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A Cat’s Mark on History from The Hill

February 16, 2021/in Digital Collections, Digital Restoration, Preservation /by Anderson Archival

What do you do when tragedy befalls a one-of-a-kind document?

Accidents are bound to happen, but it’s devastating when they happen to rare materials. Birth certificates and diplomas can be reissued, but unique, antique, or otherwise precious pieces of history don’t always have a simple—or successful—solution when the worst happens.

Kelienne “Kelli” M. Miriani-Ripple was faced with a calamitous situation in the fall of 2020 when an invaluable piece of family memorabilia was damaged in a cat-related incident.

For Kelli, remaining homebound due to the COVID-19 pandemic provided an opportunity to go through her numerous boxes of family memorabilia.

Among other treasures, Kelli discovered a framed proclamation from the Mayor of St. Louis that celebrated the anniversary and community involvement of Kelli ’s grandparents, Helen and Anthony Colombo. Pleased with what she had uncovered, Kelli leaned the document against the wall in her family room, indicating to her husband where she would like it hung in her new family museum.

Enter Tommy the cat. The framed document was in a prime location for Tommy to take notice, and no more than a minute had passed after Kelli set down the proclamation when Tommy was there, marking his territory. There wasn’t any way to clean such a foul liquid from the document, and Kelli certainly didn’t want to display her cat’s contribution on the walls.

“I felt so stupid,” Kelli told Anderson Archival.

Protect your historical documents from cats and more. Learn the best way to preserve your documents in storage.

Anthony Colombo and Helen Negro on their wedding day on January 7, 1940. Image provided by Kelli Miriani, and used with permission.

The document in question not only commemorated a milestone in her grandparents’ lives, but also provided a vital piece of her family’s history in St. Louis.

Kelli’s great-grandfather, Emilio Negro, journeyed to America in the early 1900s. He settled in St. Louis, Missouri, and began to build a life for himself. Due to the way Italians were treated at the time, he started a house-building business under an alias. Many of those houses remain in the family today. Emilio raised his family in the St. Louis neighborhood The Hill, which is steeped in the history of its Italian immigrants. Emilio and his wife Luisa’s daughter, Helen, was born in 1917, and she grew up to marry Anthony “Tony” Colombo, who was born in 1918.

Tony Colombo, like his father-in-law before him, was an integral part of the The Hill’s closely knit community. Around 1946, he returned from WWII and opened Colombo’s Tavern, which still stands on Manchester Road today.

Tony became very active in politics and was well-connected in St. Louis. Though he only had an eighth-grade education, Tony had a reputation in his community for treating everyone with respect, from politicians and police officers to the downtrodden.

Whatever you need, Tony will take care of you,” Kelli recites.

Helen and Anthony. Image provided by Kelli Miriani, and used with permission.

The Tavern offered many services: financial aid, check cashing, and more. If someone came in needing help, Tony would use his connections in the community to do whatever he could for them. Tony prided himself on taking care of his community and his family. “They called me ‘Crash’ because I was accident-prone,” Miriani recalls. “Grandpa was always there to finance repairs.”

Helen was also involved in community politics and worked for the St. Louis Municipal Courts system. The combined influence of Helen and Tony contributed to the legacies of many local politicians still active today.

Following the tradition of families on The Hill, the Colombo family always had four generations living close together. Being a beloved granddaughter of Tony and Helen, Kelli herself contributed to the larger community by helping with political work and babysitting during community events.

When Helen passed away, Kelli swooped in to rescue what items she could and rummaged through them to pull out items for display.

The original Proclamation, bearing Tommy the cat’s mark on history.

After Anderson Archival’s digital restoration.

 

The wedding proclamation wasn’t the only one-of-a-kind piece of family memorabilia found in these bins. Seeking to restore the cat-sodden proclamation allowed Kelli to consider fixing another document. A resolution regarding the Colombos’ anniversary in partnership with the damaged proclamation had a typo in Helen’s maiden name.

Kelli’s husband was the one who found Anderson Archival online. He’s an avid researcher who takes his time to read reviews and evaluate potential vendors in all aspects of his life, so Kelli had high hopes that something could be done to preserve her documents. “The worst that could happen would be that they say no.”

Always eager to accept a challenge, Anderson Archival said, “Let’s see what we can do.”

Though the proclamation was discolored, blurred, and permanently damaged, Anderson Archival was able to digitally reconstruct the text at the bottom of the document. Careful scanning of the oversized document allowed for a clear, perfectly editable image. Digitally restoring the document preserved the original in its cat-branded state but also provided a clean replica that Miriani could reprint and display for posterity.

What is digital document restoration? It may be the best solution to returning digital scans to their ideal or original condition.

