October is American Archives Month: The Power of Collaboration

Happy American Archives Month! To celebrate, the Smithsonian Collections blog is running its seventh annual blog-a-thon with blog posts every weekday in October.

This year’s theme is the Power of Collaboration. An apt choice for this particular blog, as we are a collaboration between archives, museums, and libraries across the Smithsonian.  The power of collaboration resonates deeply across the Smithsonian as scholars from diverse disciplines work together to ‘increase and diffuse knowledge.’ I suspect James Smithson would be delighted to think that the institution he endowed would go on to study and foster collaboration between topics as diverse as African Art, Astrophysics, American History and Natural History. 

This month we will be posting stories about collaboration in archives and initiatives across the Smithsonian.  The Smithsonian Transcription Center through the power of collaboration has made more than 321,274 pages transcribed and text searchable, making them available not only to scholars, but anyone with access to an internet connection.  Along with the Collections Search Center, SOVA – our online virtual archives, and SIRIS - the Smithsonian Institution Research Information System, these Smithsonian collaborations make our collections and the knowledge they help us create more accessible and useful

Locally, we will be celebrating at the 2017 Archives Fair at the National Museum of American History on Saturday, October 21st. A collaboration between Smithsonian Institution Archives and Special Collections Council, the Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference DC and Maryland Caucuses, and the National Archives Assembly that will highlight the power of the cultural heritage and the stewardship archives provide to preserve it.  Come join us to explore the ways in which the preservation of archival collections translates into the preservation of culture and how collaborations between artists and archives nurture cultural heritage.

Here at the Smithsonian Collections blog, we bring Archivists, Museum Specialists, and Librarians together to highlight their collections, current work, and the curiosities of working with collections.  With recent blogs ranging from ethnographic fieldwork to solar eclipses and National Aviation Day, this blog is a collaboration that highlights the simply amazing variety of things we can learn from each other.  The Collection Search Center is a collaboration that brings together over 12 million objects, archival collections and library materials; we hope that this month our blog can give you a peak into the work that makes these collections available and these collaborations possible.

Remember to check back every day for new content from across the Smithsonian!

Lisa Fthenakis, Program Assistant
Smithsonian Institution Archives 

“My curiosity was stronger than my fear”: The Michiko Takaki Papers

It was 1964 when Michiko Takaki boarded a plane to take her from Tokyo to Manila to begin her ethnographic fieldwork. She was planning to spend one year among the Kalinga people of the northern Luzon region of the Philippines, a location she had chosen because her doctoral advisor (Harold “Hal” Conklin) studied the nearby Ifugao. “The usual allotment for doing doctoral research and observation is one full year,” she said in 2010. “That’s what I had thought going in, but that went right out the window because I couldn’t speak the language in one year.”[1]

It was 1968 before Takaki finally returned to Yale University to complete her doctoral dissertation. In what a later colleague described as “an unprecedented 46-month uninterrupted period of fieldwork,” [2] the planned one year of research had turned into four. The data and notes gathered during those months form the bulk of the Michiko Takaki papers, 1921-2011 (bulk 1960s), the most recent collection opened to researchers at the National Anthropological Archives (NAA).

Michiko Takaki surrounded by Kalinga associates and assistants, 1965, Box 116, Michiko Takaki papers, National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution.

Born in Japan in 1930, Michiko Takaki (also known as “Michi”) had traveled to the U.S. in the early 1950s with a precursor to the Fulbright program (then called GARIOA, or Government Appropriation for Relief in Occupied Areas) to earn her bachelor’s degree in literature. She returned to America for her master’s in journalism, from Southern Illinois University. Anthropological study followed soon after. She began her PhD studies at Columbia University, then transferred to Yale. She received funding from the Wenner-Gren Foundation to pursue her doctoral fieldwork, which began when she was in her early thirties.

In a series of oral history interviews recorded between 2006 and 2010, Takaki reflected on her experience completing fieldwork in the Philippines as a woman and an outsider among the Kalinga, a people known for ritual violence associated with headhunting. [3] “I chose to go to Kalinga, but with tremendous apprehension,” she is recorded as saying. “Now for a man, an American man, to go into that part of the Philippines would be fine because Americans had prestige. Nothing would happen to a white American male, but a Japanese woman would be a very different story…Professor Conklin, my mentor, assured me that it isn’t too bad, but he is a white American. In the city, it’s a different story, but anything can happen up in the mountains. No one can come quickly to rescue you as it’s not just a single mountain range. I was frightened on my way, but my curiosity was stronger than my fear.” [4]

Michiko Takaki in the Philippines, 1965, Box 116, Michiko Takaki papers, National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution.

