As Above, So Below
Special and Digital Collections, Fall 2023
The Magician from The Painted Caravan
The first month of a new year provides an exemplary opportunity to recap—and indeed recapture—the many achievements and notable moments of the previous semester. In a particularly esoteric—with practical outcomes—the Fall Semester closely resembled the first card of the major arcana of the tarot: The Magician.
With one hand pointed skyward and the other down to earth, the figure seems to state: “as above, so below”. This seems anample description for the involved and complex work completed—and continued—by the Gottesman Libraries Special and Digital Collections team, as we oscillate between working with the granularities of foundation building, while looking forward to future projects and endeavors.
Acquisitions and Digitization
Over the course of the Fall Semester the Special and Digital Collections team acquired three collections: Myron Woolman (Alumnus), Michael Rebell’s Center for Fiscal Equity Papers, and Children’s Indian Art Collection (donated by Ami Kantawala).
Additionally, we have digitized the remainder of the Grace Dodge Papers and the Associate Dean Files pertaining to the Student Caucus and Senate from the years 1968-1974.
We look forward to making these papers more widely available in the coming spring and summer.
Preservation
Aoife Smith has been diligently at work performing vital preservation measures for our physical collection, focusing on re-foldering, re-labeling, and re-boxing portions of our special collections that most need it. This includes 16.62 linear feet of re-foldered and re-labeled material as well as 17.28 linear feet of re-boxed material.
Inventory, Audits, and Finding Aids (oh my!)
Throughout the fall 2023 semester, our Processing Archivist for Special Collections, Victoria Santamorena primarily focused on auditing the documentation for physical collections (accession records, collection inventories, and finding aids) against the physical collections themselves.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1OjbLFAwJGLE9xsC2avhTNoTgV4xxHL40v8MIO1Quuhw/edit?usp=sharing
To perform this audit, the team developed an excel database that would be used to track collections’ documentation and corresponding boxes by their accession numbers and their root collection, while simultaneously accounting for the granularity of collections’ intellectual access, processing levels, and arrangement.
A rubric was designed which categorizes the levels of description, processing, and arrangement by which we could measure the collections’ current statuses against desired levels. Close to 700 documents were examined to assess the level of description for each collection as well as the documented processing and arrangement.
This process is ongoing as the assessment and inventory increases in granularity and the scope of the project expands to include the overall accuracy of accession inventories and container lists.
Strategically, this audit will establish a better understanding of our overall processing levels and enhance the documentation, description, arrangement, and preservation efforts for each collection.
The audit will allow us to identify collections in need of more advanced processing, and in turn will help us devise next steps to better steward archival collections. Such actions will allow the Special and Digital Collections unit to improve our service to the research community through deliverables such as online finding aids that will promote enhanced access to collections and discovery of relevant materials, while further integrating our digital records with their physical counterparts.
Teachers College Digital Collection
This fall semester saw the launch of Teachers College Digital Collection and the subsequent retiring of Pocket Knowledge, thus ushering in a new (digital) age of Gottesman Libraries and Teachers College collections.
Teachers College Digital Collections (TCDC) takes a step back from the web 2.0/social archiving ethos of Pocket Knowledge and seeks instead to utilize more traditional practices of archival practices, in the hope that we can increase the long-term integration and discovery of these digital collections in relation to their physical counterparts in the form of finding aids and other best practices (see section below, “LibGuide Finding Aids” )
A rather silent majority of time this semester was spent on measures of quality assurance and control, checking on data integrity, user-experience design considerations, and any lingering migration bugs—such as applying descriptive metadata to records that went uncaptured in the initial migration period.
Specific technical considerations, timelines, and team members for the implementation of Alma Digital and Teachers College Digital Collections can be found here.
Bibliographic Records
Samie Konet contributed immensely to the enhancement and further development of our bibliographic records for objects in TCDC. Focusing primarily on capturing latent data associated with the Teachers College Art Collection, including dimensions, material types, ages, creators, and associated institutions.
