Author Archives: Maureen Callahan

Why — and How — We Digitize

Posted on by
Reply

It’s Feb­ru­ary, and we’re now in the sec­ond month of our NHPRC-funded dig­i­ti­za­tion project. In twenty-three more months, we’ll have com­pleted scan­ning and upload­ing 400,000 pages of our most-viewed mate­r­ial to our find­ing aids, and any­one with an inter­net con­nec­tion will be able to view it.

This is just the most recent effort to intro­duce dig­i­ti­za­tion as a nor­mal part of our prac­tice at Mudd. As I said in my pre­vi­ous post, we know that it’s well and good that we have col­lec­tions that doc­u­ment the his­tory of US diplo­macy, eco­nom­ics, jour­nal­ism and civil rights in the twen­ti­eth and twenty-first cen­turies. But for the major­ity of poten­tial users, who may never be able to come to Prince­ton, NJ, this is irrel­e­vant. How­ever inter­ested they may be, they may never be able to afford to visit us. And there’s a whole other sub­set of poten­tial users — let’s call them work­ing peo­ple — who can’t come between the hours of 9:00 and 4:45, Mon­day through Fri­day. Are we really pro­vid­ing fair and equi­table access under these con­di­tions? Since we have the resources to dig­i­tize, it’s imper­a­tive that we develop the infra­struc­ture and polit­i­cal will to do so.

We know that it’s time to get seri­ous — and smart — about scanning.

The ball has been rolling in this direc­tion for some time. We have three “streams” of mak­ing dig­i­tal con­tent avail­able, and with our new find­ing aids site, we have an intu­itive way of link­ing descrip­tions of our mate­ri­als to the mate­ri­als themselves.

Images of the collection in the context of the finding aid

Images of the col­lec­tion in the con­text of the find­ing aid

Our first is patron-driven digitization.

The Zeutschel -- our amazing German powerhouse face-up scanner

This is our Zeutschel scan­ner. It does amaz­ing work, is easy on our mate­ri­als, and usu­ally requires very lit­tle qual­ity control.

Archives have been pro­vid­ing pho­todu­pli­ca­tion ser­vices since the advent of the pho­to­copier. At Mudd, we have ded­i­cated staff who have been doing this work for decades. Recently, we’ve just slightly tweaked our processes to cre­ate scans instead of paper copies and to (in many cases) re-use the scans that we make so that they’re avail­able to all patrons, not just the one request­ing the scan.

A patron (maybe you!) finds some­thing in our find­ing aids that he thinks he may be inter­ested in, and asks for a copy.

If he’s in our read­ing room, he flags the pages of mate­r­ial he wants. If he’s remote, he iden­ti­fies the fold­ers or vol­umes to be scanned. The archivist tells him how much the scan will cost, and he pre-pays.

Now, the scan­ning. This either hap­pens on our pho­to­copier (the tech­ni­cian can press “scan” instead of “pho­to­copy” to cre­ate a dig­i­tal file instead of a paper one) or on our Zeutschel scan­ner. And while we feel happy and lucky to have the Zeutschel, we don’t strictly need it to ful­fill our mis­sion to digitize.

The scan is named in a way that asso­ciates it with the descrip­tion of the mate­r­ial in the find­ing aid, and is then linked up and served online. We cur­rently send the patron an email of this scan, but in the future we may just send them a link to the uploaded content.

Our sec­ond stream is tar­geted dig­i­ti­za­tion based on users’ view­ing patterns

Our friendly student receptionist, Ashley, scans materials at the front desk when she isn't welcoming patrons.

Our stu­dent recep­tion­ist, Ash­ley, scans mate­ri­als at the front desk when she isn’t wel­com­ing patrons.

We try to keep lots of good infor­ma­tion about what our users find inter­est­ing. We use a ser­vice called google ana­lyt­ics to learn about what users are brows­ing online, and we keep sta­tis­tics about which phys­i­cal mate­ri­als patrons see in the read­ing room.

From these sources, we cre­ate a list of most-viewed mate­ri­als, and set up a sys­tem for our stu­dents to scan them in their down­time when they’re work­ing at the front desk.

We do this because we want to make sure that we’re putting the effort into dig­i­tiz­ing resources that patrons actu­ally want to see — there are more than 35,000 lin­ear feet of mate­ri­als at the Mudd Library. We prob­a­bly won’t ever be able to dig­i­tize absolutely every­thing, and it wouldn’t make sense to start from “A” and go to “Z”. So, we pay atten­tion to trends and try to antic­i­pate what researchers might find useful.

Our final stream — and the one for which we cur­rently have to rely on exter­nal sup­port — is large-scale vendor-supplied digitization.

