Archives: A Guide to Information Sources

While conventional wisdom holds that books cannot be judged by their covers, visitors had a chance to do just that from the most humble of volumes to the most luxurious; from the monastic manuscripts of the twelfth century to the special editions of the twentieth.

These thesauri provide standardized vocabulary for retrieving special collections materials by form, genre, or by various physical characteristics that are typically of interest to researchers and special collections librarians, and for relating materials to individuals or corporate bodies.

This directory is maintained by the Web Resources for the Rare Materials Cataloger Editorial Group, appointed by the by the Bibliographic Standards Committee, a committee of the Rare Books and Manuscripts Section of the Association of College & Research Libraries, a division of the American Library Association.