McCurdy Update

The past couple weeks have seen Lisa and I continuing our processing and item-level inventory of the McCurdy Collection.  We've definitely been making progress, as you can see from the following picture:

Our trash pile is definitely growing!  We've broken down almost 30 boxes, but that's only about a third of the way through the collection.  Here's a picture of our new, pretty boxes:

That picture is from last week, so we've made a little more progress from here.  We ran into an issue this week with some very heavy scratchboards and we came up with a solution (and another type of storage solution to add to the multiple ones we've already used): for any heavy scratchboards, we will use Banker's Boxes (like regular file boxes).  We have bundled them up and tied them with string to keep them separate.  So far, we have those boxes, the telescoping boxes (one set with lighter sketches and another with (light) scratchboards), and then sollanger boxes for the oversized materials (scratchboards and otherwise).  So there is a lot of variety in the storage of the collection, but the final intellectual arrangement will be more fluid.

Bow Tie Cat to the Rescue

We’ve done quite a bit of work within our Shared Shelf trial this week. As our trial is coming to a close we are making sure to do lots and lots of screenshots so that we have reference material to go back to. Jennifer with Artstor has been super helpful in answering any questions that we’ve come across, including ones where we have found errors in their development. We feel confident on how to use Shared Shelf and now we are going to take a more analytical look at it to see how it will fit the inventory project. We are also still in communication with Benoit and hope to test out his site soon.

This cute little cat helped us figure out Shared Shelf and what we were doing wrong.

From Narnia to Hogwarts

The majority of the Nancy Webb collection has finally made its way out of Narnia!!! (Narnia is an imaginary magical land - i.e. the CAB room which seemed to be an imaginary land to those of us on the print inventory project at the BPL)

After last weeks clean out of the CAB room we were able to get the 2 trashcans with lids containing prints into the print stacks and some of the larger framed prints into the Jordan room (or as I prefer to call it...the Room of Requirement)

The items that went into the Jordan room are going to have to be checked for condition issues; some of the framed prints are thought to have some growth developments underneath the glass...

 As more working space becomes available in Jordan, more things will be taken out of the CAB room to be examined. The only Nancy Webb items that will remain in the CAB room are the two boxes with a sculpture each in them-since they are not prints or drawings we will not be processing/inventorying these. 

An interesting fact that we did discover came from the lid of the trash cans. The shipping label placed on them by the fine arts transport/shipping company dated that they were shipped to the BPL May 2014; however, the actual "Nancy McIvor Webb Trust Bequest of Drawings and Prints" was not accepted by the library until May 17 2015, which is known by the public minutes of the Meeting of the Trustees Special Collections Committee. Interesting that the collection was in BPL's care for a year prior to actually accepting the bequest. 

We're continuing to inventory the items that have come out of the CAB room and into the print stacks and are going back and inventorying those items that we had previously processed. This week we will look into the items that were brought into the Jordan room and begin discussing what can be done with the prints in the trash cans, as they are rolled, have suffered water damage and are now quite stiff and will be difficult to unroll. 

Copyright Research Update

I wanted to wait another day to report as I had a very exciting phone call with Nick Shockey, the Director of Programs and Engagement at SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), a lobbying and advocacy group dedicated to open access, open data and open education. My path to Nick was very circuitous. Much of my academic focus since coming to Simmons has focused on copyright and intellectual property, and part of this final research push has included my enrollment in Harvard Law School's CopyrightX course, and development of a chapter for a Kyle Courtney edited book on library leadership and intellectual property, to be published later this year on an open access press, Mission Bell Media. I see all the research as part of one grand exploration, really, and have realized that the focus of my Capstone project is less on just public media, and more on the impact of copyright and the open movement on research services and access to information--and even moreso, the need for involvement of LIS students in these advocacy realms.

I have had trouble scheduling an interview with Peter Kaufman at Columbia, which has also led to my slight readjustment of focus. I did conduct a great interview with Karen Cariani at the WGBH Library and Media Archive where we discuss the many hinderances copyright has placed upon access to public media archives, which plays into a larger discussion of the potential digital media provides in terms of increasing access, but the barriers placed upon this potential by policy and law.

In working on my chapter for Kyle--which I am now seeing as the major deliverable for this project, since it IS a publishable deliverable as I had hoped, but offers more forward examination than limited to just public media. I feel passionately that LIS programs (not just Simmons) are not adequately preparing future librarians for work with digital media in that attention to intellectual property parameters are mostly glossed over, or even worse, the idea that copyright is "scary" and thus shouldn't be approached by librarians is further promoted. This is dangerous. In the course of this research I have spoken with professional librarians and archivists in many areas/capacities, and all agree a solid understanding of copyright is absolutely integral to ANY library work you do, especially if you intend to move into leadership positions. I participated in an open community call of early career librarians in the scholarly communications field hosted by Open Con a few days ago and it was repeated by most, that their LIS programs did not prepare them for working with intellectual property or open access. This needs to change!

