Accessing Accessions

Now that encoding is complete and clean-up/quality control well underway, members of the Adams Papers slip file staff have been working on enriching the information in the database in a variety of ways. One way is by providing links to the many other Adams resources already available online. I recently added links in the Accessions Database to collection guides online at the MHS website.

The papers described in the slip file represent all known Adams documents held by institutions around the world. Included are Adams-related items in many different collections at the MHS that have come to us over the years. In the Accessions Database, these documents are listed by accession number, along with the name of the collection in which they can be found. So, for example, if a collection of John Doe papers was given to the MHS, and those papers contained some letters from, say, Abigail Adams to Mrs. Doe, each Adams letter would be assigned a unique number in the Accessions Database, and the name "John Doe papers" would appear alongside those numbers.

Since they were acquired, guides to many of our collections have been encoded and posted on our website. (We currently have over 330 guides to manuscript collections online.) My task consisted of searching the Accessions Database for MHS collections with online guides and adding links to those entries. This information can now be pulled into the Adams Papers catalog. When an individual record is retrieved, a sidebar with the heading "More about this slip" includes the name of the institution holding that item and, if that institution is the MHS, a handy-dandy link to the relevant online guide. Adams Papers editors can then use the guide to pinpoint an item's specific location, down to box and folder.

For those papers in collections without online guides, I added the manuscript call number to the notes field, just to make it a little easier to track down an item in our stacks.

Now, this job turned out to be fairly challenging because: 1) many collection names have changed over the years, 2) Adams editors often abbreviated the names they were familiar with, and 3) collections can have very similar names. (Just by way of illustration, the MHS holds separate collections called: the Henry Cabot Lodge collection, the Henry Cabot Lodge papers, the Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. papers, and the Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. papers II!) Not having the time to search through so many boxes by hand, I did the best I could to identify which items belonged to which collections. If a specific author or recipient wasn't listed in a catalog record or collection guide, I used other clues for confirmation, like bulk dates, subject headings, or acquisition, as well as the information on the slip itself.

And so we press on....