Hidden Collections Research Articles

Apac Reveal: unlocking the potential of the Australian Performing Arts Collection through open and visible storage

The world of collections storage is changing. While storage is often a challenging problem to solve because of the ever-increasing footprint requirements and associated resource costs, there is a shift within the Galleries, Libraries, Archies and Museums (GLAM) sector involving greater public access to our vast and hidden collections. This is causing some discomfort but also many opportunities. Purpose-built facilities are being designed using sustainable materials and methods, and the behind-the-scenes is being revealed. This is bringing the back-of-house to the front and generating greater awareness, value, new investment, and partnership models. This paper will share the transformational storage project at Arts Centre Melbourne referred to as the APAC Reveal. It will present the challenges and issues of developing, managing, preserving, and sharing a significant State Collection within Australia's largest performing arts organisation. It will also impart the journey of change through innovation and how building relationships, working collaboratively, thinking creatively, and testing revised ways of working, can produce opportunities which unlock the potential for a collection, staff, industry, stakeholders, and communities.

Hidden Collections and Rare Books Cataloging: A Review of the Literature

Hidden Collections and Rare Books Cataloging: A Review of the Literature

Odds, ends, and archival exclusion: ephemeral archives and counter-history in the English country house

ABSTRACT Ephemera — material culture not generally considered to be of enduring cultural or historical value — has long confounded archivists and recordkeepers. Often considered anomalous within broader institutional repositories, ephemeral records are further side-lined by dominant archival processes, standards, and logics; they lose their contextual nuances and thus become hidden collections within collections. Despite persistent professional anxieties and archival omissions, ephemeral archives often constitute a powerful source for counter-histories of a given institution, community, movement, or era. Such materials are imbued with the specific social and emotional textures of their creators’ lives and accordingly, they require a level of familiarity with their context in order to produce useful, meaningful layers of interpretation. Taking as its site of investigation the English country house archive, this article explores an ephemeral collection which offers a radically different history of an institution often perceived as a bastion of patriarchy and privilege, but which has simultaneously been obscured because of its ephemerality. In offering a close reading of a collection that represents working-class and non-heteronormative archival practices and genealogies, I draw from feminist and decolonial approaches to the archive that centre notions of care, slowness, and intentionality and present ways of better understanding, valuing, and making use of ephemeral collections.

Israel Studies collections in research libraries and archives outside of Israel: a survey

ABSTRACT This comparative, mixed-methods study explores various definitions of Israel Studies as a discipline through their manifestations in library and archival collections. A survey and a follow-up interview with collection curators provide a glimpse into library operations and demonstrate their dependency on Jewish Studies across the board. Collection strengths, extensiveness, and uniqueness are shaped not by the presence of an on-campus Israel Studies center, but rather by individual curators guided by their own proactive approach to collection building. The article includes an annotated list of over 120 distinctive collections, among which we uncover several hidden collections. Taken together, our article illustrates the need for better communication between Israel Studies’ scholarly and information communities.

Book Review: The Complete Collections Assessment Manual: A Holistic Approach

The world of collections assessment in any type of library is an ever-dynamic activity. Budgetary considerations are critical, the needs of the constituency served may change, whether or not a library has a sufficient number of staff needed to devote attention to the necessary work in this area. Other concerns for an academic library include the addition of new courses or the establishment of new degree programs. Further considerations are libraries and archives wishing to create an assessment tool towards understanding the scope of their hidden collections. Creating collections assessment tools to help libraries would go a long way to assist them in their decision making. The question is how does a library professional begin the process? What considerations are needed? How should we construct the assessment to provide us with the information we need to make constructive decisions? What tools are available to a library to help in this effort?

Hidden Collections: The Value of Irish Literary Archives

Archives play an important role in preserving literary history, but they also have the potential to change that history, by making the papers of Irish writers, editors, and publishers available, as well as by documenting larger literary and social moments. By facilitating the preservation and arrangement of these materials, archivists support new ways of interpreting and communicating historical and artistic processes to a wide audience. Archives are themselves interesting subjects of study, helping us to understand how national traditions and intellectual priorities evolve. This essay explores the value of Irish literary archives to the contemporary scholar, and considers some of the factors that shape a writer's legacy.