My final thesis goes beyond that and argues not only do we need more (required) curriculum but we need to engage LIS students in copyright and open access advocacy (which is a complicated relationship in and of itself, my piece explains a bit), because if we aren't prepared to advocate for our users in some of the most pressing issues facing access to information in the coming era, we are doing them, and our professional a disservice.

I will be completing a first draft of the chapter this week, and then expanding interviews. I have been invited by Open Con to present my research on their next community call May 10th, which seems a perfect 'cap' to my capstone!

Meetings and Meetings

Our meeting with Martha today went very well as did our meeting with Benoit yesterday. By the time we met with Benoit he had already made all of the changes that we suggested. There are just a couple more questions that we have for him before we can go and test his web form. Martha is going to share with us 500-600 records for us to use to test both Shared Shelf and Benoit’s form. At both meetings we talked about meeting with Tom from the BPL Digitization department so that we can test adding image files to the records. The Nason and Prang collections are fully digitized, so we are hoping to start with those. We are going to begin to create a workflow analysis of the inventory process. At this moment in time we are thinking about using Benoit’s web form for now and throughout the summer until Shared Shelf is officially approved.

Here is a little motivation for you all:

From smuggling to comparative religion

And all I had to do was hop over a couple of portraits to a different part of the same wall:

Hannah Adams, painted by Chester Harding, collection of the Boston Athenaeum

Although, much more awesomely, Hannah Adams has also been featured in a Wonder Woman issue:

courtesy of http://comicvine.gamespot.com/hannah-adams/4005-80183/

My Perkins biography was well-received, and I made a short version of it to be recorded for the iPhone app that the Athenaeum Director of Education has been developing for self-guided tours.

I've now moved on to documenting the life, fascinating controversies, and work of Hannah Adams (1755-1831). She is (relatively) famous as the first woman to make her living as a writer in America. (Not the first one to publish, but the first for whom it wasn't just a hobby.) She also was a major pioneer in the field of comparative religion, which until her time had been less of a scholarly exercise and more of an excuse for clerics to write incredibly insulting things about other religions and why Christianity was better. She is also tied to the founding of the Unitarian Church, and was supported by some of the most significant wealthy Federalists in Boston. She didn't make it to be that important without suffering -- from living in poverty, to waging unsuccessful copyright battles, to coming head-to-head with some of the scariest ministers in New England, she had to have some serious spunk to get as far as she did. Not bad for a woman of her time, especially one who who was constantly ill, had no formal education, and tended to accidentally stay at the Athenaeum until after it was closed in the evenings because reading was virtually her entire life. In other words, an excellent proto-nerd.

More Tosti

Hi everyone,
I just wanted to post another update! As we approach the end of the semester (already??) I have been thinking about the goals of my project and how I want to wrap it up in the final report. In terms of going through volumes and doing basic condition reports for individual prints, I am going to finish as much as I can. I have also been working on spreadsheets for each volume with the metadata from the original catalog, plus any corrections in metadata I made using the print themselves. For instance, a lot of the prints in the catalog have a generic title that does not help to identify the actual print (such as Frescoes in the hall of X), so I have been creating identifying titles using words that appear on the print. It could be an interesting future project for someone to do more research on individual prints and the works that are reproduced in the prints.

In my final report, I am hoping to explain my workflow and processes for going through the prints, and I am also hoping to draw some larger conclusions about the collection and its place in the Print Department and the library. I would like to discuss how the prints were used in the past, and how they could be used in the future. Hopefully, a report of this kind could make a case for conservation of the collection.

Having fun with our trial

Hope everyone is staying warm in this yucky weather! Kelsey and I had our online training for Shared Shelf last week and have started our trial. We are going to be meeting with Benoit to discuss the form he created for us tomorrow and will be meeting with Martha on Wednesday at the BPL to gather some of the inventory data to upload into the trial to work with. We have another training session scheduled next Monday to go over some of the administrative tools available through Shared Shelf which may help us in determining if the program will effectively meet our needs. We’re excited to finally get started playing with the program and see if it will work for us, from what we’ve seen so far we’re thinking it might be the one!

Progress!!!!

Abby and I have been finally able to get to the majority of our collection, with the rest of it coming out of storage THIS WEEK!!!! Barring any condition issues, of course...but that's a discussion for class.

Thus far, we've been going through and checking what we received from the Webb Estate from an inventory list that came with the BPL's accession of the collection. We've discussed the processing of this collection as we've gone along (there's been plenty of time) and have begun to create a more complete inventory. Abby started inventorying the items removed from the Cab room on Friday, and we plan to revisit the items we've already gone through and inventory them as well Tuesday.

We've heard word that the items we are still waiting for in the Cab room are going to be the first out, as they are conveniently located in front of everything else, so hopefully we'll be able to experience our full collection sometime soon. As I mentioned, there have been some condition issues, but we'll know more about those once the cleaning begins.

