Records Examples for Women Naming Project

I am now in the third week of updating authority records and bibliographic records to reflect women's actual names. I made some screenshots which you can see here, to show what the records looked like before I made changes.  Here is an example of the authority record for Mrs. George Adams before I made changes:
Original authority record for Mrs. George Adams,
from carte de visite collection at Chicago History Museum

Here is the updated Authority record, with name now listed as Adele Foster Adams:
Updated Authority Records for Adele Foster Adams
from carte de visite collection at Chicago History Museum

For some of the women's names, I found that there was already an authorized heading through Library of Congress (LCNAF).  So for those records, I had to download the MARC record for that individual, then import it into Horizon.  I would then open the MARC record imported from Library of Congress and merge it with the old record we had which did not include the woman's name.  Here is an example of an authority record that was updated with the authorized heading from Library of Congress:
Original authority record for Mrs. Frank Chanfrau,
from carte de visite collection at Chicago History Museum

Updated Authority Record for Henrietta Chanfrau,
from carte de visite collection at Chicago History Museum

I am nearing the end of my practicum.  I have completed 102 of the 120 required hours.  Next week, I will be finishing up an official blogpost update about the Women Naming Project.  It will be posted on the Chicago History Museum blog. Time has gone fast! I learned so much about research and cataloging.  This has been a good refresher on working with MARC records. It feels good to know that I have made an impact on recovering these women's names, and their histories. The difficult part is that there is still much more to do in the carte de visite collection and elsewhere in the museum's archival holdings.  Hopefully the work I have done will help future students and interns.

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