Expanding the Native American Collection
In LLMC’s microfiche years, its Native American Collection (NAC) was one of its most widely adopted offerings. The collection was ground-breaking in its time for both scope and depth. It was also, of course, the most economical means possible for a library to acquire wide research capacity in this high-interest field. The fiche NAC’s popularity has been echoed by our digital subscribers. Requests to digitize the complete fiche holdings of the NAC is one of the most common user suggestions that we receive.
In response, for the past decade we have been chipping away at that goal by scanning every hardcopy NAC title that we could lay our hands on. In result, a large number of the fiche NAC titles are now online. However, the bulk of the fiche titles still need migration. So we have decided that it’s time to speed up this project. Given that the processes for digitization from film have now been so much improved, and that the great bulk of the images derived from those processes are now thoroughly acceptable, we have decided that we need no longer wait for the fortuitous accessibility of print copies of the remaining titles. Instead, we have begun to methodically work our way through digitizing all remaining portions of the fiche collection.
A copy of the Table of Contents for the catalog describing the fiche NAC is accessible at http://www.llmc.com/Historical_NatAmer.asp
In this gap-filling project we are proceeding directly through that TOC. To date we have filled in all gaps among the titles described in the following sections: Basic Legal Documents, pp. 1-134; Secondary Documents, pp. 13-14; Treaties with Federal and State Governments, pp. 15-19, and Congress Generally, p. 20. At current rates of production, we hope to wind up this gap-filling process late in 2014 or early in 2015.
In addition to filling gaps relative to the LLMC fiche NAC, we are also working with the Library of Congress to supplement our online NAC with a substantial number of new titles from the LC print and microform collections. During 2014 we expect to add more than 400 titles being digitized from their print collections. In addition, we are now viewing lists of LC’s microform holdings to identify relevant law-and-governance titles that also would constitute worthwhile additions to the online NAC corpus.
All of this work complements, and is being closely coordinated with LC’s ongoing efforts toward the reclassification of their Native American holdings. Both through that effort, and also by means of LC’s constantly improving online Native American classification portal, all of these materials will be given improved visibility and accessibility. To quote Dr. Jolande Goldberg, Chief Specialist in the Policy & Standards Division, Acquisitions & Bibliographic Access Directorate of LC (and, incidentally, a valued LLMC Advisory Council member): As American Indian law gains tracking, we will need schedules that, finally, serve reference and research better. At LC we are finalizing the draft revision of the Native American KF schedules for review by the Law Library’s reference specialists and the CRS Native American law specialists. After that we will be posting it on our PSD public site for community comment. I will let you know when it goes up and send you a link. For our part, at LLMC, we will publicize that link in a future issue of this newsletter.
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