A big thanks has to be given to Aaron at the BPL, as he has been so so patient with our constant ".....so about the Webb stuff in the Cab room...." questions. He had mentioned to us last week that he believed he could get some Webb works out on Tuesday so I went in for a couple of hours just to be available. He rushed at the end of his day to get some items out (pre-vacation, nonetheless) and I felt SO BAD to pressure him so, but hopefully my constant apologizing conveyed this and didn't annoy him...

ANYWAY. Things appear to be back on track for time being and we are excited to be able to explore the remainder of Nancy's works which we truly enjoy. We continue to learn more about her through the materials received by the library as well as by examining her work itself; just Friday Abby discovered that she conceals her name and the year the work was completed in many of her works from the 2000s!

Updates on the Tosti collection

Hello eve
ryone,
We have found more original bindings in the Tosti collection, which is pretty exciting! I was interested to find three duplicate volumes with the same prints, bound in the same original bindings. The end papers in all of these volumes are the same marbled paper, which is really cool to see for people interested in paper decoration. Here is a picture of the papers:

 The fact that there are three duplicate volumes raises some of the same questions that we've been having, such as: did Tosti purchase these compiled volumes and then have them bound in the Vatican Library bindings? How did he select which prints to purchase? It is very interesting to see which prints appear together, and I feel like every time I open a new package, there are new questions.

There is also some work that I have been doing at home, mainly cleaning up my own data. I have been looking at my Excel spreadsheets to make sure that things are relatively standardized, like ensuring that I use similar wording in condition reports. I hope that this relative standardization will help the next person who looks at these spreadsheets.

McCurdy Progress

Hello, all!  Lisa and I have been making progress in our inventory of the Michael McCurdy Collection.  The last couple of weeks we have been inventorying the correspondence that was removed from the original shipping boxes (arranged by book title) and taken to the Print Stacks.  Everything seems to be accounted for there, although there were some inconsistencies between what's there and the Collection Overview from which we've been garnering our information.  We've been using an Excel spreadsheet similar to what the Print Inventory is using, and we've been color-coding the line items with green or red to signify if we've found the item.  Some other colors have been used to signify other things as well.  So far this system has worked well enough, although we decided yesterday that it would be very helpful to keep a key in the spreadsheet that delineates which colors mean what!

After finishing an inventory at the container level, we decided that it made sense to start foldering and rehousing everything as we go through with an item-level inventory.  The Collection Overview we have lists every item (/group of items) in detail, but it's not very clear.  There are also several "Miscellaneous" boxes, so we need to ascertain the contents of those and insert them into our arrangement.  We have decided that, while the Collection Overview is arranged by date of the work, and while the boxes have no clear intellectual arrangement, the most logical arrangement for the collection is by title, in alphabetical order.

Yesterday we started at the beginning of the list of titles and have begun foldering while checking our Excel spreadsheet at the item level to account for all of the items.  We are using telescoping boxes (not sure of the size), so that we can place larger artwork (in interior folders by title and by type) along with smaller manila expanding files containing smaller items like thumbnail sketches and tissue paper drawings.  We have also separated the scratchboard drawings, which are much heavier than other mediums, into separate telescoping boxes, also by ABC order.  So, the final intellectual arrangement will have them all together, but they are treated as "oversized" items (of which there are others in the collection), and will be housed separately.

We ran into some problems with the multiple "miscellaneous" boxes in the collection.  These boxes have book jackets, scratchboard drawings, sketches, and other similar items to the rest of the collection.  Most often, however, they only feature one example of work from a title, as opposed to the other boxes that represent an entire book's worth of artwork, proofs, and annotated sketches.  So, after completing a couple of boxes, we found items in a miscellaneous box that had to be brought to the front of the collection, and then had to rearrange the boxes.

There are only about four boxes arranged so far, but they look great!  We've only given them temporary labels, but once the arrangement is finalized we can print labels and affix them to the boxes.  It's exciting to see the collection go from a mass of unorganized shipping containers to several beautiful telescoping boxes!  Breaking down the cardboard from the previous containers is verrrrrry satisfying :)

After!

Before...

And the project continues...

Today, I finished up the first part of my internship assignment, which was all the Middle East slides in the GSD collection. Now that I am done with this, I am moving on to Africa and may also end up working on images from India as well, if time permits. The final breakdown of the slides I moved from the original folders is as follows:

Technology at the GSD

Hello all! I hope everyone had a good spring break! I was in Seattle at the ArLiS/NA + VRA Joint Conference (same as Martha), so mine was fantastic.

I mentioned the last time we met that I would post a picture of the light pad from the GSD and I am finally getting a chance to post it!

AAPB/Copyright research

Right before spring break I interviewed Alison Smith, Associate Director of Stock Sales at the WGBH Media Library and Archives. In advance of our meeting I reviewed the stock sales site, its various online catalogs, discovery systems, and general policies. One important thing to note, which is mentioned on the website, is that public media is NOT in the public domain. It is not produced by federal employees, but rather by independent media stations and contracted producers, thus the copyright parameters involve many rights holders and various interests.

