Library and Information Science Commons^™

Online Access To American Diocesan Archives: Current State And Lessons For Other Repositories, Colleen Hoelscher

Colleen Hoelscher

A 1997 circular letter from the Pontifical Commission for the Cultural Patrimony of the Church said that “In the mind of the Church, archives are places of memory of the Christian community and storehouses of culture for the new evangelization.” As a tool for the evangelizing mission of the Church, it is vital that diocesan archives, as the official repositories of the American Catholic Church, are accessible to scholarly researchers and other patrons. A survey of diocesan archives examined how this category of archival repository is making information about their collections available on the internet. Diocesan websites were surveyed to …

Separating The Wheat From The Chaff: Intensive Deselection To Enable Preservation And Access, Colleen Hoelscher, Jillian Ewalt

Colleen Hoelscher

In 2014, the Marian Library at the University of Dayton completed a long overdue revision of its collection development policy. The new document more clearly defined the scope of the library’s collections, and was intended to guide new acquisition decisions. However, this new document had the unexpected benefit of providing a framework for deselection projects that enabled preservation and improved access to the collections.

This paper will discuss and analyze two of these projects, and demonstrate how the revised collection development policy laid the foundation for successful deselection outcomes. In the first case study, legacy collections of genre-based ephemera were …