Print Department Report Volume 1

BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY
Print Department Project - Pt. 1
Prepared by: Martha R. Mahard, Consultant
August 27, 2014
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BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY PRINT DEPARTMENT
PROJECT BENCHMARKS
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August 30, 2014: 1st preliminary report is due
November 28, 2014: 2nd preliminary report is due
February 27, 2015: 3rd preliminary report is due
May 30, 2015: Final report is due
To cover:
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Evaluation of current descriptive information including: finding aids, inventories,
catalog raisonnés, accession records, catalog cards, online collections, databases, and
spreadsheets.
• Needs assessment for under-described items and/or collections.
• Assessment of physical arrangement
• Articulation of collection hierarchy and organizing principles.
• Recommendations for descriptive record creation including: controlled vocabularies,
content standards, schemas and other descriptive structures.
• Assessment of data mapping strategies from and into and other BPL systems (e.g., ILS,
digital object repository, DPLA).
• Outline proposed strategy for implementation of changes or adjustments to physical
organization
• Initiate testing of TMS and data mapping
This report will the cover the assessment of the physical arrangement of the
collections, an articulation of the collection hierarchy and organizing principles,
and the first part of an extensive evaluation of current descriptive information.
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Future reports:
Report due November 28, 2014: Part 2 of the evaluation of current descriptive record
creation, needs assessment for under-described items and collections and
recommendations for descriptive record creation along with an assessment of data
mapping strategies from and into other BPL systems.
Report due February 27, 2015: Recommendations for changes to physical organization of
collection and proposed strategy for implementation.
Final Report due May 30, 2015: Recap of collection assessment including physical
arrangement, intellectual access, mapping strategies, suggested workflow for TMS
integration, observations on collection condition and storage requirements. Review and
final recommendations.
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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY - PROJECT PT. 1
Goals and Objectives
The Print Department of the Boston Public Library has a long and distinguished record of collecting and exhibiting works of art on paper from the woodcuts of Albrecht Dürer and the etchings of Rembrandt to the lithographs of Toulouse Lautrec and the chromolithography of Louis Prang and the vibrant work of Boston’s contemporary printmakers. The collection of historic and documentary photographs includes the work of the Cinest daguerreotype artists, the Cirst aerial views of Boston, the stop-­‐motion images of Harold Edgerton and the haunting camera obscure images created by Abelardo Morell, along with the news photos from the Boston Herald Traveler. Curators and staff have provided support to research and scholarship, mounted gallery exhibitions and continued to build the collection, emphasizing the ideals of the founding collector, who envisioned a teaching collection allowing teachers and students to study the processes involved from original materials themselves. As part of the Library’s commitment to the “ongoing development and preservation of its distinctive special collections, which provide citizens from all walks of life with access to their common cultural heritage,” as articulated in the strategic plan of 2009, this project lays the ground work for developing sustainable physical and descriptive organizational structures for the prints and photographs collection. !
The first quarter
The work began in June of 2014 as part of a year-­‐long study. This report will cover the assessment of the physical arrangement of the collections, an articulation of the collection hierarchy and organizing principles, and the Cirst part of an extensive evaluation of current descriptive information. • The physical assessment began with a survey of the contents of the shelves in the main stack area. Additional parts of the collection housed elsewhere will be surveyed in the next phase of the project. Examination of the condition of the collection will begin when the survey is complete. • The shelf survey provides a map of the collection that is essential to understanding the underlying organization. The current collection hierarchy and organizing principles can be understood in broad strokes. As the project progresses we will continue to revise and rationalize the hierarchy and simplify the physical arrangement of the collection. • Current descriptive information is far from comprehensive. This study looks at existing forms of description . Future reports will address standards and strategies for improvement. Mahard Report 1
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INTRODUCTION
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The year-­‐long investigation of the Boston Public Library’s Print Department began the Cirst week in June, 2014, shortly after I was hired as Project Manager. This Cirst quarterly report focuses on two aspects of the investigation that have dominated our efforts to date, the shelf survey of the main stack area and the location and assessment of the collection’s documentation. Shelf survey
Working with two interns from the Simmons School of Library and Information Science I began the Cirst stage of a survey of the collection, starting with a shelf inventory. We began with this assessment of the physical arrangement because there is no effective way to get a handle on the collection based on existing descriptive information alone. The end result of the shelf survey will be an index that will, for the Cirst time, create a record of the overall organizing principles and provide a foundation a better articulated hierarchy. The survey will give us the basis from which to develop more adequate collection descriptions, it will serve as a temporary location guide for all parts of the collection and an indicator of areas where further work is needed. Additional parts of the collection to be surveyed include the Clat map-­‐size cases that are dispersed around the room, the Cile cabinets containing departmental archival materials as well as the photographic collection of the Boston Herald Traveler, boxes and other items from the collection that are currently housed on the top of these cabinets, temporary shelving housing parts of the Merriam collection, the CAB room (about which more later), and the Jordan Room. Work to date on the shelf survey makes clear several important points: •
The physical arrangement of the materials in the stacks does not suggest a clear organizing principle
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The stack space is overcrowded
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There are signiCicant physical obstacles to access !