The danger Takaki felt was palpable. “Anyone who is not one of the Kalinga is an outsider,” she said. “Eventually, you’ll be beheaded and people will know that you were killed. I don’t think it’s possible to survive in Kalinga unless you are protected by someone there.” Conklin had connected Takaki with a Kalinga man named Tan Jin, who served as her entry point to the Kalinga. “Once you are allowed to enter somebody’s house and drink their water, the master of the house is obliged to help you in the event that you are attacked…I was very fortunate, early on, that Tan Jin took me in as a guest and it was known that I had eaten his food and had drunk his water.” [5]

In the end, Takaki felt, perhaps ironically, that her gender aided her immersion into Kalinga society. “I don’t think they really knew what to do with me. I didn’t fall into [any] category they had known. I appeared to be a harmless female and it was to my advantage because, from the very start, they had sensed that I was not there with hostile intention.” For the next four years, Takaki would study the Kalinga, predominantly in the villages of Uma and Butbut. With notebooks, pencils, tape recorder, and two cameras (one for color film and one for the less expensive black and white), she compiled meticulous notes on Kalinga culture, language, and the subsistence activities of rice cultivation and livestock ownership. “At the beginning, I couldn’t even think of the means by which to communicate. I was always afraid because I didn’t really know what I could or could not do.” But by the time she left, “In Uma…they came to know me and I came to know them.” [6]

Michiko Takaki in her field office, 1968, Box 116, Michiko Takaki papers, National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution.

Takaki flew out of Manila and back to Tokyo – and from there to New Haven and Yale – in 1968. The trove of ethnographic material she had gathered during her four years in the Philippines made a similar cross-continental trip. Over the next nine years, she would work with this material to complete her 3-volume doctoral dissertation, “Aspects of Exchange in a Kalinga Society, Northern Luzon” (1977). She continued to refer to the same field notes and field-gathered data for the remainder of her anthropological career, as a faculty member in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Now preserved at the NAA, these materials serve as rich mid-twentieth century documentation on the Kalinga that should interest anthropologists and other scholars working on the northern Luzon, as well as Kalinga community members interested in their language and cultural heritage. This collection also shines a light on the life and work of Michiko Takaki, who overcame the challenges of her status as an “outsider” to complete an immersive and extended field experience, the documentary results of which have continuing value.

The NAA thanks the colleagues of Michiko Takaki at UMass/Boston who helped to facilitate the transfer of her papers to the NAA. The Michiko Takaki papers, 1921-2011 (bulk 1960s) were processed with funding from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. The collection is open for research at the NAA. A finding aid for the collection is available on the Smithsonian Online Virtual Archives (SOVA).


Kate Madison, Processing Archivist
National Anthropological Archives

Sources

[1] “Kalinga story,” Box 109, Michiko Takaki papers, National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution.
[2] “Tenure dossier,” Box 109, Michiko Takaki papers, National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution.
[3] Headhunting, the practice taking and preserving the head of an adversary, has been widely studied by anthropologists in an effort to understand the relationship between ritual violence and attaining manhood and/or sustaining cosmological balance among peoples like the Kalinga.
[4] “Kalinga story.”
[5] “Kalinga story.”
[6] “Kalinga story.”

Cleaning Up Freer’s Attic

Collections change over time. Collections often come from chaos. Archival collections are often a rushed boxing up after someone passes. The collector is no longer there to ask questions of. This inherently leads to questions. What was this ledger for? Who were these letters to? How did they want their art displayed?

Archivists, museum staff, and researchers grapple with these questions every day. It is often where interesting exhibits come from.

Head Archivist, David Hogge, puzzling out how to organize various photographs.

The Freer | Sackler Archives made the decision a year ago to overhaul the Charles Lang Freer Papers. Please click here for a link to his new and improved finding aid! Freer was the founder of our museum. Opened in 1923, it was the first topic-focused museum at the Smithsonian and its first art museum. Freer did not live to see his museum completed, but the museum did receive, on top of all of his art collection, his vast collection of papers.

Freer was a meticulous man when it came to his correspondence, his purchasing, and, well, everything. This has left a rich collection of papers for museum staff and researchers to use when studying a Freer art object or the man himself.

Not all paper is of equal size.

The finding aid (guide to any collection) for Freer’s papers, like so many other “legacy” archival collections, was created before modern archival standards were established. F|S Archives staff made the decision to overhaul the Freer papers after having many problems in recent years, both finding items for researchers and dealing with how to organize their digital surrogates. You must have a firm handle on the physical side of any archival collection before you can even contemplate digitizing it.



Working in an archives means using your hands and handling physical objects from paper to film canisters.

Physical collection? What is that you ask? It must be hard to imagine in this age of digital smorgasbord that there are still items in the world that are only available in the physical format. Well, a large part of what archivists do is make available in a digital environment what was once only sitting on a shelf in a box and only a few passionate researchers even tried to look for. Everything in an archives is unique, one a kind, the only one in the world.

Archivists are working hard around the world to make unique pieces of human history available and accessible to all, please see this great blog post about putting more of human history online. So
digitizing archival materials is crucial to both outreach (anyone in the world can look at the digital surrogates from the various Smithsonian Archives) and to the long term life of the materials. Paper lasts a long time, but it does not exist forever.

How does one organize a physical collection? How does one re-think it? A collection is always organized to preserve any original organization of the creator, in this case Freer. There are times where it becomes obvious there was no organization to begin with. This is often the main mystery that archivists struggle with on a daily basis: did so and so want these papers this way? Were these postcards meant to go together? Was this part of their research patterns? Their collecting patterns?

Organizing ones thoughts the old fashioned way, on paper.

