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Inheriting a Collection: An Interview with Cape Girardeau County Archive Center Director, Marybeth Niederkorn

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It’s one thing to take care of a collection that you’ve built or cared for from the beginning, but coming into a long-established collection can be overwhelming. Where do you even start assessing what could be thousands of documents spanning multiple topics? How do you determine what is top priority for preservation and digitization efforts and what needs to wait? How do you improve and expand the functionality of a collection that’s been in use for decades?

These are the kinds of questions Marybeth Niederkorn asked herself when she was hired as the new director of the Cape Girardeau County Archive Center. Located in Jackson, MO, the Archive Center opened in 2001 to serve as a secure and accessible storage center for county records. The climate-controlled repository is open to the public and county officials five days a week with full-time staff available to help search the estimated one million pages of documents dating back to the 1790s.

Anderson Archival recently sat down with Director Marybeth Niederkorn to discuss the challenges of coming into an established collection, what the collection offers, and what she plans to do to move the collection forward.

Anderson Archival: Can you give me a little background about yourself?

Marybeth Niederkorn: I come from a background in journalism and education, which gives me a lot of training in research and a big network [of contacts in the area]. Local history fascinates me. It always has. And now, I’m able to promote it full time while also working to preserve it, make it accessible, and just deepen the understanding and the reach.

AA: So you know the Archive Center from a user’s end, and have experience with the intricacies of this region.

MN: Right, and in this region, we are really blessed with a lot of extremely knowledgeable historians. We have a bunch of organizations that have not just directors but volunteers who are deeply informed about this region’s history and … who are able to help connect the dots for people who need to know more about either their family’s history or a business’s history or how this all fits into the overall story of how this part of the country was settled.

AA: What kind of records do you house and what function does the Archive Center serve?

MN: The Archive Center is primarily a county facility, so we house county records from the treasurer, from the collector, from the auditor, so we have things like probate records, personal property tax records, marriage licenses, county commission meeting minutes, and some school records. Some of the school records we have are from schools that are no longer incorporated, so they’re very important historically.

We also have the Cape Girardeau County Genealogical Society records here. There was a genealogist named Margaret Mates who did research on hundreds of families in the area, and she has collected information on birth and marriage records. It’s an extensive collection of binders of her work, and that’s extremely helpful when someone calls us and says, “Hey, I’m trying to figure out, my twice-great-grandfather was married three times and how does that family work?” We’re able to give them some insight usually using those records, and we can also usually pull up information on . . . maps of land ownership.

There’s a map [of the county] that we use a lot. It’s the 1901 map, and it shows who owned what and where, and we have that indexed so we can usually find some pretty good information. We can either work backwards from it using our tax records—ownership records—or, we can work forward.

And we assist patrons with research. We talk with genealogists from all over the world. We have a genealogist in Germany who has some family connection here, so he calls us sometimes. We work with people who are looking for records of all types. A pretty common one we get is someone calling in to find out when their divorce was finalized, because they are getting remarried or they need a driver’s license. It’s kind of eclectic. We never have the same day twice.

We never have the same day twice.”—Marybeth Niederkorn, Director of the Cape Girardeau County Archive Center

AA: What was it like coming into an established collection for the first time?

MN: A little overwhelming. From my time at the Southeast Missourian I knew about this facility… I had an idea of what I was getting into, but it has been a long process of wading into the collection so that I don’t drown. I’ve been leaning pretty heavily on our volunteers and on Lyle Johnston, our assistant archivist, who is a wealth of information and can put his hand on just about any document in the place when asked.

I have a wonderful staff and I am trying not to overwhelm myself. Fortunately, my predecessors, the previous directors of this facility, have been excellent stewards and custodians of this collection. I was able to step into something that was pretty well prepared for someone to take over and take it to the next level.

AA: What does the next level look like for this collection?

MN: We already have a gem of a facility. My hope is to raise the profile of this place and have more people understand what we have, what we are, and what we can do for them. We are a county facility. We’re supported by county tax dollars. I take that very seriously.

[The collection is] publicly accessible, and I would love for more of the public to know about us, and that we can do a lot of research [on their behalf] by phone or email.

We had a person this morning email us and ask what the history of a particular building in Cape Girardeau is. Our first questions back were, “What do you want to know specifically? Do you want to know chain of ownership? Do you want to know historical significance, because that’s a big question, but we’d love to help.”

We love a mystery, is what I like to tell people, because I think people hesitate to ask us to do research for them because they feel like it’s a big ask, but we love diving in and seeing what we can find for people. That is pretty much our favorite thing to do here.

