Date: Mon, 19 Feb 2018 10:18:02 -0600 From: russhanson <russhanson@grantsburgtelcom.net> Subject: Re: Subject File Categories Message-ID: <d12eed62dd32b1b126e1ef7daa5a01a7@grantsburgtelcom.net>
On 2018-02-16 21:32, Paul Wolter wrote:
> Hello everyone,
>
> I am wondering how different historical societies and research centers
> have their files organized. We have subject files for various
> newspaper clippings and documents on a number of subjects but they are
> in need of some order. For example instead of a section titled
> "Restaurants", each restaurant is filed under its own name. We would
> like to create macro categories but are wondering what they might
> be..."businesses" seems too broad and yet "appliance stores" seems too
> detailed. Do you use "car dealers" or "automobile dealerships"? Does
> anyone have a list of their subject file categories?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Paul Wolter
>
> Sauk County Historical Society
The physical storage location doesn't matter in retrieval as long as the
card catalog has enough key words to retrieve it. Storing physical
information is probably easiest to just box it as it comes in and put it
on shelves that are well identified (building, room, shelf, box....).
What is important is to enter all of the key words and identifying info
in an easily searchable catalog (computer usually) so it is readily
searched and then easily retrieved from the shelf. That is called
meta-data management (metadata is the information about item stored).
You want people to be able to pin down what is in the folder or box so
well that folks can decide if the info is really what they want before
they come to look, and then easily pull it from the shelf.
A longer term goal of most of us is to photograph or scan everything
and add image it to the metadata-- a digital copy of the the actual
stored photo or document or clipping and doing optical character
recognition on the scan to allow actual searching of the document for
words inside it -- like the WHS does for its scanned newspapers.
Our new project here for 2018 is to scan and organize old negatives
and catalog them like photos we have. We really don't want folks
handling the original item, so digital scans or even photographic copies
are good. We photographed all of the obituaries in a local newspaper
for 20 years as a quick and easy way to copy them from bound volumes.
Access is by date, name, location, and other key words.
Russ Hanson
President of the Sterling Eureka and Laketown Historicai Society (NW
Wisconsin)