When archivists make decisions about organization, we are not copy-pasting some files to a new folder in a computer drive. We are weeding through boxes and boxes of materials and attempting to form them into a unit of thought or creator's process. Think of it this way, what if you had to organize Bob Dylan’s writing process. There would be tons of paper or scraps of papers and you have to figure out if he had an order to begin with or was it all chaos? Is imposing some sort of order, potentially where none exists, harming the integrity of Dylan’s creative process or are you creating just enough access points so that a researcher writing the next bestselling Dylan biography can find what he/she needs to do their job?

Basically, does taking a mountain of paper and creating an access pathway (e.g. putting the materials in folders and boxes with labels), a way of thinking about them, looking at them, destroy intrinsically what they are?

The slow task of properly identifying and labeling boxes.  Lots of glue gets on your fingers.

There were many sections of Freer’s papers like this; piles of paper all next to one another and yet had nothing in common. F|S Archives Staff had to separate out these papers into neat pathways that would lead researchers to access points of useful information. For example, what now constitutes Series One in the Freer Papers, was once a few boxes that were just near one another. If you look at the finding aid now, you can see clear pathways/access points (e.g. Memberships and Honorary Awards, Freer Residences, Genealogical Materials, etc.). These pathways are called Series and Subseries in the archival world. Neat piles of paper that all have their own theme and purpose. This makes it much easier for researchers to find what they need; whether that is physically handling the materials or doing a Google word search. We have made these important documents that much more accessible to the citizens of the world.

This aspect of creating finding aids is the complex intellectual part. There are other aspects to cleaning up a collection that are much more hands on.

One of the biggest decisions the F|S Archives made was to completely re-number the boxes and materials in the Freer papers. This may seem like a small thing. Well, the Freer papers hold over 300 boxes and this would not just be re-numbering the boxes in a digital document (the Freer finding aid), it would entail physically pasting new labels on all of the over 300 boxes. You are probably thinking, why would you do that?!

A wall of a job of well done.

Well, most of the Freer papers are not digitized. The only way to track and monitor the small physical components of the collection is to have solid and accurate box numbers. In addition, the archives has to have strong control of the physical space our materials reside in. We have a space matrix documenting where the materials of all of our, over 100, collections are shelved.

So, yes, having accurate labels on the physical materials in an archive is essential. The long term goal – archives often have to think in the long term, collections are too large to allow for instantaneous work – is to enable much of Freer's papers to be digitized, so that more scholars around the world can examine his materials and learn more about Charles Lang Freer, his art collecting, and the art pieces themselves.

Lara Amrod, Archivist

F|S Archives

Farewell to American Archives Month

William J. Rhees, first ‘Keeper of the Archives’ for the Smithsonian Institution in 1892.
Smithsonian Institution Archives, SIA2011-1379. 

As we come to the end of American Archives Month – and our blog-a-thon – we at the Smithsonian Collections blog want to give a big thank you to everyone who has joined us. As we explored the theme of transitions, our posts have looked at how archives look to the future as well as the past and explored how an archive celebrates new beginnings. Posts from interns speak to the future of the profession and how the collections we steward connect us to our own past.  Researchers explored changing community dynamics and transitions in portraiture.  Collections span topics from aerospace to gardens, World War I to scientific field notes, Bob Dylan to indigenous languages.

Explore them all by clicking on the 2016 Archives Month tag!

I hope these posts have given you a glimpse of some of the many meanings transition has to archivists, librarians and museum professionals all around the Smithsonian. As archives across the Smithsonian have grown from their earliest form in 1891 they have seen much transition: from paper to audio, video, and now digital files. Just in the last year, the Smithsonian Online Virtual Archives was launched, transforming how finding aids, collections, and digital assets are available to the public. The Smithsonian Transcription Center has had an amazing year and thousands of volunpeers spanning the globe are transforming the research possibilities for hundreds of our collections. These transitions are making Smithsonian collections more accessible and making our mission of the increase and diffusion of knowledge possible every day.

Lisa Fthenakis, Program Assistant
Smithsonian Institution Archives

Archives and Manuscripts Collections in the Smithsonian Libraries

In 1992, I was hired to be the rare book cataloger for the Smithsonian Libraries (SIL), and almost all of my work for the first dozen years or so was focused primarily on monographic cataloging of printed books. But over the years since then, my work has been experiencing a noticeable transition encompassing a wider variety of formats, including archival materials and manuscript collections. Trend forecasters have been talking for years about the convergence of the LAMs (where LAMs = Libraries, Archives and Museums; this catchy phrase was used by Kiersten F. Latham and John E. Simmons in their 2014 publication, Foundations of museum studies: evolving systems of knowledge). I can attest that this is happening on a broad scale: internationally, nationally, within the Smithsonian Institution, and in the Smithsonian Libraries, library stuff is mixing with museum stuff, which is also mixing with archival stuff. There are fewer bright lines separating these formats in our daily work and collections, regardless of how our units identify themselves. To cope with all these changes, library, archival and museum workers need to be flexible and open to creative thinking and learning on the job. More than ever, it is crucial to collaborate with colleagues beyond the traditional boundaries of one’s profession to derive the greatest benefits from shared knowledge and experience.