The resolution document was another challenge, because the typos in the original required digital replacement of several letters that needed to match the spacing and coloring of the document around them. This typically isn’t the kind of undertaking most digital preservationists on their doorstep, because most preservation projects emphasize protecting the original content of a document. But since Kelli was intending to use this digitally-corrected document for personal display, she wanted the replica to have the correct information.

The walls of Kelli’s family room tell the stories of family members no longer alive, her own small family museum. This collection highlights the personal impact of her grandparents’ lives to both their family and community. The Colombo-Miriani museum will continue to grow as Kelli discovers new family artifacts, and now has two more beautifully restored replicas that honor Anthony and Helen Colombo.

The original Resolution, typo marring the family significance.

After Anderson Archival’s digital restoration.

Do you have family memorabilia or historical artifacts you’d like to display but are stained, waterlogged, or otherwise damaged? Digital restoration may be exactly what you need! Contact us today to see what we can do for your special item.

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

January 20, 2021/in News, Preservation, Special Projects /by Anderson Archival

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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Antique Stopwatch

2020: The Time Capsule

January 20, 2021/in Preservation /by Anderson Archival

For many different reasons, 2020 was a year to remember. The world handled a global pandemic, upheaval of normal life, and social unrest. How do we preserve the memories of this unique year and the lessons learned for generations to come?

Time capsules may seem like childhood fancy or relics of the past, especially when social media has become an essential part of documenting our personal and professional lives. Many see social media as a scrapbook of sorts, but sometimes these platforms fail to meet that need. And while Facebook and Instagram may seem ubiquitous now, there may come a time when neither is available to serve as documentation of the past.

Even if you like to post every thought and photograph online, when a year as revolutionary as 2020 comes along, it may inspire you to document this chapter of your life in a more tangible way.

Some folks found themselves with the time and opportunity to travel to their childhood home or visit extended family members to spend lockdown with. Others had to manage the belongings and collections from loved ones lost. Rummaging through old family heirlooms may have uncovered time capsules from other eras, like the box of letters your grandparents wrote to one another or the storage locker of collectibles you knew your dad kept but had no idea of the scope and detail of the history behind it. Every collection serves as a time capsule in its own way, offering a snapshot of a particular moment in time.

Professional archivists and amateur historians alike often share the mentality of collecting everything now so that the value of that collection can be fully realized in the future. In ten, twenty, or one hundred years, you may be shocked by what you saved that holds resonance.

This printout has some great starting points if you’re not sure what’s worth recording, or follow NPR’s Life Kit podcast’s advice and make a throwback ‘zine about your 2020 experience!

Been taking lots of photos of your pet’s daytime activities that you haven’t typically been home for? Try creating a digital scrapbook of cat snapshots or a website gallery you can share with friends. Photos that capture the feelings of isolation, candid masked selfies, the heat of a local protest, or tranquil pockets of nature can all prove valuable to future historians (or future friends and family) as a record of 2020. A printed photo book that can be flipped through might make a good gift for a family member who missed out on social activities. Something tangible might make a nice change as memory of a year that was spent so much online.

Even the small things hold meaning and memory. Remote work became a staple of many workplaces in 2020 out of necessity when the world seemed to shut down overnight. This was a major change for a lot of workers, and it came with its own set of mental, technical, and security challenges. For those of us lucky enough to work from home since the lockdowns began in early 2020, it might be fun to document some of the experiences you’ve undergone with that change. Ask to take screenshots of your office Zoom lunches to document the ups and downs of connecting with your coworkers in a new way.

Regardless of how you choose to document this year, here are some tips to make sure your 2020 capsule will last:

Back up all digital media. Two backup methods are always better than one! On top of keeping a physical copy on a flash drive or external hard drive, saving your time capsule to the cloud not only assures that you won’t lose the images and documents if the physical method fails, but it also makes it easier to share with friends, family, or on social media. Don’t forget to save your materials in file formats that will stand the test of time.

Organize as you go. Not only is doing this best preservation practice, but it will also make viewing and using your time capsule in the future much easier. If you decide to add metadata to your collection in the future for improved searchability, labeled and sorted materials will make that step all the easier. There’s nothing more frustrating to the personal historian than opening up a folder or album years later and finding unlabeled, unfamiliar faces. Documentation will be a key part of enjoying your collection and passing it on.

Use appropriate storage materials. All physical items in your time capsule should be stored in acid-free, archival-grade boxes, envelopes, or storage containers. The storage environment is equally important. Make sure your time capsule is safe by keeping it out of humid or variable temperature environments like attics or basements. As fun as it might be to bury your capsule, unless the vessel is secure and meant for that environmental stress, you might be sending your valuable memories to decay.