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Improvements in the general condition of the stack area are necessary for the ongoing preservation of the collection
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Documenta3on of the collec3on
With the survey underway we began investigating and compiling lists of available descriptive information, studying the various ways in which the collection has been documented over time. Only minimal information about the collection and its holdings is available online. Accession documentation has been maintained but without standardization and consistency. There is no one source or log book in which new acquisitions are recorded, as one would expect for such a historical collection. The task of compiling this documentation retrospectively should be a priority. To give an indication of the difCiculties in compiling this data, the following are a sampling of the types of records that I have examined to date, and which will be discussed in greater detail in the report: • Machine-­‐readable Ciles (primarily word documents or spreadsheets) • Print outs from computer Ciles • Typescripts
• Card catalogues • Published descriptions • Departmental correspondence Ciles. • Invoices.
• Inventories provided by current donors for large gifts or bequests. !
At this point it seems clear that the most reliable guide to the collection resides in the collective memory of the three staff members.
In the Cirst section I include background information about the evolution of the collection. The second section deals with the collection’s current physical arrangements, and possible short-­‐
term solutions. The third and Cinal section of this report looks at the currently available descriptive information, with an eye towards eventual consolidation and standardization. !
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BACKGROUND AND CONTEXT
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As one would expect in a library of the caliber of the Boston Public Library, the prints and photographs holdings form a collection of astonishing depth and breadth. The early print collectors and donors were connoisseurs who sought both completeness and variety – acquiring many states and impressions, as well as printing plates, woodblocks, and lithographic stones, to illustrate both the process of printmaking and the end result. Major nineteenth century photographs including daguerreotype portraits, tintypes, the great American West survey photographs, and images of the city of Boston from the beginning of photography onward, were regularly reported as purchased or acquired by gift throughout the period leading up to the establishment of the department in 1941. While not exactly a “hidden collection” the BPL’s print collection is perhaps best described as languishing for want of intellectual access, support, and departmental leadership. The efforts to make images from the collection available on the Internet through Flickr, demonstrate the impressive range and depth of the collection as well as its potential for scholarship and research. What the digitization project has also made clear is the desperate need for better description and documentation. The wonderful images of the collection will eventually speak for themselves, but not without a big effort to transform years of hand-­‐written notes, idiosyncratic and erratic record-­‐keeping, and intermittent descriptive practice into metadata compatible with twenty-­‐Cirst century best practice. !
This is a collection that needs to be celebrated and bragged about.
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One of the most useful sources of information on the development of the collection was the series of the Library’s Annual Reports and Monthly Bulletins, many of which are available online through the Internet Archive. Much interesting and useful information has been gleaned through a sampling of these volumes. It is clear that photographic reproductions of works of art, lantern slides, books illustrated with important prints, livres d’artiste, works of art in all formats and documentary photographs of all descriptions, were actively acquired through gift and purchase throughout the Library’s Cirst century. Sadly, as can be seen in this illustration this information is far from incomplete and is not helpful in locating the actual item. !
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1854-1940 NOTES FROM THE (ALMOST) FIRST CENTURY
Although Albert H. Wiggin’s gift of 1941 is credited with the establishment of the department and the hiring of the Cirst curator/keeper, the department’s roots go back to 1869 when Thomas G. Appleton, former trustee and generous donor, presented the Library with the magniCicent collection of prints formed by the late Cardinal Antonio Tosti (1776-­‐1866)1. The Tosti collection is documented by an inventory published over four issues of the BPL’s monthly bulletin from 1873-­‐1874.2
Side note about Tos. Collec.on As was customary for print collections of the time, the Tosti prints were primarily bound in large volumes, either as they were issued or as they were gathered and bound by the collector, in some cases they are loose in portfolios. The collection was eventually estimated to total nearly 6,000 individual pieces in approximately 125 volumes and loose portfolios. Framed items from the collection were hung in the Library for many years. The large volumes were typically stored Clat in specially designed cases. The 1890 edition of the Hand-­‐book for Readers in the Boston Public Library notes that the Tosti engravings “are shown daily in Bates Hall from 9-­‐12M.”3 This same handbook also notes that there is a card catalog to supplement the printed list. This has not been located. At some point in the early 1960s or 70s the Tosti volumes were wrapped in brown paper and the shelf number assigned in 1873 recorded on the outside of the package. Most of them do not appear to have been disturbed since. !
