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Several special collections libraries develop programs, marketing programs, and webpages to improve public access to collections. However, public perceptions of special collections libraries are poorly understood and library professionals instead depend on anecdotes or own experiences to identify barriers to access. University College London (UCL) Special Collections used an online survey to reach communities outside the university to understand what they think UCL Special Collections is and what interventions might encourage them to visit. Through their survey, it is easier to understand misconceptions about special collections and how it may discourage someone from learning more. Specific marketing and programming interventions applicable to special collections libraries are identified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Notable Japanese Collections in North America (NJC) is a digital collection discovery initiative and tool that identifies and promotes distinctive Japanese Studies collections in North America. Now entering its third year, this online database has amassed 250 print and digital collections sourced from college and research libraries and other cultural heritage institutions across the continent. Although far from complete, it already provides the most extensive list of print and digitized collections in the United States and Canada. This essay delves into the inception, collaborative journey, and long-term objectives of the NJC and culminates by spotlighting some of the fascinating holdings of its various repositories, spanning premodern to modern and contemporary periods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Eros Collection at Flinders University is the largest collection of materials produced by the sex industry and its affiliates in Australia. Acquired in 1997 and added to over the years, the varied collection (now part of the umbrella Australian Sexuality Collection) includes restricted or censored audiovisual and print materials – in short, porn. Thus this archive – typically a site of protection and care – comprises materials that many people think don't deserve protection, and this ambiguous status has raised many challenges in terms of how the Collection is valued, researched, and utilized. The thorny question of the Collection's value is traced in our research through interviews with Special Collections librarians involved with the Collection over different periods and an audit of Collection contents, access, and usage, which we analyse within the broader context of international porn archives and Australian media histories. The article examines how the Collection (specifically its pornographic material) shares key challenges faced by porn archives internationally, including public perception and access, and its uneasy fit within the Australian media histories. We argue that this neglected archive holds promise for understanding porn's place in Australia's audiovisual and cultural history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The education and training of catalogers has been well documented in library literature. However, this literature has tended to focus on the general cataloger and not special collections or rare books catalogers. This article summarizes the results of a survey of current special collections and rare books catalogers on when they decided to enter this library specialization, what skills they needed to succeed, where they obtained those skills, and their opinions on formal versus informal training. The results have implications for those wishing to become a special collections and/or rare books cataloger, those who are already in the profession and being asked to take on special collections or rare books cataloging duties, and finally those who educate and train future specialist catalogers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

University College London Special Collections holds the Small Press Collections consisting of the Little Magazines, Alternative Presses, and Poetry Store of poetry pamphlets, artist's books, and other text bearing print objects. This essay outlines the history and growth of the collections, founded by Geoffrey Soar in 1964, and starts by exploring the networks essential to the development of a large collection of international, independently published literary and visual art material. I draw on fifteen years' experience as Collection Manager to examine the challenges of acquiring, cataloguing, and managing non-mainstream, self-published, ephemeral material in an institutional context and facilitating access for researchers. It considers selected comparable collections in the UK and the US and the difficulties in aligning institutional holdings and practices. The notions of materiality and obsolescence in the context of library collections are considered in relation to mimeographed and other format little magazines and small press publications. It concludes with examples of object-based learning scenarios that reactivate the material in a teaching and research context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study develops a methodology to identify user tasks and metadata elements and to establish correspondences between them, in special collections of Chinese classics, based on interviews with 13 distinct researchers. A total of 36 unique user tasks were identified, with 30 being associated with specific elements. The methodology also encompassed analyzing how metadata in two databases supports these user tasks, leveraging the identified correspondences. The introduced methodology demonstrates its potential for data-creation organizations by providing a mechanism to select elements for metadata using the identified correspondences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study presents the results of an online survey designed to explore methods for and barriers to implementation of the SAA-ACRL/RBMS Standardized Statistical Measures and Metrics for Public Services in Archival Repositories and Special Collections Libraries. While 94% of responding institutions do collect operational statistics about public services, only half use the collected data for assessment purposes, while only 24% were certain they use the Standard. This discrepancy signals the need for additional outreach to institutions to help explain and implement the Standard across a broad range of special collections libraries and archival repositories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper consists of two, methodological and analytical, separate parts, which share the character and work of Aleksa Šantić. The first part tries, through an overview of critical valorisation, to literary critically understand the entire poetic creation of Aleksa Šantić, posing the fundamental research question of why Šantić is considered a great poet, even though his poetry, taken as a whole, viewed from an aesthetic perspective, cannot be qualified as “great”. Above all, based on the insight of criticism into the consideration of the aesthetic value of Šantić’s poetry and the conclusions derived from the comparison of already existing and own reflections, the above question is answered with the hypothesis that Šantić’s “mythical” greatness is the result of the “ordinariness” of his poetry and the ability to give that “ordinariness” a sublime sense of the “topos” of spiritual preoccupation, on the semantic level, and on the syntactic level, expressed in a simple style and phrases close to the cognitive needs of the peoples’ consciousness. The second part of the paper presents a documentary-historical and archival-library contribution to the research of the character and works of Aleksa Šantić, and appears as a separate review of the legacy of manuscript material kept by the National and University Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina within the Department of Special Collections. The legacy consists of letters, correspondence, photographs, letter cards, and postcards. These biographical and historical documents serve as a source for a factual introduction to a part of Šantić’s life and activities. The work is the result of research conducted on the basis of the project “Unification of materials on the cultural and historical heritage of Aleksa Šantić” financed by the Federal Ministry of Education and Science.

