The Inimitable Ruth Baldwin

Bailey, Rachel

Marshall, M. (2014). The inimitable Ruth Baldwin. The Journal of the Association for Library Service to Children, 12(1), 21-26.

Summary: This article studies the children’s book collecting habits of Ruth Baldwin, a librarian by trade. The collection began on her thirty fifth birthday when her parents bought her several rare children’s books. From here, Ruth was hooked spending her Saturdays scouring yard sales and bookstores looking for books to add to her collection. In 1977, she sold her 32,500 collection to the University of Florida and was appointed as curator of that collection.  Ten years later, there were over 100,000 volumes in the collection. Although Ruth has since passed, the Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature is still going strong.

Evaluation: I found this article intriguing. It was interesting to see how and why the collection began. The acquisition of more and more books pretty much became an obsession for Ruth. Probably the most peculiar thing was that although Ruth loved to collect children’s books, she really read them.

Librarianship in Practice- Making Personal Libraries Accessible: The Example of the Robert Menzies Collection.

Bailey, Rachel

Stone, C. & Berryman, J.  (2014). Librarianship in practice- Making personal libraries accessible: the example of the Robert Menzies collection. The Australian Library Journal, 63(3),       238-246. Doi: 10.1080/00049670.2014.915499

Summary: This article addresses a relational database mapping technique librarians at the University of Melbourne used to organize Robert Menzie’s (former prime minister of Australia) personal library.  From the process, library staff learned that organizing a personal library is much more complicated than indexing and cataloguing items in a traditional library.

Evaluation: I found this article interesting. It made me think how fun and challenging it would be to manage a collection at a personal library. I like how each book or artifact in the collection can be tied back to Menzies’ interests social network or big events in his life. Online access to the collection can be found at www.menziescollection.esrc.unimelb.edu.au.