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Basque Studies Program Newsletter · Issue
52, 1995
Leading the Way
An Interview with Kathryn Etcheverria, Director
of the Basque Cataloging Project
by Linda White
In February 1994 the Basque Cataloging Project began
with the goal of cataloging 10,000 volumes located in the
Basque Library. Now, five months from the end of the
project, over 7,500 books have been cataloged, and the
outlook is bright for reaching or exceeding the original
goal. The first six months of the project were difficult
because of the learning curve involved in working with
materials in a non-Indo-European language. Catalogers could
not be hired with a previous knowledge of the Basque
language, so considerable time and effort were spent in
becoming familiar with Euskara, the Basque culture, and the
publishing conventions of a different
society.
Kathryn Etcheverria has headed the project since
funding became available (on an HEA Title II-C grant), and
she has written an article for this issue of the Newsletter
on the project, the process, and the staff. (See page XX)
She also consented to be interviewed here to give her own
perspective on this unique collection and the two years of
intensive effort to catalog its
materials.
Q: As a librarian, what interested you about the
project?
I had worked with collection before and I knew a
little about it. I had learned to appreciate some of its
unique aspects, and was looking forward to being involved
again. Once I learned what the project was all about, I knew
we could do it, despite any challenges that
arose.
On the personal side, my husband is Basque, and I
enjoy learning about the Basque culture and language. I
think the beauty of this program is that it allows you to do
that. Even if you are close to Basque people, or live with
them, you may not learn much about the culture. Many Basques
in this country are working so hard to assimilate and become
part of the American culture that they have little time for
learning about their roots.
Q: What was the most difficult aspect of taking on
the directorship of such a project?
The design of the project and the request for funding
was done by someone else (who moved on to another position
before the grant became a reality). I had to spend
considerable time trying to comprehend the goals and assure
myself that I could carry them out. In addition to that, I
worked alone on the project for three months before anyone
else was hired. That was hard. I talked to myself a
lot.
Furthermore, once we had a cataloging crew together,
we were bound by standards both in cataloging and within the
wider library milieu. We had to maintain those standards and
try to stay abreast of what was happening in the library
world in general to assure the highest quality on the Basque
project.
Q: Was the lack of Basque language a problem for you
and your catalogers?
Yes, it was at times. However we decided not to allow
ignorance of the language to hold us back. We had the
cataloging expertise, and because of the proximity of the
Basque Studies Program we were able to bring the language
skills of Marcelino Ugalde, Linda White, and others to play
in the project. They were on call, basically, to help us
decode the mysteries of the language in any given
work.
Q: What was the most surprising thing you learned
about Basques while working on the
project?
This really didn’t surprise me because I’ve
been around Basques a lot, but the beauty of actually
working with Basque people, Old World and New World alike,
was a real plus on the project. They were always there, they
always followed through. They were so reliable, I began to
take them for granted! And on a personal level, they were
all positive and their presence was great for
morale.
It was always interesting to talk to them about the
language and to ask them questions about the culture. They
would stop whatever they were doing and fill us in on this
aspect or that aspect of culture, history, grammar,
etc.
Lulu Gabikagojeaskoa, Marcelino Ugalde, Juan
Ibarguren, and Lisa Tipton Corcostegui were four of the
Basques and Basque-Americans we met. Marcelino has been
working with the Basque Library for years as a Library
Assistant, and the others have all contributed to the
project in various capacities.
Q: How did you interact with the Basque Studies
Program during the period of the
project?
We utilized members of the Basque Program steadily as
our resource people, not just for language, but for cultural
issues as well. In addition, publishing is different in the
Basque Country, and we often had to ask questions about who
the publisher was and where the book was actually produced.
Sometimes a different script or font would be used in a book
and we would need help deciphering it. (The famous
“Basque font” was sometimes difficult to
read.)
Also the coffee pot was always on in both locations,
and we often met to encourage each other and to forge some
friendship ties that will last forever.
Q: If people at other library locations want to know
what we have in our library, how do they do
it?
Nevada has an online catalog called NEON. Users at
other libraries in Nevada, the U.S. and throughout the world
can access this catalog via Telnet by typing “Telnet
NEON.” For details, anyone interested can ask their
local librarian for help in reaching us via a library
terminal or their own home computer.
Q: How much of the Basque library collection will
they find online?
Roughly, over 13,000 titles are available online.
This is bibliographic information, not complete text, of
course. Over half those titles were processed by the current
project. Those titles are mainly monographs (or books).
Magazines and serials were not part of the project, and for
those titles a person must contact the Basque Library the
old fashioned way to find out what the holdings are. Also,
the Basque Library has other materials that were not part of
the cataloging project, such as maps, flags, posters,
ephemera (pamphlets, catalogs, etc.) and realia. These
materials are available for viewing by patrons on site, but
ordinarily they are not allowed to leave the
building.
The preponderance of the collection (69%) is in the
Spanish language. The rest of the collection is divided
between Basque and French (about 12% each), and then English
language books would rank as the fourth largest group. There
are also books in German, Japanese and Fang (an African
language)!
Q: What was the biggest challenge with regard to
working with books in Euskara?
The existence of pseudonyms and nicknames was a real
challenge. So many Basque writers use nicknames on their
books and we had to determine who was who. Also the place
names in their variant spellings were not familiar to us.
Library of Congress has a subject heading for the province
of Gipuzkoa but not for every little village in Gipuzkoa.
Place names established by the Library of Congress have
usually been with the Spanish name or spelling. When we
establish them, we try to use the Basque spelling (such as,
Gipuzkoa instead of Guipúzcoa).
Some of the books were actually about the history of
little villages, and we had to figure out where they were so
we could provide the proper information for the permanent
record.
Q: Why was it important to catalog these Basque
books?
The Basque Library collection is so unique that its
value is inestimable. Scholars come from around the world to
use the materials in this collection. We cannot depend on
other libraries or the Library of Congress to provide
cataloging for this material, as is often done in public
libraries, because no one else has it. Prior efforts to
catalog parts of the collection were successful as far as
they went, but they could not handle the sheer volume of
materials, and they could not dedicate total resources to
the project. This grant allowed us to do that. We have all
learned to work with the Basque material by just doing it,
by hands-on experience, by asking questions when we
didn’t understand something, and by relying on our
friends in the Basque Studies Program to help us with
language questions. And thank goodness for the
Basque-English English-Basque Dictionary! It made the whole
process seem so much more feasible.
Another reason cataloging these books is so important
is that we are in the Information Age. Everything is going
online, and this is the optimum time to be doing this. Now
not only scholars at Nevada can find what they need, but
scholars across the country and throughout the world can
“browse the shelves” of the Basque Library.
Creating a machine-readable record for all these materials
is very important, and this project has allowed us to do
that for thousands of titles.
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