The heretofore undiscovered link between surveying and hoboing

Is there any word in the English language more amusingly evocative than "hobo"? (And, by logical conclusion, is "hoboing" English's funniest gerund?)

Lest you think this an idle query with no survey content, let me tell you what prompted this train of thought. On Friday we surveyed a collection of notebooks from an amateur ornithologist who was active from the 1920s to the 1980s. This, in itself, is not unusual, since the archives of the Academy of Natural Sciences are replete with birding documentation, ranging from daily checklists of birds seen to highly detailed species and location descriptions to anatomically correct drawings to tens of thousands of photographs and slides.

What was unusual about this collection was that, along with the checklists and the decades worth of notebooks chronicling sightings throughout the United States, Europe, South America, and Africa, were journal entries in which the author chronicled his "hoboing" adventures -- hitching rides with strangers, making camp with wizened oldtimers, getting rounded up by the police -- all undertaken in pursuit of his birding passion. This presented a whole different face to hoboing and, probably needless to say, prompted a weekend's worth of hobo-related google searches.

Speaking of faces and hoboing, here's a link to a wonderfully diverting site where you can browse through visual depictions of "the" 700 Hobo Names, as authoritatively declared by John Hodgman in his book The Areas of My Expertise.

An update from the depths of the Academy of Natural Sciences archives

We've been surveying at the Academy for just over a week, and the work is humming right along. Because we're focusing on unprocessed materials in this project, we're not going through the collections of the most famous of the scientists and explorers represented in the archives (those have been processed). Still, it's been an interesting visit so far. We had the opportunity to talk to some of the collection curators about how they use the archives, and we were given a glimpse of the bird, fossil, and insect specimens at the Academy. (Three million bugs! Chills run up my spine just thinking of it!) We saw birds collected by John James Audubon (including Carolina Parakeets) and by John Gould (including Fairy Wrens).

As for the paper collections, they're not too bad either. We've just finished surveying a collection of papers by and about Edgar T. Wherry (1885-1982), who was a botanist and mineralogist. The papers at the Academy mostly deal with his extensive study of the phlox family, but we ran across an interesting PACSCL nexus:

• Wherry took courses and later taught mineralogy at the Wagner Free Institute of Science;
• a set of Wherry's hand-colored glass slides were reproduced and indexed by Marnie and Bill Flook;
• the University of Delaware has a collection of miniature books donated by Marnie Flook, and we surveyed a set of documents related to Flook's microbibliomania;
• an article about Wherry's slides was authored by the Flooks and published in Green Scene, a magazine published by the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society (of which Wherry was also a member)

There is such a broad range of institutions taking part in the PACSCL survey that it's surprising to see so many of them turn up in one collection. But as we progress through the survey, I'm finding that Philadelphia is smaller than it seems.

Rate me, equate me, any way you want me

One of the stated goals of this project is to develop a common "assessment culture" among PACSCL institutions when it comes to unprocessed collections. This will help institutions across the consortium generate ideas for collaborative projects, as well as give them a common language and methodology for prioritizing the collections in their backlogs going forward. To do this, we’re applying the same survey method and rating system to all the collections in this project, regardless of their format and regardless of their institutional context. As you might imagine, this isn’t easy – not when one week you’re evaluating an order book from a 19th century wigmaker in a university special collections and the next you’re poring over a prominent 20th century ornithologist’s research materials in one of the nation’s oldest scientific research museums – but we’ve worked hard with the participating institutions to smooth out all those little idiosyncrasies that often get in the way of coordinated planning for special collections materials.

The direct predecessor to our project is a comprehensive survey project at The Historical Society of Pennsylvania that took place from 2000-2002 – in fact, the general methodology we’re using, albeit with some modifications, is sometimes referred to as "The Historical Society of Pennsylvania protocols." Other institutions, like Columbia University and the University of Virginia, have adapted this model for their own use, and have some interesting resources online. Their resources don't appear to be online yet, but also using a similar model are institutions as diverse as WGBH public radio and television in Boston and the National Baseball Hall of Fame.

Of course, the assessment model we’re using is one among many. I was interested to read this article in ARL’s bimonthly newsletter about UNCAP, a project at the University of Chicago in which faculty and graduate students identify, assess and process collections. There are a range of models for preservation surveys, including this one developed at Washington State University that was detailed in an article in the last issue of the American Archivist. And various archival appraisal models, particularly the Minnesota Method, developed by Mark Greene and Todd Daniels-Howell, could easily be adapted to the assessment of collections for processing, not just for acquisition.

I’m curious to hear about other assessment models people have applied to their collections, for either processing or preservation. When faced with a backlog of unprocessed material, how do you decide what to tackle next?

Here, There, Everywhere

Obviously one of the neat things about this project is getting around to all the various repositories. Not only do we get to see behind the scenes, we get to work there for awhile.
Everyone we've worked with has been extremely helpful and excited about the project, making us feel right at home. We've been invited to share birthday cake, help with solving the crossword, and trade recipes. Of course this also means that when we do have to leave it can be a bit of a downer, in no small part due to the fact that we've been made to feel so welcome. But the work must go on.

This past week Christine and I visited the Academy of Natural Sciences and did some prep work. We don't usually have a chance to get acquainted with the collections before we start surveying and this was a welcome change. In addition to doing a shelf read of the collections to be surveyed we were able to do some rearrangement and bring separated collections together. We ended up with a table cleared of recent accessions and a better idea of what was to be surveyed. All of which was very satisfying.