The Archive Center holds much of Cape Girardeau County’s history

AA: What were some of the first things you had to assess?

MN: Lyle had been the de facto director for not quite a year before I came in because the previous director had been very ill and unfortunately passed away this spring. So, I’m still in the discovery phase; I’m still trying to assess where we are.

The first thing that we talked about on day one when Lyle took me on a tour of the facility was that we need to increase our shelving capacity, because there are some places where boxes are stacked two or three tall on a shelf. That’s not ideal, because paper is really heavy, and these boxes are not really designed for that level of structural integrity. That’s our biggest focus right now. As soon as we get that secured, we can start looking at what kinds of records we can digitize in order to support our physical collection.

We get that question a lot, “Why isn’t your whole collection online?” Oh, boy.

It would be really nice, but we have other priorities at the moment. We would love to have things online, but there’s also some sensitive information. We house divorce records—divorce records have social security numbers and children’s names and that kind of thing.

AA: In other words, with digitization comes cyber security.

MN: Exactly. And that would be something we would need to outsource. What I tell people is, if we had 500 volunteers working 50 hours a week, it might only take us 60 years to get most of our collection online, you know, so it’s a lot. And we don’t even have 50 volunteers.

AA: How do you prioritize changes and improvements for the archive?

MN: It’s a matter of figuring out what is going to be the most costly. As far as money and time, I’m working on grants to help secure that funding. I am working on what I consider the biggest things first, and also maintaining our document stabilization efforts.

I would really like for an outside observer to come in and assess what we’re doing right and let us know what we can improve, because I think having an outside perspective would be very helpful.

I don’t want to just go back there willy-nilly and say, “Well, I know we need shelves but I don’t know what else we need,” and just kind of throw darts at a list of stuff, if you know what I mean. Having a plan is definitely better.

AA: What other plans do you have for the archive?

MN: I’m hoping to raise the profile and public awareness of what we have, and hopefully work towards digitization as a backup to our existing hard copies. I have been talking with a lot of the other facility directors and organizations in the area. I’m hoping to work as closely as I can with, for instance, the State Historical Society of Missouri, with the Genealogical Society of Cape Girardeau County, with the Cape Girardeau County History Center, which is about a block and a half away from us, and with Southeast Missouri State University, in Cape Girardeau.

They focus more on collections that have physical objects, so their mission is a bit different from what we do, but it’s a great opportunity for us all to support each other and work together. We all have different resources and different strengths, and if a person calls us, and they need some information that I happen to know the State Historical Society is working through at this very moment, then I can direct them that way and vice versa.

My hope is to work more closely with other organizations, and generally be more visible and more accessible to people so that we can be of the most benefit possible.

People hesitate to ask us to do research for them because they feel like it’s a big ask, but we love diving in and seeing what we can find for people. That is pretty much our favorite thing to do here.”—Marybeth Niederkorn, Director of the Cape Girardeau County Archive Center

AA: What would you suggest someone coming into an established collection should do?

MN: Don’t try to do everything at once. Don’t try to learn everything at once, it’s going to take some time. Knowing the physical location of things is important, and knowing the condition of the records in your collection is important.

Knowing who your resource people are is important. For instance, we have a few key people we can call if we have a question. We got a question last week where someone was looking for the name of a specific funeral home that had operated in the 1940s and 50s. We looked in our phone directories; we looked in obituaries from that time period. We looked a few places and could not come up with it.

It’s very possible that a funeral home in the 1940s /1950s didn’t have a phone number, so it wasn’t in a phone directory. But I was able to call a couple of people, and one of them came right back with, “Oh, this was the name of it. All of their records went to a specific place whenever they closed down.” So, knowing your key people to call to help fill in the gaps and put information together is very important.

Knowing the state the collection is in and understanding what the mission of your facility is—know your goals and understand how to get there is essential. And that’s probably going to take a lot of talking to people and sitting with the collection and getting a good physical sense for it.

 

Anderson Archival is grateful to Marybeth Niederkorn for her time and participation in this interview. The Cape Girardeau Archive Center can be reached at archive@capecounty.us. For many researchers and archivists, knowing the resources that are publicly available, such as the Cape Girardeau County Archive Center, is the first step in unraveling the ever-growing story of history.

If you’re coming into a collection or have been curating one from scratch and it needs digitization, the experts at Anderson Archival are ready to help you move your collection forward.

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Is the Internet Forever? (Not Always!)

