SAA 2009: the tours

Today I went on two of the repository tours connected to the SAA: the Harry Ransom Center and the Kilgarlin Center.

The Harry Ransom Center for the Humanities is a huge, and hugely diverse, collection of materials relating to the humanities broadly defined. The tour took us through various departments: digital projects, conservation of various sorts, cataloging, and public services.

The new acquisition on nearly everyone's minds was the Robert De Niro collection, which posed such problems as "do we clean the fake blood off this cape?" and "how do we preserve these costume continuity guides?" The latter were an archivist's nightmare: collections of Polaroids attached to tags, which were safety-pinned to wire hangers. How to preserve this arrangement while also preserving its components is an issue the archivist working on the collection was still struggling to resolve.

The conservation department works not only on conserving archival materials, but also on documenting their own actions: an archive of the archive that will enable future researchers to trace the conservation history of a particular item in great detail.

The digitization and public services departments both discussed the turn to providing digital copies of requested materials rather than photocopies. These digital copies are then saved, to be available for future researchers. Metadata is created by the user, as a required part of the form they fill out to request digitization of materials.

The tour ended with a demonstration of the HRC's implementation of the Aeon collection management software, which enables users to look at a finding aid and check off boxes next to the particular folders they want to request. So far only the HRC, the University of Chicago, and the University of Miami are using the system.

Unfortunately the gallery space was in the process of mounting two new exhibits, one on Edgar Allen Poe and one on astronomy, so the only materials on display were the Gutenberg Bible, the first photograph, and a self-portrait by Frida Kahlo, but there were plenty of glorious items behind the scenes, from an eleventh-century bound manuscript to a 19th-century French subway poster.

Then on to the Kilgarlin Center, the iSchool's conservation program. The iSchool had just moved into a new space, but among the boxes and piles of stuff to be organized, it was clear that the new facilities are excellent.

The tour began with the computer lab and media room, which contained machines to play virtually any media format imaginable. From there we went to the conservation labs: manuscripts on one side and books on the other. We spent quite some time in the book conservation room, looking at a few of the projects students are currently undertaking, including one book project that will have taken 100 labor hours by the time it is completed.

The conservation labs were an interesting combination of the high-tech and the archaic, with microscopes and fume hoods on the one hand, and leather-tooling tools and a nineteenth-century block-rounding press on the other.

Then I had a break before the evening THATCamp, which is the topic for a future post.

SAA 2009: the prequel

I head to Austin tomorrow for SAA 2009. Plans:

-Checking out the UT Austin iSchool and the Harry Ransom Center, where I hope to spend much time in the future if all goes well.

-Participating in THATCamp, a digital humanities unconference, and discussing matchmaking in the digital archive.

-And, of course, the conference itself, of which - more later.