EPB Austro-Hungarian and Cattle Plague [obsolete collections]

Both small collections contained unbound single or multi-sheet items and were housed in yellow boxes. The first task was to rehouse the items individually into grey folders.

As neither locations had shelfmarks, and as there was no obvious reason why the items needed to remain in separate collections, both collections were subsumed into EPB D. D was chosen as some of the Austro-Hungarian collection had previously been pulled out and catalogued there and because the items were folio.

Workflow involved matching items against the Sierra record. As the titles were generally fairly similar e.g. circular, or in German or Czech, it was not always easy to identify catalogued from uncatalogued material, even when having a spreadsheet of the collection open. In both instances, the team searched for the title and limited it by year. Sometimes bibliographic records had additional information, essential when a cataloguer had used a descriptive title rather than the lettering. Having a spreadhsheet of each collection open at the same time allowed the team to track what had and had not already been found and, once the collections were completed, allowed for reconciliation between catalogued items which could not be linked to records first time round.

The former collection name, EPB Austro-Hungarian or EPB Cattle Plague was added to the former location field, as were any other numbers. For example, many of the former Austro-Hungarian items had numbers, such as A9 or G6, which referred to an original sales document. This document was stored with the items but is now in the collection files. There were also slips in the Cattle Plague boxes which seemed to provide accession numbers for some of the items, but they were not written on the items and did not match the information in the Library Accession Registers. Others had the accession number for the Royal Dutch Library written on them (42600). There were some other numbers written on the items and these were recorded to show how these items may have been sorted in the past.

Eventually the former location and former collection information will be added to the 903 fields and possibly the 773 or 830.