[NHCOLL-L:101] re: Auxiliary collections issues

[Tim White]

>Who in a museum curates what I would call "auxillary" collections? 
>For example, the University of Michigan Herbarium has a large collection
>of reprints, many acquired from researchers who used our collection and
>then send a copy of the resulting publication(s).  It has also grown
>when faculty have retired and given their collections to the Herbarium 

At the Peabody Museum, many of us that work in the collection areas regard
these auxiliary collections as supporting documentation for our general
research collection.  
In most instances, these auxiliary collections are maintained in the
curatorial division. Material that is transferred to the Peabody archives
or our University archives is material that we don't believe is relevant to
our collections or past curators research interests.  

Many of our divisions maintain large collections of correspondence,
reprints, photographs and slides, maps, field notes, etc.  A few of our
divisions catalog this material in our museum-wide database and where
possible link this type of original documentation (e.g., a field notebook)
to the specimen or the locality from where it was collected.  I think it is
safe to say we regard this type of material as original documentation and
regard it as part of the research collection and not separate from it.  

Four or five of our Divisions maintain large reprint libraries that, like
Rich described, are in part documentation of our type collections and the
collections of past curators and faculty.  Even though many of these
publications are duplicated in the Yale libraries, our copies are often
annotated with the author's and collector's comments.  In some instances
some of our curators' and past staff's reprints are annotated with locality
information. Our goal is to make our collections as useful as possible to
the individual using the collections and maintaining this type of
information is critical to us maintaining our database as accurate as
possible.


Tim

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