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The Cardinal was appointed Librarian of the Vatican Library in 1860 and remained in that position until his death in 1866.
2
Boston Public Library, Antonio Tosti, and Thomas Gold Appleton. 1873. The Tosti engravings. Available on Google Books and the Internet
Archive.
3James
Lyman Whitney. 9th edition, published by The Trustees, 1890.
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Selected early acquisitions
My initial researches into the Annual Reports and Monthly Bulletins make it clear that during the late nineteenth-­‐century and the beginning of the twentieth century the library was regularly acquiring other visual materials. I found information on various photographic purchases and gifts, including the photographs documenting the American West mentioned above, a set of the Frank Rinehart photographs of Native Americans taken in18984 acquired in 1900, and the October 1899 gift from the family of William Lloyd Garrison of Cive daguerreotype portraits of noted abolitionists. The Annual Reports from the 1880s and 1890s make frequent mention of donations from the famed Boston lithographer Louis Prang. Prang is often referred to (sometimes dismissively) as the father of the Christmas card, but his work goes well beyond that single accomplishment. He was a pioneer in chromolithography, and a devoted advocate of art education in the United States.5 At present there is a selection of over 1,400 images from the Prang collection on the Library’s Flickr page. The monthly Bulletin for December 1899 contains this note: !
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Mr. Louis Prang marks his retirement from business, by presenting to this Library some valuable gifts reminiscent of his long and important services to the growth of lithographic art in Boston. The collection comprises proofs which illustrate the development of lithography for the past forty years, and includes the 116 plates made for Walters’s work on Ceramics. A replica of Zumbusch’s bronze bust of Senefelder, the inventor of lithography, accompanies the gift.
On the occasion of the Indian Congress held in conjunction with the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition.
Every day on my way from Simmons to Copley Square I walk the length of Louis Prang Street, connecting The Fenway to Huntington Avenue
just west of the Museum of Fine Arts.
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THE FOUNDING GIFT AND TWO KEEPERS
Alfred H. Wiggin (1868-1951), collector
The Print Collection as it exists today was inaugurated through the beneCicence of the American banker and collector Alfred H. Wiggin. Wiggin began collecting early in the twentieth century. His particular interest was in the etching process but he collected in other areas as well. The collection includes signiCicant examples of the works of the Old Masters as well as of the artists identiCied with the revival of etching in the nineteenth century. These Wiggin considered the prelude to the work of his contemporaries – artists working in the Cirst half of the twentieth century. The unpublished typescript documenting the collection contains this note: The actual scope of the collection comes to a very considerable size. There are 4,942 prints, not including those which appear either as illustrations or in other bound forms.
Indeed one would be grateful to have an idea of the extent of those items not included in this count. Wiggin seems to have always considered the research and teaching value of his collection and was diligent in the pursuit of multiple states and impressions of prints. He was also what might be called today a “complete-­‐ist” and acquired the entire oeuvre of artists when he could. !
For the study of printmaking in the first half of the twentieth century this collection has few rivals.
Arthur Heintzelman, Keeper, 1941-1960
In 1941 when Arthur Heintzelman became Keeper of Prints and Curator of the Wiggin Collection at the BPL he was already established as a highly regarded printmaker and educator. As Keeper of the collection he wrote prodigiously, curated exhibitions and collaborated with other major institutions. One online biography lists his many accomplishments as a painter, etcher, copyist, educator and museum curator.6 He was not however a great record keeper. I have not yet located accession records for materials that were given to the collection during the early years. !
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http://thistlefineart.com/Heintzelman.htm Consulted 8/24/2014
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I will examine the correspondence Ciles in greater depth as the project progresses. Because the Library issued no annual report in the years 1940, 1941 or 1942, we do not have an ofCicial account of the presentation of the Wiggin gift or the appointment of Heintzelman as Keeper. Lacking accession records means that it is hard to tell if the entire collection was given at once or in sections spread over subsequent years. That Wiggin continued his generous contributions is clear in annual reports starting in 1943 when a gift of 1004 prints and 37 drawings is acknowledged. Highlights of Wiggin’s continuing gifts to the collection
1943
Wiggin’s gift included works by Joseph Pennell, Childe Hassam, George
W. Bellows, and James McNeill Whistler
Wiggin also presented substantial collections of the works of Augustus
John, Frank W. Benson and Alphonse Legros
1944
Wiggin gave a collection of work by Thomas Rowlandson including
prints, watercolors, drawings and books, 54 prints by Goya, and a large
collection of the work of Anders Zorn
1945
Purchase made jointly with the Library, Wiggin and another generous
donor, Hiram Merrill, of a collection of woodcuts, wood-engravings and
copper engravings by Thomas W. Nason.
Wiggin donated a significant collection of the works of three major 20th
century British printmakers, Muirhead Bone, Gerald Brockhurst and Sir
David Young Cameron
1946
The Annual Report notes the gift of “All books remaining in the Albert H.
