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Connecting Users with 
Special Collections
Describing Rare Books without  
a Rare Book Cataloger
By Christa Strickler, Wheaton College (Illinois)

ABSTR ACT Buswell Library at Wheaton College in Illinois faced a 
cataloging backlog of thousands of rare materials focusing on Ameri-
can and British Protestant evangelism and missions. Cataloging staff 
used creative thinking to solve challenges such as lack of staff time and 
expertise. We collaborated with special collections staff to determine 
specific user needs, then used our knowledge of metadata practices to 
meet those needs. Many complicated items appeared in the workflow, 
but we found creative ways to make them accessible. To communicate 
the project to the rest of the library, we presented at a staff meeting, 
explaining the types of materials cataloged and sharing tips for search-
ing for them. The project significantly increased the amount of special 
collections items cataloged annually and allowed us to connect faculty 
and students with our valuable research materials.

START WITH AN OPPORTUNITY

Buswell Memorial Library at Wheaton College in Illinois faced an excit-
ing opportunity when the Billy Graham Center (BGC) Library and the 
BGC Museum transferred thousands of holdings to our special collec-
tions. These holdings comprised a vast array of materials, includ-
ing artwork, pamphlets, and rare books. The focus of the bulk of the 
collections was United States and British Protestant evangelism and 
missions, with related church history materials. We received several 
sermons preached to missionary societies, translations of the Bible 
into languages such as Sinhalese, and pamphlets celebrating the 
virtues of temperance. 



Listen and Learn Sessions  231

OVERCOME CHALLENGES WITH CREATIVE THINKING

However, opportunities such as this often come with challenges, many 
of which require creative thinking to overcome. 

One common challenge is the lack of staff time. When I arrived at 
Wheaton College in 2014, these materials still hadn’t been cataloged, 
even though the BGC had owned the materials for decades. The day I 
started, the monographs cataloging staff included me, who is respon-
sible for all the original cataloging, and two associates for handling the 
copy cataloging. Within two weeks, one associate left, and the posi-
tion was not replaced. I needed to find time to tackle the rare mate-
rials collection with only two people and numerous other priorities. 

Our solution to this problem was to reallocate resources. We add 
approximately 8,700 print monographs per year with only one copy 
cataloger. Before I arrived, the library began moving to shelf-ready 
cataloging through GOBI, formerly known as YBP. This freed up staff 
time for other projects. Cataloging staff were also spending a lot of 
unnecessary time on inefficient, outdated practices, so I removed 
unnecessary busy work and streamlined tasks by creating batch edit-
ing processes with MarcEdit. This freed up enough time that we were 
ready to begin tackling the rare books by the summer of 2017. 

We also lacked expertise. I came to Wheaton from a small Assem-
blies of God college and hadn’t cataloged anything older than Pente-
costal sermons from the 1930s. When we started the project, my copy 
cataloger had been at Wheaton less than a year and had no previous 
cataloging experience. 

One solution to lack of expertise is to find low-cost resources. 
You can find inexpensive print materials, such as The Diction-
ary of the Book: a Glossary for Book Collectors, Booksellers, Librarians, 
and Others, by Sidney E. Berger. It includes mid-length entries on 
genres and formats. When I came across items that were unusual 
to me, such as a salesman’s dummy for a biography of the evan-
gelist Billy Sunday, I could flip through the pages of the diction-
ary and sometimes find a name for the item in my hand. You 
can also find free resources online. We found the Beinecke Rare 
Book & Manuscript Library’s Rare Book Cataloging documenta-
tion particularly helpful. At the end of this paper, I’ve included a 
bibliography of resources that we found helpful. Local experts are 
another valuable resource. Wheaton College is privileged to have 



232  ATL A 2018 PROCEEDINGS

the Marion E. Wade Center, a special library preserving materials 
on British authors such as C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Dorothy 
Sayers. While their focus is on twentieth-century materials, they had 
been doing special cataloging practices for years, so we met with 
their cataloger to get a sense of some of their policies and user needs. 