This paper considers various approaches to the practice of copy-specific descriptive cataloging in rare books and special collections and seeks to identify how practice can be improved to ensure greater discoverability. Through applying a survey method, it identifies some of the core requirements of library professionals and researchers working with these materials and proposes solutions toward the standardization of this practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This comparative, mixed-methods study explores various definitions of Israel Studies as a discipline through their manifestations in library and archival collections. A survey and a follow-up interview with collection curators provide a glimpse into library operations and demonstrate their dependency on Jewish Studies across the board. Collection strengths, extensiveness, and uniqueness are shaped not by the presence of an on-campus Israel Studies center, but rather by individual curators guided by their own proactive approach to collection building. The article includes an annotated list of over 120 distinctive collections, among which we uncover several hidden collections. Taken together, our article illustrates the need for better communication between Israel Studies' scholarly and information communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Leo Baeck Institute – New York | Berlin is a research library and an archive dedicated to the history and culture of German-speaking Jews founded in 1955 by German-Jewish scholars and intellectuals. With its extensive library, archive and art collections, it is one of the most significant places for all manners of primary source material and research literature on Jewish life in Central Europe in the centuries before the Shoah. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Bosniaca is the property of National & University Library of Bosnia & Herzegovina and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper outlines an example of Special Collections materials being used to support master's-level students' data and digital skills development. It evidences positive student learning outcomes through an unconventional interdepartmental collaboration between a digital media teaching team and Special Collections staff, which combined digital practices and tangible Special Collections material. This paper outlines the readings used for the course under review, the assignments used to evaluate students, student experiences of those assignments, and staff observations of student success and the logistics of course delivery. Findings show that in completing their assignments students (a) negotiated uncertainty; (b) increased understandings of data and digital methods; (c) embraced the lifeworlds of data; and (d) blurred the boundaries of analog and digital. More generally, this work finds that Special Collections material can be effectively used to support data and digital skills development, as well as help students gain broader understandings of digital contexts and media. Value is, however, dependent upon embracing uncertainty: something that universities tend to avoid. But, as is shown, staff and students alike can thrive in states of bewilderment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using our work together on an upper-level undergraduate English course as an example, we illustrate that a just combination of librarian and faculty skills and labor, made visible to each other and to students, creates the conditions to enact a transformative student-centered pedagogical approach with special collections as a site of learning and activism. However, we first had to recognize, reflect on, and reject the power dynamics that pervade librarian-faculty collaboration. We will expound on our shared critique of power within the neoliberal corporatized academy that helped us get beyond the conventional librarian-faculty teaching partnership to experiment with critical pedagogies of possibility and enact a feminist praxis; modeling and cultivating interdependent confidence and vulnerability to empower students to be free and creative thinkers.

