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Holding History in Our Hands

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Creating Life-Altering Memories

“I am honored to work for a company where I get to help our clients preserve historical documents,” says content specialist Marcia Spicer of her work at Anderson Archival. “Whether they are the private memories from someone who never imagined their words would survive through the generations or a public collection that can be shared with the whole world, by digitizing and helping to preserve history, we get to touch it, to experience it, and even be a small part of it.”

On the Anderson Archival blog, we try to showcase every aspect of digital preservation, from historical tales of preservation to interviews with clients and industry professionals. But we’ve never before shared the thoughts of the Anderson Archival team itself. Marcia Spicer sat down with us and answered some questions about her work digitizing historical documents.

AA: What experience do you bring to the Anderson Archival team?

MS: One of the most exciting things about our team is that we all come from different backgrounds and levels of experiences, but through training and continuing education, we’ve grown into this well-oiled, dedicated digitization machine.

Personally, I have an MA in English. I thought I would use it in writing, and while I do get to write for our blog, I definitely don’t spend the bulk of my time in an “English” mode. During college, my group of friends was a really fun mix of English majors and Historical Preservation majors. I always felt an affinity for them and understood that our areas of focus were cousins. We both worked in the intersection of past and future, helping to make the artifacts and words of the past powerful and accessible in the present. It was just recently that I made the connection. My education came full circle.

While my formal education didn’t have a lot to do with digitization, I did have a minor in Small Press Publications, looking at things like editing, binding, and publications. These factors all weigh in to digitization as well.

I’m incredibly grateful that Anderson Archival prioritizes continued education and training. Between learning from my teammates and keeping on top of the latest best practices, I’ve learned so much, and it thrills me to be able to put all that learning—from my English degree, historical preservation buddies, publication knowledge, and archival training—into practice for our clients.

AA: It sounds like this position was a one-in-a-million find for you.

MS: I honestly think a lot about how lucky I am to be here, to get to do what I do.

AA: Could you share a little more about what you do?

MS: On paper it is pretty straightforward. We take original documents, photos, and bound materials that our clients want to do something with, and we digitize them.

What does that mean?

There’s a careful review and notation of everything that comes in the door. If page 100 comes to us with half of the page ripped out, we record that. If there are little notes tucked between pages, we note that and follow up with the client to see if that’s part of what needs to be digitized or was just put there by accident. We take those documents and capture each surface using our V-cradle scanner or flatbed, and each step of the way there are eyes on the process to make sure that every part of every single page is captured completely, in focus, and accurate to the original.

We take pride in the high level of detail, care, and privacy we offer clients. Depending on what the client wants, we can tweak the light levels to make text more legible or can clean up the page to “erase” scratch marks or handwritten notes. We work with the client to ensure that the final product is going to work for what they need, but also to make sure that they have a true archival-standard copy as their master copy. Then comes a conversation about how this collection is going to be used by their audience, and whether they need us to build features like full-text search, a database, or a website from scratch.

At the end of the day, Anderson Archival is about providing solutions. I make those solutions happen. I get to preserve history through those solutions. It is a bonus—a big one—that through my work I also get to relive experiences that aren’t always recorded in books. I get to experience different viewpoints, so many pieces of the puzzle that makes up what America and the world is today.

AA: Every day offers a new challenge. Is that fair to say?

MS: A new challenge for sure, but also a new opportunity.

Not too long ago I had the chance to work with a diary from the Civil War. As I’m turning the pages of this tiny diary, making sure to treat the delicate pages gently, I’m thinking about the other people who have touched the pages. The family that brought it to us and the original author. I’m thinking about how the client for this project entrusted us—entrusted me—with this one-of-a-kind, prized possession, because they know that having that diary digitized will help it last longer, be easier to use, and be shared far easier than a single physical copy could ever be. As I turn the pages, I see when the author was feeling sadness, fear, joy, awe, confusion… Those words are from over a century ago, but the feelings he recorded are just as real today, just as universal. He might not have his name in the history books, but this day-to-day recording of his experience makes that history real.

A lot of the work we do is some degree of confidential, but when I notice a really impactful quote or startling piece of information, I rush to the team and we share a moment of awe together. I think about that moment when clients get the final product, and they too can pore over the pages to find details that they maybe couldn’t see before or couldn’t risk handling the pages to truly examine. They get to have those moments too.

AA: Thank you for taking some time to share your experience, Marcia. Would you share something you wish people knew about Anderson Archival and the work you do?

