about the encoding
standard – MARC, EAD, PNX, whatever.
 And, as we look at each component (that
is, unit of description or line in the
contents list) we realize that each one has
the required parts to be its own record.

27.  We’re going from one line in a finding aid
to a big PNX record.

31.  EAD  Generic.dtd  PNX
 You should see the massive stylesheet.
 Iterative process.
 It’s good to talk about theory. A lot.
 It’s good to push back against Primo.

32. 1. And PNX is how we shall come to know
our data…
2. Re-thinking the folder list.
3. Visibility for special collections.
4. De-centering both organizational
boundaries, boundaries of custody, and
boundaries of creator/collector.
5. Fidelity to FRBR model.

34.  Getting those 650K archival records
ingested…
 Working with other data sources,
converting to generic then PNX (should
be easier, since we don’t have to factor in
hierarchical relationships, usually!)
 EAD site redesign
 Description revolution.

35. cmcallah@princeton.edu
searchit.princeton.edu
findingaids.princeton.edu