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There’s a popular argument to think twice before you share on social media, because what is shared cannot be taken back.  Once online, it is online forever. While that is more of a precaution than a hard and fast rule, it is often something we believe.

But if you’ve ever read something and then tried to find it again a decade later, you know first-hand how content that is born digital can become unavailable.

The nature of born-digital content is as the name suggests—content built and published (or “born”) for a digital medium and meant to stay digital. Without conscious preservation efforts, born-digital content isn’t archived anywhere physically and can easily disappear.

Efforts by preservation organizations help mitigate the trickle or flood of material disappearing from the web, but they cannot capture everything.

What does it mean when born-digital content can simply disappear without much of a trace?

  1. Documenting Disappearances

In August of this year, a disturbing trend was revealed.

Over the course of the last ten years, a team of researchers had noticed that previously-available open access journals were disappearing from the web. In order to understand and document the full extent of this vanishing knowledge, they built methodology, compared databases, and tallied up the losses.

Information scientists Mikael Laakso, Lisa Matthias, and Najko Jahn identified a total of 176 journals that had disappeared between the years 2000-2019. These journals had been published all over the world and covered a variety of disciplines, meaning the problem was widespread and indiscriminate.

There are safeguards that act as a network of duplicate copies and preservation efforts for journals, but Thib Guicherd-Callin, acting manager of one such program, told Nature that digital preservation initiatives are “woefully underfunded.”

It is important to remember that this study wasn’t focused on how many journals had been successfully preserved and remained accessible thanks to programs such as LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe), and PKP PN (Portico and the Public Knowledge Project’s Preservation Network). The Global LOCKSS Network preserves 11,000 journal titles! LOCKSS makes “use of the copies it manages, by enlisting them to validate integrity against each other, rather than relying uncritically on comparisons against a centralized fixity store,” keeping digital objects safe, accessible, and verifiable.

Matthias believes a true solution would need to be shared between publishers, authors, librarians, and preservation services, but that solution just doesn’t exist yet.

  1. Digital Excavations of the Future

Modern-day historians have a wealth of physical objects and documents (often preserved digitally) that they mine for details about events, track daily life, understand a variety of perspectives, and ultimately draw conclusions about the past. The tumultuous year of 2020 has provided an interesting thought experiment around a practical question: In one thousand years, what material from this year, created almost entirely online, will be available for study? And more to our point, what material will vanish completely?

The first question of what will be worth preserving at all is a difficult one. The answer typically only becomes clear in hindsight, but in the fast-moving world of the internet, decisions are needed now. University Affairs tracks collection projects by the University of Saskatchewan and Brock University Library, noting success in user submission and a hyper-local, person-focused scope.

Many countries, such as United Kingdom, France, and Denmark mandate their national libraries to capture a comprehensive digital record of life in that country at any given time. This may prove a future advantage to historians studying these countries’ culture in the time of COVID-19.

The United States has a more randomized approach. The Library of Congress has digital archives covering the first 12 years of Twitter, but now it acquires tweets on a selective basis “similar to [their] collections of websites.” The LOC’s Web Archive team of subject experts select sites in accordance with the Library’s (incredibly broad) policy guidance. There are also the efforts of the (non-profit) Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine project to snapshot the web.

But without a legal mandate to preserve a comprehensive digital picture of the world, gaps and perspectives are bound to be missed. When only one voice is remembered, history isn’t complete.

 

Within the field of digitization, there is often a feeling that what’s done is done forever. But in reality, website collections need to be managed and interfaces kept functional as internet standards and usage practices change. A collection easily accessed on a desktop, for example, may be impossible to navigate on a smart phone. Scans and images saved on floppy discs are now difficult to access from modern computers, and other save formats are nearly obsolete.

Anderson Archival tracks the standards and trends of digitization, ensuring that files are saved in a variety of formats that have been identified by experts as having the most digital longevity. These formats include archival PDFs (PDF-A) and are often saved on cloud servers along with physical backups. We, too, believe in the notion that lots of copies keep stuff safe.

Whether you want your collection to be accessible forever online, or want to pick and choose who is granted copies and access, Anderson Archival is the solution to your digitization needs. Don’t let your digitization decisions come back to haunt you! To start the discussion and keep your collection available for the future, contact us today.

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Deciphering Your History: An Interview with German-English Genealogy Translator Katherine Schober

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Many people are spending more time at home these days, which means they may also be rediscovering family heirlooms and artifacts. Others may be looking into their family’s history for the first time. Brushing dust off the boxes in the attic and seeing old photo albums and letters from an ancestor’s past can spark an enthusiasm for family history that lasts a lifetime.