Another solution to the lack of expertise is to omit what you don’t 
know. You can always return to your catalog records to improve them 
when you gain more knowledge. The standard set of cataloging rules 
for rare books is Descriptive Cataloging of Rare Materials: Books, commonly 
known as DCRM(B). We weren’t confident about following DCRM(B) 
rules without having someone check our work, so we used RDA, the 
cataloging rules that we follow for our newer materials. Another aspect 
we omitted was the collational formula, which is a notation system for 
describing the signatures in an “ideal copy” of a book. A collational 
formula might look something like this: [A]4 B-C4 D2 E-G4. Rare book 
catalogers describe the “ideal copy” of a book, then make extensive 
notations about how the copy in hand differs. We didn’t know how to 
do this and didn’t have the confidence to attempt it without training, 
so we left it out. We also omitted detailed descriptions of physical char-
acteristics, such as book bindings, clasps, and paper type. We didn’t 
know the difference between a Cosway binding and a cottage style 
binding, or between cocoa marbled papers and curl marbled papers, 
so we didn’t attempt to guess. 

KNOW YOUR USERS’ NEEDS

An important thing to keep in mind while tackling a rare book proj-
ect is to know your users’ needs. This may seem obvious, but it was a 
crucial component of our project. 

One problem that we faced was that we didn’t know our users’ 
needs. We do our monograph cataloging work in the main library 
building, which is on the other side of campus from our special collec-
tions, so we rarely interact with special collections users. To allevi-
ate this, we collaborated with special collections staff, meeting with 
them a few times to discuss users’ needs and how we might fulfill them 
with metadata. We pooled our knowledge of metadata standards and 
practices with the special collections staff’s knowledge of user needs 
to create a strategy. 



Listen and Learn Sessions  233

One user need was acquisitions data. Books coming from the BGC 
Museum had accession numbers that special collections staff wanted 
to keep. We don’t record accession numbers in our regular cataloging 
processes, so this was a new practice for us. Our solution was to use 
the 541 field (Immediate Source of Acquisition Note). We recorded the 
copy-specific information in ‡3, the source of acquisition in $a, the 
accession number in $e, and our MARC institution code in $5:

 • 541 1\ ‡3 SC-233 c. 1 ‡a BGC Museum; ‡e 92.9. ‡5 IWW

Another user need was item-specific data. Traditional catalog-
ing focuses on the manifestation level, while rare book cataloging 
often needs to describe materials at the item level, such as recording 
damage to a particular copy or recording provenance evidence of an 
item. Buswell Library is hoping to implement an automatic overlay 
project with OCLC in the future, automatically overlaying our records 
in Voyager with updated records from OCLC, so we needed to differ-
entiate our item-specific data from the data found in the OCLC master 
record. Our solution had two parts: recording the unstructured data 
in the 590 field (Local Note) and using other fields for structured data, 
appending ‡5 (Institution to Which Field Applies) with our MARC 
institutional code:

 •  590 \\ ‡ 3 SC-233 c. 1 ‡a Extensive notes by Jim Elliot throughout 
item.

 •  541 1\ ‡3 SC-233 c. 1 ‡a BGC Museum; ‡e 92.9. ‡5 IWW

We do not put these fields in the OCLC master record because they 
only apply to our specific item. We’ve also created a bulk import rule in 
our ILS, instructing it to protect data of this type in an overlay to make 
sure that we don’t lose it in our automatic overlay project. 

A related user need was provenance data. Some records corre-
sponded to materials with important former owners, and we wanted 
library users researching those people to find these items. For exam-
ple, we cataloged a Bible owned by Redd Harper, a twentieth-century 
American evangelist, and a miniature book of poetry with a book-
plate reading, “Library of Franklin D. Roosevelt.” Our solution was to 
record this data in the 700 field (Added Entry—Personal Name) with 
a $e (Relator Term) appended to explain the relationship:



234  ATL A 2018 PROCEEDINGS

 • 700 1\ ‡a Harper, Redd, ‡d 1903-1992, ‡e former owner. ‡5 IWW
 •  700 1\ ‡a Roosevelt, Franklin D., ‡q (Franklin Delano), ‡d 1882-

1945, ‡e associated name. ‡5 IWW

We used different relator terms depending on the need. The 
evidence for Redd Harper’s ownership of this copy of the Bible was 
clear, so we used the relator term “former owner” to indicate his 
relationship to the item. We weren’t as confident in the provenance 
evidence for the book of poetry with Roosevelt’s name in it, so we used 
the term “associated name” to indicate that he had an association with 
the item without claiming that he owned it. 