This article provides an overview of the medieval manuscript items found in University Archives and Special Collections at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio. After describing the history of the Xavier University collection, it offers descriptions of nineteen binding fragments recently found within twelve early print volumes and includes provenance information for those volumes when possible. The article ends by reflecting on the benefits of participation in the Peripheral Manuscripts Project and sharing how project outcomes are influencing Special Collections work at Xavier. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a summary overview of the collection of pre-1600 western European manuscripts in Loyola University Chicago Archives & Special Collections. The collection presently comprises four manuscript codices, at least thirty-eight fragments, and four documents. The codices are a thirteenth-century book of hours from German-speaking lands; a fifteenth-century Dutch prayer book; a preacher's compilation written probably in southern Germany in the 1440s; and two fifteenth-century Italian humanist booklets, bound together since the nineteenth century, transmitting Donatus's commentary on the Eunuchus (incomplete) and an anthology of theological excerpts, respectively. The fragments consist of thirteen leaves from books dismembered by modern booksellers (most are from fifteenth-century books of hours) and a larger number of binding fragments, all but two of which remain in situ. These represent the remains of ten manuscript books: four Latin liturgical books, two texts of Roman civil law, one large-format thirteenth-century Italian Bible, one thirteenth-century copy of Ptolemy's Almagest in the translation of Gerard of Cremona, one late fourteenth-century copy of the Ockhamist Tractatus de principiis theologiae , and one fifteenth-century Dutch book of hours in the translation of Geert Grote. Many of these materials have remained unidentified until now. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We acknowledge historical absences in library collections, including those of the University of California Libraries. We will develop practices that counteract a paradigm of racist, sexist, and white-centered collecting, description, instruction, and access. Metadata, digital exhibits, and archival descriptions in particular have disadvantaged communities of color, limited points of subject-based access, and contributed to a culture of exclusivity and inequity. We commit to immediate and enduring work to elevate the narratives, perspectives, and expertise of the marginalized: those who identify as Black, Indigenous, persons of color, immigrants, women, disabled people, and those from the LGBTQ+ communities. We recognize that this work is iterative and ongoing, inherently risky, and messy, but entirely necessary.

When tragedy strikes your community, few people think about preserving the objects associated with the social mourning process.  This paper discusses a project to document our community’s response to a mass murder.  It describes how we collected and organized materials from spontaneous memorials to make them accessible to scholars in the future.  Material culture is not just the realm of archaeologists; it is also the domain of librarians, archivists, curators and historians.  Our project demonstrates how a campus community can work together to preserve materials that tell the story of such an event and those who were affected by it.

The literature lacks empirical evidence supporting the claim that the value of special collections in the academic library has grown significantly. Through a web-based survey the perceptions of librarians and archivists (N = 243) in academic libraries were investigated. The results give insight into what measures of value are perceived as important. Minor differences were found based on institutional size and managerial status. More significant differences were found for gender identity. Findings will allow directors and staff to have more productive conversations about limited resources and staff time, and advance professional discourse about the assessment of value for special collections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses current initiatives related to the Indigenous studies collections at the Newberry Library in Chicago and the relevant history of those collections. Current initiatives include work on a planning grant with three Indigenous community partners: the urban Native and Indigenous community in Chicago Forest County Potawatomi in Wisconsin and the Pueblo of Santa Ana in New Mexico. These collaborations are intended to help improve access to the collections for Indigenous communities in ways that prioritize their needs. Other initiatives include a revised collection development policy a policy for access to culturally sensitive Indigenous materials and improvements and changes to cataloging and archival processing practices and standards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Genre/Form headings are an important means by which librarians provide users with contextual or descriptive information. To facilitate the discovery of resources with important provenance characteristics, the Marion E. Wade Center added terms from a controlled vocabulary to bibliographic records representing items in the C. S. Lewis personal library collection. The selected terms focus on features that have historically been of interest to visitors. The addition of these headings in the bibliographic records allows users to use these keywords to conduct a search or narrow their results, resulting in more flexibility to locate and select the resources that best meet their needs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the Rare Book and Manuscript Section (RBMS) Controlled Vocabularies (RBMS CV) and their successor, the RBMS Controlled Vocabulary for Rare Materials Cataloging (RBMS CVRMC), both developed and maintained by the Rare Book and Manuscript Section of ALA/ACRL. These resources provide genre/form terms for use in special collections cataloging. Following a brief history of the development of the RBMS CV, this paper focuses on two projects: the creation of the integrated and linked data-compliant RBMS CVRMC and the revision and expansion of the thesaurus' terms for prejudicial materials. We offer this as a case study of a community-created cataloging resource. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The accessibility of special collections during the COVID-19 pandemic was a matter of concern for libraries and their users due to the specific nature of special collections compared to other information sources in libraries. This study therefore investigated the accessibility of special collections in university libraries in the South South zone of Nigeria during the COVID-19 pandemic. The population of the study included 233 librarians in federal, state and private universities in the zone. The study adopted an online questionnaire and there was a total of 197 respondents. The findings show that special collections were accessible to library users through library websites, institutional repositories, CD-ROMs and flash drives during the COVID-19 pandemic in Nigeria. The study reveals some of the challenges affecting the accessibility of special collections during the COVID-19 pandemic in university libraries in Nigeria and recommends ways of enhancing the accessibility of special collections during a crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The early modern period in England (c. 1500-1800) is often best remembered for dramatic developments that transformed the political, religious and economic life of the country. Henry VIII’s rejection of the papacy in the 1530s severed the English church and its worshippers from the wider Catholic community. In 1649, the execution of Charles I at the end of the Civil War marked the beginning of a transformation in the relationship between king and people. That relationship continued to evolve and in 1689, it was recast in the Bill of Rights, which subordinated the Crown to the people. The economy thrived through much of the period and by the eighteenth century England was both a leader in European and in the overseas colonies for which so many nations vied. This exhibit seeks to explore the lives of ordinary people who lived through these dramatic events. While such developments were important, they did not always gure in the everyday lives of those who were not members of the political nation. For them, concerns about their work, families, education and spiritual lives loomed larger than the activities and debates taking place at Westminster. The objects here reveal the concerns, desires and fears of some of the English people during the early modern era and how they sought to manage them--not always successfully.