And one last tip: Consult the preservation experts! Anderson Archival is always available to field any preservation questions you may have about documenting one of the most unforgettable years of this century. And if part of your year involved introduction to an existing collection that hasn’t been digitally preserved, the time is right to read about the ways to keep it available for the future.

As we kick off 2021, Anderson Archival is here for your digital preservation needs. Contact us at any time: we can’t wait to hear about your pieces of history.

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Having Trouble Digitizing Your Collection? Meet Your Solution!

December 16, 2020/in Digital Restoration, Document Scanning, General, Preservation /by Anderson Archival

What does your historical collection look like? Perhaps you have a box of bound manuscripts you’d like preserved for future generations, or maybe you have a library full of historic publications and loose papers that need organizing before you can even think about what the next steps are. The histories humans choose to save and share are vast and varied, and not every approach to digital preservation is going to be the right approach for your collection.

Collections of all shapes and sizes have come through Anderson Archival’s doors over the years. We’ve seen everything from re-processing poorly digitized collections to an oversized map from WWII. Some of our clients had a collection they knew they wanted digitized, but felt overwhelmed trying to start because of all the planning and physical work involved. If you have a bound paper collection that’s been sitting around for a decade and aren’t sure where to start, there are a few options available to you, including the solution of employing professional archivists to take the work out of your hands and get it done right.

Paging Through Paper Collections

Assessing the scope, time allotment, and potential snags beforehand can help your project run smoothly. For those tackling a smaller, loose paper collection, you may find a digitization solution under your own roof. If you own a combination printer/scanner, that may be enough to handle your loose papers. But scanning individual pages using a flatbed scanner is a more time-consuming process than many collectors expect it to be. It requires constant oversight and handling of the materials.

It may be tempting to utilize the auto-feed feature of a scanner for loose materials, but watch out for rips, snags, paper jams, and pages that are stuck together and not digitized. Auto-feeders should never be used for one-of-a-kind or fragile documents.

Collectors rightly expect their materials to be handled with the highest quality care standards when in the custody of a digital archivist.

Scanning bound materials is another matter altogether. Anyone who’s tried to scan a page of a book in a university or library setting knows how difficult it is to capture the entire page in an image—forget about trying to get an exact replica of a page using this method. Page scans will appear crooked, shadowed, blurry, or otherwise obscured by the limitations of a flatbed scanner.

For an accurate capture on a flatbed scanner, bound books would need to be split at the spine, damaging the original in order to capture high quality scans. Pressing books into a flatbed scanner is less risky in terms of damage to the book if the spine is well-bound, but often results in a lower-quality image. Fortunately, there is no need to resort to destructive methods of digitization. Alternate scanning technology is the best solution for collectors who have not digitized for fear of causing damage to their physical materials. You need not compromise the integrity of the original to preserve it.

Cradle Your Collection

A great addition to any digitization setup is a V-cradle scanner, which allows the capture of high-quality images with much less damage to the physical material compared to a traditional flatbed or auto-feeder scanner. A V-cradle scanner allows archivists to fully scan bound materials without splitting the book’s binding or damaging delicate originals.

These scanners, like all technology, vary in specifications and end results. The more elaborate and expensive scanners possess innovative constructions of cameras, lights, mechanical design, and image capture software. Full-spectrum light creates a reliable image that reflects the original exactly.

V-cradle scanners can boast superior image quality, robust software, and modular imaging technology that’s easily adaptable for materials with specific constraints. Any industry-grade scanners should be able to meet FADGI guidelines for quality images. The intuitively-shaped V-cradles come in a variety of sizes with adjustable settings and can support most standard-size books, enabling digitization of many kinds of books depending on the chosen cradle size. For institutions or archival companies who have this type of scanner, the power, specs, and flexibility open the door to a wider variety of project opportunities.

V-cradle scanners can boast superior image quality, robust software, and modular imaging technology that’s easily adaptable for materials with specific constraints.

Compare this system to that of the Afro-American’s Project Gado, which allows the newspaper to employ an efficient digitization process for their overwhelming amount of photographs saved over the years. Of course, a bespoke solution like Project Gado isn’t a feasible option for the individual collector who wants to digitize their bound materials, and neither is permanently damaging an entire collection just to make digital copies on a traditional scanner.

Collection Protection

Collectors rightly expect their materials to be handled with the highest quality care standards when in the custody of a digital archivist. The collections themselves need a safe and confidential storage area, especially for old or delicate materials susceptible to damage from environmental factors. Collectors often know from experience that storing materials in a damp basement or drafty attic will have an effect on paper materials, so an archival storage area free of mold, pests, and light pollution is essential.