Wiggin Collection, prints, drawings and books which he made available
to the Boston Public Library as a loan in April 1941
Note: for purposes of provenance current staff are in the habit of distinguishing items received as part of the founding collection as the Wiggin Collection and those received subsequently as Gift of Alfred H.Wiggin. This pattern of giving continued until Wiggin’s death in 1951. The 1951 Annual Report includes a paragraph on the Wiggin Estate and mentions only the collection of fore-­‐edge paintings, a collection of art reference books, and a collection of sixty-­‐four volumes “especially interesting because of illustrations and binding.” Although no mention of prints is made here, a few pages later, under “Prints and Drawings” signiCicant gifts, we Cind his gift of “The Guy Mayer collection of Childe Hassam comprising Cifty-­‐eight etchings and drypoints, all artist’s proofs printed on old paper, including states and personal notations by the artist in the margins, eight lithographs and four drawings which are studies for plates of the same subjects.”
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After Wiggin’s death Heintzelman continued to build the collection through distinguished purchases and a widening circle of interested and supportive donors. Highlights of additions to the collection after 1951
1952
Louis Black gave nearly 200 prints by a variety of artists including Adolphe Appia, Felix
Buhot, Camille Corot, Honorée Daumier, and Anders Zorn
Zelina Delâtre gave a complete collection of the engraved works of Eugène Delâtre,
and a collection of 332 engravings by Auguste Delâtre
Marcel Guiot presented the cancelled zinc plate for Picasso’s Les Trois Baigneuses, III
Heintzelman added to the gifts with the purchase of numerous important works
including lithographs by Bonnaard, Maillol, and Matisse and a woodcut by Picasso
Purchased 5 portfolios containing 421 lithographs by Daumier
Louis Black gave more than 120 prints by various artists including tow etchings by
Goya, 20 lithographs by Samuel Chamberlain, and one etching from a series by Kaethe
Kollwitz
1957
Purchased etchings and lithographs by major artists including Marc Chagall, Giorgio De
Chirico, Raoul Duffy, Oskar Kokoschka, Reginald Marsh, Edward Munch, Joseph
Pennell, and Toulouse-Lautrec`
Heintzelman, as a printmaker himself, was ideally suited to work with Wiggin and foster the continued growth of the collection. Wiggin was interested in every aspect involved in the process of printmaking as his collection demonstrates. Under Heintzelman’s tenure numerous important collections were added to enhance the founder’s vision of a collection that would “represent an aggregation of prints and drawings which are not available in any quantity in the print rooms of Museums in the United States.”
In the introduction to the Wiggin list, the unidentiCied author concludes with this note: To comprehend fully what has been accomplished in the art of etching in the Twentieth Century one must study this collection, for it contains unique impressions, rare trial proofs, working sketches and drawings which are available nowhere else in the world, not even among the possessions of the artists themselves. No collector in recent years has assembled such an important collection, in his chosen Mield, of prints supplemented by drawings and by the books pertinent to the artists represented.7 !
From the introduction to an unpublished typescript, “Survey of the Complete Collection of Prints, Drawings and Books in the Possession of
Albert H. Wiggin, Esq.” [undated].
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Sinclair H. Hitchings, Keeper, 1962-2005
Sinclair H. Hitchings was appointed “Acting Curator of Prints” in 1961 and of>icially became Keeper of Prints in 1962. During his forty-­‐three year tenure Hitchings built on the strengths of the collection, developed important relationships with major donors and the artists and gallery owners active in Boston, and secured signi>icant enlargement of the collection’s endowment. Although Hitchings was frustrated by the Library’s shortage of funds throughout the 1970s he managed to make important additions to the historic collections and to elicit important donations. Possibly his most signi>icant legacy is the collection of the work of contemporary artists with ties to the city of Boston. This material is not heavily collected anywhere else and yet the collection is not widely known beyond the specialist circle. Another advance for which Hitchings deserves credit is the seeking out and gathering together of photographic materials from various parts of the BPL’s vast collection. As just one example, the geological survey reports, which are now famous for their spectacular albumen prints of the American West in the 1860s and 1870s, were originally purchased as “government documents” – which of course they were. Hitchings and his staff traced these and many more and arranged for their transfer to the print department. Under his leadership the department truly became a collection of prints and photographs. !