This article summarizes the work done as part of a project to improve subject description of an LGBTQ + collection in the ONE Archives, part of the University of Southern California (USC) Libraries. The project involved adding local subject headings to augment existing Library of Congress Subject Headings. The article describes the steps that the project team took, along with the methods that were rejected. The paper discusses reasons why the team chose their course of action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined problems associated with unregulated access to Indigenous music materials in the public domain, utilizing the HathiTrust Digital Library as a case study. It focused on music materials and employed content analysis, and descriptive statistics as major methodological instruments. This study revealed the presence of musical notation as a primary condition rendering materials vulnerable to potential exploitation. This study confirmed that unregulated access may expose sensitive content protected under NAGPRA. Methodologically, this study offered a model of critical assessment of multi-institutional digitized collections. Substantively, it proposed strategies to support the protection of Indigenous content in HathiTrust. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Special collections are generally composed of various types of documents in a great amount. It is not only necessary to describe each single document constituting special collections, but also to reveal the overall and internal relationship among special collections. Regarding the organization and description of domestic special collections, there are still some existing problems such as taking a single document as a descriptive object, lacking a disclosure of the hierarchical relationship among documents, and not following unified standards in descriptions, which are to a great extent affecting the usage efficiency of special collections and is not contributing advantages for data exchange internationally. The main reason behind it is that there is no unified standard for the arrangement and description of special collections in China. Based on the previous research and application of hierarchical description of special collections conducted domestically and internationally, this paper discusses the adoption of ISAD (G) (General International Standard Archival Description) issued by the ICA (International Council on Archives) in the description of library special collections from the perspectives of descriptive standards, the feasibility of applying ISAD (G) as the descriptive standards of special collections and the practice of Fudan University Library applying ISAD (G) in the arrangement and description of special collections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pursuing professional development in special collections is hard for a paraprofessional, especially when many library schools offer limited instruction in special collections and inadequately prepare students for a professional position. When the "traditional" resources are underwhelming, it is important to know where to seek out knowledge, training, and professional connections. In this column, I explore my path in the field of rare books libraries, and offer advice for others who may be struggling to figure out their own path.

The UC Santa Cruz University Library supports the creation of digital projects which aid student scholarship, enhance on-site exhibit experiences, engage broader communities through online exhibitions, and promote our unique collections. This case study explores the use of a digital tool, ThingLink, to create a virtual 360° tour of a library exhibit space which features material from the Grateful Dead Archive. Librarians and students created this virtual tour (https://guides.library.ucsc.edu/loveonhaight360) in order to promote the library’s collections, engage students in creating new forms of scholarly work, preserve a record of a physical exhibit after deinstallation, and increase use of library resources.