My interview with Alison took about 45 minutes, which I recorded and am currently working to transcribe. Topics covered included Smith's background, stock sales staffing and workflow, WGBH rate policies, revenue, customer demographic and breakdown, professional licensing requests, impact of digitization and open access push, union/guild fees, and the broader implications of copyright on researcher and production requests. I will summarize my findings more once transcription is complete.

I have also been in communication with Peter Kaufman (Columbia) and hope to conduct a phone or in-person interview with him in the coming weeks. In advance of us speaking, I have been reading Kaufman's publications that speak to the need for moving image archives to be included in the future digital media landscape of reuse and remix, and that "by participating in the great video conversation on the web, cultural and educational institutions have the ability to engage the public," in new and innovative ways.

In terms of CopyrightX I am currently studying the rights of distribution and public performance, which play greatly into the ability of archives to digitize and share holdings with myriad or unidentified rights holders. I have also been consulting resources for librarians and educators working with digital collections--considering the AAPB is a partnership of WGBH, member stations and the Library of Congress, whose mission is much different than that of independent media stations.

Nancy Webb - Lessons in Bureaucracy

Unfortunately, the clean-up of the CAB room did not commence this week as we had hoped. Sadly, the remains of the Nancy Webb collection still await their release from their dusty, cardboard/plastic trashcan prisons.

Nancy Webb

As we have now (finally) made some progress on Nancy Webb, there is actually some things for us to share with you all besides that fact that we are waiting for the collection to come out of the CAB room...so here goes...the first post on mine and Erin's project on the Nancy Webb collection at the BPL (we apologize for the delay!)

For those of you who aren't at the BPL I'm sure you've heard us discuss the CAB room, which holds a portion of the print collection (and Nancy Webb's collection). Access has been restricted to this room because it's not particularly clean...anyway the clean up crew is finally on its way (knock on wood) and starting on Monday the collection will be coming out all shiny and clean!! 

The Nancy Webb collection was gifted to the BPL May 2015 and we have an inventory of the collection that is "supposedly" what was gifted; however, we've been told that when it was packed up and taken to the BPL traces of water damage and mold were found so not everything was taken. The collection was placed in the CAB room and is made up of: 

2 extra large cardboard boxes with framed prints; 1 tube

2 Rubbermaid trashcans

2 large, 1 medium, and 3 smallish cardboard boxes

1 cart with framed prints

 2 cardboard boxes with a sculpture in each

Over the past few weeks we were able to get two boxes from Webb's collection out and unwrapped the contents and checked to see if they were on the inventory; some were and some weren't and we have kept a detailed spreadsheet of what has not been on the inventory. 

For the most part, the first box we went through contained prints that were listed on the inventory, a large number of photocopies of some of her prints, and copies of some of Webb's books, also listed on the inventory. No mold was found! The box they came in is currently in good shape so we have temporarily left these prints wrapped in new interleaving in this box. 

The second box we got out of the CAB room proved more of a challenge. Aaron and Chris at the BPL removed it for us and in order for it to be clean had to remove its contents from the box. We came into find a large stack of prints and loose sketches torn from sketchbooks, several sketchbooks, 1 solander box filled with matted prints, a mysterious box wrapped in bubble wrap, a large stack of exhibition matted photographs by Caroline Crocker, and 2 binders filled with 35 mm slides of Webb's work. Some of the prints, loose sketches, and sketch books were on the inventory, but not all and the rest of the items from the second box were not listed. We placed each loose print/sketch in an interleave folder and grabbed a solander box to keep them in. Everything that was not on the inventory was added to our spreadsheet. We are not really sure why there are the photographs by Caroline Crocket who was a photographer from Mass and died a few years ago but the photographs document the building of the Bunker Hill Memorial Bridge. 

The worst part was the mysterious box wrapped in bubble wrap because I unwrapped it to find a red box that rattled when you shook it and that had been badly damaged by water. The lid had traces of inactive mold, which was decided to be inactive after Chris from rare books came to check the contents for mold. (and Martha you can tell me to get over it until your face turns blue but its still the grossest thing I've ever touched and haunts me in my sleep!)

Inside the box were an assortment of rocks, geodes, and pieces of broken pottery, travel documents from Webb's 1984 trip to Morocco, postcards, and a small sketchbook. Also included in the box were mice droppings.  

Luckily there was no active mold on any of the contents. The box was disposed of, I put the items in a new box after placing them in folders and envelopes, and proceeded to wash my hands about a million times. 

The other nasty part of the second box are the binders of sleeved 35 mm slides which were clearly submerged in water and now have a thick layer of dirt and grim covering the sleeves. We're going to have to go through and count the slides and place them in new sleeves. 

Hopefully, that was the worst box and we will find out soon when the rest of the collection comes out of the CAB room this week!!

Link to Shared Shelf webinars

Just realized that we never posted the link to the webinars for Shared Shelf like we said we would at our last meeting. Here is the link to the schedule for all of the upcoming sessions:
http://artstor.org/webinars?view=ADL

McCurdy update

Last week, Caitlin and I used the bill of lading and the overview of the McCurdy collection to begin populating the templates used by the Print Inventory to prepare to inventory the original shipping boxes in the Jordan Room. From our initial investigation and conversations with Print Collection staff, we were prepared that the actual contents would not match the typed container list, taped to each opened box.

