Making Personal Libraries More Public: A Study of the Technical Processing of Personal Libraries in ARL Institutions

The personal libraries of writers, scholars, artists, and other well-known people occupy an ambiguous place within the special collections areas of libraries that assume custody of them after their owners’ deaths. Ostensibly collections of books, they often contain letters, postcards, pamphlets, receipts, programs, and other ephemera that are more commonly found among personal papers arranged by archival standards. The pages of the volumes within personal libraries can exhibit annotations by former owners consisting of a few sparse underlining marks or, in other cases, dense marginalia that constitute a layer of manuscript materials lying atop a bedrock of published works. The . . .