Goodbye to AIC

Almost six years to the day after starting working at the Art Institute of Chicago, I said farewell to the museum, my colleagues, and my job last month. It was a bittersweet goodbye, and it’s incredible to look back at everything that’s happened in that time and how much I’ve grown and evolved professionally. The institutional photographic collection will always hold a special place in my heart - it’s the collection that acted as a springboard for me to learn about collections care, preventive conservation, archival best practices, and reference services. I completed a graduate certificate and masters degree using the collection as an opportunity to get hands-on experience and apply what I was learning. And the collection itself was such a joy to work with - lots of mysteries but also so many gems. 

Silent video tour of the archives.

Black and white contact sheets from the archives.

Aside from the images I worked with on a daily basis, I think I’ll most miss working with so many talented, passionate, and thoughtful colleagues. Museum workers truly are a unique breed, and though it took some time to find community, my experience working at the museum completely transformed once I formed relationships with peers across the institution. This was especially true with equity work through Mass Action, through the changes in communication brought about by the pandemic, and through the unionization efforts. Museum staff make a museum, they are the museum, and I feel so fortunate to have worked alongside so many amazing folks. I hope the field as a whole can evolve to better support everyone.

Black and white photograph in the archive; image depicts a photographer on scaffolding in a gallery.

Silent video of a drawer of exhibition image catalog cards from the archive.

I’m moving on in order to better care for myself, and hopefully to make more of a positive and direct impact on the world around me. Perhaps someday I’ll return to museum work someday, but for now, I have lots to look forward to in the form of a new job and entirely new field to learn about: early childhood education. I am going to be working as the digital asset specialist for Cultivate Learning, which is part of the University of Washington. I’m excited to begin this fully remote job and this next chapter in my career.

Society of American Archivists Annual Conference 2021

The annual Society of American Archivists conference was once again held in a digital format this year. Given my feeling of burnout, I attended with the hopes that it would help reignite my interest in archival work. Fortunately, the conference did not disappoint!

It was wonderful to see so many sessions that seemed to be focused on two general themes: reparative description and community archives. These are both topics that I have been interested in and wanting to learn more about, and given the number of sessions that addressed issues around both, I feel as though I walked away with a variety of perspectives. 

Samip Mallick presenting during the session ‘Community Archives Collaborative: Transforming Archival Work with Community-based Archives.’ The quote on his slide underscores the importance of archival records to communities, especially those that aren’t a part of dominant culture.

The sessions that I attended (both synchronously and asynchronously) that looked at the possibilities for inclusive metadata practices included: Instituting Sustainable Reparative Work from Where We Are; Language Matters: NARA and LAC Tackle Reparative Description; Temporal Ties: Addressing Harmful Pasts, Towards Imagining Just Futures; Foundations for Culturally Competent, Racially Conscious Metadata; and Making Product Less Problematic: Considerations of MPLP and Conscientious Description. The panelists in each session represented a range of different institutions - from government agencies to university libraries to small archives. It was helpful to find common threads throughout much of the discussion:

• Understanding your positionality (race, class, gender, nationality, disability status, etc) and how personal identity terms are not neutral are critical aspects to being mindful about this work, and also acknowledging that even with the best intentions it is very possible to perpetuate harm, especially if you belong to dominant identities

• Starting somewhere, even with small or basic steps like remedying collection-level description; progress over perfection

• Knowing that as archivists we often won’t know everything and need to reach out to subject experts, who are almost always members of the communities represented in and/or created by our collections

• Seeking community collaboration - not only around terms but also what priorities should be - can help archivists to be more strategic and create paths forward

• Embracing the reality that this work is iterative and that our workflows and resourcing (staff, time, etc) should take this into account; programs not projects so that the work is sustained rather than one-off

• Accepting that we may use technology to aid in speeding up some of this work - using a script to identify lists of problematic or harmful terms in finding aids, for example - but that redescription requires human intervention and judgment calls

• Accepting that there is no one-size-fits-all solution to redescription and reparative metadata work

• Approaching the work with an ethic of care and cultural humility

• Leaving notes on what was changed or amended for future users and archivists, considering if/when it is appropriate to retain previous harmful or erasing description

Sam Winn presenting during the session ‘Foundations for Culturally Competent, Racially Conscious Metadata.’ The slide provides reflections on the politics of naming.

Betts Coup presenting during the session ‘Making Product Less Problematic: Considerations of MPLP and Conscientious Description.’ The slide suggests that there should be normalization of not knowing and that learning and change should be key components to archival work.

I’m still mulling over all these ideas, and how care is so critical to a seemingly straightforward practice like description. That human-centered focus was a central theme to the sessions on community archives, as well. These sessions included: Temporal Ties: Addressing Harmful Pasts; Considering the Power of Naming Practices in Community-Based Archives; and Community Archives Collaborative: Transforming Archival Work with Community-based Archives. Some of my takeaways from these conversations:

• Many communities have grappled with symbolic annihilation from archives, which is when you and your community is not represented in mainstream collections; as a result these individuals and communities’ relationships with “traditional” repositories may be strained

• Community-based archives can provide an antidote to the traditional archival model in enabling folks to own their stories and history - in all its variation - outside those traditional repositories; self-determination, cultural sovereignty, and agency are key

• Some community-based archives may opt to adopt a post-custodial approach so that the owners/creators of the materials are able to retain the originals and the archive can then provide access to and unify materials digitally 

• Community-based archives serve to help people process generational trauma and heal, and also connect with previous generations and reclaim heritage; these archives can be a way of finding home and a way of continuing to keep the culture going

• Community is complicated! Marginalized communities aren’t a monolith, and it’s always important to take power dynamics into account with interactions; what is our relationship to power and how do we use it?

• Community-based and driven archives aren’t just about a repository collecting materials from a community but rather can and should be about disrupting existing power structures, including but not limited to training community archivists and providing them with free archival materials

• Depending on the nature of the organization, community-based archives may benefit non-hierarchical organizational structure and consensus based decision making

• Aside from simply amassing and providing access to materials, community-based archives can be uniquely positioned to activate their collections through collaborations

Joyce Gabiola and Gabrielle Garcia presenting during the session ‘ Temporal Ties: Addressing Harmful Pasts, Toward Imagining Just Futures.’ The slide reviews their framework for creating an inclusive environment at their organization.

Dominique Luster presenting during the session ‘Foundations for Culturally Competent, Racially Conscious Metadata.’ The slide asserts that archives are not neutral and that cultural competency is key in archival work.

I feel like so much of the work discussed during the sessions I attended critically looked at dismantling dehumanizing power structures in archives. The field has a long way to go in acknowledging and repairing the harm that has been done, often under the guise of neutrality and professionalism. It is heartening to see more folks working in the field centering human-centered archival work. 

Reference request: staff clothing in the 1980s

One reference request that did help get my mind off my frustration surrounding the treatment of workers and continued uneasiness about being onsite during the pandemic was from an individual working in costuming for a television show. They are working on wardrobe for an episode set at the museum during the 1980s and were inquiring whether staff working at the museum wore uniforms during this period, and what those outfits looked like if so. They were seeking reference images to help ensure historical accuracy, which I appreciate. 

One of my favorite topics of the archive I manage are images of staff and staff at work. I think it’s important to make the work of museums more visible, to help visitors understand how their experience is the result of many hands and choices, not some singular, neutral entity. So I was keen to dive in and explore staff from this decade. I had some ideas on what jobs may have required or lent themselves to uniforms - security guards, housekeeping staff, and groundskeeping staff, for example - so I began by doing keyword searches in our databases for these terms to find unique identifiers corresponding to images. I also searched the much more generic term of “staff.” From these results, I narrowed the search to images created during the 1980s. Then I began looking in the archive itself for images with the selected unique identifiers, since few of the negatives had been previously digitized. Since most of the images are organized roughly chronologically, I also perused neighboring negatives to see if there were any other relevant images. 

I found a variety of images that seemed to fit the request, so I digitized as many of these negatives and transparencies as I could while onsite. Staff who appear to have worn uniforms during this time included my original suspicions of security guards and housekeeping and groundskeeping staff. Included here too were facilities staff, carpenters, and some art handlers. Other behind-the-scenes office staff, including curators, collection managers, photographers, and editors, did not appear to wear uniforms; nor did docents. 

Transparencies showing staff at the museum who wore uniforms around this time period.

I’m forever thankful that photographers captured what they did, and that the archive has kept these images safe. Even if some of these images were considered unimportant or even boring at the time - and some may still think of them that way today - they still hold value in functioning as a snapshot of the time. In this case, the focus was the clothing, but these images can tell many stories. 

Returning to work after being furloughed

April 1st I came back to work from furlough, and mid-April was my first trip back onsite since the November prior. I made monthly visits for the rest of the spring to fulfill reference requests. It felt strange returning - I was thankful to have a paycheck from the museum again, it was great to virtually meet with colleagues again, and the physical archive itself is a comfort in its own (relatively) unchanging, indifferent way. But it’s challenging not to feel some anger and frustration for everyone who was furloughed and those who weren’t furloughed but bore the brunt of increased workloads. And the negative feelings extend to how workers at the museum and beyond have been treated in capitalist societies. Many actions taken - layoffs, workers being forced to come onsite often without necessary protective equipment while the pandemic raged, pay cuts, furloughs - were described as inevitabilities when in reality these were choices made by those with power. In many cases, though the resulting economic downturn from the pandemic has been blamed as the catalyst for these actions, there is sufficient money available. Wealth and power is further consolidated during wide scale emergencies like this one. 

A visual representation in the form of many notations on a catalog card of all the workers who have worked with this archive.

Routine work - finding and digitizing large format negatives like this one - does provide some grounding after months of instability.

It seems reasonable that those who survived the last year would move on from this experience with a different understanding of the way the world works, and how unnecessarily fraught of existences so many live. I sincerely hope that collectively, we don’t attempt to return to “business as usual.” We need better safety nets for people, and folks shouldn’t have to work in order to sustain themselves. It remains to be seen what, if anything, we carry with us moving forward. Seeing downtown emerging from winter, green replacing gray, and blossoms emerging is a reminder that time marches on. What we make of our time is up to us.

A view of Grant Park and the skyline, Chicago.

Maggie Daley Park with skyscrapers in the background, Chicago.

Lilacs blooming outside of the museum, Chicago.

A moment of peace in the north gardens of the museum on a sunny day.

VRA Conference 2021

In March, I attended the annual Visual Resources Association conference, which was a virtual event. After a year of doing many things online, it felt fairly natural to return to my screen for the conference. It’s definitely more challenging making organic connections with others in this format, but I do appreciate that the organizers encouraged attendees to contribute to community notes documents and that most sessions were recorded. It can be difficult retaining all the information presented at events like this one, so I’m glad I can have materials to turn back to at a later date. 