Postcards from Ernst Mach to E. Kulke

The Smithsonian Libraries, which currently encompasses 21 branch libraries and a central administration, grew, at first informally, as the Smithsonian Institution itself grew. During the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, various curatorial offices developed in-house book collections acquired from the personal libraries of staff members and scholarly exchanges and donations over the years. SIL’s Director, Dr. Nancy E. Gwinn, has written an overview of the haphazard early development of the Smithsonian’s library collections, which were viewed ambivalently by the first Secretary, Joseph Henry, and which were just one part of a complicated nexus of collections competing for priority and precious resources. The Smithsonian Libraries, as it is known today, was formally created as a unit by Secretary S. Dillon Ripley in the 1960s.

So what kinds of archival and manuscript materials have become part of the Smithsonian Libraries’ collections over the years? I’ll outline some examples here, many of which I have been personally involved with as a cataloger. I’d also like to note that several other staff members here at the Libraries also have archival training and responsibilities, with skills that are being put to good use as our collections continue to expand beyond the usual library formats.

The Smithsonian Libraries’ first major foray into the stewardship of manuscript collections was launched in 1974, with the gift of over 10,000 rare books and manuscripts from the Burndy Library, the private collection of industrialist and philanthropist Bern Dibner. The Burndy donation became the core collection of the Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology. Bern Dibner’s printed book and manuscript collections document the growth of European and American scientific and technological advances between the thirteenth and twentieth centuries, featuring correspondence, drafts, sketches, and ephemera by luminaries including Isaac Newton, Benjamin Franklin, Marie Curie, and Albert Einstein, among others. The Dibner Library currently has approximately 2,000 manuscript groups, having acquired additional items from other Smithsonian units and curators as well as gifts received from outside the Institution.

In 2006, the Smithsonian Libraries received its second major collection of archival and manuscript materials with the acquisition of the Russell E. Train Africana Collection for the Joseph F. Cullman 3rd Library of Natural History. Featuring approximately 6,000 archival and manuscript items, including handwritten and typed correspondence, draft novels, photographs, sketch books, diaries, original artwork, ephemera, and both man-made and natural artifacts, the Train Africana Collection highlights the adventures of explorers, missionaries, conservationists and other travelers in Africa between the late seventeenth and twentieth centuries. The manuscript and archival materials of the Train Africana Collection are a rich trove of insights into the lives and activities of David Livingstone, Henry Morton Stanley, Ernest Hemingway, and Theodore Roosevelt, among others. Thanks to the help of contract archivists and the Smithsonian’s EAD coordinator, a detailed finding aid of the Train Africana Collection, including digitized content, is available on the Smithsonian OnlineVirtual Archives (SOVA) website.

Chandeliers from Caldwell & Co.

Other branches of the Smithsonian Libraries also contain archival and manuscript collections of diverse themes and formats. The Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Library in New York City has the papers of industrial designers such as Belle Kogan, Donald Deskey and Henry Dreyfuss, and the photographic archives of both Edward F. Caldwell & Company (one of the major lighting designers of the first half of the twentieth century) and fashion photographer Thérèse Bonney. The National Air and Space Museum Library has archival and manuscript materials ranging from a scrapbook of early aeronautica to the Bella C. Landauer collection of United States aeronautical patents. The National Postal Museum Library has the Hugh McLellan Southgate archival collection on postal history. The American Art and Portrait Gallery Library has an album of cartes-de-visite portraits of nineteenth century artists. And those are only some of the highlights.

The National Museum of African American History & Culture Library, the newest unit of the Smithsonian Libraries which opens to the public in late fall 2016, is embracing archival materials as a focal point of its collections: in addition to the head librarian, the NMAAHC Library staff includes an archivist and a genealogy specialist.

The National Collections Program’s Collections Digitization Reporting System (CDRS), a Smithsonian-wide initiative to get a grip on documenting significant materials that have not been described adequately even at the collection level in the various online catalogs of the Smithsonian, has spurred the Libraries’ staff over the past couple of years to identify and describe various pockets of archival and ephemeral materials scattered across its locations, in an effort to make these formerly hidden collections (as the Council on Library and Information Resources would refer to them) findable and properly preserved, and, where appropriate, eventually digitized.

Several recent Smithsonian-wide developments are helping the Libraries to transition into a unit where its archival and manuscript collections are nearly as accessible as its printed and digital materials:

• We have multiple options for online discovery of collections: At the Smithsonian, the Libraries’ holdings are available through its dedicated SIRIS catalog, the Collections Search Center with over 10 million records of museum objects, archives and library materials from across the Institution, and the Smithsonian Online Virtual Archives (SOVA), which came online in 2015 and contains finding aids for more than 8000 diverse collections of primary resources from more than a dozen repositories at the Institution. The Libraries’ collections are also indexed in OCLC’s Worldcat, a global union catalog of library resources in all types of formats, and some of our digitized materials are available through the Internet Archive and the Digital Public Library of America, as well as more specialized thematic web projects like the the Biodiversity Heritage Library and Livingstone Online. To take full advantage of these various outlets, the Smithsonian Libraries has been prioritizing efforts to upgrade the description and access points for its archival and manuscript materials and, where possible, make them available in digitized form, since these unique collections hold the greatest interest for researchers who would otherwise be unaware of their existence.