This required first modeling our current MARC field bibliographic data to Resource Description and Access, successor to AACR2. This modeling of data is a vital measure to ensure that the data we are recording will be not only up-to-date with current practices for digital content, but also to be readily engaged for emergent trends in the field such as linked-data projects, etc.
In addition to the ongoing, individual record enhancement, a review of overarching bibliographic record description was conducted. A bib record is created and maintained by library staff, and appears as the catalog entry users interact with when browsing not only the library catalog but for materials in the special and digital collections as well.
By orchestrating a review of bib records that describe top-level collections and sub-collections, we were able to gain a better understanding of the quality of each record description. As we continue to enhance descriptions, we work towards the implementation of future projects involving linked data and increased integration between traditional (and electronic) finding aids and our catalog.
This integration will increase interoperability between siloed collections, providing visibility to the relevance of the relationships established between material in the Special and Digital Collections which may not be immediately apparent
Mapping Collections
One of the first steps taken to understand the relationship that exists between collections—as opposed to discretely within collections—has been to create conceptual maps of the way these individual collections interact with one another.
This type of mapping not only provides the use-case and pilot for future visualization and access tools, but also allows the Special and Digital Collections team to add this as textual reference for our finding aids.
LibGuide Finding Aids
Looking at our paper accession records, inventories, and finding aids revealed the need to update those records and to make them accessible to users. Currently, our finding aids are not available to users without the mediation of librarians or archivists. Without direct access to a finding aid or collection inventory, a researcher would need to be aware of a collection or names, dates, and terms associated with a collection so librarians can locate appropriate guides and resources.
The auditing process made it apparent that our documentation describing archival collections needs to be available to the public. From this realization, the Special Collections unit decided to undertake a project that will make accession records, inventories, and finding aids available online through the Gottesman Libraries Research Guides (LibGuides). By making such documents available in a more interactive format, we hope that our collections will be more accessible to the larger research community. The LibGuides format will allow our finding aids to become living documents that will reflect the collections as they change and grow.
The Grace Dodge Papers provided our pilot and test case for the implementation of LibGuide finding aids. The paper documentation for Dodge’s papers were detailed and provided information that helped describe the contents of the collection, its scope, its historical significance, its related collections, relevant topics and subjects, and issues pertaining to access and rights. I tried to format the guide in an intuitive and cohesive way so that it would be user friendly, searchable, and connected to our catalog. Once this guide is published and goes live, the hope is that it will aid researchers in their efforts to find materials to support their work.
The next steps will be to create LibGuide finding aids for other important and frequently used collections, such as the James Earl Russell Papers. We hope to eventually have LibGuide finding aids for every collection in the archive.
By The Numbers
Reference and Research
- 15 non-TC/CUL affiliated scholars requested access to Teachers College Digital Collections from a variety of institutions—both foreign and domestic—including George Mason University, University of South Florida, Michigan State University, Purdue, Wellesley, Fukuoka Institute of Technology, University of Haifa, and Mainz Art Academy
- Just over 100 “Ask-A-Librarian” Tickets received and answered
- 2 in-depth and curated workshops for researching with primary sources were conducted for two History of Communication courses, taught by Ioana Literat and Mario Khreiche.
- 12 reading room visits were conducted, two from outside researchers for an extended period, one regarding History of Pedagogy in the Modern Middle East and another an examination of George S. Counts papers.
Teachers College Digital Collections
- Number of digital representation views—1537
- Number of digital file downloads —202
- Number of digital file views—1077
Blogs
- Movable Books and Malleable Minds: Exploring Movable Books as Sites of Learning and Play by Victoria Santamorena
- Primary Source Overview by Conrad Lochner
- Primary Source Instruction for MTSU 4016 by Conrad Lochner
- A Brief Introduction to Hazel Hertzberg and a Proposed Framework for Evaluating Indigenous Resources at Teachers College by Conrad Lochner