What I’ve come to understand is that even though these documents may be old, their importance hasn’t aged. Our clients, their families, and their organizations all still connect to them, because the history is relatable and real. The experiences documented are still applicable and can be learned from today.

Without digitization, a lot of documents, especially the rarest or the most fragile, would never be available for multiple people to experience. Knowing that I’m a part of making something totally unique and potentially life-altering accessible to others means the world to me, and it speaks to the core of what Anderson Archival is.

 

We’d love to be involved in the story of your collection, whether that is through digitizing materials, building online access, or sharing your own journey on our blog. Whether you’re interested in telling us about your process, or looking for solutions, drop us a line.

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How do you choose what to digitize?

What Should I Digitize? 3 Ways to Decide

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If you’ve uncovered a box of records or your organization just inherited a building full of community archives, how do you determine what should be digitized first? What can be deprioritized and why?

Prioritizing the materials in your collection is no small challenge, especially for non-profits and institutions that value their history and mission. Trying to decide what is most “important” or “necessary” can be downright painful when you can see the inherent value and history behind every photo and document. Everything deserves to be preserved! While you’re right about that aspect, your institution only has so many hands on deck and gigabytes of storage. Some hard decisions will have to be made.

Luckily, you aren’t the first collector facing this challenge. There are three simple questions you can ask yourself about your collection to make prioritizing materials for digitization a little easier. Rest assured that any digitization is better than no digitization, and any step forward—regardless of how it looks for your organization—is a step in the right direction.

1. What Stories Can Your Collection Tell?

The point of preserving your collection is to immortalize it for future generations. What stories do you want your collection to tell in ten, twenty, or two hundred years? Perhaps you have an album of photographs that is about to pass its one-hundred-year anniversary, or maybe there’s a specific era or region your collection spans that has recently come into public awareness. This can be a great opportunity to reach a bigger audience with your collection.

What makes your collection special? Who will be most interested in what you have to share, and how can you reach new audiences? Your collection will work double duty when you choose to digitize and showcase elements that create stories in the public interest. If you have content in your collection that’s unique or can’t be found elsewhere, use that uniqueness to promote your collection and the ways it can be shared.

A sudden burst of public interest can be a great incentive to monetize your collection, or a part of it. Learn more about monetizing your collection here.

2. What Parts of Your Collection Are Most Significant, or Most At Risk?

When considering an artifact for digital preservation, you must think about what the item is made of and how it will be used. What materials will have the shortest lifespan where they are currently housed or in their current condition?

Don’t overlook high-use elements of your collection just because they seem to be holding up well. Collections that are frequently handled by researchers will age much more quickly than others, even if they start in pristine condition. Digitizing high-use parts of collections will not only facilitate easier search and use by their audiences, but it will also reduce the amount of damage taken by these essential works.

Regardless of the materials they are made of or how often they are used, historical artifacts deteriorate at a particular rate depending on the environment they’re housed in. If you have an object with physical characteristics that would potentially accelerate deterioration, like paper with iron gal ink, or a highly-flammable, unstable nitrate photograph, it should take priority over documents that have been properly housed and will therefore show their age slower.

Damaged, high-use, and highly-invested-in artifacts should be at the front of the digitization line.

3. What Can You Digitize Well With What You Have?

This is arguably the most important factor to consider when prioritizing the digitization of your collection, simply because planning alone does not get you very far. It’s important to consider the resources necessary to make the digitization happen correctly.

Will your organization need to raise funds to digitize some or all of your collection? If so, prioritize what can be done with what you have, and plan to tackle the more challenging materials when you have those additional resources.

Are damaged or fragile materials safe to handle on your own, or do you need to create a separate plan that partners with a conservation expert or a digitization vendor?

Are there enough people in your organization to perform the digitization? If you only have one flatbed scanner and one staff member available, scanning might take much longer than you initially planned for. In this case, you might consider choosing to scan the rarest or most interesting newspaper clippings, then waiting to scan the pieces that are sturdier or less urgently needed.

 

No matter how you choose to prioritize digitization of your collection, use policy to define and defend what you choose to digitize. Documenting the process is an integral part of any digital preservation undertaking. Since every collection, organization, and mission is unique, policy that outlines what should be preserved how and when serves as a steady guide.

Large or small, your collection is important and deserves to be preserved for the ages. Don’t put off digitization of your collection simply because you aren’t sure where to start. Anderson Archival is here to help—talk with us today!

