Data Set of the Provisional Catalog Records for Books in the Baldwin Library of Historical Children's Literature

The Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature in the Department of Special and Area Studies Collections at the University of Florida’s George A. Smathers Libraries contains more than 130,000 books and periodicals published in the United States and Great Britain from the mid-1600s to present day. The Library also has manuscript collections, original artwork, and assorted ephemera such as board games, puzzles, and toys. The Baldwin Library is known for comparative editions of books, with special emphasis on Robinson Crusoe, Pilgrim’s Progress, Aesop’s Fables, and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The Library also has the largest collection of Early American Juvenile Imprints of any academic institution in the United States.
While many of the volumes have excellent catalog or metadata records, a number of the volumes were part of the group that started the collection and, while progress has been made, over 26,000 remain with only brief, provisional records. In addition to continuing to work through these records following normal processes, the full data set (in a spreadsheet in Excel, XLSX format) of titles from the Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature is now available. The file is of the data, where the titles were typed from cards in the 1990s with little or no additional information aside from: system number, possible date, and call number. All of these records are Provisional and there are 26,028 of them, all listed in this data set. These Provisional records are extremely brief and so are only findable through the UF and State University Library catalogs, and are not contributed to shared systems because of their Provisional status and limited value. The data set for these records is provided online for possible use in Digital Humanities or other research. Ideally, this could result in connecting to additional information sources to enrich the records for these materials and to open into a wide array of projects and future programs related to the Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature. At any rate, this is the very first attempt at sharing this data set openly to see what might be possible.