The sessions I attended were great, and I was drawn in particular to those that centered people in the archives. The first of these was titled Cash Rules Everything Around Me:

“[this session] will gather a diverse range of GLAM professionals to discuss financial/compensation transparency and how it relates to the field. It will generate a fruitful discussion surrounding compensation at various points in one’s career and across the field at large. Everyone is encouraged to attend. Students and emerging professionals, in particular, will leave feeling empowered with strategies to navigate employment, and managers/administrators will gain insight into potential discrepancies and inequities.”

The conversation was moderated and organized by two members of the Equitable Action Committee and two additional members of the VRA. They began by presenting findings from a survey sent out to visual resources professionals regarding education and training, job advancement, pay and benefits, among other practical aspects of working in this field. Those who participated in the survey also had the opportunity to pass along advice to emerging professionals, and excerpts were shared during the session. The results of that survey can be found in the presentation slide deck. Next, a panel of folks with a lot of experience working in the field discussed their career paths, strategies for getting promotions and raises, and general tips on navigating employment in difficult times. There was a ton of helpful content shared, some of the notes I jotted down are below.

• Document anything you do that benefits work; this includes overtime, special projects, and professional development. This documentation can come in handy when asking for a promotion, raise, better benefits, and/or applying for new jobs.

• Start salary conversations before the end of fiscal year. Think of annual reviews as an opportunity for negotiation.

• Present salary justification information as a one page briefer to both your boss and HR.

• Prepare a script for discussing salary and benefits for a job offer. The script could include: thanks, here’s what I bring, here’s what my research has told me about what’s fair for a salary, maybe 1-3 more things in addition to salary if she isn’t asking for a lot more money (ex: 5 extra vacation days), “what are your thoughts on this?”

• Lots of public institutions have accessible databases where you can look at salaries for people with your job title or for the job title you are applying for. This is a valuable tool when you negotiate for a starting salary or raises.

• If a salary or salary range isn’t posted, ask for that information when scheduling an interview, as it wastes everyone’s time if there’s a misunderstanding about this.

• Talk to peers at your current institution (similar educational requirements, responsibility) and compare numbers to understand your current salary and benefits situation better.

• Research a potential employer and use professional networks to learn more. This can help you decide if the position might be a good fit and if you’ll receive adequate compensation.

• Negotiation strategies in COVID world: think about non-compensation things you can ask for - days off, flex schedule, etc

• Financial literacy is important especially if you don’t have much experience with it. Take advantage of any financial planning info provided through work

At conferences, it often feels like there’s a focus on the work professionals do, so it was a nice change of pace to see the focus shift to those doing the work. The field of visual resources is nothing without those doing the labor. I’m grateful for the folks who organized this session, and it seemed that those who attended were also glad to have a platform to talk about these issues.

Allie Scholten and a slide from her presentation ‘Remediating Records: Critical Cataloging and Keywork Reparation’ during the Emerging Voices Lightning Round session.

I also really enjoyed the Emerging Voices Lightning Round Session, organized the Visual Resources Emerging Professionals Committee, which:

“provides emerging professionals in the visual resources field and related, the opportunity to present topics from exceptional coursework, such as a master's thesis, or topics with which they are engaged early in their professional life. Emerging professionals are defined as either students in programs leading to a career in visual resources or related, or those within 10 years of the start of their career. Topics presented reveal new ideas as well as different ways of thinking about established concepts. Speakers will give the conference attendees a glimpse of interests and current discourses of the newest VRA members.” 

The slide deck for the five presenters can be found here. The emerging professionals who spoke were:

• Hilary Wang - Findings: A Survey on the State of Web Accessibility in Archives and Special Collections

• Cassie Tanks - “Can You Hear Me OK?”: Launching a Story Based Archive During COVID-19

• K. Sarah Ostrach - Photos from Taipei in Washington, DC: Processing a Chinese Collection at the National Gallery of Art

• Allie Scholten - Remediating Records: Critical Cataloging and Keywork Reparation

• Jack O'Malley - Protecting Employment and Building Capacity During a Crisis

All of the presentations were engaging. Even though I’m only barely out of the “emerging professionals” category, I still found it interesting to see what areas of the profession are being pushed and pulled - all for the better. In this lightning round too, there was a focus on people in archival settings, both those doing the work and those using the visual resources materials. I hope this focus propels the field forward.

Steven De'Juan Booth as the keynote speaker, sharing one image of President Obama and visitors to the Oval Office, part of the Obama Presidential Library collection.

The keynote session was titled the Afterlife of What We Archive, and it was presented by Steven De'Juan Booth:

“an archivist, researcher, and co-founder of The Blackivists, a collective of trained Black memory workers ​who provide expertise on archiving and preservation practices to communities in the Chicagoland area. His work and research interests include analog and born-digital audiovisual materials, Black cultural heritage preservation, community archives, and digital scholarship. He is currently the archivist/project manager of the Johnson Publishing Company Archive for the Getty Research Institute and the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture.

In 2020, Steven co-edited with Stacie Williams Loss/Capture, an editorial project exploring the state of Black cultural archives in and beyond Chicago, presented by Sixty Inches From Center, a Chicago-based arts publication and archiving initiative. ​He is currently working on a book project with Barrye Brown documenting the contributions and impact of African American archivists in SAA. He is also researching Black LGBTQIA spaces and newsletters published in the Midwest as sites and sources of knowledge production and sharing.  

Steven is part of a long lineage of Black information professionals who have matriculated from Morehouse College (BA in Music) and Simmons College (MS in Library Science). You can read more about his work on his website at http://www.stevendbooth.com/.”

He spoke about his journey to working in archives and how his experience working in the field has shaped his perception of what archives are and can be. I was drawn to his assertion that archives are as much about relationships (with donors, subjects, users, communities, fellow archivists) as they are about stuff - archives are about connection. This connection comes into play intrapersonally, and between individuals and their history and community. As such, radical empathy is key in archives. Archivists need to learn how to better talk to our communities in order to do this. We’re good at talking to other archivists but can’t always bridge the gap with folks who don’t have training in this field. And we need to spend more time listening with the understanding that sometimes users want to be heard without needing a concrete thing from the archives. He told some amazing stories about connecting with patrons to the Obama Presidential Library which clearly illustrated how to embrace this person-centered approach to the work. His talk was inspiring.

Kate Thornhill and a slide from her presentation ‘Decolonizing knowledge within Afro-Indigenous traditions‘ in the session Power and Respect: Giving Back IPR Rights to Vulnerable Communities.

The last session I’ll write about is Power and Respect: Giving Back IPR Rights to Vulnerable Communities:

“How can intellectual property rights be leveraged, documented, and framed in order to hold up the rights of vulnerable communities, provide repatriations to them, and ensure their data security? As curators, archivists, and librarians who participate in documenting future histories and hidden histories, how do we include marginalized communities into the documentation of their own visual media histories? For this VRA 2021 conference session, presenters who work in archives, digital scholarship, and museums will share techniques, methodologies, and policies that consider vulnerable communities ownership of intellectual property rights when building digital archives, digital collections, and digital humanities projects.”

A panel of four presenters discussed projects and work that navigated the boundaries of creation and ownership. These speakers were: Kate Thornhill on decolonizing knowledge within Afro-Indigenous traditions, April Hathcock on the Femifesto project, Meredith Hale on the Voices out loud project, and IP manager at San Francisco Museum of Art Sriba Kwadjovie Quintana who spoke about her experiences in that role and working with living artists.

Their presentations and the following discussion underscored how archivists and visual resources professionals need to - and in many cases are - shift away from the idea of our institutions as benevolent and rightful owners of all knowledge. Not all knowledge can and should be acquired, described, and be made accessible to all users. The wishes of creators and subjects of materials should always be centered, above the right of users’ access, especially when it comes to systemically, historically marginalized groups. I was drawn to the three pillars of the Femifesto project, as a means of summarizing what this type of relationship between communities and professionals can look like: (1) building relationships, (2) ethical cataloging and metadata creation, and (3) responsible sharing and accessibility.

The Q&A session at the end of the presentations resulted in some interesting dialogue around navigating care with creators and communities while working in institutional settings that are often more rigid, and how to handle individuals and communities in cases where legal protections are no longer in place. The panelists underscored that we operate in colonialist, capitalist systems - both at work and in our broader society. They stressed that we must acknowledge these realities, be transparent about processes and limitations, build trust and relationships, advocate for these groups, explore post-custodial models, and always consider ethics even if the law doesn’t come into play in any given situation.

These sessions and all the others that I attended at the conference gave me a lot to consider as I return to work. Though a lot of these issues don’t come up in my current role, given the limitations of working with an institutional collection, it is likely these scenarios may be more relevant in future positions. And ultimately, the overarching idea that people matter as much, if not more, than the “stuff” in our collective stewardship, is an important one to carry back to any job in this field.

Accessibility & Archives

One of the ways that I’ve been passing the time while being furloughed is attending workshops and webinars on topics of interest to me. Some of these have focused on technology in the field of image management and archives, and some have focused on decolonizing and creating racial equity in the GLAM field. I have also attended sessions focused on accessibility: Accessible Design for the NYC Digital Humanities (NYCDH) week and Reimagining Access: Inclusive Technology for Archives & Special Collections an IMLS funded symposium hosted by ArtCenter College of Design. This is one area of equity work which I haven’t spent as much time with, and both sessions were incredibly helpful.

THE NYCDH workshop focused on accessibility on the web. The presenter Heather Hill first provided some foundational information on accessibility more broadly, explained why folks in digital humanities should be concerned with this, then gave an overview of universal design and some of its limitations. Since no one approach to accessibility will be perfect for every individual, I really appreciated these takeaways:

• Remain flexible and adaptive

• Universal design is a process, not a goal

• We are trying to move in the right direction

Next, Hill covered basic concepts of accessible design in the web, including the structure and design, theme, and content of websites and digital experiences. We had the chance to learn about specifics, including the impact of proper heading and subheading usage for those using screenreaders, the importance of keyboard shortcuts for those navigating primarily by keyboard rather than a mouse, and how distracting features like automatic playing videos or audio can be distracting for some neurodivergent folks. 

The last portion of the workshop provided time for all the participants to test out a few of the accessibility tools that are available for evaluating websites: HTML CodeSniffer, WAVE, Tota11y, W3C HTML checker and CSS checker, and SortSite. My group took a look at the HTML CodeSniffer. It was overwhelming at first decoding the errors, warnings, and notices. After spending some time experimenting, it became clear how much helpful information the tool provides: it points to the location on the page that doesn’t align with the W3C recommendations for accessibility, it links to the specific W3C recommendation that’s being violated, and it provides the corresponding snippet of code for the offending issue. One of my graduate courses covered web accessibility for one lesson - which is hardly enough - and this workshop demonstrated to me how much more I have to learn. Fortunately, the presenter provided copies of her slides and additional resources so I can continue to dive into these issues.

