Celebrating Innovation in Archives and Special Collections

It's hard to believe, but we're coming very close to the end of the PACSCL Consortial Survey Initiative. John and Jenny began surveying at our 22nd and final institution, the Athenaeum of Philadelphia, last week, and we've been making final visits to some of the participating institutions and tying up various loose ends.

One of those loose ends is really too exciting to be characterized as such. We're hosting a project-end conference celebrating not just the survey project, but innovation in archives and special collections more broadly. Titled "Something New for Something Old: Innovative Approaches to Managing Archives and Special Collections," the conference will take place from December 4-5 at the Union League of Philadelphia. We've got an incredible lineup of national speakers who will be sharing creative ideas about managing collections and making them available to researchers. More information is available at http://www.pacsclsurvey.org/snso.htm.

Anyone is welcome, and the registration fee is only $50, but space is very limited. At the time of this writing, only 15 tickets remained, so if you’d like to attend, please register at http://pacsclsurvey.eventbrite.com as soon as possible. We also plan to record the sessions and making them available on our website so that even if you can't be there in person, you can benefit from the discussions.

Thirty months, over 2,000 collections and nearly 20,000 linear feet later, we're thrilled to be wrapping things up with such a bang!

Records and Archives in the News

We aren't featured in the regular press very often, but our friends at Independence Seaport Museum managed to wrangle a feature in today's Philadelphia Bulletin that does a good job of explaining what we do in layman's terms. You can read all about it online and also check out a photo (currently toward the bottom of the homepage) of some of the great stuff the surveyors uncovered during their two stints of surveying at the Museum.

The future of cataloging - yes, I said cataloging

Taking a slight detour from surveying, last week I gave an invited presentation on the implications for archives and special collections of the Library of Congress Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control at PALINET's Future of Cataloging Symposium. Since the audience was made up almost entirely of catalogers and heads of technical services for academic, public, and special libraries, this was not my typical crowd, or my typical subject matter. It was a really interesting experience, however, because both preparing for my talk and listening to my fellow speakers drove home how similar the challenges we face are.

The crux of the presentations I attended, as well as the LC Working Group report, was that people are looking for ways to improve access, streamline procedures, increase efficiency, cut costs, be more responsive to user needs, adapt to new technologies, and integrate data better into the increasingly web-centered world of information. Sound familiar?

Although I was impressed and even inspired by the LC Working Group's effort overall, and especially encouraged by the attention that "rare, unique, and other special hidden materials" receive in the report, one of the points I made in my presentation was that few special collections professionals, and virtually no archivists, were involved in the Working Group's research or the writing of the report (though the Bibliographic Standards Committee of RBMS submitted a detailed and well-reasoned response to the draft report). It's a shame, because clearly so many of the issues for which the group was proposing recommendations directly impact, and have in many ways begun to be addressed by, those of us who work most closely with archives and special collections materials, with the PACSCL survey as just one example. One of the report's main recommendations for special collections is that access should be integrated with access for other library materials. I would argue that holds true not just for access to materials, but involvement in developing standards and systems and professional discussion as well. (By the way, I'm not exempting myself from the group who didn't get involved even though I had been vaguely aware of the LC Working Group for awhile - without the impetus this presentation gave me, I might not otherwise have read this report all the way through, which would have really been a shame.)

For those who are interested in learning more about the people's thoughts on the future of cataloging, and how it parallels trends in archives and special collections, all of the symposium presentations were recorded and should be available from PALINET soon. If you're interested in one archivist's take on the LC Working Group effort and future directions for "bibliographic control" in archives and special collections, the PowerPoint slides from my presentation are available here.

Dear Folks

Over the past few weeks the survey team has been working at the Presbyterian Historical Society. As Jenny mentioned, this has been a bit of an adjustment as we move from the papers and records of physicians and all things medical to those of missionaries and ministers. Within the first week we “traveled” to China, India, Brazil, Korea, Cameroon, and East Tennessee. Very different from what we saw at the College of Physicians. One week bones the next week bibles. Just one of the reasons this job is so interesting.

We’ve recently seen quite a bit of correspondence, much of it in the form of “letters home” from missionaries abroad. These are a bit like blogs. This is especially true for the letters addressed to larger audiences such as extended family and friends or congregations. While some letters comment on larger world events, the main focus is on the work of the mission and more local and personal concerns. Blogs, though, tend to be more frequent and posts are often very specific, in a way these letters usually aren’t. However, as a means of communicating to a large group with similar interests and who are widely distributed geographically, they are very similar.

