Staff at the Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library have recently reached a major milestone with the completion of a project aimed at improving access to all of the Mudd Library’s collections.
Mudd is one of the first archival repositories in the U.S. to provide online access to information about all of its archival collections, both processed and unprocessed. Descriptive records for all Mudd collections are now available via the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections Encoded Archival Description (EAD) website at http://diglib.princeton.edu/ead . These descriptions were created in a number of ways, including ambitious archival processing projects, an EAD retro-conversion project, and the conversion of MARC catalog records. As of November 2007, finding aids for 478 Mudd collections (and a total of 999 collections from the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections) are available.
With the new EAD finding aids, descriptive records, at at least the collection level, for all of Mudd Library's collections are discoverable in the Princeton University Library’s Main Catalog, the Department of Rare Books and Special Collection’s EAD website, union catalogs and databases such as OCLC’s WorldCat and ArchiveGrid, and via common internet search engines such as Google and Yahoo.
The project was a team effort by processing and technical services staff at Mudd. The University Library's Digital Initiatives staff worked to develop the infrastructure to deliver these records to the public.
Please contact Dan Santamaria, Assistant University Archivist for Technical Services, with any questions or comments.