Professional archivists have the space and knowledge to keep your collection as safe as possible during every step of the digitization process. They understand the storage needs of paper, which can be volatile depending on age and condition. They’re also trained in handling old or fragile materials, preventing accidents that may occur with less experienced collection custodians.

Investing in the right equipment, hours of organization and scanning, and the education required to process a collection the right way often isn’t feasible for individuals or busy organizations. Digitization professionals come with the right tools for the job. Reaching out for help from a firm with the right resources and know-how takes care of everything.

What does your bound collection need? Let Anderson Archival know how we can help fulfill your vision for your digitized collection! Call 314.259.1900 or complete a free consultation form to introduce your history to our solutions.

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Hunting for History – And the Perfect Digital Archive

December 1, 2020/in Digital Collections, General, Preservation, Website Design /by Anderson Archival

For years, the city of Salem, Massachusetts has been collecting, preserving, and slowly digitizing historical records dating back 400 years. Salem, most notable to laypeople as the location of the infamous witch trials, is home to a rich variety of historical organizations. Many of these organizations have digitally shared their own collections, but in October 2020, this collection of official city records was made publicly available on the internet for the first time. For genealogists, historians, and city officials, this new resource provides easy access to data about the property, people, and town.

What is the best way to make your collection the most useful to the biggest number of people?

If you’re in the business of discovering and utilizing sources like the new City of Salem archives, then you know that not all digital archives are created equal. Searching a poorly-made digital archive can take just as long as rifling through cabinets of paper. Accurate, faceted search; clearly imaged documents; and remote access can mean the difference between a frustrating hunt and a satisfying find.

For archivists on the other side of this seek-and-find equation, it may feel daunting to look at piles of documents and wonder what is the best way to make your collection the most useful to the biggest number of people? The answer may appear so insurmountable that it halts the process of digitization and preservation before the first page is scanned.

The first step toward a digital archive, as with any historical project, is research. It’s best to come to digital collections from all directions. New and existing archives provide examples of what’s possible, and by looking at these archives with a critical eye, you can make note of what characteristics work and what doesn’t before beginning an archive of your own.

The Salem Archives

At first glance, the City of Salem digital archives pose an unassuming figure. Considering their focus on facilitating government access and research for those who already have an idea of what they’re searching for, this isn’t particularly surprising. Lots of color, graphics, and curated tours were never the goal here. For a researcher used to traversing digital archives, this might be refreshing. But for a casual genealogist or family historian just getting started, Salem’s stark entry may feel overwhelming and leave them turning to another source.

With thriving digital libraries in and about Salem already in existence, the City of Salem likely considered what audience was deemed most likely to utilize their site and for what purpose. This type of survey is one that should go into any preservation project, including digitization for public access.

In their new archive, the City of Salem prioritized powerful search tools over appealing design. Faceted, full-text search offers highlighted, detailed results in the primary source documents. A researcher or government official who comes to this library with a question within the collection’s scope, won’t need to look long before they find an answer.

Understanding the scope of an archive also helps the creators decide just how much post-scan processing is needed for a collection. The City of Salem archives feature impressively accurate OCR, but close examination of the results reveals that the searchable text layer was not corrected to match the original—some searches for exact numbers or phrases will not be fruitful. Handwritten text is also not recorded digitally.

Once a digital archive is live, it may reveal shortcomings as well as successes. Depending on how the choices made in its inception affect intended use or if the archive finds a new audience needing different features, the City of Salem may choose to revisit the collection to accommodate the new demands.

Interconnective Digital Libraries

Just as there is an art to building a digital collection, there is an art to finding the right resource for the answers you seek as a researcher. What answers does the collection provide? What is the scope of the documents included in a given collection? Who is the expected user of the digital library? There is an understanding, too, that no digital library exists in a vacuum. Each is piece of a virtual community, a web of information and sources.

Reviewing other Salem-focused archives brings this into focus.

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Even without drilling down into collections and search features, the home pages of these digital libraries provide a degree of instant understanding.

Historic Salem and The House of the Seven Gables, for example, would pair nicely with the City of Salem archives as deep dives into the architecture, ownership, and history of key locations. In addition to some full text historical works, Salem Public Library’s Local History section offers visual history that could go hand in hand with their Oregon Historic Photograph Collections. These, along with the more hyper-focused Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive and Transcription Project, are all clear in scope and what they have to offer the curious researcher. Together, they provide a more comprehensive picture than any could separately.

Just as there is an art to building a digital collection, there is an art to finding the right resource for the answers you seek as a researcher.

Pondering these questions and investigating existing digital libraries will help your soon-to-be digital library take shape. And if you’re ready to move forward towards digitization and want a partner in your efforts, the experts at Anderson Archival are ready to help.

