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The British Museum [Library] began to isolate sheet
maps and atlases from books in the late eighteenth
century. By the 1830s this was general practice in the
Museum, particularly in the increasing number of cases
of geological memoirs accompanying maps. Each part of
such a composite work was liable to take on a library
life of its own (with a pressmark of its own), and it
is now the devil's own job to re-establish the 'as
published' entity. Often the only way to do it is to
guess a connection from present-day catalogues, pull
the items, and compare the superseded and deleted
pressmarks on each.
Wendy Mann's and Paul Larson's priorities may sound
fine, but, if the collections they presently manage are
designed to live through more than one generation of
curators, how can they be sure that their successors
will recognise and maintain the connections? Too often
one can find that one part of such a connection has
been discarded, leaving the other as a useless
dinosaur.
If the total published work is so important, take also
the book into the Map Collection as 'associated
documentation'. If that effectively restricts open
access to it, that's probably a good curatorial
decision.
If you have physically to separate map and book, even
within the map collection, then generate a storage and
call number for each separated map which embodies the
unique accession or inventory number of the parent
book. In an archive context, for a 'removed' map, we
take the unique document reference for the parent file,
prefix it with a letter signifying 'removed maps', and
suffix it with an ordinal number to signify the first
(second, third) map removed from that file. For
example, W/H/726/1 identifies the first map separated
from file H/726. We mark the parent file, at the point
of removal, with the 'removed map' call number. A
patron surveying a map list will see immediately how to
call the parent file, and a patron examining the file
will see how to call the removed map, without further
reference to catalogues. This also alerts curators
taking decisions about items in one class of material
to consider also the associated items elsewhere. Which
is where I came in ...
HTH
Dr A S Cook
Map Archivist
India Office Records
The British Library
197 Blackfriars Road E-mail: [log in to unmask]
London SE1 8NG Phone: +44 171 412 7828
United Kingdom Fax: +44 171 412 7858
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