The same day, the ArtCenter College of Design hosted its symposium on accessibility in archives and special collections. The first speaker, Joshua Halstead, discussed design logics and paradigms, and how the framing of disability matters. He discussed the established (medical, functional limitations, social, minority group) and emerging (critical disability theory, disability justice, political/relational model) approaches to disability and how these different models impact design. He looked at different approaches to disability and design - through the lens of universal design, adaptive design, inclusive design, and critical design - and asserted that there is the potential for disability design to extend beyond just the immediate and practical to positively impact everyone. His talk underscored the idea that there are no stable definitions or universals when thinking about disability, and that we need to take this into account when thinking about design.

The following discussion featured members of the Society of American Archivists (SAA) Accessibility and Disability Section: Michelle Ganz, Dr. Lydia Tang, and Sara White. They provided a history of SAA’s efforts in creating guidelines for accessibility and an overview of the revised document, which is much more expansive and inclusive in its definition of disabilities - including vision, movement, hearing, communication, interaction, and mental health disabilities. The new guidelines cover core values, effective communication, the physical environment, public services, exhibitions and public programming, workplace accessibility, and digital content. It was helpful to learn about specific examples of how recommendations were being implemented in real world scenarios - installing variable height desks and chairs in reading rooms, and using supporting audio via sound domes for exhibitions - in order to understand how practically drafted SAA’s guidelines are. I will definitely be spending more time with this document.

The last portion of the symposium I was able to attend was dedicated to perspectives from archivists, users and designers with a range of disabilities: Michelle Ganz, Dr. Jeffrey Swada, and Sara White. They shared with attendees their personal experiences navigating archives and libraries as researchers and as employees. Dr. Swada presented a series of videos of his screenreader reading several archival repository websites, digital portals, and finding aids. Through his discussion, he provided some invaluable tips on how to help tools like this one more clearly and effectively present digital information. It is common to see a focus on accessibility in this field on patrons, so it was a welcome addition to get the perspective of staff navigating accessibility issues, as well. Ganz and White talked about the ways in which their disabilities intersected with and impacted working with larger teams, and ways in which they and other disabled archivists have faced discrimination. While the field is making some progress, it’s clear that we have much work to do. And I’m so thankful for those who shared their lived experiences, so that we all might better understand how inaccessible archives and libraries often are so we can make necessary changes.

These sessions have been reminders of what I enjoy and care about working in archives and archives-adjacent positions, they’ve been helpful chances to find grounding and connection while I’m away from work. Ultimately, I want to connect folks with information that is useful and of interest to them, and accessibility is core to that. And critically, this work should be infused with an ethic of care. Learning about the experiences of other folks is one important step to that end. 

Onsite visits to the museum during COVID-19

My first trip back to the museum for work happened in mid-September, and I’ve been back once a month since then. Core essential staff have been required to be onsite since the closure - teams including security, facilities, and housekeeping. Over the summer, limited additional teams whose work required them to be on campus were allowed to return in a controlled manner. This coincided with institution-wide layoffs and restructuring. I kept my job, but was moved to a new department. Regardless, both my old and new departments were permitted to return onsite. And so, to date, I’ve made three trips back to the museum.

The first trip back marked six months since the majority of the museum started working remotely. I had quite a few reference requests that required access to our card catalog and physical archives, so this took up a substantial portion of my time. I also ensured that the collection was generally intact, and that there were no glaring environmental or other condition issues that needed attention. I wrapped up the trip by gathering some information about the collection itself for my old department’s standard operating procedures manual - documentation that’s proven to be helpful in the transition to my new department.

The second and third trips back felt slightly less frenzied in pace. Given the shorter time between these visits, far fewer reference requests had built up. This meant that I had time to turn to another project: digitizing our exhibition documentation catalog cards. Totalling roughly three drawers, these cards hold information for which exhibitions at the museum were documented between the early 1900s and 1970s. After this time, this information was captured digitally in a series of databases for the department. I managed to get through the digitization of all 3,000+ cards. 

Since queries for exhibitions are common, my hope is that the digitized cards will be a useful reference for me and other staff. But to make access even easier, I plan on transcribing the exhibition titles and unique identifiers for the corresponding negatives or transparencies. And to facilitate future plans for the comprehensive digitization of all these photographic materials, and to link the images with the exhibition records in our collections management system, I aim to link the archive’s unique identifiers with the exhibition record IDs. In turn, this should result in many more archival images on the exhibition portal of the public website.

I’ve struggled with the idea that non-essential organizations like our museum should open, given the very real risk of COVID in our city, state, and country. The museum has recently been forced by our governor to close the museum to the public given the surge in cases leading up the holidays, though this closure does not apply to staff. I feel extraordinarily lucky to have been able to set my own schedule for returning to work, and I wish that this was the case for everyone. I hope that the exhibition documentation catalog card project can provide additional work for museum staff working remotely, especially if we return to a broader closure of the campus. It’s hard to anticipate what the future will bring these days, but I’m grateful to still be employed, to have found ways of doing my work, and for all the support and camaraderie of my colleagues. 

VRA EAC community hours, Institutional Responses to BLM

In April, I joined the Visual Resource Association’s (VRA) Equitable Action Committee (EAC). This group evolved from the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee in fall of 2019, and is now tasked to:

“Advance and support an equitable, diverse, accessible, and inclusive association. With critical reflection and a steady eye on the future, this committee seeks to strengthen the association’s membership by welcoming, embracing, and supporting historically marginalized people, voices, and narratives. The committee also aims to educate and empower the association’s membership on issues of accessibility and disability inclusion opportunities. This committee will advise the Executive Board on creating equitable and inclusive practices.”

I wanted to join the committee because this work is critical, and I wanted to do this work outside my workplace. MASS Action and the fairly newly formed Equity Working Groups at the museum have been great opportunities for staff to push for necessary change and support each other through our individual learning and growth. I wanted to find a similar community outside our institution’s walls, especially given the limited capacity in which we’ve been able to do this work since the museum shuttered in March. This group has been really amazing in all those and so many more capacities. The co-chairs and other members are all wonderful, kind, and dedicated folks working in the broader visual resources field. 

The committee has organized a set of regular online discussion forums called community hours, in order to support professionals working in the field. Since April 2020, they’ve hosted community hours around topics including: employee and student privacy during the pandemic, setting remote work boundaries, examining gaps in support, critical cataloging, and professional development. These have varied in format from more traditional presentations and Q&A to looser discussions with some guiding prompts. Folks in VRA and beyond have been welcomed to come as they’re interested and available, and community-generated notes are available for all on the EAC’s website. Feedback has been positive for these events.

Given the mission of EAC, after the murder of George Floyd and resulting uprisings, the committee decided that we wanted to address racial equity in the visual resources field. The proliferation of racial equity statements coming from museums, archives, and libraries seemed like a good place to start. So we opted to organize two community hours around these statements: one looking at the responses of institutions from a communication perspective, and a second looking at concrete action that has or has not come from supposed commitments to racial justice.  

I gathered readings, developed prompts, and co-moderated these sessions, with the support (housekeeping announcements, screen and closed caption sharing, note taking) of our co-chairs. I’m not comfortable speaking in front of more than a couple of people, so I’m thankful to have worked with other members of the committee on this. Given the need for conversations around racial equity, and holding our respective institutions accountable, I knew I needed to set my discomfort aside to contribute to these community hours.

Both of the sessions drew around 20 participants, largely VRA members, and there was good dialogue and discussion. It was helpful to learn what other museums, archives, and libraries were or were not doing, especially to discover whether public statements were aligning with concrete anti-racism actions. The sessions provided space for folks to bring issues they were facing at work, and for resources to be shared around racial equity and anti-racism broadly and in our professional field.

The first conversation started with some guiding prompts as a jumping off point for further discussion. For the second session, we opted to turn some of the discussion prompts into poll questions to allow those joining to participate in a different format. We recognized that some joining may not have felt comfortable adding to either the chat or speaking up - even though these sessions are not recorded for the privacy of attendees - based on fear of voicing criticisms of their employer, discomfort in talking about racism and white supremacy, and/or discomfort in participating in group settings (or something else altogether!). 

I struggled during both sessions - with long pauses between written or verbal comments, with finding the “right” words and being an “effective” co-facilitator, and with wanting the sessions to be meaningful and helpful to those joining. I recognize that a lot of this is wrapped up in my own perfectionism (a characteristic of white supremacy culture), white fragility, and white silence. And I also recognize that my own desire to support tangible change and brainstorm plans for action are driven by urgency (again, a characteristic of white supremacy) and a general need to “fix” problems rather than to sit with difficult feelings. Since these community hours are community-driven, participants steered the conversation towards holding space for one another. And that’s ok, and it’s ok that I struggled. 

More than anything, I hope those who attended got something out of the sessions, that those who looked at the shared notes gleaned something from them, and that folks feel perhaps a little more empowered to do what they can to dismantle racism and white supremacy where they find it, including in our workplaces. We’re all learning and growing together, and sessions like these are just one step in that process. 

SAA Annual Conference 2020

As with all the other changes that COVID-19 has brought about, another has come in the form of conferences and symposium being shifted to virtual events. I had been looking forward to the Society of American Archivists’ annual conference, which was slated to take place in Chicago this summer. Instead, it took place online. Though it was definitely a different experience than comparable in-person conferences I’ve attended in the past, it was still full of great sessions.

There were a number of sessions that focused on diversifying archives, and I took away so much from these presentations and following discussions. The first plenary from Tempestt Hazel of Sixty Inches from Center dove into artists of color in Chicago and the grassroots effort of the organization to amplify, advocate for, and archive the work of these communities. Hazel spoke to the long tradition of gatekeeping in archives and the need to break down these barriers in order to collaborate with individuals often underrepresented in traditional repositories. I absolutely loved one of her closing thoughts that we should all work to create “a future that works for all of us not just some of us.”

I also attended the session ‘Beyond Diversity Initiatives: Nontraditional and Student-centered Approaches to Recruiting BIPOC into Archives and Special Collections Librarianship,’ which was described as following:

The purpose of this pop-up session is to discuss how Special Collections and Archives departments in academic libraries can provide mentorship and viable/meaningful professional development opportunities for BIPOC. Despite the growing focus on diversity and recruitment by library schools and institutions like SAA, ALA, ACRL among others, BIPOC not only remain underrepresented in the field, but many continue to encounter barriers within library cultures. As many diversity initiatives often focus on current LIS students or those with expressed interest in the profession, this panel will discuss how institutions can leverage their strengths to build and foster diversity programs aimed to recruit prospective undergraduate and graduate students, and library staff and student workers into the profession.

