Jennifer, 

We have done this quite a bit in the past to describe very large and relatively homogeneous collections of published materials, primarily as a way to alleviate backlogs. The decision to describe published material in EAD has been motivated by staffing (we have more archival processors than rare book catalogers).  We also have some very large print collections that share the same provenance, so, in a sense, they are analogous to archival collections. Still, we have been trying to move away from using EAD for published materials mostly for the reasons you and Kate mention.  Instead, we have created stub MARC records from spreadsheets that we load into our ILS (not yet in Worldcat).

Here are some examples of our EAD finding aids for large print collections:

Newspapers: http://library.duke.edu/rubenstein/findingaids/americannewspaperrepository/

Comic Books: http://library.duke.edu/rubenstein/findingaids/murraycomics

South Asian Pamphlets: http://library.duke.edu/rubenstein/findingaids/southasianpams/

Beware that these finding aids are huge and may take a while to load (see previous thread on very large finding aids....). 

I would be interested if others have thoughts on this issue.

-Noah

================

Noah Huffman

Archivist for Metadata and Encoding

David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library

Duke University

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On Wed, Nov 20, 2013 at 2:13 PM, Betts, Jennifer <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
Hello all,

Are other repositories using EAD to encode book (or other published material) collections?  Colleagues outside the archival/manuscript realm have been proposing this as a way to alleviate backlog of uncataloged published material in special collections.

Are others doing this?  Concerns?  Comments?  My main concern is the published materials will not appear in a search of WorldCat and will only be found by researchers who know we have particular book collections.

Best wishes,

Jennifer
--
Jennifer J. Betts
University Archivist
Brown University
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