But simply having all the clues in front of you doesn’t mean it’s easy to piece together your family history. Genealogical research entails digging through artifacts from centuries past, and a lot can change in a century. Family members from different eras and continents had their own unique lives and traditions—which can mean your family artifacts might be written in an entirely different language than what your modern-day family speaks.

Anderson Archival sat down with German-English translator Katherine Schober of SK Translations to discuss family histories, digitization, and the joys of genealogy. Schober is a St. Louis native and graduate of Truman State University. Since 2010, she’s been translating family records, letters, and journals from German to English. Her knowledge of genealogical texts and research seemed boundless, so Anderson Archival wanted to find out what challenges family historians might have when encountering historical documents.

Schober at work.

Anderson Archival: What is it about the German language specifically that speaks to you?

SK Translations: I knew that I had ancestors from Germany, so that’s where the original interest started. Once I got to high school, I decided to study German instead of Spanish because of those ancestors. I also really love grammar and rules, and German is a very logical, grammatical language. They actually have sixteen different words for “the” depending on where the word is in a sentence!

AA: St. Louis has significant German roots. Can you speak to that as a St. Louis native?

SK: St. Louis has a lot of German immigrants who came over in the 19th century. A lot of Germans at that time said that the hills of Missouri look like the hills of Germany, so they felt like they were at home in their new state. After hearing how happy their fellow countrymen were in Missouri, other Germans then followed and ended up in St. Louis and the surrounding areas. My own ancestors (Wolken) came to St. Louis in 1854, and then a different side of the family (Mueller) came later in the 1880s. We have a lot of German history here.

AA: I’m curious how digitization plays into what you do. What’s your experience working with digitized media?

SK: Up until WWII, there was an old type of handwriting [Kurrentschrift] that was used in the German-speaking countries. It’s very intricate and detailed, with lots of small loops and flourishes. In order to be able to read it, I need to really zoom in on those letters. That’s why it’s so important to me that the document is scanned and digitized in very high quality. A lot of times I’ll get documents from clients that aren’t good resolution, and the letters become blurry when I zoom in. At that point, I’ll have to write back and say, “Please scan it in a higher resolution so that I can make out the letters.” They are usually happy to comply, because they want me to be able to decipher their letters as well!

Anderson Archival can help with high-resolution, high-quality scanning of historical documents! Read more about our process.

AA: Can you tell me more about that old German handwriting?

SK: Kurrentschrift is the same German language, the same German words, just a different style of handwriting—sort of like how Russian has a different alphabet than we do, although it’s luckily not that complicated. Some letters of the Kurrenschrift alphabet are the same as in modern German, but the majority are different. The “s” and the “e” are especially tricky. My husband, for example, is a native German speaker, and he’s able to read maybe two in five words.

Kurrentschrift was in use until after WWII, and some say that it was Hitler who said he wanted the Germans to start using the “normal” alphabet that you and I learned in school because he wanted people to be able to understand the words in the regions he conquered. He didn’t want the Germans to have one type of handwriting and everyone else to have another. When Germany lost the war, the old handwriting gradually fell out of style in the 1950s.

AA: How would you say that confidentiality plays into the work you do?

SK: I always keep documents confidential unless specifically discussed. Some clients are very open, and sometimes when I work with very interesting documents, I’ll email the client and ask, “Would you be willing to let me share this on my business social media sites for my history-enthusiast followers to see?” Some of them are excited and say, “Oh yes, that would be great, show the world and share it!” and others say, “No, I’d rather keep this private within my family.” I would never share anything without asking the client’s permission first because it does, of course, belong to them and their family. It really is a personal decision of what they feel comfortable doing.

AA: Do you think that’s a big part of choosing to research genealogy in the first place, sharing it with a larger audience?

SK: It can be. I think genealogy is a way to make everyone feel connected. Once you start doing genealogy, it can get very addicting. When you find that first great-great grandparent and realize they were a real person with a real life, you just want to keep going and finding more and more people. And it’s something that’s so exciting to share with others—especially if you find out you are distantly related to them!

Immigrants brought their languages to America, but not all of them were passed down through the generations. Image from GCaptain.com.

I recently translated a letter you may have seen on my blog from 1853. It was from a person who had just emigrated from Germany to move to America, and it was such an interesting letter because he detailed his whole experience of leaving Germany, getting on the ship, the ship journey over, landing in New York, and then getting settled in Brooklyn, NY. I was fascinated by it so I asked my client if she would be willing for me to share it. After I published it on the blog, the response from my followers was amazing, I think because people could picture their own ancestor going through the same experience and were excited to have insight into how that experience might have been.