Based on critical pedagogy, and nontraditional and student-centered approaches, the Cal State LA Special Collections & Archives Student Assistant Program is designed to support and mentor students with potential in the field. Cal State LA is one of the largest and most diverse campuses in the CSU system and is uniquely positioned to recruit students into the profession by embedding community-centered archival practices into primary source instruction, outreach and reference services, and the library student worker experience. Topics discussed by the panelists will include: fostering and mentoring students; intentional engagement; student outreach; developing student agency; and the panelists' personal experiences navigating the profession.

The presenters provided some contextual information about the field, and the stubborn pattern of archivists being predominantly white. They outlined how they are working to welcome more BIPOC students to the profession through the Special Collections & Archives Student Assistant Program. They designed this experience to be student-centered and led, constructivist in pedagogical approach, with an emphasis on mentorship and creating tailor-fit projects. The idea presented that we need to implement diversity intentionally and as a priority, beyond just our mission statements, really resonated with me. 

Next, I attended the session ‘Showing Up: Community Engagement Events Toward a Better Cultural Record,’ which featured speakers from a number of institutions and addressed the ways in which repositories can engage with their local communities:

Increasingly, archives venture outside their walls to engage with community partners to create and amplify records of groups whose stories hadn't been previously collected. While building these collaborative relationships is time-consuming and demanding, it is imperative and rewarding too. This panel will explore the centrality of community partnerships in the diversification of the archival record, featuring programs that have hosted grant-funded community engagement activities to create and collect documentation of historically underrepresented groups.

Included were discussions about how an Indianapolis repository connected with African American communities in the area to form a new digital collection showcasing the community’s history, how a repository at a university in Northwest Ohio forged new ties with the Islamic community to bolster that collecting area, and a collaboration between the American Indian Center and a partnering university to support the AIC’s archive. Each of the presenters provided information on both the ways in which they grew these partnerships, and logistical and practical aspects of the work (copyright, digitization equipment, workflow, etc). Given the long history of archival repositories either excluding non-dominant cultures or taking materials from these communities with paternalistic intentions, it was refreshing to hear how some archivists are approaching these relationships differently today. Co-creation and co-ownership can and should be at the core of this work.

SAA also organized a ‘Diversity Forum: Black Lives and Archives Strategy Session,’ which was described as follows:

The Council of the Society of American Archivists released a statement on June 2, 2020, in support of the Black Lives Matter movement. The Council unanimously condemns harassment and violence against the Black community in this statement and calls for a space “for constructive discussion toward progressive change in the archival profession and true inclusivity of the archival record…” The 2020 Diversity Forum, hosted by SAA’s Diversity Committee, seeks to provide a collective space for SAA members to reflect on the statement and brainstorm ideas about creating change from top to bottom within SAA, with a particular emphasis on ensuring accountability to reduce harm to Black and brown people and begin repairing centuries of violence committed against Black people in our society and in our profession.

During the session, we split into groups and addressed specific paragraphs within the SAA’s statement. We were asked to consider: (1) what actions can you imagine in support of this statement, (2) what resources (time, labor, money) are needed to accomplish change in this area, and (3) what would accountability look like. Support for BIPOC archivists in the form of honorarium or other payments, bolstering of peer groups, and tailored training for coping in predominantly white spaces all surfaced as ideas to support the paragraph we reviewed. The group also identified the necessity of training for white archivists on white privilege and white supremacy, as well as active anti-racist work within the field. Our group also thought that best practices and revised standards could play a role as it related to credentialing in the field, and to core aspects of archival work like description. Ultimately, for the archival field to reflect our wider BIPOC society in our staffing, collections, and patrons, this work needs to be a priority, funding needs to be dedicated to the work, and we should include more BIPOC folks in these conversations to help us figure out how to go about doing this. 

I attended a number of other sessions, and have barely begun scratching the surface of the dozens of asynchronous sessions SAA released for the conference. While I miss having been able to experience this event live and in person, I’m glad that folks were still able to come together and to do so safely. Given the other crises we collectively face, especially racial justice, it was heartening to see speakers address issues head-on. There is no simple fix to any of the challenges we face in this professional field or beyond, but I hope conferences like this one can be the spark or support individuals need to carry out this work in their repository and community.

Shifting to remote work, part 2

I have been fortunate in some regards, as much of my daily work in our department was fairly easily translated into remote work, especially after I gained access to our servers. I have encountered roadblocks attempting to help staff and the public with reference requests - a substantial portion of our physical image archives have yet to be digitally cataloged or imaged, so they are inaccessible. My work assisting with the development of our department’s new order management system and museum’s new digital asset management system have continued during this time. I have created new keyword lists, a data dictionary for all museum users, and have spent a good bit of time testing functionality and reviewing existing documentation. So too has my own work improving documentation about the physical and digital archive - in the form of a completely revised section of our departmental standard operating procedures and revised protocol for metadata creation and quality control, for example.  

Our department was still hosting an intern when we transitioned to remote work, and my co-mentor and I had to adjust quickly in order to continue to support this student. While we no longer had the chance to continue archives digitization and photography studio work, we are able to shift our focus in order to continue providing learning opportunities. We met weekly and discussed ideas surrounding work in libraries, archives, and museums. These conversations were organic, and it was a welcome standing meeting on my calendar. Staff across our department also created a series of presentations on different topics: my co-mentor provided a walk-through of how to edit photographs she and the intern had worked on together, another staff member provided a deep dive into complex image editing in Photoshop, and I provided one on metadata and another on cultural heritage imaging standards and quality control. This was certainly not the ideal outcome for this internship - effectively cut short by a pandemic - but it was encouraging to know we could still connect. I hope we’ll be able to welcome our intern back someday soon, once we are no longer living in a socially-distanced world, to give this student a proper thank-you for all her hard work.

In July, new changes came in the form of layoffs and a museum-wide restructuring. My role shifted and title changed, and I became a part of the newly reimagined Research Center. I will now be a part of a centralized Archives unit, that is comprised of the Art, Architecture, and Design collection, Institutional Archives, and the Imaging Archives. Given my need to continue focusing on physical and born digital materials created by the Imaging team, I will still work closely with my old department. There are still many questions that remain about what this change will look like and how I’ll work with my colleagues. But if I’ve learned nothing else in 2020, it’s that I need to take things one day at a time.

Watching this small garden grow has been grounding

Abruptly adjusting to working remotely during a pandemic has been challenging. It has been hard balancing the realities of life outside of work with the needs and demands of our museum. If nothing else, I am glad to be learning and growing both because of and in spite of what we’re collectively facing. I feel fortunate to have retained my job (so far). I sincerely hope that our institution, our field, and our society as a whole can recover from this reality.

Shifting to remote work, part 1

On March 13, the museum where I work made the announcement that it would be closing for the next two weeks due to COVID-19. This decision came after several weeks of mounting cases of the virus in the US. Commuting by public transit, I felt increasingly nervous during this time - apparently so too did many staff, as our leadership emailed the day prior to the announcement about our concerns expressed via the museum’s all staff email account. It became much more clear how real the situation was when word came that week of the Metropolitan Museum of Art opting to shutter temporarily. It felt like a matter of time before our museum did the same.

That Friday, we arrived at work with notice from our division head that we should begin creating a contingency plan for our department, just in case, that would cover: what equipment or resources we would need access to in order to work remotely; what work would need to be put on hold; and what projects we could turn our attention to while out of the office. Since our department was without a department head, the other manager and I turned our attention to building out a plan with our team. While there was no official word yet that the museum would be closing, it seemed best to prepare as if that were the case. Staff began gathering files onto external harddrives, requesting access for museum-owned laptops in order to get VPN access, and tending to any tasks they could only do while on site. Word finally came late in the afternoon that the museum would indeed be closing for two weeks.

Given the nature of our department’s work - photographing and managing the images that document the collections, exhibitions, people, and daily events at the museum - we knew that it would be difficult, if not impossible to translate much of this to remote working. The other manager and I had developed a list of items we could accomplish, namely working on documentation for various aspects of our work and boosting professional development. These two areas had repeatedly fallen by the wayside as a steady stream of high priority projects and a shrinking department kept the entire team busy. We broke these categories down with subtasks and proceeded to prioritize each to create a general plan. 

We also started to generate some “norms” for communication and check-ins. Given the highly collaborative nature of much of our department’s work, we knew it would be a substantial adjustment needing to proactively reach out to communicate with colleagues. We opted to set a standard for daily “stand-up” meetings at the start, to allow a forum for folks to connect, and to help provide guidance on what to do or troubleshooting on technology issues. As a second part of these meetings, we also tagged on a reading and discussion group. These would be focused around an article, white paper, video, or some other media that related in some way to our work. One staff member would be the leader and facilitate the discussion, all other staff would participate in the conversation. This responsibility would rotate among all staff on the team.

The following Monday, we all began working remotely, most of us for the first time ever while employed at the museum. Our daily meetings took up an hour to two hours daily in the first couple of weeks. Folks started easing into the documentation work our department had long put off. As we got the news from our leadership that the shutdown would continue for at least the next month, we spread our meetings out and reduced the frequency of our reading and discussion groups. Our stand-up meetings took on a concrete agenda, with prompts for each staff member to respond to: what have you been working on, what are you planning on working on, and what’s been keeping you busy outside of work? The team then dove into any questions we might want to get clarity on from leadership, specific technology issues we were facing, and resources we could share with one another. We also gained some breathing room around the projects we wanted to focus on - instead of needing to get this work done in two short weeks, we had much more time to reflect, write, and revise. 

Views from my home office.

As the weeks turned into months, we have continued to iterate on how we gather as a team, how often we do this, and the time we meet. We have also embraced flexibility as it relates to working on documentation. We have moved deadlines, shifted responsibilities, and allowed other unanticipated work to take the center stage when necessary. It has been challenging to juggle all this, especially in a completely new and largely unplanned for context. But it has been encouraging to see our department come together in ways we never previously had, to see staff more comfortable with expressing their opinions and asking for adjustments. It feels like we have all grown from this experience, difficult though it has been.

Virtual MLIS graduation

I graduated with a Masters of Library and Information Science (MLIS) from San Jose State University’s (SJSU) iSchool program in May 2020. I started this program back in January 2018, and this time felt like it went by in the blink of an eye. I went into my courses not knowing what to expect, but I’ve walked away having gained so much - breadth and depth of knowledge about information science, practical information for archival and digital asset management work, and new friends and mentors. Working full-time while taking two classes each semester was challenging, but I feel so fortunate to have put much of what I’ve learned to use in my job.

