Nélida Piñon Personal Collection: cataloguing documents from the Nélida Piñon Library at Instituto Cervantes Rio de Janeiro: a case study

Abstract

A paper given at the "Universal Bibliographic Control at the crossroads: the challenges of unifying IFLA bibliographic standards" Satellite Meeting, organised by the IFLA Bibliography, Subject Analysis and Access, and Cataloguing Sections.

The purpose of this paper is discussing some aspects of the cataloguing process of the documents from the personal collection of the writer Nélida Piñon, which was donated to the library of the Cervantes Institute in Rio de Janeiro. This collection gathers around 8,000 documents from the Humanities area and they are in several languages. Many works have dedications and origin marks, among other characteristics. The Nélida Piñon Library is part of the Cervantes Institute Libraries Network - RBIC - which has a collection development policy as well as a cataloguing and document classification system, defined for the network collective catalogue. To meet this need, a cataloguing project was developed and is being carried out under the consultancy of the Art Libraries and Information Centres Network of the State of Rio de Janeiro - REDARTE/RJ. Taking into consideration that RBIC is a network of Spanish libraries, a profile of the cataloguer's competencies was established in order to perform the descriptive representation of the personal collection of Nélida Piñon to meet the RBIC procedures, such as good knowledge of the Spanish language and culture, knowledge of other languages (English, French, German, Italian, Galician, Catalan), experience with UDC, RDA, MARC21, ISBD. However, during the realization of the project, it was observed that this personal collection presents particularities that require a more detailed descriptive representation so that the informational richness of each document is reflected in the cataloguing file and consequently in the collective catalogue. This fact led the cataloguing team to search in the specialized literature the rules and standards of descriptive and thematic representation that could meet these peculiarities of the collection. It was realised that for the technical processing of special collections, the skills of the cataloguer are fundamental and are reflected in the quality of the catalogue: a good descriptive representation allows users to access the information they are seeking. To this end, the list of competencies of the Special Libraries Association (SLA) and of the European Council of Information Associations (ECIA) was consulted to identify a series of requirements necessary for the cataloguer who works with special collections. It is observed that librarians who will carry out the cataloguing process, in addition to their academic training, need to develop competencies to work with special collections. The cataloguer must have a general culture, know how to read and analyse a document, that is, know how to verify the data needed to transcribe and describe a document. It is believed that the professional cataloguer needs to remain in constant learning, to be updated on innovations in the area of cataloguing, to be familiar with standards, policies and different methods of cataloguing and descriptive representation. This is an experience report with a qualitative focus on the development of special collections.