Cataloguing Creativity: Call for Papers

Cataloguing Creativity: A Symposium on Cataloguing Literary Archives

Group for Literary Archives and Manuscripts
Friday 15 November 2013 at the British Library

The Cataloguing Working Party of the Group for Literary Archives and Manuscripts has recently published its Guidelines for Cataloguing Literary Archives and Manuscripts, along with a related Thesaurus and Glossary.

To mark this event, GLAM will be holding a one-day Symposium focusing on issues related to cataloguing literary archives and manuscripts. We hope that this will provide a valuable forum for imparting information and sharing experiences through a mix of papers, case studies and discussion.

GLAM’s definition of ‘literary’ encompasses creative writing in all genres, whether or not intended for publication, including: poetry; the novel; other forms of fiction; other prose writing such as essays and letters by or relating to ‘literary’ figures; writing for drama, in the theatre, or for radio, television and film; life writing; the writing of criticism relating to creative writing; and the process of publishing or otherwise supporting the production and dissemination of literature.

We are approaching the topic of this Symposium very broadly, and are seeking contributions (of approx. 20 minutes) from potential participants which might address any of the following topics:

Cataloguing literary collections containing special formats, e.g. born-digital or hybrid archives, audio-visual archives.

Cataloguing methodologies, e.g. MPLP, in relation to literary archives.

Cataloguing and data protection in relation to literary papers.

Researcher participation in cataloguing literary archives, and interactive finding aids, e.g. tagging records; crowd-sourcing catalogue information.

Using keywords and subject indexing in finding aids for literary archives.