Archives
Boston Category
At the Dance Archives
Posted April 4, 2015 by Samantha Quiñon
For a few hours every Thursday I have started to go to the archives of Jose Mateo Ballet Theatre (JMBT), which has its facilities in the Old Cambridge Baptist Church, a beautiful field stone building in the American Gothic Revival style just off of Harvard Square. There, two other SLIS students and I are taking an inventory before processing the collections, as part of a grant-funded project to process the archives of many of Cambridge’s dance companies. Two weeks ago, my first time seeing the JMBT archives, I knew our goal was ambitious. The collections comprise everything from institutional records, to costumes and props, to old promotional material and performance recordings. They are crammed into four large rooms in different parts of the church, much like I imagine industrial-sized, hastily packed storage lockers to be (if such things exist). Battling through the dust and teetering piles of boxes, we have to move records around Tetris style to wind our way from item to item before noting it in our spreadsheet. Admittedly, this style of inventory…
Love in (or Lovin’) the Archives
Posted March 9, 2015 by Alexandra Bernson
I’ve been thinking about the phrase “I have a lot on my plate” lately. It seems like if my schedule were this figurative plate, it would look like I just left an all-you-can-eat buffet. In the last week I have ended a job, started a new job, worked a shift of my internship, and set up an interview for a possible second part-time job at an academic library… All while trying to keep up with my school work. In addition to all of this, I’m trying to make time for my friends, family, and (lastly) sleep. Sometimes when one’s schedule is so packed, it’s hard to remember what exactly one is working toward. But thankfully I’ve been utterly caught up in the romance that can happen with archival work. Previously, I mentioned the series of love letters between a young couple in the 1940s that is a large part of the collection in which I’m working, but recently I found several other letters written to the young woman of the aforementioned couple from a completely…
Cracking the Lock on Open Access Collections
Posted June 30, 2014 by L. Kelly Fitzpatrick
It’s no secret that accessibility is a big part of what we do here at GSLIS. Within libraries, museums, archives, and information institutions – many of us act as the tether between information and patrons. In recent months, a handful of influential institutions across the globe have begun jumping on the Open Access bandwagon – a movement which the Public Library of Science defines as “unrestricted access and unrestricted reuse.” A burgeoning topic on the horizon of information science, we as GSLIS students can acquaint ourselves with Open Access collections and create OA projects of our own. While a number of considerations lay between institutions and the creation of online open access collections, they reveal new opportunities for research, engagement, and scholarship. Once an institution has determined which objects or collections qualify, they start working forward from there to reconfigure the terms applied to the pieces within their OA initiative. For an example of these terms, browse through the specifications stated within the Getty Open Content Program. While many factors go into the creation of…
Professionalization of the Archival Field
Posted April 21, 2014 by Gemma Doyle
One of the things that struck me only after I’d started the archives program at Simmons was how incredibly diverse the field of archives really is. I knew that there were small historical societies staffed with volunteers with little or no formal training, but until I actually began to take classes in archives I had never realized how much there was to study, and how important that information was for preserving the items in the archive to begin with. My LIS438 and 440 classes were peppered with stories like the one about the (untrained) archivist who cut photographs into pieces to file each person in the photo under their name in the files: many collections of letters which were broken up in order to be filed under subjects, rather than by provenance; all the letters from all the collections mixed together forevermore; collections where diaries, of all things, were cut up so that individual “important” entries could be saved and the rest thrown away (this was thought the be an extremely efficient use of space)….
