Special and Digital Collections: Fall 2024 Report

O Thou Whose Face Hath Felt the Winter's Wind

 By John Keats

O thou whose face hath felt the Winter’s wind,
Whose eye has seen the snow-clouds hung in mist
And the black elm tops ‘mong the freezing stars,
To thee the spring will be a harvest-time.
O thou, whose only book has been the light
Of supreme darkness which thou feddest on
Night after night when Phoebus was away,
To thee the Spring shall be a triple morn.

O fret not after knowledge- I have none,
And yet my song comes native with the warmth.
O fret not after knowledge- I have none,
And yet the Evening listens. He who saddens
At thought of idleness cannot be idle,
And he’s awake who thinks himself asleep.

Amsterdam Avenue, West Side Near 122nd Street, Winter. Teachers College. 1895

The intercession period provides a much-needed time for rest and reflection, and —as we turn our faces toward the depths of winter—we should do well to remember that longer days are upon us and Spring lay somewhere just around the corner.

In the meantime, below is a recap of what the Gottesman Libraries Special and Digital Collections team worked on throughout the Fall Semester. We focused a great deal on increasing Access and Discovery of our collection, processing both newly acquired and existing physical and digital material, while also addressing user-experience issues. As usual, we continued to digitize material from the special collections, proceed with patron-oriented service, and address a myriad of additional tasks as they presented themselves.

ACCESS and DISCOVERY

 Processing of Physical Collections

 Processing Archivist for Special Collections, Victoria Santamorena, was remarkably busy—as usual—accessioning, processing, and making readily available Gottesman Libraries Special Collections.

During this Fall Semester, they finished processing two full collections. The first was the remaining three linear feet of the Center for Educational Equity Records (Approximately 30 hours), wrote the finding aid for the collection, wrote  blog post  the Center for Educational Equity Records.

The second collection—What’s Happening: An Independent Student Voice—highlights the gift of from Elaine Avidon, amassed while she was the magazine’s advisor. Highlighted in the finding aid for the collection, patrons will find twenty-two issues of the magazine; its business correspondence; personal correspondence; drawings, posters, and programs for workshops and events held by the magazine’s staff; and press materials related to the magazine. Additional materials include photographs, negatives, slides, a glass medallion bearing the magazine’s logo, and materials from Elaine Avidon's thesis. The What’s Happening collection documents the founding, organization, and operating activities of the magazine.

Victoria continued their work on on faculty and alumni finding aids, due to be made available at a later date once a more comprehensive listing is available. In addition to these efforts, we have begun the process of prioritizing and re-processing existing collections, beginning with the William F. Russell Papers to enable better discovery, access, and preservation. So far, boxes 1 through 4 have been reexamined.

In order to approach this project efficiently and effectively, workflow documentation and templates were created in order to manage multiple collections simultaneously and ensure long-term continuity. Project and processing plans were developed and audits were performed comparing the physical documents of William F. Russell to the digitized material that was migrated from Pocket Knowledge into Teachers College Digital Collections

A LibGuide landing page was developed that highlights finding aid for Centers, Institutes, and Programs, describing Teachers College many initiatives, centers, institutes, experimental schools, associations, and other projects and new materials was accessioned into the Nursing Education Archive.

Finally, the Leonard Blackman and Joan Gussow papers were re-foldered, re-boxed and re-inventoried for preservation and accuracy by Aoife Smith, our Special Collections Library Associate.

Processing and Ingest of Digital Material

 The Special and Digital Collections team continued efforts to finish migrating the last of the material left from the Pocket Knowledge platform. This material, tagged originally as Athena Digitization, was part of an extensive digitization project that touched on many portions of the special collections. However, at the time of migration, this material was largely unorganized, tagged with uncontrolled vocabularies that required manual examination of files.

 We began first with material that fit into  Teachers Collegiana (TCana), a collection that highlights course catalogs, college periodicals, directories, manuals, pamphlets, reports, legal documents, circulars, and other printed materials, ca. 1880s-1980s. Additional content was added to the  History of Education Collection, The American Curriculum Collection, and Trustee Meetings. At the conclusion of the semester, we had processed and ingested 2,639 digital objects. The following list is the allocation of digital objects to their respective collections:

• 918 objects were added to Teachers College Contributions to Education
• 625 objects were added to Official Notes
• 461 objects were added to Teachers College Announcements, Annual Reports, and Catalogs
• 232 objects were added to Teachers College Bulletin
• 190 objects were added The Official Bulletin, Teachers College
• 100 objects were added to Official Documents
• 69 objects were added to Digests of Dissertations and Masters Essays
• 32 objects were added to the History of Education Collection
• 9 objects were added to The American Curriculum Collection
• 2 objects were added to the Trustee Meetings
• 1 object was added to Grace Dodge Collection

The David Long Collection of K-12 School Finance and Reform Litigation Papers—totaling approximately 1200 objects—were ingested and made available in  The New York State School Finance Reform Archive, and compliments the work offered by the Center for Educational Equity Records.

This ingest prompted the creation of two new collections—Publications of Teachers College and The David Long Collection of K-12 School Finance and Reform Litigation Papers. The Publications of Teachers College contains 6 sub-collections—Teachers College Bulletin, Teachers College Yearbooks and Ephemera, The Official Bulletin, Teachers College, Official Notes, Radix: Teachers College Student Newspaper, Digests of Dissertations and Masters Essays. In accordance with the original arrangement of The David Long Collection, there are an additional 5 sub-collections/series and 2 sub-series.

Digitization

 Aoife Smith continued his digitization of special collections material for inclusion into Teachers College Digital Collections, as well as assisting patrons in their various requests, as needed: 

• Scanned 175 pieces of children's’ art in the Carol Cade Collection
• Assisted in patron request for digitized monographs as needed including, Education and Marginality by Marion Vera Cuthbert
• 80 documents for Institute for Urban and Minority Education/Edmund W. Gordon Institute
• 25 issues of RADIX, the Student Senate Publication

SERVICE

• 43 research inquiries
• 26 requests for access to Teachers College Digital Collections
• 19 Closed stack and reading room requests
• 9 Donation inquiries
• 8 miscellaneous or non-standard requests (copyright information, employment opportunities, etc)
• 5 individual student and research consultations and one salon-style engagement with the Department of Nutrition, highlighting the Cabinet of Curiosity exhibition on cookbooks, the history of the nutrition program through 1925, and exhibitions in the Offit Gallery and Tudor Room.

CURATION and BLOGS

 The Special and Digital Collections team wrote four blog posts that highlighted interesting material and newly accessioned and processed collections:

• Oh, The Things You Can Find: Dive into the Special Collections, RED-ucators of Columbia University,  
• My Dear Miss Nutting, Personal Experiences of Nurses in France During World War I
• Introducing the Center for Educational Equity Records
• Introducing What’s Happening: An Independent Student Voice Collection

 OTHER

• Created Qualtrics form to more efficiently integrate closed stack and reading room requests. This form auto-generates when a patron requests closed stack material, allowing them to schedule reading room visits to view the material, and alerts the Special and Digital Collections team of the request.
• We completed grant submission for archival projects funded by the National Historical Publication and Records Commission. If successful, this grant would allow Gottesman Libraries to digitize and catalog 991 ¼” reels. These reels consist of speeches, lectures, teaching material, conferences, and interviews of notable faculty, administrators, education professionals, and programs dating back to the early 20^th century. The award of this grant would not only provide researchers a trove of previously unheard material, but also ensure continued preservation of this material as the medium of delivery is at considerable risk for degradation.