Celebrating digitally

Due to COVID-19, the in-person graduation ceremony for SJSU was postponed, and our ceremony was held online. Additionally, the iSchool created a website to gather information about the graduating class, award recipients, and the virtual graduation ceremony. Here’s my page on the iSchool website. Both venues - while not a 1:1 replacement for an in-person experience - provided a sense of closure and an opportunity to reflect and celebrate, which I appreciated. My family had the chance to attend the virtual ceremony, even while living hundreds of miles away, and it was great to surprise them with the news that I had received the Director’s Award for Excellence in Intellectual Inquiry.

Student speaker Sharaya Olmeda

Dr. Sandra Hirsh, the Associate Dean for Academics, College of Professional and Global Education provided the welcome address for the virtual convocation. She provided information about the history of SJSU’s iSchool as well as some features of this program being fully online, especially the ability to connect with students across the globe. Next, Dr. Ruth Huard, the Dean, College of Professional and Global Education, gave the Dean’s address. It felt affirming to hear her talk about human-centric approaches to information, and how our work can create community. Sharaya Olmeda, the recipient of the Ken Haycock Award for Exceptional Professional Promise and the student speaker, also discussed the potential for information to empower, build, and create unity among our communities. I had the chance to partner with Sharaya in a group project for our Information Retrieval Systems course in our first semester of the program - it was so wonderful to see her recognized for her hard work, and to hear her (incredibly inspiring!) perspectives on our field. She also pointed to our program being 100% online as making our cohort of roughly 600 graduating MLIS and MARA students being uniquely poised to help our communities adapt to a virtual world.

View of graduation in a time of COVID-19

The last speaker was Julius Jefferson, the graduation speaker, section head of the Congressional Research Service at the Library of Congress, and ALA President from 2020-2021. He underscored some of the ideas Dr. Huard and Sharaya discussed - that we can make a difference and information professionals and that we are prepared to thrive in a digital world. He also recognized our class for the challenges we have experienced in wrapping up our master’s degrees while facing the realities of COVID-19. I appreciated his thoughts on how information professionals are essential workers, because of the critical role of accurate, authoritative information in today’s always-changing world. This paralleled his assertion that librarianship (and information work more broadly) is a practice given the evolving nature of the work, and that ongoing professional development is key to understanding how to help our communities. As our professors have told us all along in this program - lifelong learning is important! He also touched on our global responsibilities, that human rights and information services go hand in hand, and that we need to integrate social justice in our work. Each of the speaker’s remarks and the virtual graduation ceremony as a whole was grounding for me, given our uncertain, troubled times. It felt nice to look to the future optimistically. 

I was hesitant to pursue a master’s degree for a lot of reasons, even though many friends and mentors in the field suggested this would be my best bet moving forward in my career. I am so happy I decided to take the leap, in spite of the long nights and weekends spent working on group projects, research projects, and coding assignments. I know I’ve grown so much as a result of this program, and I’m excited to see where my career path goes from here.

DAM Systems & Institutional Collaboration

Over roughly the last year, I have been involved in discussions about implementing a new digital asset management system at our museum. My department - Imaging - has a vested interest in finding a new solution, because we are one of the power users of the existing system. I began advocating for clarity on our existing digital asset management system - what it was intended to be used for and what the development timeline was for the solution - shortly after it was launched in spring 2017. The system had potential, especially in its open-source foundations, but it has complicated workflows, frustrated users across the museum, and resulted in poor access to assets for staff. Unfortunately, due to limited staff resources, our custom in-house built system can no longer be adequately maintained or developed in order to meet basic institutional needs. As a result, we began searching for a replacement solution early in 2019.

I was selected to be a member of the evaluating team for vendor solutions based on my experience managing our department’s born digital and digitized image assets. There were two groups that looked at the options - one was focused on the technical-side of the system and the other was focused on the user experience. I was placed in this second group. We were provided with a rubric for evaluation based on specific core user needs for the software, and we watched presentations on the final selection of vendor software solutions. Together with other staff representing a wide range of departments - from Conservation to Curatorial departments to the Ryerson and Burnham Library and Archive - we sat through vendor demonstrations, rated the system based on these presentations, and discussed our overall impressions of the solutions compared with one another. It was helpful to work with such a cross-institutional team, as every member brought different experiences and ideas. The selection committee took into account the user experience and technical group ratings, as well as the cost estimate for each option, and made their decision based off this information.

After my experience in this collaborative and democratic group setting, I wanted to apply this same way of working and reaching decisions to another key component of digital asset management: metadata. I was in the midst of mapping my department’s metadata to some proposed fields for the new system. I realized that I was unclear on the meaning and scope of some of these new fields, and that other needs were likely missing. At the same time, I understood that my department’s needs were not reflective of all user metadata needs within the system. I inquired if I could form a metadata working group in order to brainstorm additional user needs, and I was permitted to move forward. I ended up leading this group, which was a new experience for me. I selected the team members from a range of departments, sent out communication, developed agendas and ran meetings, and served as coordinator about our work to other institutional stakeholders. 

We ended up meeting over the course of the fall to discuss the existing mapping work I had done to existing structure schema, user scenarios that needed to be represented in the metadata, additional fields, field scopes and definitions, and metadata field types (dropdown, free text, etc) and behaviors (searchable or not, editable or not). Once the chosen software was announced to the team, we also started determining which rough user groups (Imaging staff, Conservation staff, Curatorial staff, all staff) should be able to see and/or edit which fields. I presented our work to the administrators for the future system, and have been continuing to advise on metadata questions and issues since our working group has dissolved. This work will evolve as we move forward with implementation, but I am glad that we pursued this work with intention and focus, and that multiple perspectives were captured.

I am now part of the implementation working group for our new system. Our kickoff meeting occurred shortly before the new year, and our work will extend throughout 2020. I am representing my department and users who rely on our assets. Part of this process will involve sitting through instructional trainings on core components of the system - taxonomy, metadata, permissions - and part of it will involve shaping the user experience and structure of information within system. We will be making decisions about how metadata fields should be ordered, and which fields should also appear as faceted search options, for example. This group will also be creating documentation and training materials, and we will assist in teaching our peers how to use the system. In tandem with the administrators for the system, technical staff, and other working group members, I hope to ensure that we implement a solution that works well for all staff. 

My involvement in digital asset management at the museum has shifted and grown over the last several years. With this, my role in these collaborative working groups have varied over time - I have had the chance to both lead and advise. I feel incredibly fortunate to have been heard in my questions and concerns, and to be able to leverage the knowledge I have gained through my MLIS program.

Chicago Area Archivists: XML, EAD, ArchivesSpace

Northwestern University Library (NUL) hosted an event organized by the Chicago Area Archivists this fall. Two information professionals working in the archives and library presented on three topics: XML, EAD, and ArchivesSpace. I decided to attend the event given my increasing involvement in the sphere of metadata at work, and my interest in how other organizations adopt standards and tools.

First, the metadata specialist gave some basic foundational information about XML - extensible markup language - a plain text markup language. She provided a brief history of the language, context including related schemas (HTML, SGML), and examples of ways the data can be transformed via cascading style sheets (CSS) or extensible stylesheet language transformations (XSLT) (Miller, 2019). Next, she provided some basic structure and syntax rules, including “root” and “child” elements and limitations on characters (Miller, 2019). NUL uses XML given how flexible and powerful it can be as a way of organizing and transforming data. XML works well with a variety of structure schemas and controlled vocabularies that the institution relies on in order to publish the data on various platforms, and a well-formed XML document can be highly extensible. Oxygen is one software tool metadata librarians use at NUL to review and edit XML metadata, and the presenter provided a number of screengrab examples of this interface to show what XML looks like during her talk.

The metadata specialist then dove into EAD or encoded archival description. Once again, she provided some background information about the standard, especially as it related to the shift in making traditional paper finding aids machine-readable in order to make them more accessible (Miller, 2019). EAD is maintained by the Library of Congress and Society of American Archivists, and it is rooted in published standards for syntax and elements (Miller, 2019). The presenter discussed the core components of EAD next: the header, which describes the finding aid itself; front matter, which describes the finding aid publication information; and the archival description, which describes the collection (Miller, 2019). 

The archival description contains the core content of the finding aid, so the presenter spent the most time here. She outlined the type of information one might find here, including: the title, abstract, physical description, subject headings, biographical or historical note, collection description, scope and arrangement notes, provenance, custodial history, and access and use restrictions (Miller, 2019). The collection contents also fall under this section, and this allows for a hierarchical description of the collection - often mirroring the physical organization, broken down by box and folder level-information (Miller, 2019). Helpfully, EAD provides some structure for this way of outlining the content of a collection, allowing up to 12 layers of such “component elements” - numbered c01, c02, etc (Miller, 2019). EAD allows for an archivist or librarian to choose the degree of detail and levels of hierarchy for a finding aid, as it is not prescriptive. Finally, she discussed the use of attributes within EAD to make the components of a finding aid machine-readable. She touched on the ways in which attributes can be described through tags to provide greater specificity about the element - “label” is a label meant to be used in the display of the data, “normal” to indicate the established form of a heading like an ISO-formatted date, and “source” to indicate the source of a controlled vocabulary term (Miller, 2019).

One of the library’s archivists then provided a walk-through of NUL’s instance of ArchivesSpace, which is where the organization hosts its EAD finding aids. He discussed their workflow in ingesting documents into the system, the ways in which data can be further edited once it is in ArchivesSpace, and how it displays for the general public. The library has only been using it for a few years, but it sounds as though it is working well to make accessible finding aids for their archival collections. We had the opportunity to sit down in one of the library’s computer labs to try the system out in its test environment. This gave me a much better feel for the interface, and all of the ways in which you can manipulate and edit data. 

The day also included a tour of some of the library’s on-campus but off-site storage for archival collections. The archivist told us about the changes the library is undergoing in terms of staffing organization, and how this is impacting how special collections are conceived. Part of this will include some reorganization of the physical storage of collections, and it sounds like a daunting project they have ahead of them. I am always thankful for the chance to peer behind the scenes and see what these spaces look like at other organizations, especially since I never had the chance to visit this space when I worked at NUL years ago.

This was a wonderful opportunity to see how these elements that are often discussed in the abstract - XML, EAD - actually work in practice, and how they interface with tools like Oxygen and ArchivesSpace. I now feel like I have a much better grasp of these standards, especially in seeing examples of real finding aids. 

References:

Miller, K. (2019). Introduction to EAD and XML. [Workshop handout].

Time-based Media Symposium: Unfolding

The time-based media symposium Unfolding: Production and Process was hosted by the Art Institute of Chicago this fall. I attended last spring’s two-day presentations, and I have been working with one of the organizers - the museum’s time-based media conservation fellow - on other projects at the museum. Given the interdisciplinary nature of the work, and my coursework relating to digital curation, I was excited for the symposium:

“From the selection of formats during production, to the continual reformatting of moving image works, to ‘reconstructions’ of works that are partially lost or obsolete, choices of assessment and care are interwoven with how artworks are seen and remembered. Artists can be critical stakeholders in conservation approaches, including repositioning their past works into new contexts or modes of display. Further, the transfer between formats as technological platforms change provides opportunities to revisit an artwork’s identity or assess the underlying attributes of an analog or digital format. Unfolding will draw from art history, conservation, artists’ own procedures, and technical fields of expertise with the aim of expanding our collective attention to the in-between moments in the lives of artworks (Art Institute of Chicago, 2019).”

