Journals - Just Experimenting

Most historical societies publish their own journal, and most also receive them from other societies by exchange. The material in them is invaluable, but often difficult to find, or even learn about.

I have been experimenting how to catalogue them, and this is what I have come up with at Stratford. Needless to say, the Victorian Cataloguing Manual is totally silent on this subject.

If you are reading this, and not a cataloguer, skip right to the bottom now.

Stratford Historical Society published a Bulletin in the 1970s (from memory), and then operated a combined one with Maffra Historical Society in the 1980s and 1990s. In 2005 they started a new series of Bulletins on their own.

So the first thing is - I don't have a long run of them to catalogue. The older ones however are quite extensive, but there are indexes to them both in one form or another. So what I have been wanting to do, is somehow incorporate a broad summary of what is in each issue of the new series in the catalogue, possibly in a format that I can use to then also catalogue other newsletters in detail, especially from nearby societies. Something where I didn't have to do them all at once, or can send off to someone to do the main part in a word processing file would be good, too.

So I have issued one catalogue number (03201) to the whole series, and described it in general. (I will issue the next numbers to other journals, and not initially describe them in detail) I then issued 03201.01 to No.1 in the new series, and included several abstracts of major items in the description for that record. Beauty - off I went and created 03201.02 for Number 2, and continued on thus. (had to use .01, .02 etc, as when I got to .10, InMagic wouldn't accept it, as it couldn't distinguish from .1). Subjects were issued from the GIPPSDOC Thesaurus for each record, and chit-chat and organisational stuff was ignored.

Then I thought - why not use this as the basis for a record on the net, that people could use to purchase copies? *Lightbulb* And if anyone out there is as silly as me, and cataloguing their journals in this depth, they can just go in there and get the abstracts for Stratford by copying and pasting.

But how will people know there is a new newsletter, or a new set of abstracts?

Simple. Start another blog.

Last para - non cataloguers, start reading here again:

There is a new blog HERE. It is very set in its format, but you can either use it to find back articles in Stratford Historical Society Bulletins, or subscribe to the blog via blogger, and be advised each time a new Bulletin is issued. Or if you are a cataloguer, you can just use it to pick up the abstracts for your own cataloguing.