RE: [-empyre-] Who decides and what to preserve

["Margaret Phillips" <mphillips@nla.gov.au>]

Dear Simon and fellow empyreans

To add a little to how the NLA would respond to the donation of a formed
collection.  Our approach would be to negotiate with the potential donor
prior to acceptance of the material regarding how it was to be housed
and managed, should we take it in.  

Simon is right that generally our preferred approach in these times
would be to sort, describe and store it so as to integrate it with our
existing collections, as maintaining formed collections is the more
expensive management option.  However, it does depend on a range of
factors, such as our relationship with the donor, the nature of the
material, and the proportion of material in the collection that would be
unique to the Library's collections.  

The idea of building a new wing onto the Library would be a dream for
us, even without the strict development guidelines within the
Parliamentary Triangle and prohibitions on a heritage building.  No
matter how important the collection, we could never afford the
Nicaraguan option.  Did the donor provide the money for the building, as
well as the collection?

Cheers

Margaret

Margaret E Phillips
Director Digital Archiving
National Library of Australia
email: mphillips@nla.gov.au
phone: + 61 2 6262 1140
fax: + 61 2 6273 4322 


-----Original Message-----
From: empyre-bounces@gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au
[mailto:empyre-bounces@gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au] On Behalf Of Paul
Koerbin
Sent: Wednesday, 9 February 2005 9:20 AM
To: soft_skinned_space
Subject: RE: [-empyre-] Who decides and what to preserve


Simon

Just to answer you direct question regarding what the NLA does with
donated collections, the answer would be both of the models you
highlight. We certainly do maintain a number of formed collections often
the result of donation or benefaction, see
http://www.nla.gov.au/collect/formed.html

Paul

-----Original Message-----
From: empyre-bounces@gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au
[mailto:empyre-bounces@gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au] On Behalf Of 949Simon
Pockley
Sent: Wednesday, 9 February 2005 8:47 AM
To: empyre@gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Who decides and what to preserve


Earlier, I promised a story about the importance of cultural values:

Within the Dublin Core community, a question often crops up (in the 
interstices of discussion around metadata stuff) about the degree of 
enthusiasm for metadata standards within different cultures. The Brits, 
Australians (NZ as well) and the Nordics were early adopters of the
Dublin 
Core whereas the Latin countries have very little interest in any form
of 
international standard. Why is this so?

A woman who had been a librarian in Nicaragua told me a story about a 
wealthy benefactor who had left a large collection of his books to the 
central Library. In Australia, as in most European countries such a 
collection would have been mapped against existing holdings, selected
titles 
accessioned into the library and catalogued according to subject and
then 
labelled so that they could be physically stored with like titles. At
least 
I think that's how it goes. NLA folk might need to correct me on the 
details.

This is not what happened in Nicaragua. What was important there was not
so 
much the content of the books, or their condition, but the way that
their 
owner had them arranged. A separate wing was built and the entire
library 
was displayed in exactly the order and layout in which the collection
had 
been assembled.

The things selected were not fragments of atomised content but the
qualities 
of a relationship of a man to his books.

I would be the first to acknowledge that the warriors and heroes of this

information age are the librarians with their sifting and sorting
skills. 
But by necessity we have all become librarians. Should we be talking
more 
about our relationship to this vast datascape that we keep at our 
fingertips?

Best wishes

Simon

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