There were four total panel discussions over the course of both days. All of these combined a variety of individual contexts: practicing artists, curators, collection managers and archivists, conservators, and technicians. It was interesting to reflect on the range of perspectives on these complicated works, and how necessary collaboration is. 

The first panel in particular resonated with me as it relates to the human aspects of film and video genres within the broader spectrum of time-based media. The moderator posed open-ended questions for us to consider and the panelists to address including: what works are preserved, how we create appropriate and responsible contexts for the work (cataloging, exhibiting, etc), and how we incorporate community into this practice. Speaking to these issues were Liz Johnson Artur, a multidisciplinary artist who works in still and moving images, Abina Manning, from the Video Data Bank, and Jacqueline Stewart, a professor at the University of Chicago and director of the Southside Home Movie Project. All of them spoke to the ways in which their practices intersect with archives, and the interesting dynamics between video and film as documentary and aesthetic. Representation was also an important part of the conversation - from how access is provided in an equitable way, to whether and how materials are made accessible, and what rights creators retain in handing over their materials to a repository. The role of cataloging and description plays a role in this, and so too does the much larger concept of institutionalization of film and video. In the case of the South Side Home Movie Project, Stewart faces the history of conflict as a result of her institution’s role in discriminatory policies in its predominantly black surrounding neighborhoods. Understandably, some of those she works with on potential acquisitions feel a sense of distrust about handing their family’s materials over to this institutional archives. Ultimately, it would seem that relationships are an important part of the process of building, stewarding, and making accessible (or not) this type of time-based media, and that these archives are constantly in flux - not fixed - as a result.

Stewart introducing the South Side Home Movie Project Digital Archive

The last panel on born-digital art also struck a chord, especially given the immediate and tangible examples of challenges within preservation. Jan Tichy, a multimedia artist, discussed a few of his recent conceptual, time-based pieces that were created digitally and are dependent on specific technological tools in order to be accessible and viewable. His work reflecting on the Museum of Contemporary Photography’s collection may evolve over time as their collection grows, necessitating updates and interventions to the original work. His installation on the last remaining and soon-to-be-demolished Cabrini Green building, the resulting documentation of his installation, and the resulting live-streamed footage required different strategies for archiving. Andreas Angelidakis, an “architect who doesn’t build,” talked about his work in both digital and physical environments, and how preservation comes into play with both (Art Institute of Chicago, 2019). He works with online communities like Active Worlds and Second Life, which are both dependent on companies to maintain the underlying digital infrastructure. The platforms disappear when they are no longer profitable. He started making 3D prints of some of his interventions on these platforms, with the idea that these are more stable versions of his digital creations. These physical manifestations have proven to be fragile themselves, though. In another series of work, his work in creating a digital amphitheater through custom software ended up being reproduced in the real world through the creation of soft blocks. These blocks are meant to be rearranged and used in any way people see fit, referencing the interactive nature of the original software. It also means that the blocks are intended to be physically worn down and marked as people interact with them. Mark Hellar, a technology consultant who has worked with museums on conservation projects, talked about some of the specific projects he has helped to troubleshoot. The piece News by Hans Hacke underwent treatment when it was exhibited in 2018. The piece required reverse-engineering in order to make it compatible with contemporary internet technology and RSS feeds. The underlying software had to be completely rewritten due to licensing limitations, reliance on obsolescent platforms, and link rot of the previously used RSS feeds. Fortunately, his studio did permit for changes to be made to the digital system in order to make the time-based media piece function as it originally did. In another case, Susan Kare’s Mac Icons work made its way into MoMA’s collection as both physical sketchbooks and a series of 300 floppy discs. The storage media, the file systems, and the file formats themselves were obsolete, so Hellar helped to create disc images, set up an emulator to view the files, and built a custom server with the emulator so the files would be accessible via a web browser for curators. All of these works, their inherent fragility in their digital (and physical) forms, and the ongoing work required to make them renderable speaks volumes to the challenges of digital preservation of time-based media.

Basic components of a digital preservation plan, as discussed by Small Data Industries’ Fino-Radin

The last portion of the symposium was dedicated to more direct applications of digital curation through a presentation, workshop, and moderated Q&A session. Ben Fino-Radin of Small Data Industries presented on the ‘Past, Present, and Future of Digital Preservation Storage in Museums.’ This company consulted with the Art Institute to provide recommendations on better managing its time-based media collection. This session looked at general trends and best practices in cultural heritage institutions, including considerations like data backup and redundancy, fixity checks, repositories and access, and roles and governance in order to do this work. The workshop allowed participants to learn about some of these practices, namely using digital preservation tools to assess files. Jeff Martin, a consulting media conservator, talked about ways of performing visual quality assurance on born digital video and digitized film works, and Kristin MacConough, a time-based media conservation fellow, introduced specific technology tools to gather metadata about files. Participants had the opportunity to use Terminal to see file directories and create checksums, Exiftool to read information within files (file size, type of encoding), and Mediainfo to generate a variety of additional technical metadata. 

I am thankful that there are so many folks in the field who take seriously the challenges of digital preservation, and who are willing to share their knowledge with others. I learned so much during the symposium, and I am excited to learn more through coursework and in real-world applications.

References:

Art Institute of Chicago. (2019). Unfolding: Production and process in time-based media art. [Program].

Chicago Area Archivists: Collaborative Exhibits

The Chicago Area Archivists group regularly organizes tours and professional development opportunities around the city and suburbs. I attended one such event at the University of Chicago, which was focused around the idea of collaborative exhibits. 

We first gathered for a presentation by a librarian at the university library on the history of exhibits in the university library. From the 1970s through 2009, the exhibition space was relegated to cases lining a hallway. The space was neither approachable nor particularly practical for exhibiting works on paper, as it featured shag carpet, and fluorescent and incandescent lighting. With the construction of the new Manuseto library, this exhibition space also forced the redesign of the exhibition area. Library staff hired consultants, talked to exhibitions staff at a local museum, and dedicated their efforts to designing a modern and preservation-appropriate space. 

Before and after the exhibit space redesign

They implemented appropriate environmental controls including an independent HVAC system for fine-tuned temperature and humidity control. They also installed programmable LED lighting and a variety of security tools - video, alarms, and locks. Additionally, they oddy tested materials that were used to build the cases, which ensured the exhibition furniture is doing no unintended harm to materials on display. These cases are movable, which allows for more nimble and independent control of the exhibits by library staff - they no longer need crew to help them move cases. The cases feature spaces beneath for silica to allow for even greater control of humidity. The library has several designs of these cases available for use, and they also gained storage space dedicated for storing cases. Other features in the newly redesigned exhibition space include a ceiling mounted projector, floor outlets and AV ports, and a poster rail. 

The exhibition space rotates through an average of four exhibits per year, which correlates with the university’s quarter system. The library has one staff dedicated to this work, and the curators rotate - they may include archivists or special library staff, general librarians, faculty, students, or outside curators and donors. There has been a surge of interest in the last few years for university class students to curate exhibits. This can be challenging in a class of 30 students, as cases get crowded. It also means that the exhibition schedule may be filled multiple years in advance, limiting how faculty can design their curriculum. Library staff are evaluating how to strike a balance, and are investigating whether web exhibits may work best for these situations.

Generally, projects begin roughly 12 - 18 months from the anticipated date of installation. The library is in the process of developing a more formal proposal process. The presenter provided a sample of the timeline for exhibits, which includes development - conceptualization, item selection, and exhibit design - and production - digitization, text production, graphic design, web exhibit production, production of collateral materials. 

For the exhibitions’ budgets, most costs are generally covered by the university. The ability to use existing cases and vitrines helps to this end, as do dedicated staff at the library. Printing graphics is usually covered under the general operating budget, and occasionally there may be fees to pay for loans. In cases where curators want to design a full-fledged publication that corresponds to the exhibit, they must find their own source of funding.

As it relates to the selection of items to be exhibited, library staff have found that curators can most easily find materials in the general collection at the university. Generally, it requires more guidance from special library and archives staff for the selection of rare materials - this may include teaching curators how to use finding aids, for example. Wherever possible, they try to source materials from the university system for exhibition. When loans need to be procured, staff try to use the opportunity to inform new acquisitions moving forward.

The digital library team works with the exhibition staff member to develop web exhibits that correlate with the physical exhibits. The design for these experiences is similar in look and feel to Omeka sites, a platform with which faculty and staff are often already familiar. In conjunction with these interactive experiences, the digital team also creates downloadable PDF files with full text. In this way, these exhibits can live on after they have been de-installed, and there is documentation of the work and research. Copyright is one important factor to consider in web exhibits, and generally, they try to err on the side of caution in not digitizing and publishing online materials that are in copyright (held by external agents). Occasionally, the team works with ARS to secure licenses to selectively publish important materials. This also informs how they photographically document the physical exhibits - generally, they document cases as a whole rather than individual objects.

The library leverages existing staff and tools for PR and outreach. Library communications helps to get the word out on campus about exhibitions. Staff try to align programs and events with both the exhibit and any other initiatives on campus. Events may include tours, conferences, classes, lectures, author or artist talks, and general receptions.

The presentation next shifted to a discussion by a staff member at the Oriental Institute (OI), a museum on-campus at the University of Chicago:

“The Oriental Institute was founded in 1919 by James Henry Breasted with the financial support of John D. Rockefeller Jr., and was originally envisaged as a research laboratory for the investigation of the early human career that would trace humankind’s progress from the most ancient days of the Middle East. The goal of the Oriental Institute is to be the world’s leading center for the study of ancient Near Eastern civilizations by combining innovation in theory, methodology, and significant empirical discovery with the highest standards of rigorous scholarship. The Oriental Institute Museum was opened to the public in 1931. (The Oriental Institute, n.d.)

She provided us with some background information about the museum, including its archival collection scope of faculty records, still and moving images, institutional records, and archaeology dig records. Much of this collection has been hidden over the years, as is common with many archival collections given backlogs, but staff recognized that processing to facilitate access is important, especially with their 100 year anniversary. Outreach via this exhibit was another helpful way of raising awareness and visibility of the museum and its holdings.

