Organising and Cataloguing a Personal Collection with a Focus on Visibility: The Case of the Nélida Piñon Personal Collection

Abstract

Personal collections often go unnoticed in the collections of archives and libraries. The aim of this paper is to present an experience report on the technical procedures for cataloguing the Nélida Piñon Personal Collection, which includes works donated by the author to Cervantes Institute Rio de Janeiro. At various meetings during the donation process, the writer told the institution's librarian about her favourite works and themes. At her express request, a section titled 'Nélida’s Galicia' was created, which brings together the works she collected during her lifetime on the language, culture and literature of Galicia, in honour of her Galician origins. When cataloguing began, the need was identified to give visibility to the topics she preferred and which were relevant to studies and research into her life and literary work. To this end, the number of thematic sections was increased, such as Machado de Assis, Clarice Lispector, Ballet, Gastronomy and Elza Tavares Ferreira. This will give the researcher an insight into the interpersonal relationships between Nélida Piñon and her friends Clarice Lispector and Elza Tavares Ferreira, as well as her favourite writer, Machado de Assis, and two of her great passions: ballet and gastronomy. Some of these works contain marginalia (dedications, provenance marks, annotations, etc.) that allow us to glimpse the historical and social context in which the writer was inserted. Given these particularities, it was necessary to adapt the cataloguing to the linguistic and technical specificities of the collective catalogue of the Cervantes Institute Library Network (RBIC): Spanish language cataloguing, UDC, ISBD, MARC21 and RDA. The cataloguing team's methodological strategy for defining the sections was based on Nélida Piñon's favourite themes. Using the AbsysNet library management system, it was possible to classify each document processed into its respective section. The descriptive representation of the marginalia was based on MARC21, which partly meets the specific needs of the collection, as was the digitisation of the dedications. Part of the collection is already available for viewing by those interested in the subject, in the RBIC collective catalogue. This is an experience report with a qualitative approach that reflects the importance of knowing the particularities of the collection and its owner, which allows it to be categorised into sections. It is considered that the creation of these sections contributes to greater visibility of the information contained in each document in the collection.