Conservation and Metadata Creation
Working with the lantern slide collection was a project in distinct phases. The initial phase entailed conservation measures that would protect and stabilize the collection, which had been housed in their original vintage wooden boxes and were dusty and in need of cleaning. After this, they needed to be re-housed into archival materials. Some slides exhibited signs of mold in the form of spotting within the emulsion, but these would not be touched, as the emulsion is fragile and easily scratches and flakes. Following the Northeast Document Center’s recommendation, archival boxes and three-side sealed polypropylene acid-free enclosures were purchased to hold each slide. The wooden boxes were labeled with tags such as “Babylon/Egypt,” “60 misc. New York,” and “77 slides.” During cleaning, I wore cotton gloves and carefully cleaned each slide with a small amount of rubbing alcohol on a soft lint-free cloth made for photographic lenses and equipment. I avoided getting the fragile paper labels damp. Once the slide had dried it was placed in a sleeve and then in a box. I measured the width of the boxes and cut dividers that would fit to separate groups of about 10-15 slides. Along with this, I would transcribe any information I found on the slide exactly as it appeared. Some slides had titles and others did not. These I labeled Untitled and provided a description. Other types of information included the studios that made the slides, which included well-known commercial lantern slide producers of the time, and are a potential source of interesting research material in and of themselves. These included the Keystone View Company Factories of Meadville, PA, which produced a full line of lantern slides for sale to educational institutions; T.H. McAllister, Manufacturing Optician, located at the turn of the century at 49 Nassau Street; and Charles Beseler and Co., which manufactured lantern slides and projectors. The collection includes a large number of slides made by the American Museum of Natural History, which provided free material to New York City schools as well as delivering illustrated lantern slide lectures on various topics. Other categories of valuable metadata are the origin or entity that owned the groups of slides, such as the Museum of the City of New York, where many of Green-Wood’s collection is from, and the New York State Education Department Visual Instruction Division. I also entered location information, dates (although the majority were undated) and made notes on condition, such as where the tape had been lost or degraded, or whether there were cracks in the glass support. At first I found it necessary to transcribe onto paper while I was cleaning because taking off the gloves to enter information into the computer and then putting them back on was not efficient. However, it was soon clear that creating an Excel spreadsheet would be the best way to organize and preserve the metadata. I then had to go back and manually enter everything; it was a challenge to backtrack and catch up since so much had already been transcribed by hand. Eventually I caught up and for the remaining one-third of the conservation process I used the spreadsheet. Cleaning the collection, over 850 slides, was a very time consuming process, much more than I had originally anticipated. According to Hughes (2004), cleaning and rehousing collections is an important added benefit of the digitization process, “but such handling of every item in the collection is a highly unusual occurrence.” Looking back, another option might have been to identify a smaller number of slides of particular interest that may be good candidates for immediate digitization and just clean these; however, uncovering these slides would necessitate handling and closely examining them, in which case they might as well be dealt with now and not later.