Another related need was for annotation data. When important 
people have written in a particular copy, we want to connect the bibli-
ographic record to those people. For example, we cataloged a copy 
of the Bible that had extensive cover and marginal notes written by 
former owner Jim Elliot, a missionary to Ecuador. Our solution was 
an expanded version of the one for provenance data. We recorded 
Elliot’s name in a 700 field (Added Entry—Personal Name), with rela-
tor terms for “annotator” and “former owner,” added a 590 field (Local 
Note) with a note about the extent of the annotations, and included a 
655 field (Genre/Form): 

 •  590 \\ ‡ 3 SC-233 c. 1 ‡a Extensive notes by Jim Elliot throughout 
item.

 • 655 \7 ‡3 SC-233 c. 1 ‡a Annotations. ‡2 rbprov ‡5 IWW
 •  700 1\ ‡3 SC-233 c. 1‡a Elliot, Jim, ‡d 1927-1956, ‡e annotator, 

‡e former owner. ‡5 IWW

The “Annotations” term came from the Rare Books and Manu-
scripts Section (RBMS) provenance vocabularies. RBMS is a division 
of the Association of College & Research Libraries, and they’ve created 
vocabularies for categories such as bindings, genres, and provenance.

We cataloged over one hundred miniature books for this project, 
and our special collections librarian wanted a way to find them all 
without separating them into their own physical location. Our solu-
tion for this was to add a 655 field (Genre/Form) with a term from the 
RBMS Printing & Publishing Terms vocabulary:

 • 655 \7 ‡a Miniature books (Printing). ‡2 rbpri 



Listen and Learn Sessions  235

Items from the BGC Museum often had an emphasis on the artistic 
value. We cataloged illustrated editions of the Bible and Pilgrim’s Prog-
ress, along with some beautifully illustrated unique manuscripts, and 
we wanted these to be findable by their artistic value and not become 
lost among all the other Bibles and copies of Pilgrim’s Progress that we 
owned. Our solution was yet again to add a 655 field (Genre/Form) 
with a term from the RBMS Genre Terms vocabulary:

 • 655 \7 ‡a Illustrated works. ‡2 rbgenr 

DO YOUR BEST WITH THE TRICKY ITEMS

Tricky items are an inevitable part of rare book cataloging. Follow-
ing are some examples of tricky items we encountered and how we 
handled them. 

One challenge we faced was materials in foreign languages. We 
received Bibles in Chinese, Burmese, and Sinhalese, along with 
nineteenth-century German books in Fraktur script, but our foreign 
language expertise was in French and Spanish. For items with Roman 
scripts, we used Google Translate, which we installed on an iPad so 
we could take pictures of the text to avoid transcription. The original 
language appears transcribed on the screen along with the transla-
tion. It’s not perfect, but it gave us enough of an idea to create subject 
headings. Items in non-Roman scripts, such as Chinese, Japanese, 
Burmese, and Arabic, we outsourced to Backstage Library Works. 
The records we received were of varying quality depending on the 
language, but they were good enough for a base record that I could 
edit to in-house cataloging standards. 