Our cur­rent cold war project is a great exam­ple of this. We’ve put together a project plan, cho­sen mate­ri­als, called for quotes and cho­sen a ven­dor. We recently shipped our first col­lec­tion to be dig­i­tized, and I’ll be post­ing infor­ma­tion to the blog as we move forward.

Another good exam­ple of an externally-supported dig­i­ti­za­tion activ­ity is the scan­ning of micro­film from our Amer­i­can Civil Lib­er­ties Union Records. Our ear­li­est records were micro­filmed decades ago and recently, Pro­fes­sor Sam Walker sup­ported the dig­i­ti­za­tion of some of this micro­film so that they could be made avail­able online.

No sin­gle stream — externally-supported projects, left-to-right scan­ning, or patron-driven dig­i­ti­za­tion — would be enough to sup­port our goal of max­i­miz­ing the con­tent avail­able online. We hope that the three, each pur­sued aggres­sively, will help us real­ize our mis­sion of pro­vid­ing equi­table access to our mate­ri­als. And we think that focus­ing on this cold war project will help us reflect on and improve all of our dig­i­ti­za­tion activities.

New Public Policy Accessions: May — June 2011

Posted on by

There’s a scene in a doc­u­men­tary about the French philoso­pher Jacques Der­rida where Der­rida vis­its UC Irvine (where he had donated his per­sonal papers). The philoso­pher, going through the rows of newly-processed col­lec­tions, com­ments that the gray archival boxes on the shelves look like lit­tle gravestones.

For some­one whose best-known axiom was that “there is noth­ing out­side the text,” and who was very con­cerned about who has “author­ity” over the archive, per­haps it was some­what dis­tress­ing for Der­rida to see his texts buried away in fold­ers, boxes, shelves and behind locked doors.

It’s easy to under­stand this con­cern. In some ways, archival records are by their nature “dead” — they have been given to the archives because they’re no longer used in the course of daily busi­ness. And it’s true that most insti­tu­tions keep these mate­ri­als tucked away in closed stacks.

On the other hand, from my point of view as some­one who processes new acces­sions as they come to Mudd, col­lec­tions are con­stantly grow­ing, re-interpreted by new con­text and new evi­dence, and given new life through the research and ref­er­ence process. We care for col­lec­tions so that they may find new life — all of our core activ­i­ties, as an insti­tu­tion, are to serve researcher needs in their syn­the­sis and analy­sis of the past.

In May and June of this year, most of our acces­sions were addi­tions to col­lec­tions we already hold — in some cases, this was an instance of a donor find­ing or hav­ing cre­ated addi­tional mate­r­ial that rounds out our col­lec­tions. In most cases, new addi­tions to an archival col­lec­tions are an oppor­tu­nity to re-examine the exist­ing col­lec­tion from a new point of view.

We hope that this will be the case with our newest addi­tions. Here is a list of what we received in May and June:

[ML.2011.015] Pho­to­copy of Dou­glas Lin­der Arti­cle
[ML.2011.016] Pho­tographs and cor­re­spon­dence to William H. Kel­len­berger from John Fos­ter Dulles
[ML.2011.017] Women’s World Bank­ing Records
[ML.2011.019] Chalmers Bene­dict Wood Papers
[ML.2011.021] George S. McGov­ern Pho­tographs and Let­ters
[ML.2011.022] Marten van Heuven Writ­ings and Cor­re­spon­dence
[ML.2011.023] Woodrow Wil­son Let­ter
[ML.2011.025] Ken­nett Love Papers

Folk Art in the Archives

Posted on by

Bowen

[Left] William Bowen by Stanis­laus Korne­ski. Paint and etch­ing on wood, AR1995.78. [Right] Photo of William Bowen by the Prince­ton Alumni Weekly.

I would guess that every archives has mate­r­ial like this — objects cre­ated out of affec­tion or respect in a non-official capac­ity. These two paint­ings on etched wood — recently re-discovered here at Mudd — were cre­ated by Stanis­laus Korne­ski, a mem­ber of the draft­ing sec­tion of the grounds and build­ings depart­ment. They were given to Ed Eden­field, another Uni­ver­sity employee, as a gift, who then sent them to the archives in 1995. Resem­blances are strik­ing, I think.

Goheen

[Left]] Robert Goheen by Stanis­laus Korne­ski. Paint and etch­ing on wood,

AR1995.78. [Right] Photo of Robert Goheen by the Prince­ton Alumni

Weekly.