I might sound like your mother, but…
Posted September 26, 2013 by Julie Steenson
I am old enough to be your mother, so it’s okay. I know you are so busy that the thought of giving your time away might seem near impossible. Like many of you, I have a job, a home, a family, and of course, school. We are all in different stages of our lives, and so some of us have a cat, others a spouse. Many of us have kids – ranging from the tiny squirming variety to adult children, and everything in between. We rent apartments, live with our parents and own homes. We commute minutes and hours, and we are so tired and busy. I know what you are thinking. “I don’t have time to volunteer.” I got my first library job in recent years by volunteering at the library first, and then working my way up as positions became available. I volunteered in a prison library and found my passion to be a correctional librarian. But I am revisiting this topic (I have mentioned it in previous blogs…) because Tuesday night, I…
Preserving Morris Dancing
Posted July 16, 2013 by lazylibrarian
For the last two months I have been enmeshed in a collection about Morris Dancing. Until two months ago, I did not know such a thing existed. So imagine my great surprise Friday night when I ran into multiple Morris Dancer groups performing on the Common in conjunction with Shakespeare on the Common! I wasn’t even supposed to be there at that time but had absentmindedly gotten off at the wrong T stop and ran into the very people my collection documented! As I stood watching, a woman came up to me and said, “Has anyone told you what this is yet?” She seemed used to having to explain it to passersby. “It’s Morris Dancing!” I said excitedly and she looked at me as if I were the one jumping in the common with bells tied to my shins. Yes! I do know what it is! This led me to a wonderful opportunity to not only talk with her about Morris Dancing and how she came to be involved with it but also about how…
Learning Outside the Classroom
Posted July 13, 2013 by Carolyn Lucas
This summer has been hot, rainy, and is going by fast. And did I mention busy? Yeah, it’s been busy. This summer, as I’ve mentioned in a few previous blog posts, I’m doing a records management internship for Biogen Idec, a biopharmaceutical company located in Kendall Square in Cambridge. And I can already say, just because I’m not taking official classes this summer does not mean the learning has stopped… I find myself every now and again marveling at how I ended up here. When I initially applied to library school, I never thought I would have the opportunity to work in a place like Biogen. It’s one of the aspects that we don’t cover too much on the archives track -archives includes records management, and records management isn’t just for city planning or traditional libraries. Corporations (especially since the Enron debacle) have been tightening the leash on records management. And in this case, more regulations just so happens to equal more jobs. Two of my lovely new co-workers are actually Simmons alumni, which not…
Designing the Ultimate Exhibit
Posted June 7, 2013 by lazylibrarian
It’s the age old question….how do you design an exhibit on a budget that appeals to both adults and children while educating them about a subject? Well I’m having my first go at answering it. At my current internship at the Cambridge History Room in the Cambridge Public Library, I am taking the materials and knowledge I have gathered from my processing of the John Langstaff collection and trying to turn it into something that will interest and engage the public. The biggest issue is that most of Langstaff’s collection is paperwork (largely unreadable paperwork I might add) and his greatest contribution to the area is in theater and music, both things that are difficult to showcase in the middle of a library on a budget. But considering that I did a conference presentation on integrating archives in museums via technology, I am not ready to give up yet. I have been able to create QR codes to link to some wonderful video clips of Langstaff and his performances. However, not everyone has a smart…
Finding Archiving Principles at PAX
Posted March 24, 2013 by lazylibrarian
With a computer programmer/gamer boyfriend there was no way I was going to forget that PAX East, one of the country’s biggest video game conventions, was this weekend. Not being a gamer myself, I steered clear of making it a four day event complete with the Pokemon pub crawl (gotta drink them all!) like he did. I did, however, tag along Sunday out of curiosity. (And I would have you know that I beat, nay, alienated three men in Ticket to Ride) Upon seeing there was a panel on the preservation of video games, I also dragged the aforesaid three men along. I was greatly amused to listen for two hours to five panelists discuss the job of an archivist without ever saying the term. The panel was sponsored by The American Classic Arcade Museum (ACAM), a non-profit organization in NH that strives to preserve pre-1980s arcade games. Also present was a researcher trying to track down the original names of some of the early game designers, a professor of game design, and a gentleman…
Archives and Popular Media
Posted February 10, 2013 by lazylibrarian
My friend was watching an episode of White Collar the other night. I don’t follow the show so I was only half listening until I heard, “We are going to have to go check out the archives.” A meme/blog post has been going around recently about movies with library scenes in them and it set me to thinking about how archives are portrayed in popular media. For a lot of people, that’s how they see us, that’s their only interaction with an archives. If that is the case, we don’t look too good. This particular scene in White Collar had the archivist come out, show them into a room full of card catalogs drawers and filing cabinets, and leave them there. When one of the characters asked, “Wait, which cabinet is 1940?” the archivist called over her shoulder as she walked out, “All of them.” Now of course this is not true to life (hopefully!) especially since scenes in the archives are usually framed as a race against time, a scene that creates dramatic tension…