Another challenge was a biography of George Whitefield: Life of the 
Rev. George Whitefield, by D. A. Harsha. The corresponding OCLC record 
looked in order except for a large discrepancy in the number of pages, 
so the copy cataloger passed it to me. We discovered that somebody 
had removed the spine of the original book to separate the pages, then 
inserted supplementary content throughout the volume and rebound 
it. Where the biography’s text mentioned well-known people related 
to Whitefield’s life, such as William Cowper or George I of England, 
portraits of these people, cut from other books, were inserted next 
to the text. Also included was a Harper’s Weekly journal article about 
Whitefield’s hometown of Newburyport, Massachusetts. My solution 



236  ATL A 2018 PROCEEDINGS

to this was to derive a new record for the original biography and 
include a 500 field (General Note) attempting to explain the nature of 
the items, a 501 field (With Note) as an unstructured note about the 
journal article, and a 774 field (Constituent Unit Entry) as a structured 
way to link to the original journal article: 

 •  500 \\ ‡a Interspersed with plates not part of the original publi-
cation. Images of people and places mentioned in the text are 
bound next to the page where mentioned.

 •  501 \\ ‡a With: Newburyport and its neighborhood / by Harriet 
Prescott Spofford. New York, Harper & Bros., 1875.

 •  774 08 ‡i Container of (manifestation): ‡a Spofford, Harriet 
Elizabeth Prescott, 1835-1921. ‡t Newburyport and its neighbor-
hood. ‡d New York, Harper & Bros., 1875 ‡w (OCoLC)20608439

Sammelbände, or bound-withs, were another common occurrence 
in our workflow, particularly volumes of separately published tracts or 
sermons bound together. We decided to create analytic descriptions 
for each item to allow the best possible access for our library users. We 
then use our ILS’s “bound with” function to link them to one barcode. 
We also include a 501 field (With Note) in each record to indicate the 
item was bound with others:

 •  501 \\ ‡a Bound with miscellaneous sermons by C. H. Spurgeon. 
‡5 IWW

We also had difficulties with some items that we did not have the 
expertise to identify. One miniature book, only two centimeters tall, 
had a picture of a saint on every page, and a title page with the words 
“Fevrier 28 jours” and no other identifying information. We worried 
that only including that nondescript title would not be enough for 
users to identify the item without information about illustrator or 
time period. I posted some pictures of the item on the Troublesome 
Catalogers and Magical Metadata Fairies Facebook group page, and 
their expertise combined with detailed Google searching resulted in 
enough information to create a more helpful record:

 • 100 0\ ‡a Michel, ‡c (Fils ainé), ‡e artist.

 •  245 10 ‡a [Calendrier de tous les saints]. ‡p Fevrier 28 jours / ‡c 
[illustré par Michel fins ainé ; gravé par Lechard]. 



Listen and Learn Sessions  237

 • 264 \1 ‡a [France] : [publisher not identified], ‡c [1815?]

 • 300 \\ ‡a 300 unnumbered pages : ‡b illustrations ; ‡c 2 cm

 • 500 \\ ‡a Originally part of a 12-volume set. 

 • 500 \\ ‡a Engraving of a saint for each day of the month. 

 • 650 \0 ‡a Christian saints ‡x Calendar. 

 • 655 \7 ‡a Devotional calendars. ‡2 rbgenr 

 • 655 \7 ‡a Miniature books (Printing). ‡2 rbpri
 • 700 0\ ‡a Lechard ‡c (Engraver), ‡e engraver.

One manuscript we cataloged was in a language and script that we 
could not identify, but somebody had included slips of paper describing 
the item, so we did our best to create a record from that information:

 • 041 \\ ‡a amh ‡a gez

 • 245 10 ‡a [Bible portions in Amharic].

 •  264 \0 ‡a [Ethiopia?] : [producer not identified], ‡c [not before the 
middle of the 15th century]

 •  500 \\ ‡a Note inserted in volume: “A portion of the Scriptures in 
Amharic from Ethiopia. The pages are made out of animal skins. 
One column is Geez.” 

 •  500 \\ ‡a Note inserted in volume: “Detailed description of the 
passion of the Christ. Few pages about Trinity. Description of 
Mary. All in Amharic except quotations from the Scripture and 
the last seven page that are in Geez (Ethiopic). The date could 
not be earlier than the middle of 15th century because of the 
mention of King Zera Yaqob.”

