Library survey is done

Yesterday was a serious work day. I was able to make it out to a local library to get the Library Survey assignment (Lesson 4 of the NGS Home Study Course) finished. It was an interesting trip though.

First off, the library had what they termed the "Antioch Collection" downstairs in a locked conference room. Once a staff member opened the door, I then noticed that there were several locked cases for their books and was told that they don't open the cases for "browsing". They did, however have a binder with a list of what was in those cases which made things fairly easy although it was arranged by dewey number rather than by subject or alphabetical by author. In any event, thanks to the catalog, along with a brief flier of "highlights", I was able to find that the library had several family genealogies, a few newspaper collections (the oldest of which dated back to 1888), virtually no periodical collection (although it appeared they had at least subscribed to one Mayflower family periodical at one time and just hadn't taken it out of their catalog-instead of in the stacks, copies were found for free in front of the library shop), four file cabinets of various photos, newspaper clippings, event descriptions, memories, etc., subscriptions to ancestry.com and HeritageQuest, as well as a subscription to the archive of the Chicago Tribune with articles from 1985, a book on local naturalizations, lots of info collected from the local Ladies Group (mostly old minutes and descriptions of their annual plays), and quite a bit of info from the local area's Zoning and Planning Commission.

As the collection was definitely geared more towards a local history collection, rather than a genealogical collection, I'd say they have a decent group of useful information. However, even for a local history collection I would like to have seen a wider assortment of periodicals. A brief internet search for a historical society in Lake County, IL did not turn up a general group but there were several surrounding area societies whose periodicals could be nice additions to Antioch's history collection. Illinois also has a State Historical Society that puts out a periodical four times a year but the Antioch Library only had a couple of volumes of that journal. I'm not sure why since it would be my thought that the wider state historical context when used with the local areas more detailed information would provide the "whole picture" in historical research of the area. So I find this to be a big hole. But again, this is a small town one mile from the Wisconsin border and I think they do what they can and at least now I have a great description of what they have. It will be interesting to see how/if they expand upon their holdings in the future.

Big project coming up

My next assignment for the NGS home course is to do a survey of holdings and genealogy related materials at a public library. I was hoping to be able to get this one done prior to Christmas but really, I don't know where my head was on that one. So, I'm going to start this project next week after school starts up again but I was looking over exactly what needs to be covered in the survey and it's can potentially be a great tool, as well as a timely one to compile.

Here's a brief rundown of SOME of the topics to cover:

Is there a local history/genea. room/collection?
Any published genealogies/family histories? If so, are references included? References to original records?
History of the town/county in which the library is located?
Genealogical periodicals?
Access to PERSI?
Early newspaper collection?
Manuscripts collection?
Equipment? (ie. photocopiers, microfilm and fiche readers, computers and their format)
Online databases? Subscriptions?
ILL?

All references used and referred to should be cited and placed at the end of the survey in a bibliography.

I chose to survey a library about 15 minutes away from where I live, even though I have a library right next door just because I know the holdings of the closer library are pretty much non-existant. The library in Antioch, a little further, has their online catalog listing a bit more substance so I figured it would make for a better report for this project. But really, compiling library surveys for most, if not all, of the county library's would make for a great section in a locality guide (one of our previous assignments for the ProGen group). Something to keep in mind for the future.