Aeronautica scrapbook page

• We collaborate with other units at the Smithsonian, which generously share their expertise and advice through forums such as the SIRIS Members Group, which provides discussions and training about Machine Readable Cataloging (MARC) and other cataloging standards like Describing Archives: a Content Standard (DACS) and Resource Description & Access (RDA) that shape the content and structure of collections data in our online catalogs; the Smithsonian Institution Archives and Special Collections Council (SIASC) which addresses concerns of the collecting units and supports projects that benefit them; the Smithsonian Encoded Archival Description (EAD) Users Group which has been instrumental in launching the SOVA database and training staff in the use of Archivists' Toolkit; and pan-Institutional initiatives like the Field Book Project, a partnership of the National Museum of Natural History, the Smithsonian Institution Archives, the Smithsonian Libraries and the Smithsonian’s Office of the Chief Information Officer.

• We have the Smithsonian Digital Volunteers Transcription Center, which went online in 2013 and has now had over 1,000 projects transcribed from fourteen participating museums, archives and libraries. The Smithsonian Libraries has so far contributed fourteen of its manuscript and archival holdings for transcription, including the commonplace book of a late eighteenth century English woman interested in scientific topics; a scrapbook of papers related to physicist Ernst Mach; a notebook of pressed butterfly specimens collected in East Africa during the second half of the nineteenth century; and a parallel vocabulary of the English and Potawatomi Indian languages, to name a few. Currently, the Transcription Center is featuring a fifteenth century Latin manuscript of Boethius’ De institutione arithmetica, complete with intricate palaeographical markings and abbreviations. The international community of Smithsonian Volunpeers, or digital volunteers, has diligently and accurately transcribed the various works made available through the Transcription Center, and thanks to their efforts, these texts are now keyword-searchable in the Collections Search Center.

Cropped section from page 125 of Boethius' De Institutione Arithmetica

Twenty-first century library, archival, and museum work here at the Smithsonian and elsewhere is continually subject to transitions: in organizational structure, workflows, formats, priorities, staffing, budgets and technological developments. Regardless of our job titles, we have to be flexible and continually learn new skills to deal well with the changes, since the tasks and policies that have traditionally defined our collecting units are not always things we can, or need to, sustain. While this ever-changing working environment is challenging, I welcome the opportunity to collaborate more closely with my colleagues across the Institution –archivists, conservators, researchers, curators, information managers, social media officers, exhibition designers, and others – to improve the ways we present our collections to the world.


Diane Shaw, Special Collections Cataloger
Smithsonian Libraries

October is American Archives Month: Transitions

As the weather finally begins to cool down from the summer the activities in the many archives and special collections are just getting heated up across the Smithsonian in preparation for American Archives Month! For the sixth year in a row the Smithsonian Collections blog is running its annual blog-a-thon and providing exciting new posts every weekday in October.

Every year a theme is selected such as “Hidden Connections,” “Revealing Hidden Treasures,” and “True Stories.” This year’s theme is Transitions. In addition to being discussed October 5th at the 2016 Archives Fair, our contributing archivists, librarians and museum professionals will write about what transitions mean to them.  As a whole, the Smithsonian archival community has had an exciting year since last year October. The Smithsonian Online Virtual Archive (SOVA) has transformed how many of our finding aids, collection records and digital assets are discovered and accessed by the public. The Smithsonian Transcription Center completed its third year and now has almost 200,000 pages of materials completely transcribed, reviewed and fully text searchable. And of course, the most important event this year was the historic opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture whose archival collections can now be found both on the SOVA and the Transcription Center.

For the National Museum of the American Indian, this year we celebrated the 100th anniversary of the founding of our predecessor institution the Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation (for a brief history on the founding of the museum see this February post by Museum Specialist, Maria Galban). Materials from the MAI’s early years, including annual reports and George Heye’s correspondence, can be found digitized and available on the SOVA in the Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation records as well as available for transcription (for those projects not already completed) on the Transcription Center.

For us in the NMAI archive center, the anniversary of the MAI has been more than just a time to reflect on the history of the museum and its collections. It has also been a time to re-emphasize and re-commit to the important museum and archival practices that have transitioned in the last 100 years to not only include Native American voices in the process of describing their own historic materials, but making collaboration between the archive center and Native communities a fundamental part of how we do our work.  Later this week, you’ll be reading a post by one of our summer interns, Nina Sanders (Apsáalooke, Crow) who will discuss her experience working with William Wildschut’s photograph collection taken mainly among the Crow (Apsáalooke) from 1917-1928. You should also check out this post by our other summer intern Kelsey Moen on her work with the Kimowan (Metchewais) McLain collection. McLain was a significant figure in the contemporary Native art world and a finding aid to his collection is now available online.

Remember to check back every day for new content and happy archives month!

Rachel Menyuk, Archives Technician
National Museum of the American Indian, Archive Center

The Little Lady with the Art Cart

In celebration of the 2016 Smithsonian Folklife Festival opening today on the National Mall, we are publishing this piece by summer 2015 intern Erin Enos. Erin recently graduated from UNC Chapel Hill with a Masters in Library Science with a focus in Archives and Records Management.

Lily Spandorf at the 1995 Festival of American Folklife. Photo by Smithsonian Photographer. Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections, Smithsonian Institution.