Caitlin and I decided to test two boxes at item level to see how the actual contents of the opened boxes would compare against the data we reformatted and the packing lists. We were not surprised to find items missing from the boxes (primarily the woodblocks, books and correspondence).  It was also interesting to see the range of materials included in the collection that we had read about. In the boxes were preliminary thumbnail sketches, scratchboard drawings, sketches on tissue paper, publishers’ proofs, book jackets, promotional materials and, even silk neckties! Actually seeing the objects raised all sorts of questions for us regarding documentation processes, conservation needs, and storage materials.

Scratchboard by Michael McCurdy, from "Paul Revere"(we're betting that
plastic covering and adhesive tape are not exactly archival)

After this initial test, Caitlin and I began a container level inventory of all three storage places within the Jordan room: a double table, large library cart and tall baker’s rack, all full of boxes.  We also discovered materials from a related collection (“Face to Face”) that Caitlin had worked on in a past internship, mixed in with our collection. Our next step? Locate the woodblocks, books and archival material pulled from the boxes…treasure hunt ahead!

One container yield two ties designed by Michael McCurdy for the Sierra Club. The
sketches and mockups for the ties are included in the collection.

Update on Perkins

As you all know, my medical issues were preventing progress for a lot of the past month, but I have finally been working on things again and I've done some more reading about Thomas Handasyd Perkins. I even got some time in the rare book reading room to check out some of the letters he and his brother wrote to their business partners.

They were as slimy and horrible as I had suspected they might be. Maybe worse.

I've started writing a new history of Mr. Perkins that docents will read as they decide how to structure their talks. Hannah and I have agreed that the most important quote for me to include would be one I found from a later biographer who said that "smuggling is as New England as boiled dinner."

And tomorrow you get to meet my supervisor, Hannah, in class!

Update on the Tosti collection

Hi everyone,
I have been continuing the process of opening up volumes, going through to see if anything is missing/tipped in, and doing condition reports on the prints. This process is pretty smooth, but I am noticing things that I want to look into a little more. For instance, the volumes (which are all pretty big, but of varying sizes) are all bound a bit differently. Some volumes were clearly bound by the BPL: they have cloth bindings, the spines are stamped with BPL stamps, and the bindings are also stamped with numbers that we're pretty sure are the BPL identifying numbers (the A.2.1 kind of numbers that I mentioned last week). But this week I started working on some volumes that are covered in marbled paper, have gilt decorations on the spine, and have different identifying numbers that were possibly the original numbers used by Tosti. The different kinds of bindings have made me interested in how the prints were originally collected and organized: did Tosti buy volumes of prints already bound together? Did he select certain prints from his collection to be bound together? I think it would be cool to learn more about how the collection was originally organized and bound...if that information is out there somewhere!

Another update is the annotated catalog that Martha and the inventory workers found in the stacks. I have been working with a digitized version of the nineteenth century catalog of the Tosti collection, and a while ago, at some point, someone took the catalog, pasted it into a book, and annotated the catalog. This annotated catalog is going to be digitized and I am very excited to spend time looking at it: the annotations include information about portrait sitters, dates for the prints, and other notes that will be very helpful.

It seems like every time I open a new volume, I am learning something new about the collection!

More McCurdy!

Lisa and I are currently working our way through the beginning stages of making an inventory.  We have discussed that, while our main deliverable will be a processing plan, it is difficult to plan steps and a workflow without being certain that everything is accounted for.

We are both working from the documentation we have -- a large Collection Overview that lists (hopefully) everything in the boxes, the bill of lading, and permissions forms -- to create an excel spreadsheet that we can then use to tick stuff off as we open the boxes.  The Collection Overview is pretty exhaustive, but not very clear.  For example, there are box notations for some items, but not all, so it is unclear if everything in that section is in the same box or not.  The excel spreadsheet we're plugging into is the same one used for the Print Department inventory.  It has some fields that aren't necessary for us, but the fields we're filling in are: object type, source of data, creator/artist, other name, box title, title, notes, date of publication or creation, and publisher.


The boxes so far seem to represent all of McCurdy's work under one title.  Most of these are for certain books, so, for example, the box titled "The Very Best Christmas Tree" includes a copy of the book, and various prints, proofs, mock-ups, and even correspondence about the publication of the book.  Most of the information we need is found in the Collection Overview, although we also want to supply the name authorities for each author and we may need to research some of the missing publication information (or it may be evident once we crack open the boxes).

Lisa brought up a great point about the research value of this collection -- someone interested in book illustration could see the process from planning to production.

We plan on finishing our halves of the spreadsheets by the time we meet again on Friday.  Then we can start cross-checking our spreadsheet with what we find in the boxes!