In 2020 the IFLA Rare Book and Special Collections Section (RBSC) published the Competency Guidelines for Rare Books and Special Collections Professionals. The guidelines are divided into five chapters and are intended as a white paper for all librarians dealing special collections. The document focuses on the figure of the librarian, his interactions with the collections owned by the cultural institution in which he works, his relations with the users. A remarkable tool especially from the point of view of professional ethics, the IFLA standard defines ideal situations to which documentation professionals can look for the strengthening of their knowledge.

O espólio de Fernando Pessoa tem sido, desde a sua aquisição pelo Estado português, em 1979, um núcleo fundamental da cultura em língua portuguesa. Esse manancial, que esteve na génese das sucessivas edições da obra do poeta depois dos trabalhos pioneiros de chancelas como a Ática e a Aguilar, conheceram extensões relevantes desde 2008. Foi nesse ano que foram adquiridos pelo Estado português alguns documentos incluídos pelos sobrinhos de Pessoa, no quadro de um polémico leilão. Em 2020, um novo conjunto de autógrafos foi adquirido pela Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal através de um ajuste directo com os herdeiros de Pessoa, só recentemente disponibilizados para consulta na Sala dos Reservados da BNP. Este artigo conjuga uma descrição sumária do processo de novas aquisições, com a apresentação de um conjunto seleccionado de documentos, alguns dos quais inéditos, a que se somam alguns materiais que em 2008 foram digitalizados por uma equipa de investigadores que trabalharam em casa dos herdeiros de Pessoa e que não constam nem do conjunto leiloado em 2008, nem dos documentos adquiridos em 2020.

Michigan State University (MSU) is home to one of the largest library comics collections in North America, holding over three hundred thousand print comic book titles and artifacts. Inspired by the interdisciplinary opportunity offered by digital humanities practice, a research collaborative linked to the MSU Library Digital Scholarship Lab (DSL) developed a Collections as Data project focused on the Comic Art Collection. This team extracted and cleaned over forty-five thousand MARC records describing comics published in Canada, Mexico, and the United States. The dataset is openly available through a GitLab repository, where the team has shared data visualizations so that scholars and members of the public can explore and interrogate this unique collection. In order to bridge digital humanities with the popular culture legacy of the institution, the MSU comics community turned to bibliographic metadata as a new way to leverage the collection for scholarly analysis. In October 2020, the Department of English Graphic Possibilities Research Workshop gathered a group of scholars, librarians, Wikidatians, and enthusiasts for a virtual Wikidata edit-a-thon. This project report will present this event as a case study to discuss how linked open metadata may be used to create knowledge and how community knowledge can, in turn, enrich metadata. We explore not only how our participants utilized the open-access tool Mix’n’match to connect the Comic Art Collection dataset to Wikidata and increase awareness of lesser-known authors and regional publishers missing from OCLC and Library of Congress databases, but how the knowledge of this community in turn revealed issues of authority control.

This paper details the library special collections material held at the library of Highland Theological College, University of the Highlands and Islands. Our three primary special collections are the focus of this article, The William Temple Collection, The Rutherford House Collection, and the Fort Augustus Collection. We detail here the story behind these collections entering our custody and proceed to highlight a selection of monographs of provenance and personal interest. This paper constitutes original research into the collections, building upon a foundation laid by the late college librarian, Mr. Martin Cameron, (1953-2019) who curated the collections over some twenty years. We also discuss the curation two new collections – The Liturgical Music Collection, comprising sheet music and musical sources from the Fort Augustus Collection, and the Historical Texts Collection, comprising the library’s oldest books of academic interest.

Rare book collections do not form in a vacuum; they are shaped by the individuals who assemble and curate them. This is certainly the case with the rare book holdings of Becker Medical Library at Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine. This paper examines some of the most significant donors to Becker’s rare book collections in order to explore how these collections are a reflection of the interests and priorities of the physicians who assembled them, and also raises the issue of how the makeup of these collections create a Western-focused narrative regarding the history of medicine.

