Ruth C. Carter - The United States Newspaper Program: Cataloging Aspects

Volume 4

THE UNITED STATES NEWSPAPER PROGRAM

Cataloging Aspects

Edited by
Ruth C. Carter

First published in 1986

This edition first published in 2016

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1986 The Haworth Press, Inc.

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ISBN: 978-1-138-80197-4 (Set)
ISBN: 978-1-315-68235-8 (Set) (ebk)
ISBN: 978-1-138-92841-1 (Volume 4) (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-68174-0 (Volume 4) (ebk)

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The United States Newspaper Program: Cataloging Aspects

Ruth C. Carter
Editor

The United States Newspaper Program: Cataloging Aspects has also been published as Cataloging & Classification Quarterly, Volume 6, Number 4, Summer 1986.

1986 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, microfilm and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Printed in the United States of America.

The Haworth Press, Inc., 28 East 22 Street, New York, NY 10010-6194
EUROSPAN/Haworth, 3 Henrietta Street, London WC2E 8LU England

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

The United States newspaper program.

(Cataloging & classification quarterly; v. 6, no. 4) Bibliography: p.

l. Cataloging of newspapers. 2. Newspaper and periodical libraries-United States. 3. American newspapers-Bibliography-Methodology. I. Carter, Ruth C. II. Series. Z693.A15C35 vol. 6, no. 4 025.3 s 86-4828 [Z695.655] [025.3'432]

ISBN 0-86656-576-0

The United States Newspaper Program: Cataloging Aspects

Cataloging & Classification Quarterly Volume 6, Number 4

RUTH C. CARTER, University of Pittsburgh

WALTER M. HIGH, North Carolina State University

MOYRA EVANS

The United States Newspaper Program (USNP) constitutes the most geographically extensive and most comprehensive original cataloging enterprise undertaken in this country. Through grant support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, fifty states, the U.S. Trust Territories, and some fifteen national newspaper repositories will enter bibliographic and holdings records into the OCLC/CONSER database for an estimated 300,000 newspaper titles. Well over 15,000 institutions will participate in the program as catalogers crisscross the states to record holdings in public libraries, county courthouses, newspaper offices, college and university libraries, and sometimes in private hands. The end result of the USNP will not only be the vastly enhanced access to news-papers provided by an online database and numerous offline bibliographic products, but also the preservation of hundreds of titles important for research. To this end, cataloging is in service to preservation, for detailed holdings records will furnish information enabling states and institutions to fill gaps and complete runs.

Cooperation and interchange among project participants characterize the effective operation of the program. On the national level, cooperative managerial responsibilities between the Endowment and the Library of Congress were formalized in 1984 through an inter-agency agreement stipulating the respective program roles of the two federal agencies. The Endowment provides overall policy direction and grant management, while as monitor of the CONSER database, the Library of Congress provides quality control over records and furnishes technical advice to the projects.

The program was launched by grants to six repositories with extensive holdings covering the fifty states. The initial six participants included the American Antiquarian Society, the Center for Research Libraries, New York Historical Society, Kansas State Historical Society, the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, and Western Reserve Historical Society. The Library of Congress soon joined the effort as a seventh national repository, though not with Endowment grant funds, since NEH is prohibited from making grants to other federal agencies. Collectively, these repositories were estimated to hold over 50,000 U.S. titles. Entry of their records would allow the database to be built quickly and furnish a large body of bibliographic records to which state projects would add holdings. As it turns out, many of the holdings at the national repositories are either very short runs or single issues. State projects have had to enhance a large number of exisiting records and some anticipated cataloging efficiencies have been lost. Nonetheless, there was an important outcome of the work of the initial repository projects beyond the creation of records.