ACRL College & Research Libraries News

Association of College & Research Libraries

Computerized access to a chapbook collection

By Judith E. Endelman Assistant Librarian, Lilly Library Indiana University

and Diane K. Bauerle Technical Services Assistant, Lilly Library Indiana University

In 1983 Lilly Library, the rare book library of In- diana University, received the Elisabeth Ball collection of children’s literature. This collection, considered by many to be the finest collection of children’s literature still in private hands, was begun by Elisabeth Ball’s father, George Ball, one of the five Ball brothers of Muncie, Indiana. Over many years, father and then daughter devoted a great deal of care and attention to building up the collection. Following Elisabeth Ball’s death in 1982, the books and manuscripts were left to the George and Frances Ball Foundation. After weighing many factors, the foundation selected the Lilly Library to be the recipient of the Ball library. Of the 14,000 books and approximately 1,000 manuscripts which the library received, approximately two-thirds were books for children. One of the Balls’ collecting interests was chapbook literature, and their collection of two thousand chapbooks is among the largest collections of its kind. While many of the chapbooks they collected were written for children, a large number were clearly intended for an adult audience. Most of the Ball collection chapbooks are English with a good representation of American imprints, and a few French titles.

The word chapbook is a 19th-century term used to describe the popular literature formerly circulated by peddlers, hawkers, or chapmen (hence the source of the term) consisting chiefly of small pamphlets of popular tales, ballads, tracts, and so forth. Chapbooks were small and easily transportable, usually consisting of eight, sixteen, or thirty- two pages. They were generally cheaply printed with bad type and worn, crude woodcuts. The badly drawn picture of the knight on horseback that adorned the cover of the tale of Guy, Earl of Warwick (see cover) might also appear on the cover of Sleeping Beauty or Cinderella. Their price was low—usually between one and five pennies. Typical subjects included legends, ballads, fairy tales, dream interpretation, or sensational tales of crimes and criminals. By the mid-19th century, however, chapbooks often did not meet all the criteria of the classic definition. As patterns of distribution changed, chapbooks became part of the stock of the news agent, the bookseller, and the toy store owner as well as the peddler. To appeal to changing popular tastes, chapbook design changed as well. Some were relatively elaborately produced, sometimes with a hand-colored frontispiece and a substantial cover. These upscale chapbooks fetched a higher price as well. The chapbook was finally killed in the late 19th century by the development of newer popular literature formats—the gothic novel, the penny dreadful, the cheap newspaper, and the magazine.

Although chapbooks were printed and sold by the thousands, very few of them have managed to survive. The inventory of one late 17th-century London publisher, for example, listed nearly ten thousand inexpensive books ready to go out. According to historian Margaret Spufford, their poor survival rate is due in large part to the fact that chapbooks along with the rest of cheap print served a secondary function of supplying the very real need for toilet paper.¹ Some of those that managed to stay out of the privy can be found at the New York Public Library, Harvard University, and the National Library of Scotland, Lauriston Castle Collection, which maintain some of the largest chapbook collections.

Lilly Library’s budget and staff are not sufficient to have enabled us to consider full cataloging for every item in our chapbook collection. Yet library staff members were aware of the great research value of this collection and were anxious to provide access to the material. To catalog the chapbook collection using AACR2 with catalog copy input to OCLC, our normal procedure, would have been an expensive and time-consuming project. Few chapbook titles are online—in OCLC or RLIN— and bibliographic searching would have been slow and costly. The cost to catalog the collection would have probably been close to fifty dollars per title. Given the library’s cataloging backlog, the collection may have remained uncataloged or partially cataloged for many years.

In the pre-computer era, the library might have considered producing a short title list of the collection, a procedure often used to produce relatively immediate but often inadequate or limited access to a group of pamphlet or ephemeral materials. The Lilly Library staff chose instead to develop a computerized index to the collection using database management software, dRase II. When the project was initiated, Lilly Library had just received an IRM–XT. The chapbook index was one of the library’s first computer projects. Ry using a computerized index we hoped to reap a double benefit—faster and less expensive processing for the library as well as better access for our users.

We chose dBase II as the database management system for several reasons. It is easily available and fully compatible with our IBM-XT. Its general popularity would ensure that staff could be found who already had some experience with the program. Most importantly, its two levels of functioning provide a necessary flexibility. Direct manipulation of the database using the program itself can be used for smaller, less complicated projects, while the built-in programming language allows for the development of customized programs designed to run specialized systems. We chose the latter option for the chapbook project, designing two separate, menu-driven programs to input data and search the database. This option has many advantages for us. Designing a customized program eliminates the need for extensive staff training in dBase II. Users only have to follow the onscreen instructions to use the system. Specialized programs can serve as a kind of buffer to protect a database, whereas direct manipulation of a database by an untrained operator can result in damage to it. Moreover, by separating our Maintenance System (used for adding and editing records) from our Report System (used for searching the database) we further protected the system so that individuals not trained to add or edit records cannot accidentally enter the system.