This article discusses an undergraduate module which introduces students to the study of the history of education through the lens of our own institutions - UCL (University College London, UK), founded in 1826, and the IOE (Institute of Education, UCL's Faculty of Education and Society), founded in 1902. The module critically examines the close, but often hidden, connections between British education and empire, asking what impact these imperial legacies have today. After outlining the module's origins and relationship with the history of UCL and the IOE, the article sets its creation in the wider context of initiatives that seek to critique and reimagine institutional histories within higher education for a variety of purposes. The article also explores the developing role of the IOE Archives team in teaching, and explores how academics and archivists work together to teach institutional histories, and how this work can prompt change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On the 170th anniversary of the birth of composer Ciprian Porumbescu, the National Library of Romania invites the public to remember his work by organizing the exhibition Ciprian Porumbescu's mastery in the service of the great ideas of his time. The exhibition includes scores from the heritage collection of the National Library of Romania, images of the composer, as well as the manuscript of Pretty Woman: for voice and piano. The heritage scores belong to publishers such as Moravetz, Lito Schildkraut, Constantin Gebauer, Oscar Brandstetter, Breitkopf und Härtel, as well as the Porumbescu family publishing house. In addition to special collection documents, the exhibition also includes CDs with famous violinists such as Ion Voicu, ștefan Ruha, Alexandru Tomescu, performing the famous Ballade for violin and piano, patriotic songs performed by the Artistic Ensemble "Doina" of the Romanian Army or religious music recorded by the Orthodox male choral group "Harisma". Together with the sound recordings, the National Library also owns the DVD of the film "Ciprian Porumbescu", directed by Gheorghe Vitanidis, produced in 1972, starring actor Vlad Rădescu. The exhibition is open in the space Courtyard of Dionis (ground floor) and can be visited from 30 May to 31 December 2023. Through everything he has done, the artist Ciprian Porumbescu has shown a deep understanding of the turmoil of his ancestral history and has linked, to the point of fusion, with the Romanian aspirations of all time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As special collections librarians have become increasingly focused on instruction and active learning there has been a move toward more elaborately designed assignments spread over multiple visits to the special collections library. While such activities are undoubtedly rewarding as library experiences, they may not meet the needs of the professors teaching the classes, for whom teaching time is often at a premium. The one-shot session allows the professor more flexibility within the semester, and this calls for librarians to think about how active learning techniques can be implemented in a single session. This article offers some practical solutions to how the librarian can plan one-time visits to the special collections library that center student learning, while still making the most of the semester's instruction time. Ultimately, librarians would do well to make a virtue out of the necessity of such single-visit instruction sessions, as their flexibility for professors means that they will be a central part of special collections' instruction for the foreseeable future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In addition to central institutions such as state archives, many other types of archives that are covered by archival legislation have recently been increasingly promoted and developed, such as private archives and special collections of individual institutions, community archives, etc. However, the fact is that due to various obstacles many such places are not officially registered in the mentioned categories, even though they correspond to them in terms of character and activity. Such archives, whether they are registered or only operate nominally in one of the legislative frameworks, often differ from state archives in the priorities according to which they define their methodology. For example, many adapt the methodology of describing archival records and working with users in accordance with the logic and dynamics of the environment in which they exist. In addition, in such places, the roles of the creator and owner of the material are mostly intertwined. Historically speaking, special collection departments were more focused on internal users, often also the creators of the materials, than on external users -- individuals, groups, institutions or associations. However, in the last few decades, the number of external users of private and special, especially research archives, has been increasing, which is why it was necessary to re-examine the dynamics of the archival staff's relationship with all types of users and propose certain improvements. In the context of contemporary digital technologies and social networks, special librarians and archivists in special collections get to know users more and more thoroughly and readily respond to their specific requests. Furthermore, they also try to gather potentially interested individuals and groups, thus creating new communities of users. In any case, the appreciation of the implicit knowledge of users is valuable as a pledge in the process of ending the binary opposition of business and research value of archives. This is most visible in the example of community archives, which rely very directly on small stories. The analysis of the work of the Special Collection of Ethnographic Materials of the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research in Zagreb, Croatia, served here as an example of those services that function as informal special research archives and were created for their needs by the parent institutions. It was at the same time an example of a special collection that takes over evaluation criteria from other specific forms of archives, such as community archives, precisely recognizing the aforementioned qualities as a bridge to a more inclusive archival activity. The relationship between employees and users was examined through the lens of different methodologies, projects and cooperation in approaching archival records. Special emphasis was placed on the contemporary models of community involvement. Based on the review of the record lists of external users over a period of 60 years and the management of social networks, it was shown to what extent the characteristic approach to archival records and users, more precisely, their presentation and dissemination, affects the specificity of the formal and legal status of the Institute's Special Collection. The paper also concludes that social networks are not only important for promotion, dissemination and networking, but that due to the already mentioned inclusion they represent a completely new environment. Certain individuals within this environment transform from passive followers into a new, modern type of users of institutions within the GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Canadian Journal of Academic Librarianship / Revue Canadienne De Bibliothéconomie Universitaire is the property of Canadian Association of Professional Academic Librarians (CAPAL) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Zbog svojih jedinstvenih i rijetkih kolekcija, Specijalne zbirke Nacionalne i univerzitetske biblioteke Bosne i Hercegovine (NUBBiH) su nezamjenjiv izvor za mnogostruke istraživačke projekte i naučne radove. Već dugi niz godina NUBBiH ulaže napor da putem svojih projekata naučnoj zajednici pobliže predstavi vrijedne kolekcije Specijalnih zbirki. Da bi se korisnicima osigurao brži i lakši pristup građi, a ujedno i zaštitili originalni dokumenti od njihovog daljeg propadanja, građa koja je obuhvaćena projektima digitalizira se i prezentira kroz Digitalne kolekcije NUBBiH. U ovom radu predstavit ćemo jedan takav projekt, a to je projekt zaštite i prezentacije Arhiva poljičkih isprava iz Zbirke Aleksandra Poljanića te ćemo prikazati dosadašnje rezultate, kao i krajnje ciljeve ovoga projekta. = The Special Collections of the National and University Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina (NULBIH) are an irreplaceable source for multiple research projects and scientific papers. For many years, NULBIH has been strengthening efforts to present values of Special Collections to the scientific community through its projects. To provide users with faster and easier access to the material, and at the same time to protect the original documents from their further deterioration, the materials covered by the projects are digitized and presented through the Digital Collections portal of the National and University Library of BIH. In this article, we will present the ongoing project “Protection and presentation of the Poljica Documents Archive from the Collection of Aleksandar Poljanić” and so far, the results and ultimate goals of this project.

