Access to New-York Historical Society's Pamphlet Collection

FAIN: PC-50115-07

New York Historical Society (New York, NY 10024-5152)
Henry F. Raine (Project Director: July 2006 to August 2009)

Cataloging, rehousing, and preserving 18,000 pamphlets, including speeches, political tracts, annual reports, biographical sketches, catalogs, and sermons dating from the 19th and 20th centuries.

The New-York Historical Society (N-YHS) is seeking funding for the first two years of a four-year project to catalog and conserve a collection of approximately 36,000 American pamphlets published during the nineteenth and early twentieth century. The N-YHS library?s pamphlet collection, which includes addresses, political tracts, annual reports, biographical sketches, catalogues, and sermons, illuminates the cultural, economic, political, religious, social, and scientific history of the United States. It contains more than 5,000 items cataloged nowhere else, and is the last sizeable collection at the N-YHS that is completely inaccessible to researchers. This first phase of the project will build upon catalog records found in the Research Libraries Information Network (RLIN) and create original cataloging records for items not cataloged anywhere else, resulting in the cataloging of 18,000 items, approximately half of the collection. It will also conserve approximately 9,000 items.