Because the chapbooks would remain within their own self-contained system we were not bound by normal cataloging conventions, MARC format, AACR2 rules, or Library of Congress classification schedules or subject heading terms. We used one classification number for the entire collection with an item number to identify each individual chapbook. The entire machine readable file will be cataloged and input to OCLC according to MRDF (machine-readable data files) format.² We used a special subject list that had been developed for the Harvard chapbook collection, modified slightly for our purposes.

Before designing our record format we read widely in chapbook scholarship and discussed our project with faculty at Indiana University who have an interest in chapbooks. The elements we chose to include were selected by consideration of the kind of research likely to be done with the collection and the access points that would be important to users. Our record format includes thirteen fields, nine of which are indexed and can be searched and four which are not. The nine indexed fields include call number (actually an item number), author, title, uniform title, country of publication (with London being considered a country to enable researchers to isolate London from provincial English publishers), city of publication, publisher, subject, and date. Up to three of these fields can be searched simultaneously, allowing a user to obtain a list of all the Cinderellas published in London before 1820, for example. The four additional fields included in the record (but not indexed) require some elaboration. The date source field gives the citation to the source that enabled us to date the chapbook. Since most chapbooks are undated, we have established dates from consulting chapbook bibliographies or publishers’ directories that usually provide a range of years the publisher was active. Fields for secondary place and publisher allow us to record this information for the many chapbooks that may list more than one printer or publisher or may list one publisher but more than one city.

The comments field allows for recording additional information about the item. Typical comments may include a note about the book’s physical makeup, the fact that there is a publisner’s advertisement on the cover, that the book contains a second story not included in the title, or that the item is a variant of another item in the collection.

Although the system is quite simple to use, it is necessary to have specifically trained personnel as well as various types of documentation to guide these people. For this purpose, we have prepared a series of manuals. The users’ guide contains general information on the database, search and output options, as well as the explanation of the date source and subject abbreviations. The users’ guide is kept in our reading room and is intended for use by patrons who request searches. The searchers’ guide is intended for use by the library’s reference staff who will perform searches for patrons. The workform guide has been prepared for the cataloger with complete information on definition decisions and details on how to fill in the workform. The Maintenance System guide is for the staff member who inputs new records into the system. This also explains some simple dBase II procedures. For example, record deletion is performed directly through dBase II and not through our special program. Complete program listings are also maintained, in case future modifications are required.

The two great advantages to this system, that it is efficient and relatively inexpensive to produce and that it provides better access to the materials than conventional library cataloging, should recommend its adaptation to similar collections of pamphlets or ephemeral materials. By customizing the dBase II program we have produced an index that can be used by almost anyone. Moreover, with only slight modifications this system could be used to index pamphlets, sheet music, photographs, or other special collections once accessible only by short title lists. Microcomputer and database software can provide a much needed solution to the problem of handling such special collections.

Readers who would like more information about the chapbook project or would like to see sample records are encouraged to write to us at the Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405.

Editor’s note: This article is based on a paper presented at the Popular Culture Association annual meeting in April 1985.

Retrospective conversion in music

A national plan to promote the creation of bibliographic records for music materials not yet represented in national databases has been developed as the result of a national conference held last July in Wayzata, Minnesota. The plan offers guidance to libraries embarking on RECON projects and to funding agencies considering applications for assistance, and furnishes a means for coordinating independently supported RECON work and making the resulting records available to the music library community at large.

Two organizations took the lead in developing the plan: REMUS, a committee of the Music OCLC Users Group, and the Associated Music Libraries Group, which currently consists of seven large research libraries. At the Wayzata conference, sponsored by a grant from the Council on Library Resources, a Joint Committee was created to draft a plan and oversee its implementation. The committee is composed of delegates from REMUS, the Associated Music Libraries Group, the Music Library Association, the International Association of Music Libraries (U.S.), the Association for Recorded Sound Collections/Associated Audio Archives Project, the Library of Congress, OCLC, RLG, and WLN.

The new national plan gives high priority to the conversion of records for printed music, recorded music, and music in microform, including serial publications. Next in order of importance are books and serials about music, followed by moving and fixed image materials, archival materials, and manuscripts.

Full details of the plan appear in an article by John H. Roberts in the Music Library Association Newsletter, no. 60 (March/April 1985), pp. 10-11. A copy of the Wayzata conference proceedings, Retrospective Conversion of Music Materials, may be obtained from the Council on Library Resources.

Notes

1. Margaret Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories (London: Methuen, 1981), pp. 48, 92.
2. Machine-readable Data Files Format(Dublin, Ohio: OCLC, 1984).