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3 Ways to Make Your Historical Archive Impactful Today

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In leisure time alone, the average human processes at least 34 gigabytes of information daily. On the internet, this looks like their newsfeed, the endless scroll of what friends and acquaintances are doing at any given moment, and the 24-hour news cycle. Even if a user is searching for something specific, they’re bound to be distracted because the Internet is built to monetize our attention. Only the shiniest, most intriguing, emotion-laden ads, sites, and headlines get the spoils.

In this high-competition virtual world, how do you make a historical archive or digital library stand out on the web? Here are 3 ways to make your archive impactful today!

  1. Connect Documents in the Collection to One Another

How can your archive invite users to spend more time on it to facilitate discoveries and new knowledge? Create your own rabbit hole of connected information for users to explore. History doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Add links between people, places, and key terms in your collection. This can be done in the text itself, on a helpful sidebar, or though metadata.

If your collection is displayed as text, adding links to other related documents or categories could look similar to what you see on a blog or online newspaper. When a paragraph from a historical diary names a location, that text can link to a category page that aggregates all content in the collection connected to that location. A name? The text could link to a short Who Is explainer to provide context, list additional appearances of that name in the collection, or connect to works that person has authored.

This text and metadata accompanies a painting by Raphael in Google’s Arts and Culture explorer. While it doesn’t provide a lot of interlinking, users can view more work from Raphael and learn about walnut as a medium.

If the collection is primarily image-based or layered with text, it might not be possible to integrate links into the content itself. In this case, a sidebar or section of content links below each page might be helpful. If this section displays linked metadata, users can easily see more from the same author, related to the same keywords or key people and places.

Many times, this metadata already exists in text within a collection. Curating a collection of related links takes care and time, but even one or two links can enhance users’ experience and encourage them to dive deeper.

Have questions about digital collections? Take a look at What Is a Digital Collection or Digital Library? for answers.

  1. Connect Documents to Their Time and Place in Culture

The contents of a single archive may not have all the necessary items to create full context of the time and place in which a person and their documents existed. Filling in the gaps for visitors of the collection can take a lot of dedicated time and effort, and may require partnerships with other organizations and collections. But the effort can produce greater user engagement and allow the collection to become a valuable resource for researchers or historians.

There are many ways to create a more interactive, user-focused collection.

Maps: Creating a map to track a person or item’s movement in history can provide the context needed to understand its importance. Users can orient the documents in the real world with familiar places that they can better connect with. Using historic maps can be useful, but online services, like Google Maps, can be just as effective and oftentimes more interactive.

Infographics: Creating infographics may take time and skill, but they are a great way to track or represent ideas. They are also easy for users to follow and can include links or pictures to allow more engagement. Want to show how events relate to one another or highlight main ideas with historical context without overwhelming the user with a page full of text? An infographic may be the way to go.

Historical Dictionaries: Not everything from two hundred, three hundred, or a thousand years ago will make sense to a modern reader, even with historical context. Linking text that may mean something different in its time or is no longer in common usage to a historic dictionary can give more value to items that would otherwise confuse more than illuminate.

  1. Connect Documents to Today

Blogs and articles utilizing an “On this day in history…” connection to the past can be a fun reminder of what the world was like throughout history. Articles that highlight past events on the date they occurred can be a great idea to help users connect to the collection in a new way. They can also be effective social media posts to engage your audience beyond the collection itself and keep interest even when there is nothing new about the collection to report.

What you share has a lot to do with why you want to share. We dive into many of the reasons to make your archive available online, and the benefits of doing so.

There’s no one way to build an archival flashback. The San Diego Union Tribune offers scanned images of their old edition along with a newly transcribed copy of the featured article, giving both easy reading and on-page context. On the other hand, the Library of Congress’s “Today in History” feature gives an overview of an event with images of items relating to the subject of the article. The Chicago Tribune goes a step further and offers not one event in history but many throughout the years.

However you choose to feature your collection’s place in time, a connection to the present, even if only by date, can be a great way to engage your audience and have them coming back again and again.

 

Anderson Archival helps build digital libraries and collections through high-touch digitization, OCR, metadata, and design. Wherever you are in your digitization journey, we can help.

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Hunting for History – And the Perfect Digital Archive

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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.

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

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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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Quotables: 5 Benefits of Switching to a Paperless Office—It’s Not Just About Searching (Budget Earth)

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Founding Principal Amy Anderson’s post in Budget Earth discusses all things paperless office, the hows, the whys, and the unexpected benefits digitization can offer.