One of the most exciting things that happened after publishing the letter was one man’s comment that really surprised me. This blog reader wrote that his own ancestor’s name was actually mentioned in the letter. His ancestor was one of the people that the author himself had gone to visit when he landed in New York!  My client and that man do not know each other at all today, but it turns out their ancestors were friends, proof of which was in the letter. I thought that was so exciting! Genealogy can really help connect people.

AA: What other kinds of documents do people bring to you?

SK: I work with a lot of church records. In the past in Germany, it was churches who kept track of people’s births, marriages, and deaths. The government didn’t keep track of these life events until the late 19th century, so anyone who’s traced their ancestry back farther than that works with church documents.

I also get to work with a lot of diaries, and those are my favorite because you really get to know a person through their personal writing. I feel so lucky that I get to read their secret thoughts 200 years later! That’s a lot of fun for me because you really feel like you’re getting to know a person and how they lived on a day to day basis. I’m a big journaler myself, and sometimes I think to myself, “Okay, I need to be careful what I write down in case anyone reads this in 200 years!”

AA: What are some challenges with the digital copies people send you?

SK: Sometimes the letter is very creased, and if there’s a big fold in the page it makes it very hard to read. Sometimes the letter is torn so half of it is missing, or there’s water damage to the letter or document. Usually, the thing that I always tell people if they are working with church records, for example, or any other type of records besides a letter or diary, is to send me as much of the document as they can. [I use] not only their ancestor’s records but the records of other people on that page, for comparison purposes. If their own ancestor’s record has water damage or a tear or a crease, then I can look to the record above or below to get a better idea of what words or phrases are missing from their own ancestor’s record.

AA: Have there been any recent projects that you’ve worked on that you’d want to speak to as far as anything that’s been particularly interesting or challenging for you?

SK: I really love the diaries. One of my favorite diaries was set during the early 1900s, written by a woman whose husband was stationed in Thailand in the army. She travelled via ship from Germany to Thailand to go be with him and she kept a diary of her ship journey. She wrote about her life on the ship, and then getting off at different ports and experiencing the culture in the different countries they stopped at. Every page, for hundreds of pages, she wrote, “I miss my husband so much,” “I can’t wait to see him”, etc. So I was really excited for her to get to Thailand and read about their long-awaited reunion. But, much to my dismay, the diary stopped right before she got to Thailand, so I never got to hear how she finally saw her husband again or how their reunion was. It was like a book with the ending torn out!

Just recently I did a letter that was written by a nine-year-old in 1822 and it was really cute. He wrote home to his father and asked him if he could stay at his friend’s house longer and if his father could send him some money because he wanted to buy presents for his friends. That was 1822, but asking if he could stay longer at a friend’s house could have been something a nine-year-old today would say today. That’s something that really strikes me, that humans have really stayed the same throughout history. The circumstances may change, but the basic emotions and feelings and relationships all stay the same.

Interested in learning more about what Anderson Archival can bring to a historical document collection? Check out our pieces on the benefits of sharing a collection online, and explaining the optical character recognition (OCR) process.

AA: What other challenges do family historians bring to you? What sort of questions do you hear?

SK: A lot of people get overwhelmed with where to start in their genealogy research. They’ve heard the family stories that their great-grandfather came from Germany, but they don’t know the town he came from or the year he came over, and the people who might have known that information have already passed away. For those people getting started, I would advise them to start with themselves, and then their parents, and then their grandparents, and document from there. A lot of people are tempted to start with the immigrant they heard came over from Germany a hundred and fifty years ago, but because so many people have the same name, or there’s a lot of towns in Germany with the same name, they might end up looking for the wrong person in the wrong town. It’s really important to document everything you know first and then build off that before you just jump in the middle and try to go from there.

AA: What key skills should someone look for when seeking a translator?

SK: The most important thing that a lot of people don’t know is that you should always look for a translator who’s translating into their native language. If you want documents translated from German to English, English should be the translator’s native language because that’s the language they’re going to be writing in and that’s the final product you’re going to get. Then if you’re wanting to go from English to German, you should find someone whose native language is German. You want that final product to be written by someone who has a good feel for writing in their native language.

 

Anderson Archival is grateful to Katherine Schober for her time and participation in this interview. If you’d like to employ her genealogy translation services, she can be contacted through her website or on her Instagram. Partnering with experts like SK Translations is just one way Anderson Archival keeps your collection’s individual needs on the forefront.