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Digitizing the Oldest Black Newspaper in America—One Photograph at a Time

November 16, 2020/in Custom Software, Digital Collections, Document Scanning, Preservation, Special Projects /by Anderson Archival

When John H. Murphy founded The Afro-American newspaper in 1892, his goal was to combine three separate church publications into a single-page newsletter. Murphy was both a former slave and a Civil War veteran, and in the Reconstruction era, The Afro-American served to inform and unite his Maryland community. Little did he know, it would become America’s oldest running black newspaper. By Murphy’s death in 1922, the newspaper had grown to cover most of the Atlantic coast and expanded to thirteen regional editions.

At its heart, The Afro-American (now simply Afro-American, or colloquially, Afro) was a mouthpiece for black America. It documented everyday life in black neighborhoods that the mainstream white media didn’t cover. Wedding and funeral announcements, neighborhood restoration projects, feats of black artists and athletes, and local community events could all be found in an issue of the Afro-American. The editorial section argued against Jim Crow machinations, discussed black labor rights, and highlighted education advocacy. The newspaper also gave a voice to aspiring black journalists, like Murphy’s own daughter Elizabeth Murphy Phillips Moss, who became America’s first black female reporter.

Murphy’s children continued the Afro-American’s important work. Fourth generation relatives John J. Oliver, Jr. and Frances M. Draper manage the paper today. It’s been a cornerstone in representing black journalistic voices in their own words and social groups. Media of the time tended to focus only on exceptional members of the black communities. Unless a black person was a celebrity of national renown, they were unlikely to catch the attention of mainstream news publications. The Afro-American was a way for a black child in Baltimore to pick up a newspaper and see stories of citizens and communities that looked like them.

There was a whole culture, a whole way of life that was ignored by American society. It didn’t exist but in the black press.”—Asantewa Boakyewa, an administrator in the Center for Africana Studies, Unboxing History

Preserving Everyday History: A Daunting Task

An institution as large and old as the Afro-American is bound to have a lot of source material stored, but the reality is almost beyond imagination. In 1923 the newspaper’s staff began actively storing every document, photograph, and letter used in the publication.

One approach to digital preservation is to focus solely on material with the highest research and revenue value. This would, in theory, limit the scope of the project to photographs of famous newsmakers and the articles with the most recognizable headlines.

However, such an approach would fly in the face of the Afro-American’s mission. From its inception, the newspaper held the lives and experiences of everyday citizens in high importance. A digital representation of the Afro-American wouldn’t be complete without advertisements, local births and deaths, letters from around town, and images of black people who aren’t already found in the historical canon. Everything was important to the Afro-American, and everything would need to be digitally preserved in order to keep the paper’s rounded picture of its time and community.

Nearly seventy years of bound broadsheets live in the Afro-American’s archives, which takes up seven rooms of the newspaper’s headquarters. Four of those rooms boast floor-to-ceiling shelves of hundreds of archival boxes, containing over 150,000 labeled envelopes stuffed with artifacts. File cabinets encase folders of photographs, each carefully annotated on onion skin pasted to the back of each photo. With no way to find a needed source easily, indexing would require digitization.

Digitizing a collection of this size and composition would prove the Afro-American’s biggest challenge.

Materials that old and delicate (like the onion skin annotations) need to be handled carefully, and the variety of media types meant that care and cost would be required in the effort. Manual digitization wouldn’t be as simple as feeding documents through a scanner. Sorting, categorizing, and deciding on metadata factors for the digital end product requires intense planning—something that’s much harder to do when a collection fills seven entire rooms.

Into The Future

Enter Thomas Smith, a graduate student and young programmer, and his invention, Project Gado. In 2010, Smith worked with the Afro-American to win grant funding for digitization, but even with money, the effort faced a daunting task.

The archives of the Afro-American contained 1.5 million historical photos. When approaching the project, Smith took stock of the collection. In his Medium article about the project, Smith writes, “The standard approach to scanning a commercial archive is to focus on the most valuable 1% to 2% of the collection. Almost invariably, this means capturing images that cover famous people and major events. The everyday, being less profitable, is left out.”

Smith’s vision? Use brand new technology to digitize everything.

He built Project Gado, a scanning robot which, by Smith’s estimation, would shrink scanning time and man hours. Gado works through Python and Arduino coding languages and operates by lightly suctioning photographs and placing them, one by one, on a scanner. Supervised by a human, the robot was able to scan about 120,000 images in the first year.

Additional Challenges & Earning a Profit

A virtual folder of raw image files is just as useful for research or revenue as a folder of photographs, but it can offer superior search capabilities when set up properly. This can save significant time and resources that can be allocated to more important tasks than sifting through boxes.

