Posted on by Stephen Cameron

The End of the Semester

Welcome back everyone for the last update I’ll be doing this semester!

Over the course of the past number of weeks I’ve learned a lot about the inner workings of the cataloging system and how libraries work a bit more behind the scenes. At times it felt like a bit of a firehose when it came to the amount of information I had to learn about in a relatively short amount of time, but in the end I got into a good groove and was able to get, what I feel, was a good amount of work done. While I did have the general system down, I always felt like there were these farly quirky or niche things that I needed a little more guidance on (for example, in some call numbers there would be a lowercase letter here or there which signaled an incorrect call number, in other cases however, there could be. It all depended on the letter and where it was found).

In light of all that, this past week I finished up the rest of the Gomez Mexican-Mormon History collection, including all of those surprise boxes I mentioned earlier. In the lsat of the boxes, there were more copies of the Book of Mormon in a few other languages, a number of books published by the Museum of Mexican Mormon History, and minutes from a variety of conferences from the early 20th century.

After completing those, I was asked to start entering some information into ArchiveSpace regarding some unofficial newspapers from BYU called the Student Review. Among those were a couple of issues from the Student Enquirer which included this gem that I felt like I needed to include in this blog post:

All of this with the library and Special Collections has been a wonderful opportunity for me to learn and to grow in new, and definitely unfamiliar, ways. I hope you all have learned, at least a little, along with me this semester!

All the best,

Stephen Cameron

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The New Boxes

Welcome back everyone! I apologize for no post last week, but I’m back now and have a few updates for you regarding that batch of surprise boxes that we found a couple of weeks ago.

Regarding the A/V box that we had, after I had completed the inventory for it and made a list for the materials missing to properly store the contents inside, someone else in the department took the box so the proper items could be ordered. Afterwards, the box was then taken and entered into our ArchivesSpace folder that we have for the Gomez collection, so from what I understand here is that that box is now complete!

With that box done, I have continued working on the last of the boxes that we have in the collection. There have been a number of books written by Fernando Gomez and published by the Museum of Mexican-Mormon History, a number of autobiographies (such as a copy of The Life and Times of Harvey Hyrum Taylor), as well as some other histories of the Mormon history in Mexico.

Today I started working on a box with a set of the History of the Church by B.H. Roberts, and the autobiography of Junius S. Romney. While I won’t finish that today, I will be able to complete that box, as well as the last two boxes, next week.

That’s all for me this week! Until next time.

Stephen Cameron

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A/V Materials and Some Surprise Boxes

Hello again everyone!

I know in my last post I mentioned that I had finished up all the Liahona periodicals in the boxes that I had been working on, however there were a couple of other extra Liahona copies that I had to go find in the WorldCat records and enter them into the system if they were there. Alongside those two or three copies, were a couple of other miscellaneous monographs,

I thought I had finished up most of the Gomez collection which would open me up to work on the last box of A/V materials. At least, that’s what I thought would be the case. Lo and behold though, I was directed to another five boxes of materials that had been stowed under the the table of the room that I do my work in! That being the case, I have a few more items that will keep me occupied for the next few weeks. Although, we don’t know what, exactly, is in these surprise boxes, so next week I’ll have to take some time to go through the boxes and separate out what will be staying with the cataloging side of things or will be heading over to the archivists in Special Collections.

That being said, today I was able to go through the A?V box, which seems to contain a number of older VHS tapes and oral histories that had been passed along to CGU with the collection. The first step with it was just to sift through the materials and see what was in there and whether or not they have any sort of protective covering. Now that that’s done though, Next week I’ll most likely be spending time adding the A/V material into the archival finding aide, but that will have to wait until then.

As for this week, that’s all I’ve got for you. Until next time!

Stephen Cameron

Posted on by Stephen Cameron

Making Sense of the Liahonas

This week, I started working through the two boxes that contained a number of Liahona periodicals. The majority of the twenty-two bound texts ranged between 1945 and 1955, so, when it came time to start cataloging them, I had to get a refresher on how to create Local Holding Records for serials. However, before I could get to cataloging, I had to separate the Liahonas into different groupings to make the different LHR copies, and putting similar copies into the same copy groupings, To my surprise, this took a little longer to do than I had initially anticipated. Once I separated them out, it was a relatively easy, if not long, process to enter their information into the OCLC records.

Sorry it’s a shorter post this week, but I’m glad I was able to eventually finish this up! Next week, I’ll be finishing up some miscellaneous monographs that were left over before moving onto the box of A/V materials.

Until next time!

Stephen Cameron

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The Next Box and Finishing Up the Community of Christ Collection

Welcome back!

After finishing up the hymnal box last week I had a few boxes to choose from to work on next, among them is a box full of A/V material and another two are filled with bound Liahona periodicals. However, I ended up choosing another container with a number of monographs in it before going back on working on the others.

So far, I’ve found that there are a lot of books from the pre-1950s in fairly good condition. Among them was an interesting book titled “Some Suggestions for Latter-Day Saint Missionaries: From the Field of Successful Commerical Salesmanship,” which is an interesting take on how LDS missionaries should approach their missionary work abroad. As the title suggests, it seems like its an approach that utilizes a charismatic, door-to-door salesman charm to apply and teach gospel principles. If nothing else, it’s a unique take on missionary work. Among these works are nice Spanish translations of both “Jesus the Christ” and the “Articles of Faith” by James E. Talmage.

