The UCLA Library has received a $750,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to catalogue more than 55,000 rare books and make them more accessible to users. The project will involve two concurrent efforts focused on rare books in the Charles E. Young Research Library Department of Special Collections, claimed to be one of the leading collections of its kind in the country.
The initiative seeks to promote the learning, research and creation of new knowledge by greatly improving online access to information about rare and unique books. The efforts are expected to make the books more visible and useful to scholars, both at UCLA and around the world.
One effort will create online catalogue records for about 25,000 items in a variety of languages and subjects that currently have no online record. Many of them were acquired before UCLA holdings went online in 1977. The other effort will address a cataloging backlog involving more than 30,000 items acquired since 1977. This will enhance the existing online records to include more complete bibliographic information. The catalogue records will be loaded into the UCLA Library Catalog (catalog.library.ucla.edu) and also into the national database OCLC/WorldCat.
The latest project is part of a larger effort the UCLA Library to address the widespread problem of 'hidden collections.' Research libraries across the country have extensive backlogs of rare books, manuscripts and archives, and it is a major challenge to find staff and funding necessary to catalogue and process these materials.
The library had created the Center for Primary Research and Training in 2004 and the Center for Primary Research and Training Plus in 2007, which was also funded by a grant from the Mellon Foundation. Through these programmes UCLA graduate students receive training in archival methods to organise and describe unprocessed archival collections in their areas of interest. This makes the collections more accessible to all users and gives students experience with primary source materials. It also provides opportunities to identify possible topics for student theses or dissertations.