She made the case that archives are examples of and critical to cultural heritage as much as museum collections objects are. In the context of OI, such archival materials include documentation of now-destroyed ancient sites, and records that tell the story of provenance for historic objects. To make the archives more visible and relevant, they have pursued several projects. One of these includes the Cultural Heritage Experiment, where OI lends reproductions of archival materials to students at the University of Chicago. Students may pick from a selection of digitized images and records, and then have the opportunity to bring the archives into their own personal spaces. OI staff gather stories from students about their experiences, and from this, they are building an archive of the Cultural Heritage Experiment.

The museum has pursued a number of other avenues to connect its holdings - especially those in the archives - to the campus and the broader community. The OI is working to create a museum-in-a-box via 3D printed replicas of museum objects. This will allow the materials to travel to classrooms for remote learning opportunities. The museum also encourages loans, and it works with contemporary artists to activate the museum space in new ways. Finally, and perhaps most relevant to the subject of this event, the OI also works on collaborative exhibits.

The OI staff member presenting curated the exhibit currently on display at the library - Discovery, Collection, Memory: The Oriental Institute at 100. She walked us through the exhibit and discussed each of the cases - their contents and the process of developing a narrative connecting the history of the museum with its collections. Working so closely with institutional archives at my own museum, it was interesting to hear about how this material was reframed to show its value in telling this story. There was discussion of the role of museums like this one, and exhibits that celebrate their history, in contemporary conversations about cultural patrimony and repatriation. Complicating all of this is the university-wide umbrella under which all of these organizations and departments operate, and the bureaucracy and politics that follow as a result. The curator’s talk left me with a lot to reflect on, and I was thankful for the frank discussion.

Views of Discovery, Collection, Memory: The Oriental Institute at 100

Original negatives rarely go on display in exhibits, so it was exciting to see an example of how this can be done

A few museum objects were also on display, seen here behind one of the cases with archival materials

I appreciated seeing documents that reference some of the behind-the-scenes work that happens at museum - including acquisition and registrarial records, seen here

The event ended with a tour of the new building of the library, which prompted the redesign of the exhibition space. The structure is notable in that it features automated retrieval of general stack and archival materials in storage which is several stories below the reading room. Library staff demonstrated how the robots work, how this system interfaces with library workers, and how patrons can request materials. The climate-controlled, secure storage is much more efficient in how materials are organized on the shelves than open stacks which patrons may browse.

Several stories of subterranean storage

Computer terminal for one of the robots and a view of some oversized library material stored on the shelves

Reading room above the automated retrieval storage area

I appreciate the openness of professionals in the field to share this type of insight into some of the work they do, and for organizations like CAA that make these events happen. It helps me to consider practices where I work, and how we might shift to create more value for our users. 

References:
The Oriental Institute. (n.d.). About. Retrieved from https://oi.uchicago.edu/about

Archival Reference & Information Seeking Behaviors

In the last year or so, I have begun fielding research requests at work. Our archives serve as an important visual repository for and about the museum, as the “corporate memory [which is] preserved so that the parent institution can understand its history” (Pugh, 2008, p. 43). Staff ask for images, and I attempt to locate and make accessible via digital surrogates visual representations of subjects for which they are looking. These are extrinsically motivated, as research, publication, or exhibition projects often drive these requests (Pugh, 2008). 

Sometimes requests are straightforward - a known negative which depicts a specific museum collections object. If the negative or transparency can be found within the collection - either via the image number or object accession number - the material is usually easily digitized, and the file and corresponding descriptive metadata from the catalog card and/or negative sleeve can be shared with the requestor. Often, queries are much more vague and do not have specific images associated with them. Questions are open ended: “what images do you have that depict families visiting the museum in the 1950s” or “do you have any images of the museum gardens with flowers blooming?”

One such more general request came from the collection manager, conservation technician, and researcher of the Thorne Miniature Rooms at the museum. She emailed stating that looking for “all gallery and installation views” of the miniature rooms from their first installation to today. There was thus no defined right or wrong “answer,” and nearly any image could be useful. At first, I jumped in and attempted to locate as many images as I could alone. I performed a basic keyword search in our database, digitized several dozen contact sheets, and asked if I could be of further assistance. Only at this point did I start to understand how necessary ongoing conversation and an iterative approach to research is for more general requests like this one. This experience also taught me the value of following a more traditional reference process of query abstraction, query resolution, and query refinement (Pugh, 2008). 

There were some gaps in the digitized contact sheets that I’d provided, and this staff member inquired if I could search again. We ended up meeting face-to-face, and she explained more fully what these images were for (to inform future interpretation of the miniature rooms, including wall labels and the installation of the rooms), and specific types of images that would be especially helpful (visitors looking at the rooms, position of lights in and around the rooms, views above and behind the walls and ceiling where the rooms have been installed). This interaction helped provide greater context in the form of her individual needs: the research purpose, intended use, and her previous experience and preparation (Pugh, 2008). This conversation served to more fully develop the query abstraction initially posed in her first email communication.

Given the limitations of our information retrieval systems, it is challenging to formulate the general topic in the form of a textual query. However, when we pooled our knowledge, we were able to find more relevant images. I ended up teaching this staff member how to use our information systems, and we worked together to formulate new queries, use different search terms, search in different fields, and generally try different methods to find images. Our process evolved and changed organically as we gained new information, much as Pugh (2008) describes Bates’s theory of berrypicking. This staff member was able to bring to the table expertise about the topic, and I was able to leverage knowledge about our systems and organization of knowledge. Through this query resolution, I helped steer her to relevant images while she provided additional points of access.

It is unlikely that this research will ever be “finished,” given the complexity of her request and the challenges of our information systems. Our query refinement may therefore be ongoing. It was rewarding teaming up to tackle this investigation, and it has informed how I facilitate other research queries.

References:

Pugh, M. (2008). Providing reference services for archives & manuscripts. Chicago, Illinois: The Society of American Archivists. 

VRA Conference 2019

I attended the Visual Resource Association conference for the first time, and this year it was hosted in Los Angeles. I only became aware of the organization in the last year or so prior, which is odd given how closely the focus and goals fit with topics I am interested in professionally! I am glad to now be more connected to this group, and to have had the chance to meet so many folks through their annual meeting.

My first day was spent attending an intensive course in using the application OpenRefine. This is a free, open-source “tool for working with messy data: cleaning it; transforming it from one format into another; and extending it with web services and external data” (OpenRefine, n.d.). Two members of VRA who had practical experience using the application in their own respective professional settings, led the group in the basics. Using sample spreadsheets they provided, we loaded data, got an overview of the interface, performed basic sorting and filtering functions, and learned how to use functions to automate data cleanup. Most of the actions we took were fairly simple, but it is clear how useful even these basic commands could be. I wanted to take the class to better understand how we might approach our data cleanup project at work, where we face the merger of data from multiple different sources (homegrown databases, spreadsheets) into a new digital asset management system. The workshop helped me to think about how we could leverage tools like this one to work smartly, and how we will need to think creatively in order to cluster data to facilitate automation. In some cases, this may mean we need to perform several actions in order to transform information fully. Though this prospect still seems a little daunting, it was exciting to dig in and try my hand at some of this work.

The next days followed with more traditional conference sessions. The first I attended focused on the digital asset management environment at LACMA and the institution’s use of ResourceSpace. The museum’s Digital Assets Specialist discussed where DAMs is located within the organizational structure of the institution, and how that informs their goals. The Collections Information & Digital Assets (CIDA) team takes a user-centered approach to their work, and they are often acting as bridges between the museum’s IT department, external support services for their DAMs system, and staff. She talked about how this work is akin to translation, communicating between different groups in order to make sure all needs and dependencies are met. A big part of this work is also user education and training, to ensure expectations are realistic. With roughly 300 staff using the system, and over 350,000 assets managed within ResourceSpace, she also stressed the importance of management and governance, and integration with other existing systems (collections management database). As my museum pursues a new DAMs system, this presentation gave me a lot to think about - not just in terms of the solution we pick, but how we think about assets as information and how we can better serve staff.

DAMs management overview at LACMA.

Next up were a series of lighting talks on various projects and programs VRA professionals have recently undertaken. All of these presentations were interesting and showed the broad scope of work folks are involved in in this field. An MLIS candidate spoke about the ‘Information Worlds of Art Museum Staff,’ which appealed to me given my recent coursework in information communities. She set about her research project asking whether art museums’ staff information needs were being met by their current information resources, and what information worlds art museum staff contain. Through surveys sent to participating institutions, she learned that: museum websites are the most common information sources for all participants (intranet, public website) and all staff reported problems using this resource; and that online surrogates for the art object or primary text source were most commonly used as opposed to original resources. This has important implications for institutions like my own, and these findings could be leveraged to create better information resources for communities like these.

Another interesting lightning presentation was given by the Hirshhorn Collection Documentation and Research Manager. She discussed the role of photography in documenting artwork, especially with installation and contemporary artwork. While her institution has staff photographers who create this type of documentation, she posed the question “should visitor created photography documentation be collected and archived?” These type of images reveal how visitors interact with, experience, and perhaps even understand works of art. They can also document how a piece changes over time. While the Hirshhorn does not currently have any policies or protocol in place for the active collecting or archiving of visitor documentation, the museum does apply value to interaction on social media, and they are investigating the topic further. It is interesting to think about the possibilities of allowing more documenters - aside from institution-approved photographers - to contribute to the record of artwork.

The Image Resources Curator at UC Santa Barbara gave the final lightning presentation. She talked about how the UCSB Visual Resource Center underwent a physical transformation as they transitioned away from traditional slide library functionality after a renovation. They adopted a modular design to the new space to meet the needs of their community - professors and students. This included the installation of configurable furniture, a projector, multifunctional walls, multiple new workstations, and a large monitor. They also created space to view and temporarily store special collections, archival, museum collections to be used for instruction at the VRC. The physical space thus became much more closely aligned with the mission of serving the evolving needs of the community.

Kyoto Gardens at the conference venue, a lovely spot to take a break between sessions.

The next session I attended was focused on tools for analyzing art, texts, and films. The panel session looked at the development of various technologies from a VRA perspective: the development of a database that used content-based query for films, a comparison of existing OCR tools, and the application of deep learning to analyze the significance of image library slides. While much was presented as a work-in-progress, these technologies hold the potential to unlock information held within a range of resources. There is potential for VRA professionals to be able to more effectively describe and make accessible their collections, to provide new means for discovery, and to empower users to better analyze collections. It is likely that these tools will only improve with time - as is already evident in the advances in OCR.