Minerva H. Weinstein (1893-1982)

Dr. Minerva H. Weinstein (1893-1982), was the first woman licensed by examination to practice optometry in New York City and the fourth woman licensed in the State of New York. In 1915, Dr. Weinstein graduated from the American Institute of Optometry, becoming the third generation in her family to forge a career in applied optics. She began her practice at one of three family-owned optical shops in the Bronx, where she remained for more than 40 years, diligently serving the needs of her community’s most vulnerable members and tirelessly researching new techniques to improve care for the most difficult vision problems. During her career, she founded the Bronx County Optometric Society and organized the local Woman’s Auxiliary for the Bronx, Manhattan and Brooklyn, as well as the New York state affiliate of the national organization. She was a founding member of the Bronx County Optometric Service, the first free optometry clinic in New York, and went on to expand the service to two additional locations. She also participated in professional women’s organizations, charitable foundations and civic clubs, and represented optometry at community events. Dr. Weinstein’s narrative is unique, but in many ways her family’s story was typical of many immigrants arriving in the U.S. during the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who were successful in improving their lot and passing on a professional legacy to the younger generation−and it is a story that is particularly common among optometry’s founders, and one that resonates in the first two decades of the twenty first century. The story of her career, and the personal details that serve as its backdrop, are also representative of the many challenges faced by the generation of professional women who helped establish the profession of optometry during the inter-war years. This biographical sketch, made possible through research in Minerva Weinstein Papers (MSS 501.4.11) held at the Archives & Museum of Optometry, sheds light on the tremendous debt optometry owes to its founding mothers and highlights the work that remains to complete the narrative of optometry history through new scholarship in hidden collections.

Making Beautiful Music Metadata Together

This paper discusses how the Howard B. Waltz Music Library and the University of Colorado Boulder’s Metadata Services Department cooperated to resurrect and complete a long-dormant retrospective conversion cataloging project involving musical scores and vinyl records. It addresses the resources that both groups brought to the relationship; the collaborative process by which decisions were made; the implementation plan and challenges; and how fostering a culture of customer service within the Metadata Services Department contributed to the project’s success. It also contrasts Colorado’s project with two other cooperative music cataloging projects and explains how its approach can serve as a model to other libraries who have significant cataloging backlogs or hidden collections but may feel hindered by the lack of specialized in-house cataloging expertise.

“Hidden Collections” in your Collection: World War II Depository Maps at Texas A&M University Libraries

A project to identify and inventory the World War II Era Map Collection held by Texas A&M University Libraries began in Fall 2018. While the project is in its beginning stages, the number of unique and interesting government printed maps that have been rediscovered has been exciting. These maps hold tremendous research value: providing snapshots of shifting boundaries, showing movements of troops, and serving as a visual history of the knowledge both the Allies and Axis powers had of the land, commerce, and military of their adversaries.

Project Abstract: an Anglo-American intelligence operation in 1947 to recover guided weapon technical documentation buried in Germany

ABSTRACTIn early 1947, American intelligence organisations learned that there were hidden collections of technical documentation that pertained to World War II German guided weapon development that were not recovered by Allied investigators in 1945. A joint Anglo-American intelligence operation was initiated in February of that year, dubbed ‘Project ’ by the Americans, to recover the caches. Project was a concerted effort by British and American scientific and technical intelligence experts to round up the last material remains of the World War II guided weapon programmes at the renowned experimental and testing establishments at Peenemünde in northern Germany.

Leveraging Collective Experience to Digitize the Fossil Insects of Los Angeles

The Invertebrate Paleontology Collection at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County (NHMLA) has received support from the United States National Science Foundation (NSF DBI 1702342) to digitize the museum’s unique and historic collection of 28,000+ fossil insects. The primary goal of this project, “Fossil Insects of L.A.”, is to increase access to these collections for both research and education. Key collections to be become discoverable through iDigBio and iDigPaleo include the Georg Statz Collection (Oligocene, Rott Formation, Germany) and three faunas from Southern California: Barstow (Miocene), Rancho La Brea (Pleistocene), and McKittrick (Pleistocene). Fossil Insects of L.A. constitutes the final contribution to the Fossil Insect Collaborative Thematic Collections Network (TCN), a consortium of institutions that have been digitizing the largest fossil insect collections in the United States. As a project beginning at the tail-end of the TCN’s active funding, Fossil Insects of L.A. is actively leveraging existing TCN knowledge and resources to streamline workflows and efficiently achieve project goals. In addition to basing imaging and preservation protocols on those designed by TCN partners, Fossil Insects of L.A. is using a layered approach to provide high-quality taxonomic information without sacrificing the pace of specimen digitization. Previously unidentified specimens are initially identified only to Order, allowing them to quickly continue through the digitization process; specimens can then be re-examined by experienced project participants and external experts, who are able to reference the specimen images generated during digitization. A critical and novel aspect of this component of the project’s workflow is the concurrent digitization of the literature associated with the Statz Collection. These data will be used as a test case for the "Enhancing Paleontological and Neontological Data Discovery API" (ePANDDA) project (NSF ICER 1821039), which seeks to associate related datasets found in iDigBio, iDigPaleo, and the Paleobiology Database. Fossil Insects of L.A. will digitize and make 10,960 specimens publically available online, of which over 6,200 will include images. An additional 15,684 specimen records from the Rancho La Brea Tar Pits will also be included in the data mobilization. In doing so, Fossil Insects of L.A. intends to dramatically enhance the research potential of these formerly hidden collections, as well as synthesize and demonstrate digitization best practices generated through the TCN.