We are dedicated to preserving your history, no matter the language that history may be written in. Even the detailed OCR our archival experts perform needs the expertise of human eyes, especially when written in German.

Language doesn’t have to be a barrier when it comes to family history projects. Contact us today to learn how we can help you tackle your next genealogical challenge.

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Remembering the Suffragettes: Turning Your Online Collection Into a Narrative

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To celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment giving women the right to vote, libraries and museums are showcasing the historical artifacts of the century-long movement. Looking at these collections, it’s easy to see how the stories we learned in school can leave out some of the most interesting bits of history. That is why historical collections, no matter how niche, are important to filling the gaps that history books leave out. In this way, a digital collection becomes more than a collection of papers or photographs; it becomes a narrative of history.

Library of Congress’s Suffragette Exhibit

In a year affected by COVID-19, online access to historical collections is more important than ever. Exhibitions that would usually be offered in person have moved partially or completely online to continue educating and inspiring those who can’t visit. The Library of Congress is one of the organizations turning to the internet to celebrate the women’s suffrage movement. In addition to in-person exhibitions, they’ve created an online exhibit for people to explore.

The “Shall Not Be Denied: Women Fight for the Vote” online exhibit does more than simply display digital versions of the items in their collection. The Library of Congress organized the exhibition to tell a story. Rather than just present the artifacts, it narrates the different eras of the suffrage movement. Visitors can explore the early, post-Civil War women’s movement; see the picket lines in front of the White House; and learn about the brave women of color who are rarely included in history books. Though often condensed, the women’s suffrage exhibit tells a larger story of a movement that survived and changed over decades.

Beyond the main exhibition, the Library also links out into more focused collections, such as Photographs from the Record of the National Woman’s Party and Women’s Suffrage in Sheet Music, to expand on their narrative. These collections are unique, and on their own don’t tell a story. But when combined with the main exhibition’s narrative, these smaller collections add humanity to the historical figures showcased. These were impressive and creative women who lived and fought for their rights.

Telling a Story with Your Collection

One of the most important parts of a collection is the story behind it. It could be the story of gathering the materials or the story behind the artifacts, but the larger narrative is what the audience connects with. Researchers or avid enthusiasts may be able to appreciate a collection with little more than the artifacts themselves, but if your goal is to share, inform, or educate people who are new to the subject or wanting to expand their knowledge, then building a narrative is essential.

Having a strong narrative to your collection not only leads the visitor to the most important or interesting artifacts, but it puts the collection into historical context. Even journals or detailed records need context in order to enrich the history they represent. Without context, the women of color highlighted by the Library of Congress’s More to the Movement section of their women’s suffrage exhibit are just pictures and names. It’s the context of their place in the story that explains how important the women were to the suffragette movement and why they were overlooked by history.

How Digitization Can Improve Your Collection’s Storytelling

An online collection has advantages over a physical collection, one being an improved opportunity for storytelling. When a person visits an exhibit in person, they can only see what is displayed at that time. In many cases this is only one part of a larger collection. Space, condition, and security can keep amazing artifacts from in-person viewing. People must also move through a gallery and could miss items meant to be experienced together.

By digitizing, the entire collection is at the visitor’s fingertips. No need to hide away the most interesting pieces in order to protect them from deterioration. Millions of people can see these rarely shown items whenever they want, and the inclusion of these artifacts will enhance the integrity of the larger story.

Instead of wandering a physical gallery, possibly missing items due to crowds or time limitations, an online collection has the advantage of linking items together. As visitors follow these artifacts through the story behind them, they can choose to leave the path and go down a side story through direct links to other artifacts or web pages. Once done, they can easily return to the main narrative without missing anything. Since a digitized collection is available 24/7 online, visitors can come and go when it’s convenient for them.

 

People don’t always remember names or dates of historical events, but a well-told story that brings those events to life is easy to recall. Artifacts and documents enhance that story. They give proof of what happened and voice to people long past. Your collection has a unique story to tell, if you let it.

Do you have pieces of history that you’d like to see displayed as a narrative that could impact the world? Anderson Archival can help. Give us a call at 314-259-1900 or an email at info@andersonarchival.com today!

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Visit Your Collection – From Home?

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The global response to COVID-19 has included mass closures, urging the public to stay at home and “shelter in place.” These conditions are not exactly conducive to visiting collections of art, books, or historical documents. Unfortunately, that means the majority of research, study, and reference has come to a stuttering halt. Unless, of course, the collection, museum, library, or entity has a robust internet presence that allows for faceted search, guided tours, and, most importantly, remote access.