Establishing Physical and Intellectual Control
Several times throughout this initial phase I met with Green-Wood's historian Jeff Richman to discuss the specific subject categories that would represent the various series in this collection. At our first meeting, we came up with about 35 initial categories, including Aerial Views, Broadway, Bowling Green, Central Park, Fifth Avenue, Museums, Street Scenes, Wall Street, and many others. Once the conservation phase was over and the physical and intellectual arrangement began, we sifted through the individual boxes and decided where each slide should go, creating new categories as we went along. My method was to put a post-it on each group of slides indicating the subject category, and move on to the next. The challenge for me, over the next several weeks, would be the physical arrangement and re-arrangement that came with all this sorting. Categories emerged and changed. Groups of slides had to be moved into certain boxes in alphabetical order, which meant the contents would often shift to other boxes which would disrupt the order of the next box. I found it difficult at times to discern how best to deal with the actual backlog of filing that accumulated and how to keep things in order. I was constantly certain there must be a more efficient way, but the solution eluded me. As I was thinking about strategies of arrangement and description, I decided it might be helpful to visit the Brooklyn Historical Society, meet with their archivist, and discuss how their collection of lantern slides is organized. Most but not all of it has been digitized, and is also physically accessible for research (although Archivist Julie May says researchers rarely access the physical collection). While they use similar archival and conservation methods, their intellectual arrangement—which May inherited but did not implement— is quite different. Instead of dividing the collection into subject categories each slide was given a number and placed into numerical order in boxes. Although there is simplicity to this method, I do believe that the arrangement into distinct subject categories/series makes sense for Green-Wood's collection and will be one of its strengths, as it will facilitate search and retrieval and enhance usability. On the subject of organization, May recommended creating a numbering system that lends itself to unique object identifiers that translate to file names so that the object ID matches the file ID. It is important to consider how Green-Wood might continue to collect and grow this collection, and to therefore attach a numbering system to it that would allow for future growth. May agreed that the system I proposed, which would be an abbreviation of the subject category followed by the specific item number, would allow it to be easily tracked and found. I then suggested the following to Richman, for example: LS-BB-001 (Lantern Slide, Bridges, item #1). When the item is digitized it will also carry this as a file name and the ID will be entered into the spreadsheet with this as a unique identifier.
Working with the lantern slide collection was a project in distinct phases. The initial phase entailed conservation measures that would protect and stabilize the collection, which had been housed in their original vintage wooden boxes and were dusty and in need of cleaning. After this, they needed to be re-housed into archival materials. Some slides exhibited signs of mold in the form of spotting within the emulsion, but these would not be touched, as the emulsion is fragile and easily scratches and flakes. Following the Northeast Document Center’s recommendation, archival boxes and three-side sealed polypropylene acid-free enclosures were purchased to hold each slide. The wooden boxes were labeled with tags such as “Babylon/Egypt,” “60 misc. New York,” and “77 slides.” During cleaning, I wore cotton gloves and carefully cleaned each slide with a small amount of rubbing alcohol on a soft lint-free cloth made for photographic lenses and equipment. I avoided getting the fragile paper labels damp. Once the slide had dried it was placed in a sleeve and then in a box. I measured the width of the boxes and cut dividers that would fit to separate groups of about 10-15 slides. Along with this, I would transcribe any information I found on the slide exactly as it appeared. Some slides had titles and others did not. These I labeled Untitled and provided a description. Other types of information included the studios that made the slides, which included well-known commercial lantern slide producers of the time, and are a potential source of interesting research material in and of themselves. These included the Keystone View Company Factories of Meadville, PA, which produced a full line of lantern slides for sale to educational institutions; T.H. McAllister, Manufacturing Optician, located at the turn of the century at 49 Nassau Street; and Charles Beseler and Co., which manufactured lantern slides and projectors. The collection includes a large number of slides made by the American Museum of Natural History, which provided free material to New York City schools as well as delivering illustrated lantern slide lectures on various topics. Other categories of valuable metadata are the origin or entity that owned the groups of slides, such as the Museum of the City of New York, where many of Green-Wood’s collection is from, and the New York State Education Department Visual Instruction Division. I also entered location information, dates (although the majority were undated) and made notes on condition, such as where the tape had been lost or degraded, or whether there were cracks in the glass support. At first I found it necessary to transcribe onto paper while I was cleaning because taking off the gloves to enter information into the computer and then putting them back on was not efficient. However, it was soon clear that creating an Excel spreadsheet would be the best way to organize and preserve the metadata. I then had to go back and manually enter everything; it was a challenge to backtrack and catch up since so much had already been transcribed by hand. Eventually I caught up and for the remaining one-third of the conservation process I used the spreadsheet. Cleaning the collection, over 850 slides, was a very time consuming process, much more than I had originally anticipated. According to Hughes (2004), cleaning and rehousing collections is an important added benefit of the digitization process, “but such handling of every item in the collection is a highly unusual occurrence.” Looking back, another option might have been to identify a smaller number of slides of particular interest that may be good candidates for immediate digitization and just clean these; however, uncovering these slides would necessitate handling and closely examining them, in which case they might as well be dealt with now and not later.
