[Publib] Re: Genealogy Collection Questions

[Andy Barnett]

At 10:19 AM 3/11/2009 -0400, you wrote:
>1. Do any of you make available to the public genealogy materials that you 
>don't actually own? i.e., do y'all own all your materials that your 
>library houses?
No. Donate it and it is ours. We add, discard or sell at our discretion. We 
do allow the local genealogy society to house a file cabinet of their 
materials here, but that is not a public file. Not our material, just 
stored here for their meetings.

>2. Additionally, how many of you have a separate room for the family 
>history section? Do any of you keep those resources in the public stacks 
>with the rest of non-fiction? We're considering the second option, but 
>we'd like to get some perspective from other librarians.

We have an area, but like the YA area, it is a collection/browsing area - 
not a meeting room or club house, but a multi-use area, where a collection 
and affiliated items (indexes, microfilm and readers, tables) are kept.

The genealogy collection has all our genealogy related  materials, from how 
to books to a few reference items. We have made just about everything in 
that collection circulating. Though much of the material is expensive and 
specialized, we wanted to share it, especially within our shared system. 
Since we have great support from our local genealogy society, that amounts 
to about 14 shelves of books. We re-classed most of it, so that all the 
German genealogy books are in 943, Irish in 941.5 and Internet in 004.6. 
With that many books, putting everything under 929 would not have shelved 
like-with-like enough to satisfy us.

The local history collection is separate and reserved for material about 
our county. If we have circulating copies of those, they are shelved in our 
non-fiction collection.

Truly rare items are kept in secure storage. Cataloged, but secured, with 
no public access.



Andy Barnett, Asst. Director            McMillan Memorial Library
490 East Grand Ave. Wisconsin Rapids, WI  54494
                 www.mcmillanlibrary.org
Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that 
matter.  -  Martin Luther King, Jr.