In order to make the Afro-American’s newly-digitized image collection searchable and sellable, Smith and the digitization team knew they would need to employ metadata. Adding information by hand was one option, but being a technical expert, Smith wanted to try powerful AI tools. In 2010-2012, this kind of technology was still in its earliest days when applied to visual media, so Smith’s team started building what they needed from scratch.

For the text, though, a major tool was Google Vision’s OCR. This tool detects when text appears in a document and then attempts to read it. This is an impressive tool, but has significant limits that can only be mitigated by detailed, human review. Check out the results in the Afro-American Archives.

AI tools created by IBM and trained by Smith’s team were also useful in identifying themes, content, and historical figures. Where the AI fell short was around gender and age. Even in today’s AI, facial recognition is largely ineffective when presented with people of color.

All that time and effort resulted in a product that could be sold to media marketplaces, like Getty Images. Now, licensing these powerful images helps fund the Afro-American’s reporting. These tools also helped move the field of preservation forward and displays just how useful deep learning and AI can be to the future of digitization.

The Impact of Everyday History

Smith pinpoints the incredible impact digitizing everyday black history creates. “That experience—that personal moment of interacting with the past—is a unique engagement with history that the archive offers.” This connection between the modern, everyday person and their counterpart in the past only comes when attention is paid not only to famous figures, but faces in the background. “Digitizing a whole archive (or at least a massive sample of it) affords the opportunity to capture both the iconic, highly profitable images and those that document daily experience,” says Smith.

Today, this wide-spread preservation of all perspectives and identities throughout history is more feasible than even ten years ago when the efforts to digitize the Afro-American began. According to Smith, “Modern scanning tech like the… overhead camera can scan hundreds of images per hour, and sheet-feed scanners today can scan delicate materials without damaging them. For institutions that can afford the tech, there’s no excuse not to digitize everything.”

Digitization of the Afro-American’s archives is ongoing, and presentation of its contents remains in flux, but organizations seeking similar results now have an amazing success story to look to for inspiration.

History’s raw materials, like fossils, are embedded in layers of time. Consider a drawer in your office desk or a hall bureau at home: Its jumbled contents form a visual collage of your recent past. History gets written when somebody sifts through the remains and ponders how all the pieces fit together.”—Bret McCabe, Unboxing History

Our histories, our cultures, and what makes us one human community—these concepts are more than items displayed in museums or on library shelves. Our stories wouldn’t be complete without the everyday lives of the community. The Afro-American’s massive historical collection of journalistic ephemera illustrates a rich history of a side of American life that is often missing from narratives.

Seemingly-ordinary collections are often the truest pictures of history. This ideology is part of Anderson Archival’s mission, just as it powers Project Gado and lives on in the Afro-American’s archives. If you’re ready to make sure that your collection is available for future generations and even for profit-earning, reach out to us today.

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“More to Be Told”: Finding the Right Fit for Your Private Collection

October 30, 2020/in Client Story, Digital Collections, Document Scanning, Preservation, Special Projects /by Anderson Archival

It’s finally time! You’ve decided to preserve that collection of historical family artifacts you have boxed up and collecting dust. Maybe they’re a little water-stained or faded from sitting in your basement for a decade, or possibly you’re considering offering your collection to a larger audience once digitized. No matter the size or condition, your collection is important and deserves to be preserved.

Once you’ve developed the scope of your digitization plans, it’s time to make some decisions about how to proceed. Do you tackle the project on your own with equipment you already own? Do you find an archival firm that specializes in your kind of collection? As with any hiring process, it can sometimes be difficult to find the right fit in a partner that meets both your needs as the guardian of a collection and the needs of the collection itself.

When I first came into possession of [the journals] I thought, ‘Maybe this is something I can do on my own time. Maybe I can get a scanner.’”

Collection custodian Jim Surber found himself in a tough position when planning ahead for his digitization goals. “The collection’s been in my possession for about a year now,” says Surber. “I just wanted high quality images of the covers and the contents so they could be easily shared.”

The collection consisted of twenty-one bound journals given to Surber by an extended family member. The journals belonged to Surber’s great-grandfather, contained daily diary and travel entries ranging from years 1895 to 1925, and included a number of loose newspaper clippings. The journals themselves were each about the size of a small notebook, most of them no larger than 7” x 4”. Though some of the handwriting inside had faded significantly over the years, most of the materials had inked text that remained clear even after years in storage.

Despite being nearly a century old, most of the journals were in good structural condition. “[The collection] was stored in a house as far as I know,” says Surber, “probably just a box in the basement.” Storage is an important, oft-underestimated element of document preservation and can be a huge factor when it comes to the end condition. It’s rare that a collection stored in a basement is free of water or pest damage. This collection benefitted from not being overhandled, but the tradeoff of its diligent storage is that the information in the journals had never been carefully reviewed or studied.