Are missionaries currently posting blogs? A search online brought up a few missionary blogs, and it does seem as if the “letter home” has continued well into the digital era. The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) website has a number of them posted from various missions around the world.

The spice of life

Variety is the name of the game with this project -- we're visiting 22 institutions and seeing thousands of collections, so a range of subjects is to be expected. Most of the time, though, there's a relatively smooth progression of topics from one collection to the next one. We might, for example, go through a number of personal papers and then work our way through a series of institutional records. At the moment, for example, we're looking through personal papers at the Presbyterian Historical Society. Many of these are collections of letters and reports from missionaries. Even though we're jumping around geographically -- from India to Korea to Cameroon to Iran to China -- there is a fairly consistent format and tone to the materials. However, there have been a few times when moving from one collection to another has made me sit up and notice how odd the juxtapositions can be.

The first wild jump in topic that comes to mind comes from fairly early in the project, when we surveyed collections at the Chemical Heritage Foundation (one of the institutions where depth of coverage of a particular discipline is the norm, and where, for a non-chemist, the differences between collections can be a bit subtle). This shift in subject matter can be explained by the fact that they have a collection that's pretty far out of their normal collecting scope: the records of the National Democratic Club in New York City. We looked at this set of scrapbooks of club activities and minutes of various committees right before we surveyed the records of the Advisory Council on College Chemistry. One minute I'm scrounging through scrapbooks looking to see what big politicos attended the club's dinners and the next I'm reading reports on how to revise the chemistry curriculum for the college student of the 1960s.

At many of the other PACSCL institutions, diverse subject matter is more to be expected, but seeing what collections fall next to each other in the survey order can still be entertaining and informative. At Bryn Mawr we surveyed a collection of materials compiled by Susan Braudy as part of the research for her book on the radical Kathy Boudin, who was convicted for involvement in the Weather Underground and Black Liberation Army robbery of a Brinks truck in 1981. This collection contains court transcripts, copies of FBI files, transcripts of police radio transmissions, and clippings of contemporary news accounts. After this taste of counter-culture and the American justice system, we went on to more traditional cultural fare with the papers of the Philadelphia artist Ben Wolf. (Wolf also appeared in national print media, but it was his artwork that showed up, not his mug-shot). The papers document Wolf's career as an artist, illustrator, and critic, but more interesting to me was the collection of Sherlockiana among his papers. He was a member of the Baker Street Irregulars and provided illustrations for the dinner menus of the Sons of the Copper Beeches (a Philadelphia "scion society" of the Baker Street Irregulars), and he collected all sorts of programs, articles, newsletters, photographs, and ephemera about the brilliant detective.

At Temple University, another institution with quite a wide range of subject matter on the shelves, we ran into what in retrospect looks like a very similar pairing of diverse subjects. This time it was Fred Zimring's research materials on Barrows Dunham, a chairman of the University's philosophy department who was dismissed from his position for refusing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, which was investigating him on charges of subversive activities and alleged membership in the Communist Party. Just the day before we were browsing these interviews about the reach of government into academe during the red scare, we had been steeped in motherhood and apple pie, with the Emilie Mulholland baseball collection. Mulholland had worked for both the Philadelphia Athletics and the Pittsburgh Pirates, and she amassed a pretty impressive collection of memorabilia: baseballs, photographs, programs, a couple of jerseys, and a variety of elephants (the mascot of the Athletics). Mulholland was also a dedicated scorekeeper, and her collection includes years' worth of scorecards.

Consideration of these shifts subject, and shifts of geography, discipline, time period, and weightiness of the matter at hand (not to say, of course, that baseball isn't a very weighty matter...), reinforces for me how interesting this project is for the surveyors. Digging into one collection and savoring its contents (albeit for a short time) is one of the primary joys of this job, and being served a brand new dish with the very next collection is another.

You describe my back...

Recently Josie, our intern for the semester, and I surveyed a collection that reminded me of one of the hoped for outcomes of this project: that once people find out about some of these "hidden" collections we're surveying, they will want to use them, and that maybe they'll even want to assist in bringing them further into the light.