Highlights of additions to the collection after 1961
1963
Purchased lithographs by Doré, Grandville, Lepere, and Pennell
Purchaces 495 lithographic American, French and English posters of the
late 19th century
Gifts of etchings and lithographs were received from numerous donors
including Olive Benedict, Charles Childs, Helen Chipman, Francis
Adams Comstock, and others
1965
Purchased a collection of 139 lithographs, 13 woodcuts, and 1 drawing
by Charles H Shannon
Gifts of etchings and lithographs wer received from Boston Prinmakers,
Samuel Chamberlain, and Agnes Mongan, among others
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In later years the Annual Reports generally omit the very useful sections on notable purchases and gifts Mahard Report 1
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Hitchings, like his predecessor, was a poor record keeper. Both men were gifted and prescient collection builders. Hitchings widened the scope of his collecting, sometimes indiscriminately, but always with enthusiasm. Both men published and contributed to exhibitions at other institutions, building a long record of collaboration throughout the print world. For better or for worse, it is unlikely that either of these gentlemen would be hired for such a position today. They were fortunate to have >lourished in an era when subject area expertise and entry into the “old boy network” of collectors and benefactors was not only valued but essential. They developed and promoted a collection of remarkable strengths. The collection will continue to be essential for scholars and has the potential to provide enormous resources to the public at large when it can be made more thoroughly accessible. I hope to discover, through further investigation of the departmental >iles and correspondence, whether it will be possible to create a retrospective index to annual gifts and purchases. While not the same as an accession log, such an index will provide a single locus for provenance information. We know that accession numbers have been assigned to items entering the collection, as we have come across them on items in the stacks, often with accompanying copies of invoices. In 2010 a very basic formula for recording accession information on spreadsheets was implemented. This process will need to be improved and incorporated into overall descriptive practice for the future. 2005-2014
With the retirement of Sinclair Hitchings, the oversight of the collection passed to the responsibility of the Keeper of Special Collections, in a major administrative shift, merging the oversight of the department with Rare Books and Manuscripts. Several endowed funds allow the continued development of the collection as opportunities arise. Artists with long-­‐term relationships with the collection continue generous contributions and bequests. When completed this report should provide the foundation for further strategic planning for the direction of the department. The three current staff members are all long-­‐term employees and hold a considerable institutional memory among them. Their work has necessarily focused primarily on public service (answering reference inquiries, negotiating loan requests, preparing exhibitions). They have worked on descriptive data for speci>ic projects but none of them think of themselves as cataloguers. Much of the work that needs to be done in the collection requires for more staff with better support, and a focus on cataloging and description. !
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CURRENT OUTLOOK
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The stack room, on the third >loor of the Johnson Building is accessed through The Arts department’s work area. Print collection materials were installed here in late 1972 when the building was opened. Staff workstations are now located in a small, airless, not terribly functional, of>ice between the door leading to the Johnson Building elevator and the door that connects The Arts reading room in the McKim building to their work area. I say not very functional as other than two staff members’ desks, there is only one work surface which is too small for any work with the materials in the collection to be done in this area. Works of art on paper, whether >ine art prints, photographs, or ephemera take up more space than book collections and require large clean work areas to be handled safely. The room is airless and uncomfortable when more than one person is at work. There is no appropriate space for working with classes or distinguished visitors. Visitors requesting access to materials are served through the Rare Book department’s reading room. This presents an interesting work>low problem as there is no good direct route from the print stack to the Rare Books reading room. Overcrowding and significant barriers to access exist throughout the stack area
The stack room is over-­‐crowded and appears somewhat haphazard in arrangement upon >irst encounter. Boxes that have not been moved in years have accumulated layers of dust and the >loor needs careful cleaning. Book trucks loaded with boxes and matted prints are parked in the aisles; tops of >ile cabinets are piled high with books, boxes and miscellany. In one aisle a “baker’s rack” of temporary shelving has to be moved in and out in order to access the permanent shelving. Other aisles are obstructed with oversized frames (some with art work and some empty) leaning against the shelves, making access to the shelves by one person almost impossible. The main aisle, on the right as you enter, is almost completely impassible, >illed with frames, boxes and miscellaneous furniture. On the day that I started work, the Print Department staff were still involved with clearing out the Cushman room, which had been their headquarters for several years, and moving the collection of reference books and other >iles into space provided in the Jordan Room. !
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ASSESSMENT OF PHYSICAL ARRANGEMENT. PRINT STACKS.
The organizing principle in the arrangement of the stacks is no longer clear. It is possible that in 1972, when the space was >irst occupied, there was a plan, perhaps putting the most called for materials at the front and leaving space throughout for expansion, but even this basic order has by now broken down. Only the longevity of the three staff members, their commitment to the collection and their combined institutional knowledge makes the collection accessible today. Mahard Report 1
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By mid-­‐August the interns and I had examined twenty of the twenty-­‐>ive ranges in the main stack room in detail. If this were a collection entirely housed in standard-­‐sized boxes we would have had an easy time – but there are at least eight different sizes of boxes, stacks of loose prints, supplies, framed objects lying >lat on shelves, paper-­‐wrapped packages, and the occasional three-­‐dimensional object. Obstacles encountered meant that we were unable to reach certain sections without major shifting of oversize framed items or boxes. These areas were noted and will be returned to when more help is available. There are stacks of matted prints that are not in boxes. Many of these have hand-­‐written paper tags with identi>ication, but as these are not attached in any way many tags have become separated from their objects. !