For about thirty summers, she made her entrance onto Washington D.C.’s National Mall and went about her typical painting routine.  Squeak-squeak-squeak went her easel cart as she dragged it behind her.  The heat of the District's summer would beat down her as she walked.  She brought all the art supplies she needed in her efficiently packed cart: her pens, her ink, her charcoal, her cardboard "easel," and most importantly, her detailed and meticulous artful eye.  The tiny woman would find a lovely spot under a big shady tree and would get out her sketch pad of paper, pick up her black ink pen, and start to draw. Her name was Lily Spandorf, and with every line and wash of color carefully drawn and painted onto paper, she illuminated the world of the Smithsonian Folklife Festival (formerly the Festival of American Folklife) as she saw it.

Astou Adje braids a young woman's hair during the 1990 Senegal program at the Festival of American Folklife. Lily Spandorf drawings, Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections, Smithsonian Institution. 

My name is Erin Enos and I am a 2^nd year graduate student at the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  This past summer, I had the pleasure of working with the artworks of the incredibly talented Lily Spandorf in the Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives at the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage (CFCH).  When I first arrived at the Smithsonian on my first day, I did not know who Lily Spandorf was. That all changed one day when archivists Cecilia Peterson, Greg Adams, and I carefully laid out Lily’s artwork on an office table.  What we saw was incredible.  Laid out before us was a plethora of drawings Lily had done during her visits to the Smithsonian Folklife Festival.  On numerous sheets of paper were sketches of men and women happily dancing in traditional dress from all over the world, musical bands playing guitars and banjos for on-looking crowds, and even simple scenes of Festival visitors enjoying wedges of watermelon. As a summer intern, it was my job to help to re-house, process, and describe Lily’s 750 pieces of art.

As I worked on processing the artwork, I also learned a little more about Lily herself.  She was born in Austria in 1914 and as she grew into a young lady, it was clear that she had real talent for art--an honors graduate of the Vienna Academy of Arts, she left Austria in 1938 to continue her art education at London’s St. Martin’s School of Art. She moved to Washington D.C.'s Dupont Circle neighborhood where she created  a huge body of work that included countless paintings and drawings of streetscapes from around the city; she intentionally sought out and painted many older buildings slated for demolition. Her work captured moments in time in her adopted city, where she spent the rest of her life until her passing in 2000.

Puppeteers put on puppet show for three children, date unknown. Lily Spandorf drawings, Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections, Smithsonian Institution.

Lily worked in a distinctive style.  Her mode of drawing was mostly in black ink, sometimes with splashes of watercolor and acrylic paint. My favorite piece of hers is a scene of two puppeteers putting on a small show for two or three children.  I love the detail that Lily put into the design of one the puppeteers' dress, the clothing and strings of the marionettes, and the playfulness and smiles of the laughing children’s faces.  If there were two words to describe her work, I would describe the art as “delightfully magical”.  It really is.

Valdur Tilk, woodworker from Elena, Estonia, at the 1998 Baltic Nations program. Lily Spandorf drawings, Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections, Smithsonian Institution.

By the time my internship was over, it was amazing to me how fast the time went!  Working with Lily’s art was a pleasure and I truly wished for more time to work on the project. Although I was sad to leave the project, it made me very proud to know that I played a part in preserving Lily’s beautiful Festival art and the legacy that she left behind.  Fortunately, her collection is now accessible to the public online. It was the first digital collection released by the CFCH.  My wish is that others will enjoy and appreciate her talent and artwork as much as I did.  

Erin Enos
Intern
Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections

The Dilemmas of Sharing Digital Assets in Large Scale

We live in a digital world where digital curation and digitization projects are taking place everywhere. For Archives collections, which often consist of multiple boxes and folders of materials, we are often confronted with the question of whether to digitize only selected portions of a collection (and if so, how to select which materials to digitize), or whether to digitize a collection in its entirety. In either case, we are faced with a huge accumulation of digital objects, management issues and public access challenges. 

Since 1995, the Smithsonian has taken an item-level-cataloging approach for some of the archival materials using MARC format. The Smithsonian Collection Search Center became the online platform for sharing the 216,700 individual digital assets. Though we are proud of having made such a large amount of digital assets accessible to the public, it’s clear that our item-level-cataloging approach cannot keep up with the demanding pace of mass digitization. But if we don’t catalog individual items, how can we provide access to the digital objects with good context?  After searching and experimenting, we came up a scalable solution.

We have started a new process of handling the ever-increasing rate of archival material digitization and have made the archival digitalcollections available in the SmithsonianOnline Virtual Archives (SOVA).

A page displaying archival collection contents with digital objects

Instead of cataloging digitized items individually we are shifting our attention to organizing our millions of digital assets according to the physical arrangement of the collections.
Following the EAD Finding Aid format, our digital assets are “virtually filed” according to the collection Finding Aid structure.  We created simple “DynamicSlideshow” software that would read and display digital objects according to the structured directory.  The syntax to call for a particular slideshow is in the form of the URL link which I will explain below.  The slideshow link can be entered into any DAO (Digital Archival Object) field for easy image browsing with better contextual information.  We believe this approach will scale to the mass digitization efforts that the Smithsonian is undertaking.

Browse images using a Dynamic Slideshow

Here are a few examples to show how our method works for complex collections that have been fully digitized.  The method also works for small collections or collections with selected partial digitization.