And from the "who knew?" department this.

Finding the skeletons in your closets (and basements and desks and drawers)

Most collectors are accustomed to finding what they want in less than glamorous places. Archivists and manuscript librarians are no exceptions. The basement, the attic, the garage, the abandoned office building and the self-storage unit are work environs almost as familiar to us as the processing table and the reading room.

When I visit participants in this project to determine what they want us to survey, I find people will often begin by showing me sets of nicely labeled and orderly archival boxes in well-lit stacks. This is the "socially acceptable" portion of their backlog.

But when I press and ask "Is there anything else?" that's when the real adventure begins. Suddenly I'm being led into dark basements where towers of ancient liquor boxes and loose and often grimy manuscripts dwell. We're crouching under desks and pulling out keys for locked cabinets that haven't been opened in years. We're looking at items of unknown provenance brought in by predecessors and problem collections that have been sitting on the "I'll get to it someday" shelf for decades. As Rebecca Johnson Melvin, the head of the manuscript unit at the University of Delaware's Special Collections pointed out, oftentimes these collections have been around so long that we almost don't see them anymore. It's as if they're part of the furniture. (Funnily enough, we actually did survey a piece of furniture last week, a wooden cabinet with, what else, slides inside.)

Almost everyone in the project has found more for us to survey than what they originally intended, and often they uncover even more while we're onsite surveying. I think, and participants have told me, that seeing what we do, being "forced" to revisit holdings when selecting collections to survey, and having a few more hands and minds available to the cause makes facing this portion of the backlog more palatable. These are the skeletons in these institutions' closets, but they're not all that scary upon closer inspection.

For the last three weeks we've been surveying the most extensive skeleton yet. Samuel Moyerman was a Philadelphia manuscript and memorabilia dealer who sold collections up and down the Eastern seaboard. When he died, a good deal of his inventory remained unsold, and in 1972 the University of Delaware Library received two moving trucks full of it. Over the years the staff have been able to process a great deal of it, but significant unprocessed caches remained, including a pile of boxes that were on the floor in a corner of their vault whose only finding aid was a brief typed list taped to the wall. What made this particular pile so daunting was that it wasn't just one collection, it was over 100 collections, most with discrete but somewhat uncertain provenance, with dates ranging from the 18th to 20th century and subject matter that ran the gamut from wigmaking to the health of prison inmates. Given the press of other responsibilities and projects, finding a way to tackle this group of material had seemed challenging at best, but the survey project provided an opportunity to finally meet the challenge head on.

Thanks to the efforts of the intrepid Anita Wellner, Rebecca, the surveyors and a small band of UD interns and staff who were willing to get their hands dirty (literally), there is no longer a pile of Moyerman material at the University of Delaware. Instead there are 110 survey records and dozens of other materials which the staff plan to integrate into existing collections or process in the very near future. Information on the contents of that pile will soon be available in a publicly searchable database and ready to be included in MARC catalog records and collection-level EAD finding aids with the use of a few simple tools and macros. It's one of the most rewarding aspects of this project to me, seeing nagging problems addressed and "hidden" collections made more accessible.

So, what skeletons are lurking in your closets? Don't worry, you can fess up anonymously if you want.

But mommy, I don't want to look at pictures of shuffleboard again

In the past few months we've encountered a number of collections of people's travel slides out in the fields of surveying. These have ranged from small boxes with a few dozen slides a piece to an entire metal cabinet of 3D stereo slides.

I have to admit, my first, admittedly unfair, reaction to these collections is usually "Why??!!" I have visions of these collections' lives before they found archival homes, and these visions generally consist of generations of grandchildren being forced to sit in darkened living rooms, watching through the window at their friends outside playing, while Grandma and Grandpa recount all the meals they ate during their annual pilgrimage to Myrtle Beach.

But we've seen some pretty interesting travel slides so far, from people who didn't just hit the typical tourist destinations in their journeys or approach their travels in the usual way. There was the set at the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society by an unknown photographer whose travels included cruises to Cuba, Panama, and the North Cape, and vacations spent documenting the people and places of Minnewaska, New York. (Elena Sisti, the Horticultural Society's Information Services Librarian, said she could see the makings of a whole Lake Wobegon-type narrative for these.) There was also the collection at the University of Delaware's Special Collections whose extensive indexing and categorization reflected an anthropological approach to the world, even though the travel was likely for pleasure, not business. Even the set whose accompanying narrative consisted primarily of descriptions of morning routines and dinner menu selections, also at the University of Delaware, was oddly compelling.

On a related (though more frivolous) note, the Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players have made a career of taking slide collections they find at garage sales and thrift stores and turning them into songs. (I've always thought they'd be the perfect musical entertainment for the annual meeting of the Society of American Archivists.) Take a look at the video slideshow that accompanied the CD version of their song "Mountain Trip to Japan, 1959" for an innovative use of travel slides.

The survey of 33,000 linear feet begins with a single step

Here's a geographic representation, complete with commentary, of all the places we've visited in the course of our work, courtesy of the omnipresent Google's My Maps feature.

The Sites of the PACSCL Consortial Survey Initiative

Please visit regularly as we add survey stops and even some collection information to our very own pseudo-GIS system.