Steve Gardham wrote: Almost all archives/collections consist of at least 50% readily accessible books that can be found easily in libraries. The appropriate person needs to identify all of the non-essential material that can be sold (book dealer/Ebay) and any money from that could be used to find an appropriate archive to take the more personal material that the collector has accumulated. Not ideal but at least practical.

This suggests that we should start by making up a working catalog. It wouldn't have to have complete bibliographical details (editions, etc.), just titles and such. And that suggests to me that it might be worth asking the LibraryThing database to let us set it up as a Legacy Library. That way, the content information would still be available to all even after the collection is broken up, and it might be of some help to the new catalogers.

Still a lot of work, but it is something that could be done by a non-librarian.