ALEG

Introduction

The Lu Rees Archives bring a large, valuable, popular and specialised collection to the ALEG project. Aside from well over 5000 articles, reviews, obituaries, award notices and autobiographical and biographical notes, the Lu Rees archive contains a computerised index of:

• 131 descriptions of artwork
• 124 descriptions of audio recordings of authors/illustrators commenting on their own or others works
• 2427 descriptions of correspondence
• 13 descriptions of book dummies
• 54 descriptions of dust jackets
• 48 descriptions of exhibition material
• 66 descriptions of printer's galleys
• 265 descriptions of manuscripts in preliminary or final form
• 433 descriptions of photographs
• 36 descriptions of posters
• 1249 descriptions of promotional material
• 131 descriptions of programs
• 44 descriptions of research material: background resources for an author/illustrator's work
• 61 descriptions of transcriptions of talks
• small numbers of descriptions of contracts, poetry, plays, short stories, slides, videorecordings, reference plate lists

A further 5000 items are to be added to the index over the next year.

The Lu Rees Archive is currently maintained on a set of Filemaker databases which are accessible only from one ageing Macintosh computer. Data from the databases is manually extracted to produce consolidated author files (cut and paste into Word).

Moving this material into ALEG would seem like a 'win-win' for both Lu Rees and ALEG, providing coverage of an exteremely important area for ALEG whilst offering opportunities to Lu Rees to allow their archive index to be accessed by a broader community and remove their dependence on an ageing computer system.

But much of the archival items described above are not "core" ALEG material. Some of this material could be (and is) represented in a consolidated manner by the NLA RAAM facility, but most of it would not be representable in such detail in either ALEG (as planned) or RAAM, requiring Lu Rees to maintain their existing system.

The rest of this document explores a path whereby all of the Lu Rees archive could be represented in ALEG with no loss of functionaility or granularity

Proposal for housing Lu Rees Archive Items in ALEG

Many of the Lu Rees index records describing published articles, scripts, poems, short stories, reviews, obituaries, award notices and autobiographical and biographical notes can be represented in the proposed ALEG structure, and identified appropriately as having been sourced from Lu Rees and will be maintained by and added to by the Lu Rees subject experts.

The 'other' category of material (in the list shown in the Introduction above) could be represented as a new archival Item entities with the 'types' and 'attributes' shown below:

Item Type	Attributes
	Author Reference	Work Reference	Item Description	Item Date	Item Author	Citation	Other Attributes
Artwork	Y		Y		Y		media, number of pieces
Cassette of author's/illustrator's talk	Y	Y	Y	Y			?
Contracts	Y		Y	Y			party one of contract, party two of contract, contract pertaining to
Correspondence	Y		Y	Y		Y	correspondence from, correspondence to
Dummy	Y	Y	Y		Y
Dust Jacket	Y	Y	Y
Exhibition Material	Y		Y	Y	Y	Y	exhibition title
Galley	Y	Y	Y
Manuscript	Y	Y	Y		Y
Photograph	Y		Y	Y			photographic subject
Poster	Y	Y	Y	Y			title, producer
Promotion Material	Y	Y	Y	Y			title, producer
Program	Y		Y	Y			title
Reference plate lists	Y	Y	Y	Y
Research Material	Y	Y	Y	Y
Slide	Y		Y	Y			photographic subject
Transcript of Talk	Y	Y	Y	Y			location
Videorecording	Y	Y	Y	Y			producer, source of broadcast

All types have 3 additional attributes:

1. Reference number
2. Date added to the archive
3. Restricted access flag

Material held as archival items would always be linked to the ALEG 'name' entity, and sometimes, as indicated in the 3rd column in the above table, to an ALEG 'work' entity.

When ALEG was showing an author or work which had archival items associated with it, the user would be prompted to click on a hyperlink which would display all the archival items, grouped by the above categories.

The attributes in the archival items would not be linked to other ALEG topics, nor would the archival items be searchable.

Format

It is proposed that this information be stored in EAD (Encoded Archival Description) format with a single collection for each Lu Rees' author. The information about the archive items will be maintainable using a web interface which does not require the maintainer to know the detailsof EAD or XML.

Conversion

The Lu Rees archive records can be dumped from the Filemaker databases and imported into the ALEG system quite simply. There may be some minor issues in identifing ALEG names and works to which the archival item records should be linked.

Issues

• Whilst not wanting to divert the bibliographic focus of ALEG, are there other archival items which we should accomodate?
  MLA: Yes - unpublished play scripts - talk to Kerry

• Do we expect the long term future of this type of material to be in a separate specialist archival resource which can be hyperlinked from ALEG?
  MLA: Yes - but with growth of use of EAD to describe archival resources, may need to leave the door open to Z39.50 etc interrogation