The MVZ Archives has published its first two finding aids to the Online Archive of California (OAC). Researchers can now find the Inventory to the Paul Elias field notes and the Inventory to the James F. Lynch field notes on the OAC website.
Users will notice an emphasis on geographic names. Because this data is critical to researchers, we decided to take the time to include the hierarchical structure of the higher geography. This matches the structure used in the MVZ specimen database, Arctos. The thought is that down the road, we will be able to match up entries in the database with finding aids. This will help in that process.
For those that are interested, we are using Archivists’ Toolkit to catalog our material. Archivists’ Toolkit only has the MARC 651 field for geographic names . Unfortunately, you cannot add more MARC fields to Archivists’ Toolkit, otherwise, the MARC 662 field (Hierarchical Place Name) would have served us well. We also realized that the traditional controlled vocabularies would not be as helpful to our researchers and to any future efforts to link the database. So I added Arctos as the Authority Source in Archivist Toolkit. Name authorities are critical for the integrity of our records and I feel comfortable using Arctos for that purpose.
Note: We are not exporting MARC records from Archivists’ Toolkit.