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: Launching Your Legacy: How You Can Impact the Next Generation (Just Luxe)

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Principal Farica Chang’s post in Just Luxe discusses the importance of conserving your legacy for the next generation. Whether that conservation is physical or done through digitization, ensure that family, community, and society members can access their history.

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. 

Contact Us

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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Access to Your Archive: Make It Easy, Make a Difference

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Why digitize?

This is the question many archive owners, collectors, and curators face. In an increasingly digital world, analog access to collections and archives is still the norm. But should it be?

A Philosophical Question

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

In the spirit of that popular mental exercise, if a physical archive exists but no one can access it, does it impact the world?

Sadly, this is the state many archives find themselves in.

For collectors and curators, the problem of access is one that can seem insurmountable. Many collections are housed in personal residences, in a dedicated room of a library, or even in storage. Finding aids such as indexes or the Dewey decimal system assist those who can visit the material in person, but the barriers to access are high.

The Limits of Physical Access

Take the example of a hypothetical newspaper archive. The entire collection, frequently cited in family genealogy research, is only accessible in one location. Rather than attempt to visit the collection, researchers call the curator with their questions. Often, these researchers only know a name or a location or some other fragment of data, so the curator must wade through decades of material, and once they discover the desired information, the researcher receives a copy or scanned image.

For researchers, limited access means the process takes time and reliance on someone else to find the information they seek. Often, copies of originals come with a price tag because of the labor involved in retrieving them. Other times, the cost is borne by the original material, which experiences wear with every turned page.

For the curator, the system seems to work. People can access and use the collection to enhance their research. Why should they digitize?

  • Location: Instead of visiting or calling a single location, researchers could access the collection anywhere in the world with an internet-connected device. Potential visitors who may be limited by disability, travel funding, time, or state of emergency, could experience the collection digitally.
  • Condition: Instead of risking tears, smudges, and other damage with every physical search, the material could be safely stored in its current condition while allowing continued, constant digital use.
  • Search: Instead of relying on summary documents, finding aids, and the diligent labor of an authorized user, everyone accessing the collection could search for names, dates, locations, and other keywords, making the information they seek available in a click.

A real-world example of how digital preservation could have benefited mankind is that of the Museu Nacional of Brazil, which was almost completely lost to fire in 2018. It was the home of many unique collections and a frequent travel destination for researchers. Just months before the blaze, researcher Cassia Roth had traveled to the museum to view one of the exclusive collections in the massive archive housed there.

I was there for just a few days, so I only took pictures of a small fraction of [the] collection, telling myself that I could always come back—the archives were not going anywhere,” she wrote.

The museum was a hub of research and innovation for hundreds of years, but lacked funding. Why should they have digitized?

  • Preservation: Hindsight is 20/20, but even without a disaster in the rearview mirror, curators could have investigated crowdfunding to restore the 200-year-old building’s faulty electrical and sprinkler systems or digitally preserve the museum’s collections over time.
  • Impact: The truth is, we may never know how many researchers and students were unaware of the contents of the Museu Nacional until reports of their loss. Online access to a collection doesn’t guarantee widespread knowledge, but it does facilitate the possibility.

Ultimately, if access and exposure are important to the curator of a collection or archive then digitization should definitely be considered. Don’t let inertia prevent you from taking the initial steps towards digitizing your collection.

Types of Digital Access

The good news is that digitization can revolutionize how a collection or archive is accessed and used. Each collection is unique and some types of digital access may be more suitable than others.

  • Open Access: Similar to the way Archive.org or Google Books function, this model makes all content fully searchable on the internet. Users may discover an archive through a wider web search.
  • Free Access Once Registered: Need to track who is accessing your collection? Requiring users to register prior to gaining access keeps the documents available to those who sign up, but has the feel of private access.
  • Paid Subscription: A potential revenue stream for the archive, this model unlocks the collection once a user has paid a fee.
  • Additional Paid Perks: All levels of access can also offer options to pay for special features like high-resolution printing, guided research aides, photo licensing, etc.

Every level of digital access eliminates the limitation of physical location, offers enhanced search options, preserves the original documents from continued exposure, and provides a mechanism through which your archive can be utilized fully.

 

Access is merely one of the powerful arguments for digitizing your collection. Are you ready to start the process and protect your collection from an uncertain future? Contact Anderson Archival today at info@andersonarchival.com or 314.259.1900.

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