Special Collections Committee meeting of January 17, 2002

Present: Toby Appel, Richard Boursy, George Miles, Martha Smalley (Chair), Richard Warren, Jae Williams

Primary agenda item was discussion of the proposed Special Collections brochure, which Ann Okerson has offered to fund.  The following issues were brought up:
 

- Should brochure include only special collections that directly report to YUL, or also BAC, Babylonian Collection, etc.?  - Our preference would be to include BAC and Babylonian, but not Peabody.  We would need to get Ann's ok re. this.

- Does Beinecke have any plans to produce a brochure that would overlap in purpose with ours?  - George will check with Barbara

- Should the individual Beinecke collections (e.g., Osborn Collection) be listed as separate entities, or lumped together under BRBL? -  We think separate listings would be appropriate, unless Beinecke has plans for its own brochure.

- Who is the audience for the brochure? - The "fancy" brochure would be oriented to donors and distinguished guests.  We hope that we can use the text and some images to create a low cost version that might be would be appropriate for handing out more freely to faculty and students.  The "fancy" version would provide minimal contact information for the collections, while the "guide" version might include a  more detailed contact info sheet at the end and a brief description of available tools for identifying special collection materials at Yale (e.g., Orbis, finding aid database).

- What will the brochure include? - There should be a substantive introductory section that provides an overview of special collections at Yale, followed by entries for each collection, with an image associated with each entry.  - Martha will put together a first draft of the text, drawing from the current web site commentary.

- How will the brochure be designed? - After the text and images are in hand, we will talk with Peter Johnson at RIS. George also suggested Angie Hurlburt as a possible designer.   Our expectations are that the brochure will be similar in size to the "A Fitting Memorial" SML brochure and that the cover will be "collection neutral" - maybe a typographic design or other design not clearly associated with any one collection.  RIS has a CD of background designs that Jae scanned.

After discussing the brochure, we had a brief discussion re. the treatment of "semi rare" materials at LSF.  Committee members were encouraged to attend the CDC LSF forum on Jan. 24.   We also hope to take a field trip to LSF in the spring.

Next meeting will be on February 14th at 10:30 a.m.

Martha Lund Smalley
Research Services Librarian &
Curator of the Day Missions Collection
Yale Divinity School Library
409 Prospect St.  New Haven, CT 06511
Phone 203 432-6374  Fax 203 432-3906
Martha.Smalley@yale.edu