New Public Policy Accessions: April 2011

Posted on by

As orga­ni­za­tions grow and change through time, so do their archives.The Mudd Man­u­script Library col­lects the records of the Amer­i­can Civil Lib­er­ties Union [ML.2011.011], the Asso­ci­a­tion on Amer­i­can Indian Affairs [ML.2011.005], and Amer­i­cans United for Sep­a­ra­tion of Church and State [ML.2011.003], among many other orga­ni­za­tions. In the last few months, we’ve had the plea­sure of receiv­ing a new cache of mate­ri­als from each of these orga­ni­za­tions and adding them to exist­ing col­lec­tions. Although some mate­ri­als from both the ACLU and AAIA may be restricted for some time to com­ply with legal and pri­vacy con­cerns, the remain­der will be valu­able to researchers hop­ing to learn about the recent his­tory of these impor­tant organizations.

In addi­tion to these orga­ni­za­tion records, we have also received an accrual of papers from James A. Baker III, for­mer Chief of Staff to Pres­i­dent Rea­gan and Sec­re­tary of State to Pres­i­dent George H.W. Bush [ML.2011.002]. These records, mostly from his post-Washington career, include research files cre­ated dur­ing the writ­ing of his mem­oir, cor­re­spon­dence, events files, and a small num­ber of finan­cial files. They also include his “desk drawer” files, let­ters and notes from impor­tant fig­ures in his career, includ­ing Pres­i­dents George H.W. and George W. Bush, Nancy Rea­gan, Henry Kissinger, and Karl Rove. Please con­sult the find­ing aid for this col­lec­tion for access restrictions.

Con­tinue read­ing →

“How High Can an Income Tax Fix Go?” The LBJ tax scandal that you’ve probably never heard of.

Posted on by

The Mudd Man­u­script Library recently acquired an extremely inter­est­ing col­lec­tion from a little-noted event in polit­i­cal history.

werner
Werner’s 1944 memo explain­ing the dis­cov­ery of fraud­u­lent bonuses to Brown & Root exec­u­tives. The actual recip­i­ent of these funds was deter­mined to be the Lyn­don B. John­son 1941 U.S. Sen­ate campaign.

Between 1942 and 1944, Elmer Charles Werner led an Inter­nal Rev­enue Ser­vice inves­ti­ga­tion of Brown & Root’s* covert finan­cial sup­port of then U.S. Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Lyn­don B. Johnson’s failed 1941 U.S. Sen­ate cam­paign. Accord­ing to Werner’s records, this inves­ti­ga­tion was impeded and even­tu­ally ter­mi­nated by a com­pli­cated series of requests from John­son to Roosevelt’s White House to senior IRS officials.

This col­lec­tion includes Werner’s diaries from 1942–1945 (the period dur­ing which John­son was inves­ti­gated); Werner’s notes and news­pa­per clip­pings regard­ing the case; a chronol­ogy of the facts of the case pre­pared by Werner; and Werner’s man­u­script nar­ra­tive regard­ing his expe­ri­ences which he enti­tled “How High Can an Income Tax Fix Go?”

Many years before their trans­mit­tal to Mudd, these records were cen­tral sources for a chap­ter in Robert A. Caro’s book The Years of Lyn­don John­son: The Path to Power (1981). There, Caro explains how Johnson’s con­nec­tions to the Roo­sevelt White House pre­vented the IRS inves­ti­ga­tion from explor­ing the full scope of Brown & Root’s secret con­tri­bu­tions to the John­son campaign.

Con­tinue read­ing →

New Public Policy Accessions: July 2010 — March 2011

Posted on by

One of Mudd’s newest acces­sions, the Kris­ten Tim­o­thy Papers, finds itself in good com­pany with other Mudd col­lec­tions doc­u­ment­ing indi­vid­u­als who have had pro­found influ­ence in the United Nations, includ­ing the papers of Mar­garet Sny­der, Regional Advi­sor of the

United Nations Eco­nomic Com­mis­sion for Africa; Henry R. Labouisse, Direc­tor of UNRWA and Exec­u­tive Direc­tor of UNICEF; David A. Morse, Director-General of the ILO; and many other luminaries.

Tim­o­thy orga­nized the United Nations’ Fourth World Con­fer­ence on Women in Bei­jing in 1995. The con­fer­ence addressed endur­ing inequal­i­ties for women and girls across the world. Tim­o­thy was instru­men­tal in out­lin­ing the Bei­jing Dec­la­ra­tion and Plat­form for Action, which were adopted by con­sen­sus on 15 Sep­tem­ber 1995.

Timothy’s records include audio-visual mate­ri­als (much of which is avail­able online), records regard­ing the cre­ation of the plat­form for action, mate­ri­als cre­ated in prepa­ra­tion for and dur­ing the con­fer­ence, and a series of Timothy’s research records on the his­tory of the global women’s movement.

Con­tinue read­ing →