Library Science Core Collection for NH Libraries

Thanks to ARPA funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services a collection of 20 library science titles was selected and purchased by the staff at the NH State Library to serve as a core professional development collection for librarians in our state. 

A complete list of the selected titles is available at https://nhsl.libguides.com/librarydevelopment/LS_core_collection 

A box containing the set of 20 books will be distributed via NHSL van delivery between now and the end of March to each of the 212 NH public libraries that completed last year's Public Library Survey by the deadline. 

Cataloging records for each of these titles is available through the NHU-PAC.

Town Report Project Update

The final batch of NH town
reports ready for pickup

Back in September we began an ARPA-funded project, in partnership with UNH, to provide a permanent digital collection, accessible on the web, to town reports for all 234 New Hampshire Towns. 

That project has been a focus for the NHAIS & Technical Services section here at the State Library, as well as the Circulation staff. This week UNH staff (who have also been doing a TON of work on this project) will pick up the last batch of reports from the NHSL collections to be digitized. Over the last several months we have pulled 11,363 individual town reports from NHSL shelves and sent them to UNH for digitizing, creation of metadata, and addition to their digital archive. 

When we began this project we discovered that most of the NH Town Reports in our collection did not have item-level cataloging in our system.  There were 9,704 individual town reports in the NHSL catalog back in September. There are now 39,023 items in our catalog for 243 towns. This includes the 234 official NH towns as well as some villages and "locations" that have issued town reports in the past. In cases where a town had one name and changed to a different one, those reports (if we have them) are reflected on the record for the current name of the town.

There are currently 21 NH towns "completed" (meaning all the reports UNH and NHSL have for that town are digitized and available online. As UNH processes the reports more and more towns will be fully available online. We appreciate the libraries who told us about their town report holdings and we will be sharing that info with UNH after all our holdings are completed so that any remaining gaps might be filled in.

Town Report Digitization Project

At the Governor and Council meeting yesterday our collaborative project with UNH to add additional town reports to the UNH digital archive was approved.

NHSL staff is working with UNH staff to gather the reports already held in our collections and those that are born-digital. Once those phases of the project are complete we will be looking to fill gaps. In order to be ready to do that as efficiently as possible we would like to gather information about the town report holdings of NH libraries so we will know who may have any reports that we do not.

If you want to help, please complete this short survey (link is at end of post) before the end of November. It asks for the years (ranges please, not a one-by-one list)  for which you hold your own town's annual reports and then any other NH towns for which you hold reports. 

https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/nhtownreports

 

Digitizing NH Town Reports

Part of NHSL's Town Report Collection

One of the ARPA-funded projects the NHSL is working on is to provide a permanent digital collection, accessible on the web, to town reports for all 234 New Hampshire Towns. We are doing this in partnership with UNH.

UNH’s collection includes 15,700 digitized reports from 214 of the 234 towns in New Hampshire. It is hosted as part of their scholars archive at https://scholars.unh.edu/nh_town_reports. Since December 2020 documents in this online collection have been downloaded over 25,000 times by users from 136 countries around the world. They have a process in place and a contract with a company that digitizes the reports for them. It is a great resource!

The NHSL has a paper collection of NH Town Reports, some dating as far back as the mid-1800s. We obtain these reports each year directly from the Town clerks per RSA 201-A:18, paragraph (d): “The clerk in each town and city shall forward to the state library 2 copies each, and to the library of the University of New Hampshire one copy each, of the city or town report for the previous fiscal year.”  http://www.gencourt.state.nh.us/rsa/html/XVI/201-A/201-A-18.htm

The project we are are undertaking is to fund UNH to fill in the existing gaps in their digital town report collection. We will also be working with them to locate paper copies of reports needing to be digitized. The project will be worked on throughout the coming year (up until the ARPA grant funding deadline) and will include loading existing born-digital reports to the site and digitizing from paper those reports that are missing from the digital collection. NHSL staff and UNH staff are working on inventorying existing physical holdings so we will know if we have gaps. If we do, we will do outreach to specific towns to fill those gaps.

The NHSL catalog includes a serial record for each NH town report. We have added a link to each of these bibliographic records (with a few exceptions which I will address next) that takes you to the UNH page for that specific town. The paper holdings of NHSL are reflected as individual items on the serial records in our catalog. When we began working on this in May we realized that lots of our paper holdings were not reflected in the online catalog. Since that time NHSL staff has added 8,504 town report items to the catalog and continues to work on this (about 2,000 town report items are being added each month).

The towns that do not have links in their report records to the UNH site are the ones for which there are no digital holdings in the UNH collection. These will be the first priority in the digitizing project:  Middleton, Mont Vernon, Orange, Pittsburg, Sugar Hill, Sullivan, Surry, Waterville Valley, Webster, Wentworth, Westmoreland, Whitefield, Wilmot, Winchester, Windham, Windsor, Wolfeboro, and Woodstock. The full NHSL holdings for these town reports are reflected in our catalog.

If you would like to replace the MARC record in your local system with the one to which we have added the live link (as an 856 tag) to the digital collection, you can do so by saving the MARC record from the NHSL catalog:

1. Search the catalog for the town report you want (a keyword search for REPORT and the name of the town typically gets you there)
2. At the right side of the screen is a "Save record" option. Click that and choose the format your local system uses (MARC UTF-8 is common) and save the bib record.
   
3. Load the saved record into your local system so that it will overlay your existing record and keep your items intact. (How to do this is different in every system).