Northeastern Illinois University serves as a depository for the publications of the State of Illinois. Our state documents are organized according to a rather unique call number system. We needed to document this system in order to assist patrons in accessing this collection, to allow library staff to add to and work with this collection, and to preserve this interesting piece of library history. This talk outlines why we decided that this documentation was necessary and how it was carried out. We also discuss the challenges of working with a provenance-based classification schemes and some of the surprising benefits that this project yielded.

Christopher Straughn is the Continuing Resources Librarian at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago, Illinois, where he has been a faculty member since 2019. He also serves as the Government Documents Coordinator and the liaison to the linguistics, TESOL, and philosophy departments. Chris completed his Ph.D. in linguistics at the University of Chicago and his MSLIS at the University of Illinois. His library research interests lie in space management and new ways of looking at metadata.

Presentation Slides

Contact Info - C-Straughn@neiu.edu