National Identity, Historical Consciousness, and Historical Preservation

Bahamians are a people of increasing heterogeneity. The experiences of Bahamians of all backgrounds would profit from greater scholarly exploration. In any such undertaking, utilizing extant “hidden” archival collections and capturing oral history narratives is essential, as the challenge of documenting the historical experience of the African-descended Anglophone majority of Bahamians makes plain. Libraries can play a leading role in reducing the risk of losing hidden collections and oral narratives. That much is clear from the investment that the University Libraries of the University of The Bahamas have made in hosting “From Dat Time”: The Oral & Public History Institute of the University. Collaboration among cultural heritage institutions can accelerate the pace of bringing hidden collections to light and generating oral narratives. Technological advances enable us, meanwhile, to offer broad access to disinterred collections and captured oral history narratives. We can develop models of accessing such data that strike the right balance among competing imperatives of fostering education and research, of generating revenue, and of strengthening national heritage institutions.

Shining a Light on Hidden Collections and Catholic News Media

Shining a Light on Hidden Collections and Catholic News Media Marian J. Barber38 As director of the Catholic Archives of Texas, a statewide repository of material from the early sixteenth century to the present, I am acutely aware of the many issues involved in carrying out our mission of collecting, preserving, and making available as appropriate thousands of records, photographs, books, and artifacts that document the Catholic experience in Texas. Collecting actually comes fairly easily, but preserving material and making it available to church offices, individual Catholics, academic researchers, genealogists, and others pose greater challenges. Digitization offers a promising option for meeting them. This discussion will focus on three ongoing efforts to use digitization to preserve fragile or deteriorating items and make those materials and others easily accessible to researchers with limited resources for visiting far-flung collections: programs implemented by the Council on Library and Information Resources, the University of North Texas’s Portal to Texas History, and the Catholic Research Resources Alliance. Council on Library and Information Resources The Council on Library and Information Resources, or CLIR, is an “independent, nonprofit organization that forges strategies to enhance research, teaching, and learning environments in collaboration with libraries, cultural institutions and communities of higher learning.” The Council often works with the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to further the foundation’s goal of creating and disseminating new knowledge by serving as a re-granting agency. From 2008 to 2014, it administered the Mellon-funded Cataloging Hidden Special Collections and Archives program that made 129 cataloging grants totaling over $27.5 million. Catholic institutions were not frequent recipients, but in 2009, Marquette University Libraries received a grant of $149,964 for [End Page 17] the Catholic Social Action Access Project, a collaboration with St. Catherine University and the Catholic University of America.39 In 2015–2016 Mellon funded a new project, “Digitizing Hidden Special Collections and Archives: Enabling New Scholarship through Increasing Access to Unique Materials.” Again CLIR serves as the re-granting agency. For individual applicants, grants range from $50,000 to $250,000; for collaborations, $50,000 to $500,000. They distributed slightly less than $4 million in 2015 and slightly more than that amount in 2016. The goals include development of protocols for digitizing material and increasing access that can be replicated nationally and internationally. Free access is a very important element, though not obligatory. The new program places even stronger emphasis on collaboration than the cataloging project. In its first year, the 18 funded projects included a $499,086 grant to the Philadelphia Area Consortium of Special Collections Libraries, including Villanova University, for “Bibliotheca Philadelphiensis: Toward A Comprehensive Online Library of Medieval and Early Modern Manuscripts” held in member institutions’ collections.40 Villanova is also a partner in one of the 17 projects funded in 2016, a $448,893 effort to document a publisher of nickel and dime novels. Other 2016 projects not directly involving Catholic institutions but of potential interest to researchers on Catholic subjects include programs on the American labor movement, executions in the United States from 1608-2002, Cuban-American relations, archeological finds in Honduras, and home movies and amateur films by women. Recipients of 2017 grants were to be announced in July of this year. CLIR notes that program funding must be renewed annually, but that they expect it to continue for several years.41 Also of interest to Catholic archivists should be CLIR’s “Strategies for Advancing Hidden Collections,” an effort built around a Mellon-funded series of six 90-minute recorded webinars and a resource library on “techniques and best practices for increasing the visibility, usability, and sustainability of collections in the gallery, library, archive, and museum community.” CLIR has also received funding from Mellon for “Recordings at Risk: Digital Reformatting of Audio/Film/Video,” offering $2.3 million over four rounds in 2017 and 2018. Two rounds remain; Catholic archives with rare or threatened recordings in any format should consider approaching CLIR about developing proposals.42 [End Page 18] Portal to Texas History The Portal to Texas History, a project of the University of North Texas Libraries, is one of many similar efforts undertaken in the United States by libraries...