I picked the next session largely because I was unclear of the definition of the core topics: digital scholarship and digital humanities. I was relieved when the presenters discussed this collective uncertainty we have about these subjects. They talked about how these disciplines bridge technologies, scholarship, and the humanities to bring VRA collections to life through interpretation. These types of projects range from complex and collaborative, like the digitization and presentation of the American Academy photographic archives in Italy, to more discrete and independent, like the interactive website ‘How to Make a Fake.’ The creation of robust metadata and notations, faceted searching options, use of IIIF, and mapping functionality help transform digitized resources to educate users and tell stories. The last presenter touched on some of the challenges within this domain, especially as it relates to the technical expertise needed to develop and sustain these projects over time. One example that helped illustrate this point was the use of a commercial real estate walk-through application, which was employed in a digital humanities paper to show the recreation of a historic interior in 360 degrees. This experience may need to be migrated to a new tool, should this service ever become defunct, and navigating licensing and copyright limits while attempting to effectively archive and preserve the paper can be difficult. VRA professionals cannot expect themselves to have the answers to all these potential roadblocks, but rather must leverage existing contacts with expertise, and help to bring together potential collaborators. As I have found time and time again in library school - it isn’t necessarily about what you know, it’s about knowing how to find the information you need - which includes our information networks.

The session, ‘Framing Places and Identities: Biographies of Photographic Archives and Their Environments,’ provided multiple perspectives on the complex histories and provenance many visual resource collections. In one case - a collection of photographs of the Salerno ivories at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence - the original physical images, digital surrogates, and new born digital images underwent transformations over time. The newest images were merged with the existing collection, and the collection as a whole was transformed as it became available online and was published widely. A different collection, Foto Arte Minore, has continued to grow over the decades. The intent of the photographer whose work comprises the core of the collection was carried out by the predecessors in his company, and more recently by commissions for similar work by the collecting institution. The relationship between repository and creator has thus become more fluid and active. A third presenter discussed how his institution had to piece together the body of work created by one important local photographer after it was dispersed by his family. This involved scouring sites like Craigslist and Ebay, proactively reaching out to the community, and maintaining lines of communication with potential donors over time. Though not all of the photographs were recovered, the portion of the collection that was reunited helped to tell the everyday story of the Japanese and Japanese-American community in 20th century California. The process also brought surviving subjects of the photographs, researchers, and the repository closer.

Next, a VRA professional from a neighboring art museum here in Chicago talked about ethical image use, or “sure, we can, but should we?” She made the case that as time has gone on, it has become easier to determine copyright but less clear if there are ethical implications for licensing images. Several case studies and their issues were presented: the use of an artist’s portrait rather than their work, overlaying text on artwork in marketing material, using artwork that aligned questionably with new product for the museum gift shop. In all situations, though copyright would permit use, there was the potential for conflict over the choice and context of the use of the images. The presenter stressed the importance of communicating with and educating requestors in these cases, to determine if a compromise or alternative solution could be found. Since she is often dealing with living artists, she also discussed how she often reached out to them to clarify these issues. In response to the question she posed of ‘who should be responsible for making ethical image decisions within an institution?’ she concluded by saying that everyone needs to feel ownership. Hopefully this type of awareness and consciousness is growing in libraries, archives, and museums that license images of and from their collections.

Custom-designed digitization station at the Getty.

The final presentation of the conference took one digitization project from start to final products: ‘Ed Ruscha’s Streets of LA: A Lesson in Digitizing, Organizing and Presenting Visual Information at the Getty.’ The team involved in the project first talked about the origins of the work, namely the access issues due to the format of the materials and the conservation concerns. They worked with a vendor to develop a custom solution to digitize the collection to minimize preservation issues and allow for ventilation, while also ensuring quality capture. For metadata, the team relied on accompanying written notebooks, notations on original housing material, OCR’ed street and business signs, and Google Cloud Vision API to create item-level descriptive data. They were also able to leverage existing GIS location data when they were able to determine street addresses. For both Google Cloud Vision API auto tagging and imported GIS location data, the team had to spend some additional time to perform quality control and assess how accurate and helpful this generated data was in this context. Finally, the team employed IIIF and designed two separate online portals for the anticipated users of the collections: scholarly researchers and the general public interested in the subject of the images (streets of Los Angeles over time). It was helpful to understand all of the work that went into the project like this one, especially as it relates to both expertise and staffing.

Example of auto-tagging suggestions for one of the images digitized as part of Getty’s project.

In between all these sessions, I had the opportunity to connect with other VRA professionals and new friends. We debriefed on what we learned, shared about our work, and commiserated over common challenges. Even though I am new to this community and felt uncertain about my role and fit, I felt welcomed. I will value the personal interactions and connections just as much (if not more!) than all the knowledge I gained through the formal presentations.

References:
OpenRefine. (n.d.). Welcome! Retrieved fromhttp://openrefine.org/

California Museum of Photography Tour

I visited Los Angeles for the first time this spring, which provided me with an opportunity to visit one of my SJSU professors and the museum where she works - the California Museum of Photography. I took her class the previous fall, and it was focused on managing photographic collections. This visit helped further contextualize everything we discussed, and it provided me an opportunity to see some of the materials she discussed in person!

Exterior of the museum with a view of the room-sized pinhole camera!

We toured the collections storage areas first. It always feels like such a privilege being granted access to these spaces, and this visit was no exception. There are four total spaces - vaults - and we looked at two of these. The first housed prints, cameras, and other photography equipment. Prints were either stored in custom drawers (stereographs), or they were matted and housed in boxes (oversized prints). They were fortunate to receive grant funding several years prior in order to do some of this preventive conservation rehousing work. We also talked about collections care issues in this space. They have a sizable collection of 35mm, medium format, and large format cameras, most of which are made of a variety of types of materials. The 35mm cameras in particular may include various types of plastic, metal, and glass. Determining the optimal way of storing - bagging, boxing, no covering - and combating a less-than-optimal filtration system within the HVAC system poses an ongoing challenge. There is also an interesting room divider in the collection, which necessitates special storage and care. The screen has mounted mammoth albumen prints, which are light sensitive. The object must therefore be draped with light-blocking material, as even when the overhead lights are off, emergency lights stay on at all times.

The first vault

Part of the 35mm camera collection

The second storage space primarily houses negatives, though there is some additional photography equipment. The stereographic negative collection - both cut and uncut - comprises a large portion of this room. Some of these negatives are glass, and some are film, and they are organized by the code Keystone View company (one notable publisher) assigned them. What is notable about this space is the use of special seismic cabinets for glass plate negatives and fragile mechanical equipment. These units are designed such that they sit on metal plates, which in turn sit on metal bearings. The bearings allow the cabinets to move with vibrations, which helps protect the material inside.

Seismic storage units for fragile material

Stereographic negative and prints

We also spent some time in the library and viewing room, which is open to the public by appointment. They are currently working on cataloging all of the bound volumes, but it is challenging given current staffing levels and the demands of the UC (which the museum is part of) cataloging requirements. There is one collection manager, a registrar, and two curators who work with the collection. They do host student workers and interns and draw heavily on the undergraduate and graduate student body at UC. We talked about the value of this additional help, which can be tempered by the additional workload it creates for staff. Occasionally, the library space is also used to temporarily store large collections items, for which staff need to make additional space in their vaults and/or create custom housing enclosures. When I was visiting, I had the chance to see two such oversized cameras up-close: a custom machine-gun camera and a 24”x24” view camera.

Exploded view of a camera using actual components from a stereographic device

The last several hours of my trip were dedicated to seeing the exhibitions at the museum. I visited when the galleries were closed to the public, and it was so pleasant to explore and enjoy the photographs alone. I first stopped at In the Sunshine of Neglect: Defining Photographs And Radical Experiments in Inland Southern California, 1950 To The Present. From the website for the exhibition: “the show presents the title’s territory on the eastern edge of the Los Angeles Basin as an experimental tabula rasa playground for photographers, where nothing was at stake, so everything was possible” (UCR Arts, 2019). Some of the inspiration for the exhibition was drawn from “the work of New Topographics photographers Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, and Joe Deal, who are well represented among the show’s 194 works” (UCR Arts, 2019). The photographs on display covered a wide range of themes - including social landscapes, environmental impacts, and photography as performance - while all still being centered in this specific geographic area. The curation was thoughtful and images thought-provoking.

In the Sunshine of Neglect

In the Sunshine of Neglect

The second exhibit I visited, entitled Collected, covered the theme of museum collections through the lens of this particular institution. From the website for the exhibition, the show: “examines the first photograph collectors, people in the 19th century who assembled images of loved ones or photographs of interest, and also features several modern collectors whose gifts helped to shape the California Museum of Photography’s collection… the museum’s collection has been made possible through donations from collectors, both the descendants of early photographic collectors and those who collect photographs and cameras today… these gifts have helped the museum expand the breadth and depth of its holdings, and have contributed to the museum’s success” (UCR Arts, 2018). The relationship between museums and donors is something I have been thinking about more frequently, especially as there is an increasing need for transparency and accountability in these partnerships. The exhibit featured a wonderful sampling of photographic technology and genres of images, and it felt at times like I was physically stepping into some of my course lectures.

Collected

Collected

I feel so fortunate to have, once again, toured the facilities of and talked with another professional whom I greatly respect. Museum collections managers and archivists are chronically overworked, so I truly appreciate the time every one of these individuals has set aside to meet with me in the last several years. This visit was a wonderful way to start the trip, and it helped provide some much-needed background information about the region itself.

References:

UCR Arts. (2018). Collected. Retrieved from https://artsblock.ucr.edu/Exhibition/permanent-collection-gallery
UCR Arts. (2019). In the sunshine of neglect. Retrieved from https://artsblock.ucr.edu/Exhibition/in-the-sunshine-of-neglect

VRAF Omeka Workshop

The Visual Resources Association Foundation organized a series of workshops that were hosted across the United States in 2018 through 2019. Fortunately, one of these took place right here in Chicago, and the University of Chicago hosted it. The one-day course was focused on Omeka and how it could be used for digital humanities projects. I attended with the hopes that this platform might be a useful tool for publishing online some of our image archives at the museum.

We were given a helpful background in the differences between the versions of Omeka - including both classic versions and Omeka S. Most of the workshop focused on the classic versions, and the hosted Omeka.net platform was our testing environment for the day. We covered the main components of building a site: items, collections, and exhibits.

I was happy to see that platform has batch upload functionality for both images and corresponding metadata. The built-in tools to link to outside media, resources, and geospatial metadata result in richer exhibitions. The accessible metadata standards (Dublin Core with support of PB Core and VRA Core through a crosswalk), user-friendly user interface, and helpful plugins make this a great solution to get projects off the ground and onto the web. There are options for third-party hosting, and the how-to resources seem exhaustive. Additionally, the Omeka Everywhere suite of tools translates this functionality into additional user experiences. The collection viewer, mobile app, and digital tablet or table viewer for in-gallery viewing all provide greater accessibility and visibility of items published to the corresponding Omeka site.

It can be challenging finding the resources to build out custom portals to publish our unique holdings, and there are limits to what our existing infrastructure can do. This is where I think Omeka might be a great fit for our needs - it is a nimble, intuitive platform that would help make more accessible our archives.