----------------------------Original message---------------------------- 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 Often the only way to do it is to guess a connection from present-day catalogues, pull the items, and compare the superseded and deleted pressmarks on each.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