Fig. 117.—Storage Box for Pamphlets, Letters, etc. ([Section 306]).
307. Prints, Photographs and Maps.
307. Prints, Photographs and Maps.—Unframed, unmounted “illustration” material, in which are included prints, illustrations, photographs, maps, and broadsides, requires separate and careful filing. In the first place it should be, so far as possible, mounted on “nature,” “sultan mecca,” or similar mounts of uniform size. This applies particularly to prints and photographs, and is the best means of ensuring their preservation and ease in handling and consulting them. They then need close classification by one of the existing systematic schemes to line on so far as may be with the classification of the books; and it is often necessary to expand a classification considerably to differentiate the almost innumerable sub-topics which may form the subjects of pictures. Such expansion is skilled work and should be done only by an expert classifier. An examination of the classification proposed for local photographic surveys in Gower, Jast and Topley’s The Camera as Historian, 1916 (Sampson, Low), will show how minute a classification photographs demand. Each mount should bear a label, in the top left corner preferably, giving the class-number, the subject, and other particulars (see the sections on Photographic Surveys, [433], etc.). The filing may be in classification order in boxes which will lie flat on the shelves; and the most economical boxes are those made of the stoutest material compatible with lightness, such as cardboard covered with rexine, pegamoid cloth, etc.; heavy boxes of wood are awkward to handle and should be avoided. Better than boxes, because of the ease of consultation and insertion permitted, is a vertical file in drawers. In this the prints are inserted loosely like cards in a card-index, and no lifting and little handling are necessary to find any given print. For vertical filing the mounts should be the stoutest available, and a further protection is to use folders to hold groups of prints—one to a topic as a rule. The projecting edge of the folder may bear the topic number.
308.
308. Maps do not fit readily into the vertical system, and are troublesome material as a rule. Several solutions of the map-filing problem have been suggested—rolling them and inserting them in tubes in a cabinet on the principle of the umbrella stand; mounting them on spring rollers and fixing them over bookcases where they can be drawn down to be consulted exactly as a blind is drawn; and an ingenious method devised by Mr G. T. Shaw, and described in Public Libraries: their Organization, etc., 1918 (Library Association), is worth examination. For the many small maps that all libraries possess, flat filing in such boxes as [Fig. 118] depicts is probably the best. Single sheets of the Ordnance Survey, or other similar maps which are much handled, should be mounted on linen or some similar material, and an additional protection from tearing is to bind them with tape, which may be done by folding the tape over the edges and running them round with an ordinary sewing machine.
Fig. 118.—Box for Filing Prints and Maps ([Section 308]).
309. Newspaper Clippings.
309. Newspaper Clippings.—The vertical file is an excellent instrument for dealing with newspaper clippings. These, in the case of matters of temporary interest, may be dropped into classified folders. For clippings which it is desired to keep, it is better to provide a mount, which may be of paper of sufficient substance to bear them, and paste them down, writing in the top left corner the class-number, subject, source and date of the clipping. The older methods of filing clippings in newspaper-cuttings books, or in any form of guard book, have the disadvantage of inflexibility, want of rational means of indexing the contents, and occasion reference in course of time to several volumes for matter on any subject.