For an organization like the St. Louis Art Museum, online access to the arts was already a major part of their mission. When the museum temporarily closed due to COVID-19, expanding access on that existing framework was a natural next step appreciated by those prevented from visiting in person.

Social Media Integration

Regardless of their social media presence prior to the mass temporary closures, museums now use these channels to reach new and dedicated audiences. The St. Louis Art Museum, for example, shares a piece of art every day on their website and social media.

Many museums already utilized Twitter, but recently they’ve ramped up their presence. Themed hashtags add a little fun by offering beautiful samplings of art or something a bit creepier. Even something as simple as a security guard learning the ropes of Twitter to showcase the National Cowboy Museum has made the news. All draw eyes, virtual visitors, and donation dollars.

No matter if they post every day or only once a week, these organizations bring a little bit of brightness to the digital landscape.

Participate at Home

Students and bored creatives stuck at home have been thrilled by interactive challenges and activities facilitated by museums. The Getty Museum challenge, where participants try to recreate a classic work of art with household objects, has generated some incredible depictions of time spent at home due to COVID-19.

Blanton Museum of Art, out of The University of Texas at Austin, has a wealth of #MuseumFromHome material including informational coloring pages, the perfect addition to an at-home art class or zen coloring for a quiet evening.

Is your museum or collection left in the dark because of limited in-person access? Contact Anderson Archival to explore your options!

Virtual Tours 

Beyond having materials available and searchable online, many museums offer virtual tours. These videos or guided web pages move beyond a collection of viewable documents to include video, commentary, and themes.

For a fee, the Winchester Mystery House can be experienced from the comfort of your home. The Immersive 360 Tour brings visitors through the bizarre building with narration and historical details.

With or without the optional Virtual Reality experience, the Pitt Rivers Museum’s online walk through is breathtaking. No need to worry about crowds or the price of getting to Oxford, UK; this resource provides the means to spend time looking at every exhibit at your own pace, enjoying the nuances of a museum with artifacts grouped by theme rather than time or place.

The natural world isn’t beyond a virtual visit, either. The Nevada board of tourism offers “Roam from Home,” with Google Earth explorations of ghost towns, landmarks, and even a forest of cars.

Collections of documents and printed matter make for stunning virtual visits in different ways from many of these examples, and a guide through themed virtual exhibits invites digital guests to sit down and explore the material in a new way.

 

Combining a few of these strategies and learning opportunities is the Library of Congress. Turning 220 years old this year is cause for celebration. Social media posts with #LOC220 will involve everyone! LOC also has an extensive series of webinars, videos, and interactive events that showcase their collections and ways individuals and families can learn from home.

 

The extra features and enhanced access that COVID-19 has unlocked don’t have to disappear when life returns to normal. One silver lining to this global pandemic is that it has invited everyone to rethink the ways people experience the world. Why not continue an interactive program with your collection? And even when physical visits are available once again, consider just how much a searchable online library accessible anywhere improves upon a single room with a finding aid.

Have you been inspired by the ways online access has been highlighted and cherished lately? Anderson Archival can help take your collection into the digital world. Give us a call at 314-259-1900 or an email at info@andersonarchival.com today!

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Quotables: Q&A: Mark Anderson on how organizations can preserve their historical documents

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Co-founder of Anderson Archival Mark Anderson recently interviewed with Karen Dybis of Corp! Magazine.

All organizations, whether they are families, nonprofit groups, or businesses, have documents that are important in telling their story. These historically valuable papers should be preserved—but what are the best ways to do it?…

“Every business has a story to tell,” Anderson says.

Corp! Magazine provides “excellence in reporting important economic, growth, trend information, and resources” to businesses. Dybis’ interview with Anderson delves into the reasons why an organization or business should preserve their history by preserving their documents.

Click to read the article at Corp!

Do you have a historical document collection that you’d like to make more accessible, relevant, and impactful? Anderson Archival uses proprietary methods to digitize collections so they are easily searchable, ultimately accessible, and even more meaningful to a wide audience. Let us help you today! Give us a call at 314.259.1900 or email us at info@andersonarchival.com.

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What are Quotables? This is a category in our posts to highlight any professional publications that benefit from our expert archivist experience and quote us in articles for their readers. 

Karpeles Manuscript Library2019, Anderson Archival

Firefighters Save Historic Documents Amid Museum Fire

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A St. Louis museum was compromised by a fire this week, but thankfully most of the collection had been digitized!

