Steve Fesenmaier writes “Last summer one of the worst disasters in post-WWII librarianship took place at the Hennepin County Library – Charles Brown decided to end using the Berman/Freedman Bibliographic Database founded by current ALA prez Mitch Freedman and built by HCL head cataloger Sandy Berman and his staff. I started a petition to save it. Subsequently HCL and the University of Illinois recently signed the legal documents that provides access to the database to the public thru the ALA Archives housed at UI.
Steve Fesenmaier writes “Last summer one of the worst disasters in post-WWII librarianship took place at the Hennepin County Library – Charles Brown decided to end using the Berman/Freedman Bibliographic Database founded by current ALA prez Mitch Freedman and built by HCL head cataloger Sandy Berman and his staff. I started a petition to save it. Subsequently HCL and the University of Illinois recently signed the legal documents that provides access to the database to the public thru the ALA Archives housed at UI.
Chris Prom, the assistant university archivist, is in charge of the transfer. He recently told me that anyone who is willing to sign the sub-licensing agreement can send a CD-R to him and he will return a copy of the database. You can reach him at: [email protected].
He will be sending out a public press release by the beginning of July. I am just writing this as the person who worked with Casey Hill at New Pages, creating a petition signed by more than 100 librarians and others from around the world. I have also been asking Mr. Charles Brown and his staff about gaining the access they promised a year ago. Given what they have done to Sandy – like discard all of his books from their collection, hire expensive private investigators to find out WHO discarded them, and eventually finding NO ONE – all this after they forced him to retire ( see Revolting Librarians Redux for the full story plus a state-of-the-library article by Berman)- I have no reason to believe anything they say. Luckily Chris Prom is not like those people.
My copy was mailed by Mr. Prom today – Monday, June 9th. I have no idea how I will use it – but I will. Hopefully thousands of people, including catalogers, will acquire their own copies, and somehow use his patron-friendly subject indexing to continue the work that Berman and Freedman began so long ago. I know that LC catalogers continue to totally ignore Sandy’s many suggestions – they won’t respond to his letters in any way. They did create a new subject heading last summer in record time – mountaintop removal mining – after Sandy, myself, and other anti- MTR people in Appalachia wrote LC.
Congrats to Chris Prom, the University of Illinois Archive (also for hosting the Sandy Berman website – http://web.library.uiuc.edu/ahx/ead/ala/9701040a/berman/sanford.htm)
and Madeline Douglas, the webmaster, for fighting for Sandy – the librarian who fought for us all.
At the same time as we applaud the rescue of the databases, we should also encourage UI to make them accessible on-line as an OPAC with the bibliographic database and authority file interacting.
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