Finding himself with a collection that was so important to him and his family, Surber began to explore his digitization options. “When I first came into possession of [the journals] I thought, ‘Maybe this is something I can do on my own time. Maybe I can get a scanner,’” says Surber. “Then I found out, ‘Wow, this is more involved than I thought it was. This is really going to take a lot of time, a lot of dedication.’”

Many caretakers of personal collections start out in the same position. The handling and imaging of delicate pages and bindings often don’t hold up well in the small flatbed printers most people have in their home offices. An archival firm has resources like cradle scanners and imaging software that would be impossible for the DIY digitizer to afford or access.

The Surber journals in particular presented an imaging challenge; the author had used as much of the page as possible in most of his entries, and the text reached the very edge of the inner margins on many of the pages. “I’d have to press [the journals] flat on a scanner, and not all of them should be pressed flat like that,” Surber recounts. “These are fragile and I don’t want to risk hurting them.” The narrow or, in some cases, nonexistent margins required a cradle scanner and careful maneuvering to capture the entire page. For historical artifacts like these journals, using a flatbed likely would have inflicted damage and provided incomplete scans, putting a frustrated collection owner back at square one.

If a collection requires the extra care and expertise that only an archivist can provide, what’s the appropriate next step? Finding a digitization partner that values a collection as much as the guardians do isn’t always an easy task.

Interested in learning more about what a digitization partner can do for your collection? Read about Historical Document Digitization.

“I called a couple [digitization firms] before I called Anderson Archival,” Surber says, “and it wasn’t really what they did. These companies basically told me, ‘I know what you’re getting at but it’s not really what we do.’” Surber’s collection was historically significant to him and his family, but the big digitization firms he reached out to weren’t willing to invest their time and expertise. “They just blew me off,” Surber recalls. “I wasn’t able to convince them it was worth their time.” Unless your collection is a truckload full of documents that can pushed quickly through a scanner with little or no processing, many digitization firms may not work with a private collection.

One benefit of family collection projects is that the audience connection is so much more immediate. Surber says, “My digging around the family history has led me to a lot of people my branches of family hadn’t been in contact with in many years. It’s interesting to hear people’s stories and reconnect with people.” In this way, Surber and Anderson Archival approach historical collections from the same perspective. “Everybody has a different story from those days, so we’re just trying to put it all together. It’s been so long but I think there’s more to be told.” Thankfully, Anderson Archival’s digital copies of the collection can facilitate that connection.

Not all collections are understood to be historically significant to the larger public, but just because they may never be viewed in a museum or gallery or aren’t easy to feed through a high-speed scanner, does not mean that they aren’t worth preserving. Digitization of family collections is important and necessary.

If your collection means a lot to you and you’d like it to be around forever so that anyone you choose can learn from and enjoy it, digitization might be the answer. Let Anderson Archival do the hard part for you. Contact us today!

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Quotables: Protecting Paper History: 4 Rules for Safeguarding and Preserving Historical Paper Documents (TechPatio)

October 26, 2020/in Preservation, Quotables /by Anderson Archival

Principal Farica Chang, in TechPatio, shares some tips for keeping family collections safely stored, accessed, and digitized.

Click here to read the full article!

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 preserve your legacy today! Give us a call at 314.259.1900 or email us at info@andersonarchival.com.

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. 

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Quotables: 3 Essential Ways to Preserve Your Family’s History (Living Better 50)

October 16, 2020/in Preservation, Quotables /by Anderson Archival

Principal Farica Chang, in Living Better 50, shares some tips for keeping family collections safely stored, accessed, and digitized.

Click here to read the full article!

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 preserve your legacy today! Give us a call at 314.259.1900 or email us at info@andersonarchival.com.

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. 

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WWII Map Comes Home After 73 Years: Conservation and Digitization of a Soldier’s Legacy

October 1, 2020/in Client Story, Digital Restoration, Document Scanning, Preservation, Special Projects /by Anderson Archival

[Above: Anderson Archival’s digitized copy of the map displayed on a monitor with the original conserved map laid out on the table below.]

Working with historical documents means that Anderson Archival is privy to many valuable stories. The impact of these tales is often deeply personal as well as bearing a cultural impact. We recently completed work creating high resolution images to digitize an oversized World War II map. The global impact of this document is clear—one side of the map bears a narrative that tracks the movement of the 83rd Infantry Division from Normandy in June 1944 to Germany at the end of the war. The other, a detailed map, bears the signatures of the infantrymen it was gifted to, including the recent owner’s beloved father, S/Sgt Myron H. Miller.