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The goal was to get an overview that would allow us to articulate the physical organization of the space. The accessibility of the aisles deteriorates somewhat the further back in the stacks one goes so that ranges twenty to twenty-­‐>ive are extremely dif>icult to navigate. We did a minimum survey in these areas. While one person entered information into the laptop, another person held framed objects out of the way and a third, perched on a stool, read the labels; we recorded only those boxes with labels that could be read clearly. We omitted all items marked as part of the Merriam collection as the last ranges in the collection are predominantly Merriam items. Much work remains to be done on the Merriam collection which has important Old Master prints mixed in with fantasy and erotica of the twentieth century. Thus we saw the famous 100 Guilder Rembrandt on a shelf in Range 21B along with a box containing prints of the minor 20th-­‐century illustrator Vincent Smarkusz. !
The stack survey notes areas that need to be returned to for further investigation. There are numerous instances where prints that were gathered for exhibition have not been returned to their original locations but kept intact, with their labels in many cases. This practice has contributed to the confusion. We found two boxes of prints that had been gathered together for a researcher in 1983 and 1984. Surely he must have >inished his study by now. The table that follows is a digest of what we found in the survey. The master version of the survey remains a work-­‐in-­‐progress and contains information that should remain restricted, but selected pages from the current version can be examined in Appendix I. Mahard Report 1
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[Note: table redacted for security reasons; June 15, 2015] !
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INVENTORY: NEXT STEPS
CAB Room
The survey of the CAB room will be undertaken starting in mid-­‐September. Brief visits to count and measure shelves and boxed materials stored there make clear several points worth mentioning here. First the room is not climate controlled and as such is inappropriate for storing works of art on paper. The exposed brick walls mean that layers of dust coat every surface in the room. As a staging area where large incoming collections are stored temporarily before processing it would be just about acceptable. But due to lack of space in the main print stack, materials stored here include the extensive Daumier holdings, much of the important Rowlandson collection, as well as unique Cruikshank drawings, extra-­‐illustrated volumes, illustrations for Dickens’ work, and the plates for the Tichnor Brothers post card collection. Two large recent acquisitions are stored there for want of a better place, but must be moved so that work can begin on inventory and processing. There are two sections, the nearest to the door has >ive ranges of three bays each, the second has >ive ranges of eleven bays each. The bays are almost all nine shelves in the >irst section and ten shelves each in the second. I took rough measurements in the hope of getting at least an approximate idea of linear feet of shelving involved. The shelves are 35” wide and 12” deep; a range therefore is 24” wide. There are approximately 1370 shelves in total. This translates to almost 4000 linear feet and does not take into account the stuff in boxes on the >loor and along the walls. I expect to begin the shelf inventory in September. Print collection staff will need to help identify what is in the unmarked boxes and piles of miscellanea. This inventory will allow us to highlight any additional high priority items that should be moved to the climate controlled print stacks as soon as possible. Further details about the contents currently stored in the CAB room will appear in the next report. !
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The Jordan Room
At present the Jordan Room houses the Print Department’s reference collection and a number of old >ile cabinets full of departmental correspondence. Also located here is the card catalog which is no longer available for public consultation. Digital capture of the information on these cards should be a priority. As I have emphasized the absence of accession information elsewhere it should be noted that many of the catalog cards contain abbreviated provenance information on the verso. I plan to go through the correspondence >iles more carefully – having only sampled their contents to date. I do not plan to examine the book collection as those are, for the most part, already catalogued. !
Remaining Files and Cabinets in Print Stack
To complete our study we will examine the contents of the >iles that are ranged around the outer walls of the Print Stack. Over one hundred of these contain the Photo Morgue of the Boston Herald Traveler, a rich and often consulted resource. Additional >ile cabinets include departmental correspondence, research notes, and an as yet unexplored miscellany. The oversize materials in the map-­‐size cabinets will need to be more closely surveyed. Many drawers are unlabeled and their contents unidenti>ied, if not unidenti>iable. Prints and photographs are housed together in many instances and no order is apparent. From our overview of the shelved materials it seems likely that more oversize cabinets will be needed. !
PHYSICAL ORGANIZATION
One of the great bene>its of a closed stack area in the age of technology is the ability to simplify organizational schemes. Classi>ication and detailed arrangements yield to the computer’s ability to point to precise locations. With some effort we can impose an order that will work for the staff and still be comprehensible to new comers.