Digitization and the Changing Roles of Libraries in Support of Humanities Research: The Case of the Harrison Forman Collection

Objective – this article examines the role of libraries in expanding access to primary sources through digitization and in providing support for humanities research. Research method – the author analyzes the literature on information behavior of humanist scholars in light of the increased use of digitized primary sources. Next, using the example of the digitized photographs and diaries from the Harrison Forman Collection, the author explores the emerging role of libraries in creating a new source of scholarly materials and supporting research in humanities. Results and conclusions – digitization increasingly matters not only for practical reasons of ease of use and access but also by offering a new potential for humanistic research. Digitization projects provide enhanced intellectual control of primary resources, offer an opportunity to uncover hidden collections, and bring together scattered materials. Digital collections in their present design demonstrate some limitations in supporting scholars’ browsing behavior and in providing contextual information. Creating digital collections in support of humanities research requires the transformation of library roles and collaboration with digital humanities scholars.

Starting almost from scratch: Developing special collections as a teaching tool in the small academic library

ABSTRACTThis article presents strategies on how small academic libraries—where instructional efforts are often limited to information literacy initiatives—can expand their pedagogical efforts by way of book history instruction by developing a small but capable rare books collection used solely as a teaching tool. Discussed are methods for locating hidden collections and the removal of materials from general stacks to rare book shelving, the advantages and limitations of the one-shot instructional session, methods of earning administrative buy-in that can lead to small rare book acquisitions budgets, and promotional and collaborative strategies to build university-wide support. The article concludes with strategies on how to develop a three-credit undergraduate course on book history taught by a librarian using a rare books teaching collection acquired by modest expenditure and careful selection.

Using Copac data to benchmark collections

Purpose – The Copac Collections Management (CCM) project has been underway since 2011 with the goal of exploring how Copac can make a real difference for collection managers. By making Copac data work harder and building prototype collection analysis features on its extensive database, the collections management tools can provide valuable information from the catalogues of the UK’s major research libraries. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach – Developed to support staff in collection management activities the CCM tools offer a web-based collection management support service. It is a “grass roots” project designed to meet the needs of library practitioners and its development has been a community-based collaboration with extensive design input, consultation, feedback and support from the wider library community. Findings – This paper presents a case study showing how the tools are now embedded into “business as usual” at the University of York library. The case study reflects on how York is using the tools to assist: identify collection strengths and contribute to the identification of “unique and distinctive collections”; identify collection gaps and produce lists of potential titles for purchase; inform stock editing policies; review and prioritize work on “hidden collections”. The paper outlines the benefits of using the tools and considers lessons learnt. Originality/value – The paper offers an overall view of the tools and the potential uses by the UK higher education community. The case study will be of interest to libraries in exploring new ways to approach collection management issues, with a view to making efficient use of available resources.

Involving subject librarians in batchloading

The University at Albany developed a batchloading workflow, which included subject librarians in an activity usually reserved for technical services librarians. While batchloading reduces backlogs by increasing productivity, the proliferation of vendor MARC and OCLC MARC creates its own backlog of files waiting to be loaded. Bringing subject librarians and a collection development perspective into the process helps set priorities for dealing with this new backlog, as well as serving to uncover hidden collections.

Making Metadata Maker: A Web Application for Metadata Production

Cataloging and metadata operations in academic libraries are focusing on original cataloging of their unique and hidden collections that have not been available to users because of a lack of metadata. However, creating MARC format metadata is an expensive process; libraries need professional catalogers with appropriate experience and knowledge or must train staff to do the work. To improve the cataloging and metadata creation workflow, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library developed a web application, Metadata Maker, which allows anyone to create metadata in four different formats, including MARC21 for an online public access catalog, regardless of their familiarity with metadata standards or systems that utilize the metadata. Released as an open source application, Metadata Maker supports diacritics and Unicode non-Roman language encoding, and creates metadata records that ensure discovery and access of unique library collections.

Building an Inclusive Community of Archival Practice: The Historical Society of Pennsylvania's Hidden Collections Initiative for Pennsylvania Small Archival Repositories

Building an Inclusive Community of Archival Practice: The Historical Society of Pennsylvania's Hidden Collections Initiative for Pennsylvania Small Archival Repositories

Hidden Collections at the Georgia Tech Archives

Hidden Collections at the Georgia Tech Archives