The Women and LGTBIQ+ Work Group was created in 2019 to respond to the forecast of an increase in the number of specialized collections on women, feminism and LGTBIQ+ in public libraries. Its first objective was to draw up a document to establish guidelines and to aid the management and creation of new specialized collections on these topics based on the previous experience of several libraries in the library network of the Diputació de Barcelona. The article begins by describing the working group methodology, summarizes the most relevant contents of the resulting Document (published in 2021) and reviews the experiences of the libraries in Vilanova i Geltrú, which have created new specialized centres in accordance with the guidelines. The next section discusses the present and future of the work group, focusing on the second objective: the review of the indexing of the subjects in the collective catalogue in order to find inconsistencies and suggest changes, and the assignment of new subjects to the documents related to the areas of knowledge concerned, in order to make them more accessible. This paper highlights the importance of networking with other libraries and specialized offices, of sharing knowledge and experiences when addressing complex issues, and the need to keep a gender perspective in mind throughout the library and throughout the library system. It also stresses the need for library professionals to receive continuous training in these areas.

The Women and LGTBIQ+ Work Group was created in 2019 to respond to the forecast of an increase in the number of specialized collections on women, feminism and LGTBIQ+ in public libraries. Its first objective was to draw up a document to establish guidelines and to aid the management and creation of new specialized collections on these topics based on the previous experience of several libraries in the library network of the Diputació de Barcelona. The article begins by describing the working group methodology, summarizes the most relevant contents of the resulting Document (published in 2021) and reviews the experiences of the libraries in Vilanova i Geltrú, which have created new specialized centres in accordance with the guidelines. The next section discusses the present and future of the work group, focusing on the second objective: the review of the indexing of the subjects in the collective catalogue in order to find inconsistencies and suggest changes, and the assignment of new subjects to the documents related to the areas of knowledge concerned, in order to make them more accessible. This paper highlights the importance of networking with other libraries and specialized offices, of sharing knowledge and experiences when addressing complex issues, and the need to keep a gender perspective in mind throughout the library and throughout the library system. It also stresses the need for library professionals to receive continuous training in these areas.

In advance of loss of archival space, a health sciences library developed a plan to weed and organize its archives. Working with the health sciences center foundation and campus academic affairs officials, the library hired a local archivist on a contract basis, for the last quarter of 2017, to execute this plan. This case study describes the organizational context, details and administrative implications of the project. This description is a unique contribution to the literature about the use of contract labor in health sciences library collections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]