Travel and Publicity

The Cover of Whiting's
Travel Journal

So in the past couple weeks (interrupted by Spring Break), I spent time cross-checking the PR files with the Finding Aid for them in Word, which some of the interns last summer compiled. It's incredibly detailed and I only made a few additions - they did a really good job! Since then, I've been reading and researching a travel journal written in 1898 by Kate Burr Draper Whiting. I just finished reading and taking notes on it today and it's incredibly fascinating. Whiting, around 60 years old at the time, took a two and a half month long "cruise" with her husband and two of her sons. They traveled to an incredibly amount of places, including Spain, France, Tunisia, Algeria, Jerusalem, Lebanon, Istanbul, Greece, Italy, and Egypt. Two of the most interesting part of the journal are the fact that it is typed (probably by a typewriter, which would become fully standardized ten years after Whiting's trip) and the multitude of photographs taken. Over 100 photographs line the pages of Whiting's journal. In 1888, George Eastman invented the Kodak camera, which allowed anyone to take a photograph while allowing others to process that photograph. In 1901, the Kodak Brownie became mass produced for the general population. While the Brownie was released after Whiting's trip and she does not refer to the process she used to take the photographs, I think the photography alters her narrative - not only did I get to read in great detail about the places, but I was able to see them as well. Pretty cool in my opinion!!

Street and Marketplace in Jerusalem

One of the Egyptian Pyramids
and a Camel

After this, I will be fully processing and organizing a Finding Aid for this journal. I have thoroughly enjoyed reading it so far because of my dual love for history and travel, and look forward to completing more research on its author. Simultaneously, I will continue to work on re-housing the negatives from the PR Group, which will show me more of the College's history. As the second half of the semester launches, I look forward to more interesting work within Special Collections and Archives!

So Many Choices!

As the semester progresses, I have been working on many little projects to get a feel for the different aspects of reference librarianship.  One of the projects that I just finished working on was a collections development project, in which I got to work closer with one of our reference librarians, Kerri.  Collection development is an ongoing process, for there are always more books being written and published.

First, Kerri had me work with the McNaughton collection, which is housed in the library’s browsing room.  Each month, a list is published that includes all of the titles that will become available to be acquired for a collection.  I was able to look at the May 2015 collection.  There were so many titles, but of course the library does not have room for them all! It was so hard to narrow down the list from over eighty to twenty-five.  In the end, I looked for a wide variety of genres and viewpoints, as well as other factors such as the author and how popular the book was.  It made me realize how much thought and effort goes into developing a collection.

Additionally, I looked through a list that is published by the group Indie Bound, which highlights titles that were published by indie publishers.  With this list, I had to do some deeper research because there is no synopsis with the titles, so I looked up the book for its content and also for the reviews.   It was hard to separate my own personal interests in order to make decision that would benefit the community, but in the end I got the hang of it.

I really liked this project because it allowed me to see a different side of the library! Below are some titles to look forward to in our collection!

              

Keeping busy!

I have been keeping very busy in Special Collections!  I just finished a project combing some papers that had initially been separated.  One box was intended to be department papers, while the other was supposed to be personal papers.  I talked with some of the staff and we decided that it would be best to combine the papers, as they have a lot of common information that would be good to have in one place.  That collection is finally complete and it feels great to have my first full project all done!

The day I finished this project I got to talking with the book conservation specialist.  Since I have been in Special Collections I have been interested in learning a bit more about this field.  It was really cool to learn about some different ways rare books were bound and what kinds of attributes makes them special.  She told me about some of the rare books the college has and what kind of work she generally does to preserve and repair them.  I also got to learn a little bit about the projects that students were working on.  Some of the students are working on creating special boxes for rare books.  These boxes will have a rounded edge, which is not something normally done.  They chose to do this because the books are quite beautiful and rare and they wanted the boxes to reflect that.  I love having the opportunity to learn about things like this!

Today I got introduced to a new project I will be working on likely on and off for the rest of the semester.  I am going to work to identify people in photographs from the Theatre Arts Department's past productions.  This will be an awesome project because I can work with the theatre arts materials, which is something I am really interested in as a theatre arts minor.  I'm eager to be working with with digital collections for the first time, and excited to reach out to alum as a resource to help identify people in pictures.  There will certainly be more posts about my progress with this project!