We also cataloged the unpublished illustrations of a poem in manu-
script form. The solution to that challenge was to derive a record from 
the published version and make the changes applicable to the manu-
script. We recorded notes on its format and created a 787 field linking 
it to the published version:

 •  100 0\ ‡a Cleaveland, Elizabeth H. Jocelyn, ‡q (Elizabeth Hannah 
Jocelyn), ‡d 1824-1911, ‡e author.

 •  245 10 ‡a No sect in heaven / ‡c illustrated and engrossed by F. 
Schuyler Mathews.



238  ATL A 2018 PROCEEDINGS

 •  500 \\ ‡a The drawings by F. Schuyler Mathews, glued to cards 
bound by ribbon, and marked for final placement in the published 
volume. Some pencil lines for text placement still visible.

 •  787 08 ‡i illustrations for (expression): ‡a Cleaveland, Elizabeth 
H. Jocelyn, (Elizabeth Hannah Jocelyn), 1824-1911 ‡s No sects 
in heaven. ‡t No sect in heaven. ‡d Boston : L. Prang & Co., ©1891 
‡w (DLC) 21019367 ‡w (OCoLC)10646608

INFORM YOUR COLLEAGUES

Though we were doing some great work, many of our colleagues were 
not aware of the project or the work required for it, so I wanted to raise 
awareness of our work and show our colleagues how to access the 
cataloged materials. 

I did this primarily through a presentation at one of our monthly 
staff meetings. I talked about collection strengths and how those affect 
our cataloging policies. I then gave examples of some of those collec-
tion strengths, such as temperance literature, pro- and anti-slavery 
literature, and materials on the First Great Awakening. I also showed 
examples of the different genre terms they could use to find the mate-
rials, such as miniature books, antislavery literature, or hymn texts. 
After the meeting, I sent a follow-up email to the staff to explain the 
difference between searching for these things in our discovery layer 
(WorldCat Discovery) and our catalog (VuFind). I explained that much 
of the item-specific information would not display or index in the 
discovery layer, so they would need to use the catalog if they needed 
to use that metadata for searching. 

REVEL IN THE REWARDS

The most tangible reward was 
the dramatic increase in Special 
Collections cataloging. We 
started the project in 2017, and 
the amount cataloged has helped 
generate interest from the rest of 
the library:

Another reward has been an 

YEAR ITEMS CATALOGUED

2014 177

2015 144

2016 82

2017 896

2018 2311

FIVE-YEAR COMPARISON of Special 
Collections cataloging



Listen and Learn Sessions  239

increased ability to connect faculty with research materials. One of our 
faculty members is interested in the Puritans, so I would notify him 
whenever we cataloged relevant items, such as a book by the Puritan 
theologian Richard Baxter, published in 1680. 

We have also been able to connect students with hard-to-find 
items. One day I was at the reference desk helping a student who was 
writing about Christian publishing in China during the early twenti-
eth century. I was able to find some recently cataloged annual reports 
from the Society for the Diffusion of Christian & General Knowledge 
Among the Chinese, published at the time she was studying. 
By far the greatest reward for me has been to play a role in preserving 
history. When I hold a 1558 work by the Lutheran Reformer Philipp 
Melanchthon in my hands, I’m overwhelmed by the great privilege I 
have in preserving the heritage of my faith and making it more acces-
sible to others. 

ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY

“Advance Reading Lists.” Rare Book School (blog). Accessed May 17, 
2018. https://rarebookschool.org/course-descriptions/reading/.
Includes reading lists for Rare Book School courses such 
as The Bible and Histories of Reading, Rare Book Cataloging, and 
Advanced Descriptive Bibliography. 

Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library. “Beinecke Cataloging 
Manual.” Accessed June 12, 2018. http://beinecke1.library.yale.
edu/info/bookcataloging/home.htm.
Cataloging procedures from the rare book catalogers at Yale 
University. 

