Ventura County Museum of History and Art

Purpose: Sustaining Cultural Heritage The Ventura County Museum of History and Art will update the management of its special collection of historical materials through retroconversion of card catalog records to electronic MARC (machine readable cataloging) format. The museum will enter into a consortium of museum libraries and contribute its records to three online databases. The museum will contract with the Online Computer Library Catalog (OCLC) for retroconversion of 5,000 book and monograph records and to enter the records into the OCLC WorldCat system. The museum will join the Central Coast Museum Consortium and contribute the book and monograph records to an online union catalog, making holdings searchable along with those of the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden, the Santa Barbara Historic Society, and the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History. The museum will also extend its existing partnership with the Ventura County Library by contributing book and monograph records to the online public access catalog. This is the first of several stages in a long-term plan to make the museum's library and archive collections more electronically accessible and, thus, available to a larger audience.