Example 1:

ACA Galleries Records, 1917-1963, in the Archives of American Art [ View Example here ]

Notice the DAO tags syntax (below) looks like a URL link, and it is set to display images at the folder level.  The path of the directory dictates the sets of images for display.

http://edan.si.edu/slideshow/slideshowViewer.htm?damspath=/CollectionsOnline/acagall/Box_0001/Folder_001/

http://edan.si.edu/slideshow/slideshowViewer.htm?damspath=/CollectionsOnline/acagall/Box_0001/Folder_002/

Example 2:

Guide to the Sam DeVincent Collection of Illustrated American Sheet Music, in National Museum of American History Archives Center [ View Example here ]

Notice the DAO tag is set to pull images at the Series level:

http://edan.si.edu/slideshow/slideshowViewer.htm?damspath=/Public_Sets/NMAH/NMAH-AC/AC0300/S01

http://edan.si.edu/slideshow/slideshowViewer.htm?damspath=/Public_Sets/NMAH/NMAH-AC/AC0300/S02

Because the display dynamically pulls and displays the image sets, new images can be added to the directories in the DAMS (Digital Asset Management System) any time and the display will always pull the latest sets.  The DAO tags do not need to be modified because they point at the underlying structure, rather than the individual image files.

The image set can be dynamically selected with some simple syntax changes, as shown below:

Link points to Folder level:

http://edan.si.edu/slideshow/slideshowViewer.htm?damspath=/CollectionsOnline/acagall/Box_0001/Folder_002/

Link points to Box level

http://edan.si.edu/slideshow/slideshowViewer.htm?damspath=/CollectionsOnline/acagall/Box_0001

Link points to Collection level

http://edan.si.edu/slideshow/slideshowViewer.htm?damspath=/CollectionsOnline/acagall

The “Dynamic Slideshow” and DAMS structured directory path are designed to be used for more than just EAD Finding Aid; they can be used for many different purposes.  For example, we use this method to manage the SmithsonianTranscription website with 1400+ individual transcription projects which are guided by the same structure.

To see more examples, please follow these links to collections with digital objects:

From National Museum of American Indian Museum Archives Center: [ View here ]

From Archives of American Art [ View here  ]

Ching-hsien Wang, Project Manager
Collections Systems & Digital Assets Division
Office of the Chief Information Officer

One Hundred Years of Museum History

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Museum of the American Indian (MAI), the National Museum of the American Indians’s (NMAI) predecessor institution. On May 10, 1916, George Heye—along with Trustees F. Kingsbury Curtis, Frederick K. Seward, and William Lare—signed a foundation deed creating the museum, an institution for “the collection, preservation, study and exhibition of all things connected with the anthropology of the aboriginal people of North, South and Central Americas, and containing objects of artistic, historic, literary and scientific interest” [1]. The basis of the MAI’s collection was the the approximately 175,000 specimens already assembled by George Heye and informally referred to as the “Heye Museum.”

George Heye laying the cornerstone of the Museum of The American Indian– Heye Foundation, November 8, 1916 (NMAI P11449)

While MAI was officially founded in 1916, the seeds of the institution were planted over a decade earlier. George Heye had begun collecting Native American objects in 1897 but by 1904 he became serious about founding his own museum, devoting much of his time to acquiring large collections and cataloging them. He hired museum assistants, including staff from the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), to work after hours to help clean and organize his collections.

1905 time card for George Lentz, AMNH Museum Assistant, for his evening work for George Heye
(NMAI.AC.001, Box 266.5)

Heye cultivated relationships with collectors, dealers, and institutions with Native American collections. He developed a vast network of ethnologists and archaeologists such as George Pepper (AMNH), Marshall Saville (Columbia University), Mark Raymond Harrington (a Columbia graduate), and archaeologist Theodoor de Booy, who conducted expeditions and collected material for Heye throughout the Americas.

Supper at “the Heye Museum,” 10 East 33rd Street, NYC, 1912. From left, seated: Mrs. Marie Heye (George Heye’s mother), Harmon Hendricks, Mrs. Thea Page (later Mrs. George Gustav Heye), and George Gustav Heye; standing: George Pepper, Theodoor De Booy, and Marshall H. Saville. (NMAI N10987)

As early as December 1905, Heye sought support to found an institution with two facilities—one for exhibitions and one for storage—with research space for students. His motivation for collecting was not solely to amass a large private collection but instead to create an institution for the serious anthropological study of the people of the Americas. In 1906, after Heye discussed his museum idea with philanthropist Archer Huntington, Heye decided that the time was not right to create an institution that would rival the American Museum of Natural History. Instead, Heye placed his growing North American ethnology and archaeology collections at the University of Pennsylvania Museum in Philadelphia. There the collections were cared for and exhibited in two galleries from 1909 until 1916 when Heye withdrew them to create the MAI, much to the dismay of the University Museum staff, who believed he would ultimately donate his collection to their museum.

In the decade following his first conversations about building a museum, Heye was able to generate support for his vision of a new anthropological institution in New York and create the MAI in 1916. In 1922, the museum building finally opened to the public at Audubon Terrace at 155th and Broadway in New York on a site donated by Archer Huntington.