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What it looks like today
Although it looks chaotic, an underlying logic does gradually appear. Big groups of similar materials are more or less together, although not necessarily in a comprehensible sequence. So we have the Prang collection, the historic photographs, contemporary artists, the Boston Pictorial Archive, and Americana in groups. Most of the “>ine arts prints” are located either in the shelves at the rear of the stack area, farthest from the door, or in the CAB room (about which more later). Postcards occupy most of a single side of a range. What we don’t have is all the nineteenth-­‐century American prints together in one place, for example. Things break down with the variety of sized boxes, with materials pulled out for exhibition and not returned to original locations, and stacks of loose matted prints, matting supplies, and framed objects interspersed. !
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What Systems Do Other Collections Use
Most major print collections today have grown out of legacy collections with the same problems and complications that face the BPL’s Print Collection today. Many of these stem from the inheritance of idiosyncratic organization schemes begun by collectors and donors and continued without regard to more logical arrangements -­‐ and without the bene>it of library science! One particularly glaring example of this from my own experience is the nearly 200 boxes of lithographic sheet music in the Harvard Theatre Collection, entirely arranged by the name of the performer depicted on the cover. Even in the 1970s we knew that it would take a computer to solve that problem for us. I have been told that at the Villa I Tatti the photographs of paintings in Berenson’s renowned fototeca were >iled chronologically by the date of the artist’s birth, but this in uncon>irmed. For many years major collections of prints and photographs have been “arranged for use” and “self-­‐indexing.” This meant that a collection of portraits might be arranged alphabetically by the sitter’s name, as was common in many large collections of photographs. There was no practical way to know what photographers were represented in such a collection. Mahard Report 1
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Further complications are introduced when we take into account the shelving requirements of materials of multiple sizes. !
EXAMPLES
The Harvard Theatre Collection has a world-­‐famous collection of engraved dramatic portraits, in addition to which collectors had added more than 500,000 photographic portraits over time. Here are some of the sections into which the portraits were arranged: !
Engravings:
• Extra-large, in drawers
• Extra-large in boxes
• Three sizes of boxes: small, medium, large
• Inserted in extra-illustrated/Grangerized volumes – access through a
hand-written card index from the 1920s with locations such as “A&A v3
xii” • Special collections
• Griswold Collection of Portraits; Sheet music; Binney collection of
dancers; etc.
Photographs:
• Daguerreotypes and other cased photographs
• Cartes de visite
• Cabinet size – in separate male and female alphabets by sitter
• Separate sections for scenes, minstrels, dancers, circus
• Larger than cabinet size up to about 10” x 14”
• Oversize in boxes
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And so on – it becomes obvious why specialized staff are essential to managing such complexities and how important subject knowledge can be. A researcher looking for portraits of 19th century opera singers once presented me with a list of last names only. I was compelled to ask which were the men and which the women, which left him under-­‐impressed. !
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The New-­‐York Historical Society published a very useful guide to their print, photograph, architecture and ephemera collections in 1998. In the guide they include of chart of the collection with these major divisions: !
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•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
General
Photographs by photographer
Photographs by topic/collector
Photographs by format
Architecture by architect
Architecture by topic/collector
Prints by creator/collector
Prints by format
Ephemera [by genre]
Although this seems quite orderly and straightforward, I know that considerable effort went into creating this kind of order out of a collection that had similar organizational issues to our own. Once you start looking into the topics it is easy to see the location speci>ic interests that are also re>lected in Boston’s collection. Also, this is an intellectual grouping and does not attempt to capture the order in which the collections are stored. The American Antiquarian Society’s web page has a complicated listing of the types of graphic arts collections among their holdings, including the following, only slight abridged: • Artists' Collections (include drawings, prints, watercolors, paintings) [
• Broadsides (single sheet printing) [Charts; Circus posters; Civil War recruiting posters;
Entertainment advertisements;[… ]News carriers’ addresses]
• Drawings
• Engravings
• Ephemera (printed items originally intended to be disposable)
• Commercial [Advertisements; Clipper Ship Cards; Trade Cards; William Allen Collection]
• Events [Calendars; Invitations; Menus; Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition Collection; Tickets]
• Cards [Calling Cards; Christmas and Holiday Cards; Civil War Envelopes; Sentiment Cards;
Valentines]
• Financial [Bank notes; Billheads; Lottery tickets]
• Institutional [Election Ballots; Membership Certificates; Rewards of Merit; Ream Wrappers]
• Games [Amusement; Instructional; McLoughlin Paper Dolls]
• Geography [Atlases; Guidebooks; Maps (War maps, Geological maps,
• Railroad maps, Postal maps, Handwritten maps, Pocket maps)]
• Misc. GA Collections [Thomas and Eno Collection; Scrapbooks; Bound volumes; Silhouettes
(framed & unframed); Portrait paintings, miniatures, and sculpted busts; Artifacts; Textile
Printing]
• Lithographs
• Music
• Ballads [Ballads digitized in ABE; Isaiah Thomas Ballad Broadsides collection]
• Music books [Hymnals; Secular Music; Songsters (only lyrics); (Mss. Music Book Collection)]
• Sheet Music [Sheet Music -- Pictorial (subject access); Sheet Music – Engraved; Sheet Music
– Lithographed]
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• Photographs:
• By format [Ambrotypes; Bound volumes of photographs; Carte-de-visites; Cased
photographs; Daguerreotypes; Stereotypes; Tintypes]
• By subject [Actors and Actresses; Groups; Native Americans; Historic Buildings of Central
Mass.; Worcester County; Worcester Portrait Photographs]
• Prints, by subject
• [Art Union Prints; Political Prints (U.S. Political Cartoons, Civil War Cartoons, European
Political Prints, Charles Pierce Collection, U.S. Historical Scenes; Portrait Prints (General
and Worcester); U.S. Views (by state, by town, within Worcester)]
Note that here too at least some of the sheet music collection is >iled by subject.
