The Institute of Jazz Studies (IJS) is excited to announce that it published its 200th finding aid on the Archives and Special Collections at Rutgers website. For many decades, the IJS’s world-renowned collections had many access tools and inventories ranging from spreadsheets to typed lists on binders, reflecting the evolution of archival description over the past 60 years. Since installing ArchivesSpace (the engine behind the website) and having a central location for finding aids on the website, Rutgers University Libraries is moving towards facilitating researchers’ use of all the unique collections that make our libraries shine. This tool allows the user to search across all finding aids within the Institute.
“A long time in the making, publishing the 200th finding aid to ArchivesSpace is a great milestone for the Institute,” said IJS Metadata Archivist Diane Biunno, who works behind the scenes to update the finding aids. “I am proud to have been part of the collaborative effort at IJS to improve the discoverability of and access to our archival holdings.”
These access tools are a mix of some legacy “old-fashioned” finding aids and newly created ones. The work that went into making this happen was a team effort first started by IJS Archivist Elizabeth Surles. In 2014, she developed and led a collections-wide survey to ascertain the collections’ provenance and pin down exact locations for different materials. Building on this work, the IJS now has intellectual and physical control of the collections under its care and is looking ahead to growing our descriptive footprint. These 200 finding aids are only the tip of the iceberg, as the IJS continues to create access tools for holdings such as the William “Count” Basie and Mary Lou Williams papers, two of its most robust and extensive collections.