Our Project So Far

Hello everyone! Kelsey and I have been working on our project for a couple of weeks now. So far Kelsey has given me a tour of the print department and showed me all the cool things in the stacks including Donald Trump’s hair ; ) We have gone through the inventory excel sheets and determined what information is being captured and what needs to be changed to the webpage that Benoit created for us. We made suggestions and notes on changes we thought could be done. After receiving additional suggestions by Martha on updates and clarification on things we have gone over the webpage a few more times. Below is what we hope to accomplish next.

Next up we are going to go through CCO and RBMS for controlled vocabulary in our drop-down menus. We would like to meet with Martha again to ask a few more questions and possibly set up a time to meet with Benoit as well. As we continue to work on this webpage we are going to highlight what sections are needed for each stage of this project. For example, Martha informed us that the “Materials and Techniques” section is needed for the cataloging portion of this project. After we are done looking at the webpage, we will further our search into ARTstor and Shared Shelf. We are hoping to start our 30 day trial with Shared Shelf soon so that we can test it out ourselves. Throughout all of this we are also going to look for articles about both ARTstor and Shared Shelf to see if we can learn even more about other experiences with them.

Rights/Licensing Research Progress

Not a ton more to report since our meeting last week, but I have followed up on the points discussed, namely setting up a meeting with Alison Smith, the Associate Director of Stock Sales and Licensing at WGBH, working in the Library and Media Archives. Alison and I will sit down on March 3rd, and prior to then my main goal will be to familiarize myself with the department's externally expressed policies via their website. In addition, I will make sure to have a solid list of questions drafted and anticipated requests for numbers/information that they are able to share with me (revenue, requests, etc.). 

Casey Davis sent me a copy of the AAPB's Deed of Gift, which I have begun to review. She also put me in touch with Peter Kaufman, Associate Dir. of Columbia's Center for New Media Teaching and Learning, co-chair of JISC's Film & Sound Think Tank, and is on the board of EUScreen. He is also the founder of Intelligent TV. Casey warned me Peter was out of town for a week, but I sent an introductory email and downloaded several of his publications to read up on in advance of speaking with him, including "Assessing the Audiovisual Archive Market: Models & Approaches for Audiovisual Content Exploitation," and "Video on Wikipedia and the Open Web: A Guide for Cultural and Educational Institutions."  

So right now I am heavily in reading/research mode and have begun my literature search for pieces addressing licensing, copyright, and open access in public media. 

Advancements With McCurdy

Hello, all!

This week, Lisa and I concentrated on getting organized in preparation for really getting into the processing of the McCurdy collection.  Using the processing plan template we found on the LOC website, I have been attempting to fill in as much as possible from our available documentation: the name of the collection, basic scope and content/research value notes, and preliminary steps in getting a handle on this disorder of a collection. Lisa and Martha finally found some acquisition documentation complete with a bill of lading. This includes a numbered box list, and Lisa is cross-checking both of our pieces of documentation to make sure we have it all and to resolve discrepancies. The next step is to capture the information from the print-outs taped to each box -- probably by photographing them. We will then need to make sure everything is accounted for, and also find a way to share the data between the two of us.

We are excited to discuss everything in class today and to hear about everyone's projects!

- Caitlin & Lisa

The Wonder of 35mm Slides

Before I start, I just want to tell you, Martha, that you have a great reputation at Harvard. I have gotten told by a great number of people how great you are and how instrumental you were in setting up the system of cataloging visual materials that I am working with.

I finally got a chance to dive in head first into the 35mm slides this past week. I am working right now with 35mm slides of Iran. I have to assess the state of their cataloging, figure out who the slide was donated by, and then recommending or declining them for digitization based on this status. Many of these slides have been cataloged in VIA but have not been digitized, so I am helping close this gap.

I love working with 35mm slides. This may be an unpopular opinion, but I just love their size and the tactility of them. I haven't since I was in undergrad and scanned them for the art history department, but I am really enjoying working with them. I am getting a light pad to use in the next week or so to make it easier to see the slides. 

I get to work with VIA and SharedShelf during my work, which I am enjoying. I have never gotten to see the back end of SharedShelf before, so I am really enjoying seeing how it works, knowing what kind of fields are required and offered by the system, and learning how to navigate it. I am also enjoying working with VIA, since I have never done so before. 

I cannot wait to dive deeper into this project and see what else I get to do to help with their visual resources. 

Tosti collection

Hi everyone!
I have been to the Boston Public Library print stacks to work with the Tosti collection about three times so far. I have a pretty clear workflow: I take a wrapped volume from the shelf, open it, and flip through the volume, comparing the prints that appear in the volume with the nineteenth-century catalog. Basically, I am checking to see if the prints that should be in the volume are there, and if anything unexpected appears. Then I go back through the bound volume and create a condition report for each print, checking the prints to see if there is any damage and making recommendations, such as minor cleaning.  The bound volumes are labeled alphanumerically, so there is a clear order that I use to go through the volumes (I started with volume A.2.1, moved to A.3.1, etc.).