Berger, Sidney E. The Dictionary of the Book: A Glossary for Book Collec-
tors, Booksellers, Librarians, and Others. Lanham, Maryland: 
Rowman & Littlefield, 2016.
Includes medium-length definitions of rare book terms suit-
able for a non-specialist audience. Great for helping to iden-
tify unfamiliar genres and formats. 

British and Foreign Bible Society., T. H. Darlow, and H. F. Moule. 
Historical Catalogue of the Printed Editions of Holy Scripture in the 

https://rarebookschool.org/course-descriptions/reading/
http://beinecke1.library.yale.edu/info/bookcataloging/home.htm
http://beinecke1.library.yale.edu/info/bookcataloging/home.htm


240  ATL A 2018 PROCEEDINGS

Library of the British and Foreign Bible Society. Historical Catalogue 
of Printed Bibles. London: Bible House, 1903. https://catalog.
hathitrust.org/Record\001179750.
We cataloged some early Bibles, and this book helped us 
provide more detailed descriptions of some of them. Freely 
available online in HathiTrust. 

“British Book Trade Index.” Accessed June 12, 2018. http://bbti.
bodleian.ox.ac.uk/.
Contains biographical information on people in the English 
and Welsh book trades through 1851. Good for looking up 
details on publishers, bookbinders, engravers, etc. 

Carter, John, and Nicolas Barker. ABC for Book Collectors. Eighth ed. 
New Castle, Delaware: Oak Knoll Press, 2004. https://www.ilab.
org/articles/john-carter-abc-book-collectors.
A helpful glossary of terms. Not the newest edition, but this 
one is available for free online. 

Folger Shakespeare Library. “Category:Cataloging - Folgerpedia.” 
Folgerpedia. Accessed June 11, 2018. https://folgerpedia.folger.
edu/Category:Cataloging.
Cataloging procedures from rare book specialists at the 
Folger Shakespeare Library.

Gaskell, Philip. A New Introduction to Bibliography. [Corr. ed.]. 
Winchester, UK: St. Paul’s Bibliographies, 1995.
We didn’t use this for our work, but we kept encountering it 
as a standard text in the field.

Rare Books and Manuscripts Section. “Descriptive Cataloging of 
Rare Materials.” RBMS - Rare Books & Manuscripts Section, 
September 25, 2014. http://rbms.info/dcrm/.
Includes links to standard cataloging manuals for rare books, 
manuscripts, maps, and more.

———. “RBMS Controlled Vocabularies: Controlled Vocabularies for 
Use in Rare Book and Special Collections Cataloging.” RBMS 
– Rare Books & Manuscripts Section. Accessed June 12, 2018. 
http://rbms.info/vocabularies/index.shtml?PHPSESSID=8ba066
bf9bde0d8ba910c05e80bfdcd3.

https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/001179750
https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/001179750
http://bbti.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/
http://bbti.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/
https://www.ilab.org/articles/john-carter-abc-book-collectors
https://www.ilab.org/articles/john-carter-abc-book-collectors
https://folgerpedia.folger.edu/Category:Cataloging
https://folgerpedia.folger.edu/Category:Cataloging
http://rbms.info/dcrm/
http://rbms.info/vocabularies/index.shtml?PHPSESSID=8ba066bf9bde0d8ba910c05e80bfdcd3
http://rbms.info/vocabularies/index.shtml?PHPSESSID=8ba066bf9bde0d8ba910c05e80bfdcd3


Listen and Learn Sessions  241

Includes binding terms, genre terms, paper terms, printing 
& publishing evidence, provenance evidence, type evidence, 
and relationship designators. A must-see for terms to include 
in 655 fields. Has some overlap with LC vocabularies and RDA 
relationship designators.

Wolfe, S. J. “Dating American Tract Society Publications Through 
1876.” Text. American Antiquarian Society, November 12, 2013. http://
www.americanantiquarian.org/node/6693.

We cataloged several undated tracts from the American Tract 
Society, and this web page was essential for helping us supply 
publication dates.

http://www.americanantiquarian.org/node/6693
http://www.americanantiquarian.org/node/6693