The particular collection that spurred these thoughts consisted of 140 feet of 19th and 20th century records of an prominent Philadelphia publishing house, the J.B. Lippincott Company. I'll admit I had been holding off on surveying it for awhile, because it seemed like, to use a highly technical term, a monster - more than 90 boxes of volumes and paper records, plus nearly one hundred volumes that weren't in boxes. We had an accession record, and some donor correspondence to work from, but it seemed like that was it.

Before we started surveying, however, our staff liaison brought another access tool to our attention. It turned out that within the past year a researcher had learned of the collection's existence and requested to use it. Undaunted at learning that there was very little description and that it would be difficult to use in its current state, the researcher worked out an arrangement with the institution whereby he would provide a preliminary assessment and listing for the entire collection. The result was a very useful (albeit skeletal) wordprocessed box- and volume-level inventory that will undoubtedly aid both staff and other researchers who request access in the future. (A secondary benefit for the PACSCL survey team is that a collection that could have taken the good part of a day to assess, got done in less than an hour.) (Update: HSP has posted a preliminary finding aid for this collection that combines the survey description and the inventory.)

In this era of movement towards minimum standards cataloging and processing and increasing pressure to make resources available more quickly, there is a lot of talk of what role user-supplied description could play and how best to encourage it. Some people seemed convinced that this is something far on the horizon, something that requires advanced cyberinfrastracture and a thorough understanding of Web 2.0 technologies. While I'm all for exploiting technology as much as possible to improve our service to and interaction with our researchers, this example is a reminder that we don't have to work out all the technological kinks to make user-supplied description a reality now. Something as simple as asking a researcher to give you a copy of that Word document they produced on their laptop over the course of their research visit can make access better -- and the lives of your friendly neighborhood surveyors a whole lot easier!

What do you do with the collection of a nobody?

One of the most active archival institutional blogs is Historical Notes from OHSU, the blog of Oregon Health & Science University's Historical Collections & Archives. I'm in awe of the frequency and the quality of the posts on this blog, which attest to some serious blogger discipline. I was struck by this recent post about the desirability of collecting "the great" versus collecting "nobodies," because I had been thinking along similar lines as the result of a collection we surveyed recently.

This particular collection consisted of the papers of a Pennsylvania man who appears to have worked in middle management in some sort of factory or plant. This man was a frustrated writer and inventor, as evidenced by the reams of unpublished manuscripts he left behind -- for poems, plays, essays, and novels (often accompanied by rejection letters), as well as notes on inventions and many politely worded declines from a range of companies of this man’s ideas for "the next big thing." Correspondence in the collection indicates that its creator had contacted a number of repositories in a desperate bid to have it placed somewhere, anywhere, so that his life's work wouldn't be for naught. Correspondence in the collection from the holding repository suggests that the curator took pity on this person, and agreed to take in the collection as "storage." (The collection arrived in the early 1970s, likely at a time when stack space was at less of a premium.) So, this collection has survived and made it into a repository, but to what purpose?

Certainly there is a now fairly longstanding trend of looking into the lives of ordinary people, particularly ordinary women. I don't know if this collection is that reflective of the experience of an "ordinary" man, however – it seems fairly unordinary to leave behind 18 feet of unpublished manuscripts and a raft of letters to various companies suggesting improvements to typewriter efficiency and renewed marketing of the hula hoop. If we approach it from the angle of literature, and place this collection in contrast to the papers of many successful, "great" writers in this repository and other PACSCL repositories, is it a worthwhile juxtaposition? Are bad writers, to paraphrase from Tolstoy’s observation on unhappy families, all bad in their own way? And does that make them worth studying?

Jenny has a category that she's jokingly asked to be added to the survey – whether the collection is good source material for a novel or a movie. This collection certainly fits the bill. I can definitely see the makings of something like American Movie in this person's frustrated aspirations to fame and fortune. But whether this collection could be anything more than that, I just don't know.

Back on the archival track, in the RLG-sponsored "Digitization Matters" forum last summer, Yale's Bill Landis suggested in a talk on mass digitization for archives that it's perhaps best suited for our not-so-great stuff (sound file; if you prefer to read some similarly provocative thoughts along these lines, check out OCLC’s report Shifting Gears: Gearing Up to Get Into the Flow). Why not put up an undistinguished collection in its entirety with minimal metadata and see whether anyone uses it, he queried. This collection would certainly make for an interesting experiment in that vein.