But the personal impact doesn’t end there.

Founding Principal Amy Anderson recalls, “When I heard their story second hand, I just knew we had to write about it!” And thankfully, S/Sgt Miller’s children, Myra, Lynette, Marshall, Del, and Ken, were more than willing to share the incredible one-in-a-million tale of the map that made it back to their family “73 years later via a Frenchman.”

Anderson Archival: What do you know about your father’s involvement with the map?

The Miller Children: We know that the map was printed after the war ended as a gift to the soldiers of the 83rd Infantry Division in September 1945. It commemorated their service as a unit from Normandy, June 1944, to Zerbst, Germany, and the end of the war. With the fighting over, they had occupation duty as military police restoring order in Germany and Czechoslovakia.

Of the eleven buddies who signed the map, two joined Company K as replacements on the same day in July 1944 in Normandy—our father Myron H. Miller and James V. Cocola—and they ended the war together. Sgt. Hutchinson appears with them in a photo our dad saved. The others joined January 1945 and later. By those final days together they must have been very close.

Pfarrkirchen, Germany. Sunday, July 29, 1945. Sgt. Hutchinson and S/Sgt. Miller are on the left. Image used with permission.

AA: How did the Frenchman you reference come to be in possession of the map?

MC: Antoine Noslier, an expert on the history of the war in Brittany specializing in the 83rd Infantry Division, residing in St. Malo, France, purchased the map on eBay in 2011, about five years before meeting our family. He bought the map sight unseen because it was described to have original autographs on it.

Myra was advised to contact the expert Antoine for information as she was planning the family’s trip in 2016 to follow our dad’s footsteps through France, Belgium, and Germany. Antoine had been recommended as a reliable authority on military actions in Brittany. Myra, Ken, Del, and Marshall wanted to find the location in St. Malo (Brittany) where their father had pulled his wounded buddy out of the street after he had been hit by a sniper.

Just a few weeks prior to our arrival in St. Malo, Antoine was working on another project when he pulled out the map to check another name (James V. Cocola) that he remembered was on the map. His eyes landed on the name “S/Sgt Myron H. Miller, Dixon, Missouri” and he was amazed. He contacted Myra to confirm that our father was from Dixon, Missouri. Then he described the map he had—with our father’s signature. We were floored.

That summer, after we arrived in France and met Antoine, he took us into his kitchen—where he had the map spread out on his table. We took photos of the signature and sent them to our sister Lynette (who was not on the trip) to confirm the handwriting. She was 100% positive it was our father’s.

Then he described the map he had—with our father’s signature. We were floored.”

AA: What do you know about the process and reasoning behind returning the map to you?

MC: When Antoine showed the map to us, we were simply thrilled to see it and took many photos. We did not ask for the map from Antoine, as he had purchased it for research.

The following summer, Myra returned to St. Malo leading a Footsteps Researchers tour, and Antoine presented the map to her as a gift to the family. It was quite a gift. We are very grateful and thankful to have the map in the family.

Antoine Noslier presents the Miller children with the map. Left to Right: Myra Miller, Del Miller, Antoine Noslier, Marshall Miller, Ken Miller. Image used with permission.

AA: What plans do you have for the conserved map in the future?

MC: We have had the map professionally restored and preserved by NS Conservation in a frame that allows viewing of both sides.

We believe we have a valuable piece of World War II history and an heirloom to be displayed and treasured by the family. We will have replicas made from the digital copies to use for display at our speaking engagements and book signings with our new book Soldiers’ Stories: A Collection of WW2 Memoirs, Volume II, and with Footsteps Researchers. It is important that we stop further damage to the map and showcase our father’s signature and those of his buddies.

We also want to send a copy of the map to Antoine Noslier as a gift since he gave the original to us.

AA: What lead you to Noah Smutz/NS Conservation?

MC: Our family friend from Philadelphia, Robert “Bob” McNabb, searched the Internet for someone in St. Louis who could do a professional job. Bob’s father, James McNabb, fought with the 83rd Infantry Division, Company K, with our father, and he has a strong interest in World War II history. Bob called Noah secretly and got information, then he told me to call after he felt Noah was right for the job.

 

Smutz, in turn, directed the family to Anderson Archival for the creation of digital images. In addition to the work itself, we are grateful to Smutz, and to the children of S/Sgt Myron H. Miller, Dixon, Missouri, Company K, 331st Infantry, 83rd Infantry Division, for allowing us to be a part of this one-in-a-million story and to share it with our readers.

What family stories can Anderson Archival help you safequard? Contact us today for more information about how we can help you connect the dots and digitally preserve your family’s historical artifacts.

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Did you Miss these?

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  • 2020: The Time Capsule January 20, 2021

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