Special Collections Subcommittee meeting
November 11, 2003
Present: Toby Appel, Richard Boursy, Elisabeth Fairman, Tom Hyry, Ulla Kasten, George Miles, Jae Rossman, Martha Smalley, Libby Van Cleve, David Walls, Richard Warren

Guest: Scott Gac

Announcements:
Libby Van Cleve: OHAM received a Save America’s Treasures grant to support preservation activities. They will be making reel to reel archival back-ups as well as digital copies of audio material and analog and digital copies of video material.

Discussion with Scott Gac, Special Collections Fellow

Scott told us about his work, his interaction with the History Department and Whitney Humanities Center, and his goals for the fellowship. He confirmed our suspicion that it is somewhat difficult to get an overall feel for special collections at Yale when starting from the YUL front door. We decided to ask PIC again whether there could be a direct link to the Special Collections page from the front door. [Martha will do this.]

ARL Exposing Hidden Collections meeting

Tom reported on this meeting that he attended in September along with Alice Prochaska, E.C.Schroeder, Meg Bellinger, and Jane Gillis. Goal of this working conference was “to explore the challenges of providing access to uncataloged and unprocessed archival, manuscript, and rare book materials.” Basic question is whether to “do more to less, or less to more.” “The perfect is the enemy of the good.”

Special Collections Fair: Date is Tuesday, March 30th.  George has reserved the Beinecke mezzanine from 10:30 to 4:30.  Possibilities for publicity: various listservs, Yale Daily News, leaflets posted on campus. We will pursue this more at our next meeting.

Next meeting: Tuesday, January 13^th, 2004, 10:45 am.