I also finished up the Community of Christ collection that I had been working on a number of weeks ago. We weren’t sure sublocation information we should be putting on the ID flags and the Aeon hyperlinks, but we ultimately figured it out, so I spent one day this week fixed up that information and officially passing the collection off to Cataloging.

Anyway, that’s it for me this week, I’ll give my weekly update on what I’m working on next week!

Stephen Cameron

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Finishing Up the Hymnals

This is going to be a bit of a shorter post, this week seemed to fly by! I was able to finish sorting the hymnals and cataloging the copies that already have records online, the other ones will be moved over to the cataloging department and they will finish up the rest of them.

One of interesting conundrums I faced while I was working through the hymnals was that there were both print books and musical score records for them. Since I was mostly working with monographs in the collections, I hadn’t come across records where I had to make a choice like this over which record would be more appropraite to sort them into. After some discussion and training, we determined that placing the hymnals we have into the “musical score” section would be the best call.

After finishing up the hymnals, I have started on the next box which contains a number of monographs from the first half of the Twentieth Century. I’ll share some more about that next time.

Stephen Cameron

Posted on by Stephen Cameron

Moving on to Hymnals

Hello everyone!

This past week I was able to finish up the box of copies of the Book of Mormon that I had been working on. In total, there were about twenty-five to thirty different languages in the collection. After working my way through those, I started the cataloging process on the next box in the Gomez Collection which contained a lot of Spanish hymnals!

What I noticed early on as I was looking through them was that, although they all had the same copyright date on them, many of the hymnals contained a different amount of hymns in them. with about half of them containing 256 hymns, while the other half only had 252. Due to the discrepency, I spent some time separating them out into a few different piles according to their hymn count, printing date, and language.

As I was sorting them, I came across one particular name that stuck out to me which, after a little digging, I believe belongs to a former LDS leader and apostle, Richard G. Scott. I can’t be exactly sure at this point, but the signs point in that direction. Here is a photo of the book!

That’s it from me this week. Until next time!

Stephen Cameron

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Cataloging Copies of the Book of Mormon

Hello everyone!

This week I have spent a majority of my time working through one of the boxes in the Gomez Mexican-Mormon History collection which contains many, many various copies of the Book of Mormon. As the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is a global church, they have sought to translate one of their most important books of scripture into a variety of languages in a widespread attempt to reach as many people as possible. As of right now, there are over 100 various translations!

With that in mind, it has been a neat experience to go through this particular box and seeing all the copies that the Gomez’s have collected over the years. So far I have come across 25, from Icelandic, Lithuanian, and Polish, to Arabic, Armenian, and Greek.

While I was working through the cataloging process earlier I realized that I needed to tweak some of the call numbers because the printing date differed from the copyright and/or the publishing date. Hopefully I’ve learned my lesson now and won’t forget in the future! There are so many little things here and there that I need to remember that sometimes it’s hard to keep track of all the small peculiarities in the system, all in all thoough it has been quite an enlightening experience!

Until next time!

Stephen Cameron

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Tweaking the Cataloging Records

Hello everyone!

This week isn’t terribly exciting regarding any form of entering new cataloging records into the library’s system, so there won’t be any updates on that end. However, on Monday I was asked if I would be able to fix a slight issue that we had regarding the Aeon links we were using on the Special Collections website. These are the links that people could use to request the books that have been uploaded into the system, so, In light of that, I spent most of this week going in an fixing up the records of the books I had input over the past few weeks.

That’s all I’ve got for today, I’ll be here for another update next week!

Stephen Cameron

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Finishing One Collection and Starting Another

After learning the general catalogining process for the items that I would be cataloging, I was able to finish up the Community of Christ collection that we had and moved onto the Gomez Mexican-Mormon Collection. This collection is what I’ll be working on for the foreseeable future since there are a lot of boxes to work through with a lot of exciting items to look at and log into the system!

Here are a few pictures from one of the books I came across as I was cataloging. It is from a self-published book by Eran A. Call that he titled La Historia de la Iglesia de Jesucristo de los Santos de los Ultimos Dias (Los Mormones).

La Historia de la Iglesia de Jesucristo de los Santos de los Ultimos Dias (Los Mormones).

This book is a brief summary of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, from its origin up to, assumed to be roughly, the date of publication. What particularly struck me in this book were many beautiful illustrations throughout the book that depict various events throughout this church’s history. Here are a couple of them:

I’ll apologize here for some of the image quality, the pages in the book are glossy and the lighting in the room made it somewhat difficult to get a picture lith less light glare in it. However, that being said the quality of the illustrations and pictures captures that Eran Call is attempting to portray in this book.

While I am cataloging part of tje Gomez Mexican-Mormon Collection, a large portion of it pertains to Eran Call, who was an LDS mission president in Mexico, and his writings as well as many of his possessions that he had that were eventually passed on to the owner of this collection. With that in mind, I think books like this are great additions for the collection as a whole and I can’t wait to see what else is in here.

Until next time!

Stephen Cameron