I have no idea what a volume will look like before I open its brown paper wrapping. Some of them are so big I can't lift them by myself--I just reached the first one that I could carry through the print stacks by myself. The last volume I worked on had several pages tipped-in to the book. I had an exciting moment on Thursday when I realized that a series of prints in the Tosti collection is the same as a series held by the British Museum--talk about copy cataloging! It's an exciting project in that I never know what's going to happen, but that also creates challenges. For instance, I opened a volume on Thursday which had mold in it. Luckily, it doesn't hold the threat of propagating!

Right now, the goal is to just continue with the workflow I've been doing. I wanted to shout out a thanks to Brett and Aaron in the print stacks, who have answered a lot of my questions and been really helpful!

My discoveries of the week

Thanks to those of you who have posted so far - and if you haven't written anything up yet, now is a good time!

As a reminder our postponed class meeting is this Tuesday the 16th at 10am.

I was moaning on about my various commitments in my last post and just to encourage you I want to say that I couldn't handle it all so I postponed the taxes appointment (cowardice in part, not ready mainly), the Cemetery meeting isn't until next week, and I did the NEDCC meeting by conference call. The week seemed much saner once I took out big chunks of travel time.

I have thirteen lovely ladies in my Lifelong Learning class and they are going to be fun. Doesn't mean I don't have work to do for them but some of the anxiety is gone. I started out by asking how many of them followed social media in any form - about 2 admitted to following grandchildren on FaceBook but that was it. They looked alarmed when I even mentioned it lest I be about to require them to open a Twitter account.

The joys and frustrations of the Print Department were mainly focused for me this week on dealing with the need to prepare for two additional presentations. I found some interesting stuff when I was investigating the two Whistler prints that we were showing. One, the Girl Reading by Lamplight, is an etching of Whistler's half-sister Deborah, who was married to fellow artist and etcher Francis Seymour Haden. Haden, the older man, had been enjoying some success with his landscape etchings and for a time he and Whistler worked together. The Girl Reading by Lamplight was apparently drawn and etched from life. Haden etched the same scene, in landscape format, and when I found out about that I went to our inventory database to see if we also had Haden's print. Indeed, there it was. So for my last presentation I was able to tell the story of the two men, whose relationship soon faltered - Whistler was very difficult always - and show both prints together. Which one do you like better?

Whistler's A Girl Reading by Lamplight, 1859

Haden's A Lady Reading by Lamplight, 1859

Rights research at WGBH

Today I met with Casey Davis, Project Manager of the American Archive of Public Broadcasting at the WGBH Educational Foundation to review my research goals, get her feedback, and learn a bit more about workflows and processes related to rights clearance at WGBH. 

The meeting was extremely productive and Casey feels my thesis is starting to focus in on a really compelling topic: how the climate of open access is impacting the rights and licensing landscape in public media amidst the push for digitization--especially as compared to current trends in other time-based media archives and the digital reproductions market prevalent in the museum world--and how copyright reform and advocacy may further influence the course of public media's approaches and policies in the future. 

Casey outlined three current streams of thought about open access initiatives in the public media sector, which I outline below:

1. The all open access movement that is pushing for all content made accessible via Creative Commons licenses. Individuals to contact:
1. At Columbia Peter Koffman, a big open licensing in public media advocate (Casey is connecting me)
2. Newshour, WNET's Winter Shank
3. Jo Skinner
4. Melody Joy Kramer
2. The middle ground: WGBH -- working to digitize, make accessible, but also in a position to monetize
1. I am going to review the WGBH stock sales website to familiarize myself with their policies/procedures
2. Casey is going to connect me with the stock sales department lead, Allison Smith
3. See below for data to be requested
3. Faction in public media encouraging digitization as the key to more revenue. 
1. Led by the former stock footage licensing AAPB director, now at CBP p
2. Pushing for stations to monetize archival content--potentially stymieing vision of open access
3. Released recent report to reference
4. Concern that this will hinder access
5. Metadata vs transcripts vs content -- some encouraging stations to even license their metadata!

DATA TO COLLECT:

Reference & Reproduction requests

Revenues - gross and actual, pre/during-digitization

Actual costs of digitization

Numbers from member stations

Determination of non-contracted/orphan works

Background to AAPB:

The AAPB and Library of Congress received a grant for digitization. At that time many member stations had already signed basic agreements with the CPB. The AAPB held a rights-related meeting early on with folks from the Berkman Center, WGBH legal counsel, and the LoC and determined they needed to go back to stations for firmer contracts if they were to put digitized content online.

Many stations actually don’t have contracts with content producers, and didn’t know what they had in their collections, so the AAPB requested they sign a quitclaim, which allowed the AAPB to make things available to the extent the stations do in fact own the content.

The team then developed a strategy to review content in order to determine what was legally appropriate for the online reading room. With new collections the Archive uses a deed of gift modeled after Peter Hirtle's example in Research Library Issues, which includes the request for donors to dedicate content to a CC license, however, the stations can choose to sign the agreement and not comply with that request. They must, however, agree to open all metadata up to the public domain. 