Establishing Physical and Intellectual Control
Several times throughout this initial phase I met with Green-Wood's historian Jeff Richman to discuss the specific subject categories that would represent the various series in this collection. At our first meeting, we came up with about 35 initial categories, including Aerial Views, Broadway, Bowling Green, Central Park, Fifth Avenue, Museums, Street Scenes, Wall Street, and many others. Once the conservation phase was over and the physical and intellectual arrangement began, we sifted through the individual boxes and decided where each slide should go, creating new categories as we went along. My method was to put a post-it on each group of slides indicating the subject category, and move on to the next. The challenge for me, over the next several weeks, would be the physical arrangement and re-arrangement that came with all this sorting. Categories emerged and changed. Groups of slides had to be moved into certain boxes in alphabetical order, which meant the contents would often shift to other boxes which would disrupt the order of the next box. I found it difficult at times to discern how best to deal with the actual backlog of filing that accumulated and how to keep things in order. I was constantly certain there must be a more efficient way, but the solution eluded me. As I was thinking about strategies of arrangement and description, I decided it might be helpful to visit the Brooklyn Historical Society, meet with their archivist, and discuss how their collection of lantern slides is organized. Most but not all of it has been digitized, and is also physically accessible for research (although Archivist Julie May says researchers rarely access the physical collection). While they use similar archival and conservation methods, their intellectual arrangement—which May inherited but did not implement— is quite different. Instead of dividing the collection into subject categories each slide was given a number and placed into numerical order in boxes. Although there is simplicity to this method, I do believe that the arrangement into distinct subject categories/series makes sense for Green-Wood's collection and will be one of its strengths, as it will facilitate search and retrieval and enhance usability. On the subject of organization, May recommended creating a numbering system that lends itself to unique object identifiers that translate to file names so that the object ID matches the file ID. It is important to consider how Green-Wood might continue to collect and grow this collection, and to therefore attach a numbering system to it that would allow for future growth. May agreed that the system I proposed, which would be an abbreviation of the subject category followed by the specific item number, would allow it to be easily tracked and found. I then suggested the following to Richman, for example: LS-BB-001 (Lantern Slide, Bridges, item #1). When the item is digitized it will also carry this as a file name and the ID will be entered into the spreadsheet with this as a unique identifier.
Once this system was settled on and the collection was under basic physical control, I began to itemize the contents of the boxes. I cross-referenced with the spreadsheet to make sure all the slides were accounted for and then added the correct categories. Since the slides were cleaned and entered in the order they originally arrived in, I re-sorted them in Excel so that all the slides in one series would be grouped together alphabetically. Following this, the individual slides would need to be given a number and arranged in order. I decided it was more efficient to physically order them according to the spreadsheet, rather than moving the items around in Excel. I started with Box #1 and located item #1 on the spreadsheet, and then arranged that in the correct spot and so on. Locating the slides was not always readily apparent—on a second pass several subject categories had to be re-verified, for instance, should the old post office be its own category or remain in the "Buildings" category? Should a slide in "Panoramas" really be in "Aerial Views?" Should Hudson and East Rivers be generally filed under "Rivers" or should they each be sub-categories of that series? Additionally, there were two boxes of images that were not necessarily New York-centric: portraits of nurses, miscellaneous artwork and prints relating to the Civil War. I was uncertain what to do with these, especially since they had been set aside early on, as Jeff agreed they did not really fit. Now, I wondered whether to integrate them into the spreadsheet and physical boxes or keep them apart. If they needed to fall after "Markets" in the boxes, for the purpose of alphabetizing, then again all the subsequent contents and categories would have to physically shift location. In the end, I decided to keep these separated into two of their own boxes, but to integrate them into the finding aid as a "Miscellaneous" series. The physical and intellectual itemization was becoming a very lengthy, ongoing process and at a certain point I decided that it was more critical to move on to phase three—creating the finding aid in Archon. In my conversation with May, she had also recommended giving everything a collection level record in Archon, and to hold off on itemization until a later point.