Mrs. Thea Heye placing the first specimen in a display case in the Museum of the American Indian–Heye Foundation, 155th and Broadway, New York. (NMAI N02173)

Heye and MAI staff members continued to collect specimens, sending out archaeological and ethnographic expeditions to the far reaches of the Americas, purchasing from collectors, and traveling abroad to purchase Native American items that had found their way into European collections. By 1990, when the MAI became part of the Smithsonian Institution, the collection included more than 800,000 objects, most of which were acquired during George Heye’s lifetime.

If not for the vision and determination of George Heye and the MAI staff who followed in his footsteps, the National Museum of the American Indian would not exist in its present form nor would it contain the impressive collections NMAI is known for. This year we celebrate the founding of the Museum of the American Indian and the many collectors and individuals involved in buildings its collections. As part of our centenary celebration, this month the NMAI Archive Center will add the newly digitized George Heye records and correspondence to the SOVA.  See an earlier blog for more information about using the SOVA and check back here and on the NMAI blog for more information about the museum’s history and the people associated with it!

-Maria Galban, Museum Specialist, NMAI Collections Research and Documentation

[1] MAI Foundation Deed, 1916. Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation Records, Box 153, Folder 3. NMAI Archive Center, Smithsonian Institution.

This post also appears on the National Museum of the American Indian Blog

Shared Connections: Collaboration across Smithsonian Archives

Blogs across the Smithsonian will give an inside look at the Institution’s archival collections and practices during a month long blog-a-thon in celebration of October’s American Archives Month. See additional posts from our other participating blogs, as well as related events and resources, on the Smithsonian’s Archives Month website.

As we come to the end of October and American Archives Month, I find myself reflecting on this year’s theme of hidden connections and several new initiatives on which the archival units across the Smithsonian have collaborated to “unhide” these connections and enhance online discovery of the Institution’s vast archival holdings, among the largest holdings in our nation measuring nearly 140,000 cubic feet of materials.   The primary sources of the Smithsonian document the history of art, culture, music, design, flight, space exploration, science and technology, landscapes and gardens, and native cultures in the United States, as well as the long history of the Smithsonian itself.

The most significant collective achievement of the Smithsonian’s archival units was this month’s launch of SOVA:  Smithsonian Online Virtual Archives.  This new and innovative web portal allows users to explore our nation's historical legacy as documented in the Smithsonian's vast, rich, and varied archival collections.  SOVA provides online access to descriptions and detailed inventories of thousands of primary resource collections held by multiple repositories across the Institution — all in one integrated interface.  Users can now discover previously hidden collections related by topic and/or by names of persons, families, businesses, and organizations regardless of where the collection lives.  And, they can explore related digital content from archival collections, such as letters, manuscripts, diaries and journals, ledgers and stock books, photographs, scrapbooks, sketchbooks and drawings, technical drawings and blueprints, field notebooks, log books, rare printed materials, sound recordings, videos, and much more.

Found in SOVA:   Frida Kahlo with her painting, Self-Portrait as a Tehuana, ca. 1943 / unidentified photographer. Florence Arquin papers, 1923-1985. Forms part of: Florence Arquin papers, 1923-1985.  Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution

Artwork by Acee Blue Eagle.  Forms part of the Acee Blue Eagle papers, 1907-1975. National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution

Archival finding aids or collection guides are the key to unlocking information in SOVA. Each unique archival collection has a finding aid that provides the user with varying levels of descriptive detail about the collection, including links to related archival collections in repositories across the Smithsonian, as well as related archival collections across the world by linking to ArchiveGrid.  Digitized content from each archival collection currently maintained in the Smithsonian’s DAMS (Digital Asset Management System) is also accessed via links provided in the collection's finding aid, thus providing users with the full context of the digital objects.

Another exciting archival discovery interface shared by the archival units is the Smithsonian Transcription Center.  The website invites the public to “help make our vast collections in art, history, and science more accessible to anyone with a curious spirit,” and that they “are working hand-in-hand with digital volunteers to transcribe historic documents and collection records to facilitate research and excite the learning in everyone. Together, we are discovering secrets hidden deep inside our collections that illuminate our history and our world.”   The very nature of archival documentation makes it the ideal medium for transcription.

The Transcription Center opened in July 2013 with thousands of documents across 31 projects from eight Smithsonian museums, archives, and libraries. They have grown with the help of volunteers to include over 900 projects from thirteen participating museums, archives and libraries. Current archival projects available for transcription and review include the E. Howard Clock Orders Ledger from the National Museum of American History’s Archives Center;  the Bladensburg Union Burial Association Records from the Anacostia Community Museum Archives; artist Arthur Dove's diary from the Archives of American Art, and the Field Notebooks from the National Museum of Natural History and the Smithsonian Institution Archives.

Found in the Transcription Center now:  A page from Arthur Dove’s 1942 diary found in the Arthur and Helen Torr Dove papers, 1905-1975, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution

Collaborative projects among the Smithsonian archivists just make sense.  They allow us to efficiently share more of our collections online with the public, thus, helping current and potential users to discover previously hidden collections and to explore the many connections to be made among our archival holdings here at the Smithsonian.

Barbara Aikens, Head of Collections Processing
Archives of American Art