This meeting was very fruitful. Casey is going to put me in touch with several individuals, and member stations, and recommended a few resources/reports to review. In addition she will share the AAPB's Deed of Gift with me. My next step will be to set up an appointment with Allison Smith at WGBH after reviewing their stock sales information, and to update myself with a literature review refresher to see if anything new has been published on this topic in the past 6 months or so.

Education Internship at the Boston Athenaeum

Because I've been in the hospital and have had a ton of doctors' appointments the past couple of weeks, quite a bit of my work has been remote and research-based so far for this internship. Fortunately, my supervisor, Director of Education Hannah Weisman, has been very understanding. There are a lot of small projects within this project, but the overall aim is for me to write some more diverse historical perspectives into our education materials. (Full disclosure: I've already worked at the Athenaeum for two years in a different department, so I say "our" for simplicity's sake and I hope that's not too weird.) As an example, here's the subject of my first project-within-the-project:

From the Boston Athenaeum website. Artist: Thomas Sully. Date: 1831-1832.

Thomas Handasyd Perkins. He's treated like a superhero in Massachusetts. He founded or gave lots of money to a pretty big list of institutions, such as Massachusetts General Hospital, the Perkins Institute for the Blind, and of course the Boston Athenaeum, just to name a couple of super relevant highlights. However, guess how he made his money? Slaves and opium. Not only that, but he was highly involved in some of the nastiest parts of each of those businesses, from what I've been discovering. That's all I'll say for now, because I'm still fact-checking. So, my job is to highlight some of those points, as well as the more well-known ones about his good deeds, for docent talks that are given when non-members come in for tours. I'm supposed to do this with quite a few historical figures represented in our collections, not necessarily to air dirty laundry, but also to highlight contributions of women, people of color, and otherwise diverse groups that have not often been celebrated in old New England institutions like ours. The idea is to present a fuller picture of our history, and not just to pretend it was all rosy... or that it wasn't the labor of enslaved people and opium addicts that made Boston's prosperity possible. (Cue Ta-Nehisi Coates quotes here.) Stay tuned for how well I fare and how many angry people throw things at me.

McCurdy Collection - Caitlin and Lisa

Hello!

For our capstone, Caitlin and I are conducting an assessment and creating a processing plan for the Michael McCurdy Collection at the Boston Public Library. Over the last two weeks, we've worked to wrap our heads around exactly what the collection entails, gather resources and track down the various bits and pieces that will be needed to put together our processing plan. Here's our assignment, as written up by the marvelous Martha:

Module 5: Assessment and processing plan for Michael McCurdy collection: McCurdy is an important artist and illustrator. According to Wikipedia (!) his main archive of work covering a period of 48 years is at the Boston Public Library. The contents of the collection are in wrappers and need to be opened, checked against the existing inventory and prepared for rehousing. In addition to assessing the condition of the contents of the collection, this module will include the preparation of a workable processing plan.

Caitlin and I have done some initial scoping out of the project and took some pictures as documentation. For your enjoyment and edification, we're including them in the post!

The Jordan Room at the BPL (one baker's rack of McCurdy on the right of the image)

Baker's Rack full of boxes from the McCurdy Collection. Note the titles and packing slips on the boxes.

Bigger than your average library cart, loaded with more McCurdy. Oh, note the box on the top tipped sideways...it is marked "this side up" facing us. I'm thinking the contents, if not packed securely, have all slipped to the bottom.

Close up of a table filled with boxes, most of which have been opened. Note the box on the lower right with the packing slip cut through.

Peeked into one of the open boxes on the baker's rack; here's a book jacket featuring his illustrations.

Another peek in the box labeled, "An Old Fashioned Thanksgiving"

The boxes in the Jordan room are all labeled and numbered (the highest number we could find without disturbing the boxes was #85); each box has an itemized packing list affixed to the top. Looking in one of the opened boxes, it's pretty clear to see that some of the items listed on the packing slip have already been removed. Talking with Print Collection staffer Aaron, it would seem that some of the collection is stored in at least two other rooms; original woodblocks used to create the artwork in one location and correspondence/archival material stored in Print Stacks (confirmed this already). Martha gave us a 35 page document to go along with the project that is a descriptive write up of the collection. What we need to track down is the original inventory that would have been included as part of the purchase of the collection. To gain access to that documentation, we'll need to appeal to the Head of Collections.

Here are some of the resources we've gathered:

• Artist’s website with links to his exhibitions (no catalogue raisonne yet for this artist, so exhibition catalogs become important documents for correctly identifying works, if need be): http://www.berkshares.org/artists/mccurdy
• Library of Congress site for their Prints and Photographs Division, which will have much of what we need for resources to conduct this project: https://www.loc.gov/rr/print/
• Basic guide to help begin the project (Library of Congress guidelines): https://www.loc.gov/rr/print/tp/ChecklistToPlanProcessing.pdf
• Here’s a sample of a processing plan for a print/photograph collection; the plan we create will be modeled on this: https://www.loc.gov/rr/print/tp/RogovinProcessingPlan.pdf