Managing and Describing Publications and Periodicals (legacy)

NEVER IMPLEMENTED

Smith College Special Collections is in a period of transition from managing periodicals and other publications in collections described in finding aids to managing them in the library's online catalog according to bibliographic standards, and will likely remain in this state for some time.

Historically in the SSC, periodicals received along with donations of manuscripts, papers, or records, were often separated from this provenance and moved into the Periodicals collection or one of several "topical collections," such as the Birth control collection. Effective in 2017, this process was ended, and the following procedures were put in place for all Special Collections:

• Newly-acquired books will be cataloged bibliographically and added to the ILS as items held by one of the collections in Special Collections, regardless of their source. When the source or provenance of a book is significant, that information can be included in the bibliographic record.
• When a small number of periodicals or ephemera are included in a collection of personal papers or corporate records, they will be managed and described as part of that archival context.
• When a donation or transfer includes a significant quantity of periodicals that are not meaningfully integrated with the rest of the collection, they may be separated and added either to the Periodicals Collection (SSC) or an existing cataloged resource (CA).
• Any additions to the SSC Periodicals Collection must include the following information, regardless of whether the title was already in the collection (in which case the entry needs to be expanded and updated) or not (in which a new entry needs to be added):
  • Periodical title
  • Date ranges held
  • Volume and issue numbers held
  • Author and/or publisher as a related Agent record, if known. We are looking here for information that would tie this to other collections in our holdings, or otherwise provide meaningful points of access. No one is going to be looking for Teen Vogue because it is published by Conde Nast, so we probably won't add Conde Nast as the publisher in that case. However, if we have the newsletter of a particular organization, or a magazine that was associated with a specific activist, it is very important that we do make that association explicit.
  • A historical note to explain the context of the publication, if it is not well known or obvious, e.g., "Living was the semi-annual literary magazine produced by the Women's Spiritual Cooperative of Bangor from approximately 1985 to 2010."
• The practice of inter-filing periodicals in order to retain alphabetical order between boxes will no longer be continued. New acquisitions can be added to a box with a new box number, but continue to be described in an alphabetical list.

A future retrospective project to properly catalog the contents of the Periodicals Collection is on the horizon, but not currently prioritized for resources.