Late Tuesday night, March 26, 2019, a four-alarm fire broke out in the Karpeles Manuscript Library Museum in South St. Louis. As a St. Louis-based company dedicated to digitally archiving historic documents, this almost-tragedy hit close to home, and we waited for news of how much of this unique collection was left.

The 107-year-old Greek Revival building, originally the Third Church of Christ, Scientist, housed a portion of David Karpeles’ manuscript collection, the largest private manuscript collection in the world, as well as an exhibit by the St. Louis Media Foundation. Some of the items on display included France’s approval of the Louisiana Purchase, Columbus’ handwritten letter describing the coasts of America, documents about revolutionary Che Guevara, and a number of historic St. Louis-related documents. The loss of any one of these items would be a devastating blow to both world and local history.

Yet, thanks to the hard work of nearly eighty firefighters, none of the documents were lost to the fire. The exhibits were set up on the first floor, and the fire began in the back of the second and higher floors. This not only allowed firefighters to try to contain the blaze away from the collection, but gave them time to remove as much as they could from the path of destruction.

While some items did receive water damage from putting out the fire, it’s amazing that nothing was lost in the two-hour blaze. If the worst had occurred, though, not all would have been lost. Part of the collection had already been digitized, so even if the original document was destroyed in the fire, its contents and the meaning behind it would have been preserved through digital archiving. These backups were appropriately stored offsite, so were completely safe from the hazard.

Here at Anderson Archival, we’re happy that both the physical and digital copies of these documents are still here, but this serves to remind us of the importance of digitizing historical collections for both their short- and long-term preservation. We hope that Karpeles decides to reopen the library in St. Louis, and continue to share this amazing manuscript collection in our hometown.

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Search Results: 0 – The Unseen Cost of Inaccurate Data and Sub-Par Solutions

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Anderson Archival is pleased to have presented at Digital Preservation 2018 (#digipres18) in Las Vegas in October! The conference, with a theme on the future of digital preservation was hosted by the National Digital Stewardship Alliance (NDSA) and the Digital Library Foundation (DLF).

At the conference we highlighted what archivists should consider when creating or updating a digital collection, when not to choose economy over quality, and the various ways in which a digital collection can fail to be a useful research tool as a result of substandard work.

We embraced attendance at Digital Preservation 2018 as an opportunity to take part in the national discussion of preservation quality and access, and we would like to share with you what we presented at the conference.

Minute Madness

Anderson Archival shared a short one-minute presentation on the hidden cost of incorrect data.

Our Minute Madness presentation, “Search Results: 0 – The Unseen Cost of Inaccurate Data and Sub-Par Solutions” illustrated our experience in providing preservation solutions for a client who had previously invested in what they ultimately realized were poor solutions that offered only inaccurate, incomplete data.

For a collection that is used for scholarly research within their organization, this was a problem.

This group considered their collection preserved, but after a careful audit of their digital materials, we discovered that not only were chunks of original information missing entirely, the scans that were complete provided such messy OCR that search results woefully underrepresented the actual contents of the collection.

Search Results

What was the true cost of using this cheaper digitization solution for ten years? It’s impossible to calculate! Imagine the hours lost to inefficient search, and the research and publications that are now known to have drawn from fragmented data.

For instance, see what happens if OCR software reads this famous quote from Winston Churchill:

 

If the OCR mistakes the g and h and it goes unchecked, we end up with this in the collection:

If you searched for the famous portion of this Churchill quote “go to hell,” this document would never show up in your search results. Now imagine this hundreds of times over throughout your collection – many collections being tens of thousands of pages, or larger.

Inaccurate OCR data provides limited search results, and the lack of good search technology will give you an infinite number of useless results. These are both complicated by poor metadata tagging.

So what happens when a digital collection is preserved with inaccurate data and sub-par solutions? The voices of history don’t resonate when users access a poor software solution with inaccurate search results, and your collection won’t be used to its greatest potential.

The methodology you employ can mitigate these problems.

For the most accurate data, establishing a multi-step system for scanning, image cleanup, OCR and quality assurance is critical. 

You also need detailed tagging to support your data architecture and the right search technology tuned to your data set.

The Executive Director for the project mentioned above was horrified to learn that nearly a decade of their research was not complete.

How do you feel about your collection? Is quality important to you?

With a digitization provider like Anderson Archival, every step of the archival process is performed and checked by members of our expert team.

It’s time to gain confidence in your data and your search results! Check out our poster from Digital Preservation 2018 and call us today at 314.259.1900.

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