I want to thank the 8 - 10 people who responded to my inquiry regarding how
much of their annual new receipts come from the depository program and whether
or not they found the Marcive records for maps worthwhile as a source of
cataloging records. Basically, I got replies from moderate-sized (Central
Washington State, Kent State) collections to large collections (Arizona State,
Univ. of Kentucky) and found that the majority had very high percentages of new
receipts come from the depository program (ca. 85-95%), which doesn't really
surprise me knowing that typically most institutions do not give much, or any,
funds to heads of map collections for purchasing materials and gifts come and
go. We are fortunate here at Penn State to be collecting via several routes,
one of which is a comparatively decent budget for map purchases, but also an
active campaign to contact Chambers of Commerce and Visitors Bureaus that bring
in titles each year, gift donations from time to time, and a long-standing high
participation rate in LC's Summer Projects. I forwarded a rough guesstimate to
my administrators of approximately 70% of all our receipts coming from the
depository program (I stress guesstimate here, no formal counts have been kept)
and this allowed decisions to be made regarding the use of Marcive map records.

I truly want to thank those of you who gave me very direct warnings or
otherwise pointed out weaknesses in the quality of some types of Marcive
records, we will be sure to adopt these "red flags" into our workflow
procedures as best as possible!

Thanks again to all of you who provided numbers, notes on quality of Marcive
records, and even offers of numbers after I'd completed this little assignment!
You guys/gals are great!!!

Paige
Paige Andrew
Faculty Maps Cataloger
   and Associate Librarian

Paige Andrew <[log in to unmask]>