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