Librarians have known for years that giving items individual unique identifiers makes it much easier to manage them. Accessions stamps have been used for centuries, automatically rolling on to give each item a number of its very own. Making those identifiers machine-readable took things to a new level. We're talking barcodes! Barcodes allowed libraries to … Continue reading Beep! Beep! Why barcode your archive?
Tag: User services
The ILLiad, and other stories
Making Archival and Special Collections More Accessible is a new publication whose name says it all. The good folk at OCLC Research have pulled together seven years of research and summarised it in this handy document. Some of the content will already be familiar to readers of this blog and the Handbook - but it … Continue reading The ILLiad, and other stories
Bye Bye Basement!
Fingers crossed and all that, my service, Special Collections at the University of Bradford, should get our long-awaited new premises in 2016. Hooray! Our project is part of a wider programme which will transform the lower floors of our 1970s Library to meet the needs of modern students. Before: rambling, dark mazes full of odd … Continue reading Bye Bye Basement!
Dear Special Collections, your service is …
How do we find out what users (and non-users) think of our services? We need to know this in order to ensure our services meet their needs and to argue our case for resources to improve them. Pretty obvious stuff, but it can be hard to get that feedback, to manage it, and to make … Continue reading Dear Special Collections, your service is …
Modernising Copyright: the White Paper is published
Important and good news for UK special collections services and their users. The UK government has just published the final part of its response to consultations following the Hargreaves review of intellectual property: Modernising copyright: a modern, robust and flexible framework. While not addressing underlying problems of copyright, the changes outlined allow a wider range … Continue reading Modernising Copyright: the White Paper is published
Alone in the Reading Room
Archivists and librarians in UK special collections often work solo. Managing reader access in this situation is challenging. Helen Weller, archivist at Westminster College, asked the archives-nra discussion list members for tips on how to cope, and shared them via a guest blog on the LIS New Professional's Toolkit site: Lone archivists and reading … Continue reading Alone in the Reading Room
The Special Collections Handbook 