These examples demonstrate how other collections have attempted to solve the problems associated with such diverse materials and subject matters. In the Theatre Collection it is relatively easy to assume that everything is at least about one topic -­‐ until that is you start getting into circus, ballet, and minstrels (I could go on…). The New-­‐York Historical Society’s arrangement seems logical as far as the divisions of prints and photographs is concerned but architecture does not >it in this typology unless it is a collections of buildings. The more detailed listing does not really clarify, although it seems likely that the collections “by architect” include drawings and views by that architect or >irm. But Architecture by topic / collection is more puzzling as it includes: !
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•
•
•
•
Cathedral of St. John the Divine
Geographic
Green (elevated railroads)
Lighthouse
Penn Station
Surely these must be groups of views whether prints or photographs, so why have a major section called Architecture. One possibility is that this allows them to put all views, whether photographic or print, together on one topic. Not a solution that I would advocate as a preservationist, but one commonly adopted in under-­‐documented collections. In fact it is what was done in forming the Boston Pictorial Archive -­‐ a collection of convenience, gathering most frequently requested topics into one arti>icial collection. !
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What Will Work Here
As is typical in all major print and photograph collections there are innumerable possibilities for organizing the materials on the shelves. Developing a hierarchy that is consistent, logical and takes into account all the idiosyncrasies of such a collection is fraught with traps for the unwary. What I propose here should be regarded as a preliminary, basic outline, based upon the work of the shelf survey thus far, for further discussion and enhancement. More input from the departmental staff, and other stakeholders plus consideration of materials still to be inventoried, is needed. Unlike book collections, print collections have seldom had the bene>it of neatly classi>ied (or classi>iable) objects >itting neatly on their shelves in well-­‐ordered rows. The true bene>it of a closed stack means that the collection does not have to conform to a neatly “browsable” classi>ication order, but can take advantage of solutions that are space ef>icient and still easily navigable by the trained staff. This also means that we >irst consider usage, what makes access easiest for the staff who must retrieve the materials for users and maintain the stacks in good order. The most logical is not always the most obvious or the most useful. What works at the Library of Congress or the New York Public Library will not necessarily be appropriate here. Here are the major categories for hierarchical arrangement that I propose: Prints and Drawings
• Fine prints
• Contemporary Prints
Photographs
• Historic photographs
• Contemporary Art Photographs
Postcards
• Geographical arrangement
• by Collector
Posters
• By artist
• Unknown artists by country
Ephemera
• Trade Cards
• Produce labels
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• Bookplates
With these major categories we can then begin to make logical sequences that will facilitate intellectual navigation of the collection, and also improve access for the staff. !
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PRINTS AND DRAWINGS
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I de>ine this large category to cover all types of works of art on paper from the late >ifteenth-­‐
century through the twentieth-­‐century. Currently in the Print Collection distinction is made between >ine art prints and contemporary art. I believe that can be accommodated under one main heading. I include drawings because so many of the artists are represented by both prints and drawings, and in many cases the drawings are studies for the print. Nothing is to be gained by separating them arbitrarily. The current organization by nationality within each century could be retained, although it presents some dif>iculties. Ideally we would want to arrange all the boxes of one size in sequence, followed by the next size of boxes in sequence. We need to determine how many boxes of each size are represented in the different divisions as that will have an impact on sequence. For the best use of the available shelf space all boxes of the same size should be together in any sequence. For argument sake let us assume that we have three sizes to work with. That will give us something like this:
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Prints - Geographical (nationality or culture)
Europe 15th & 16th centuries
Alphabetical by artists
small boxes
medium boxes
large boxes
Europe - Italy - 17th century
Alphabetical by artists
small boxes
medium boxes
large boxes
****
Prints - Major artists - 15th & 16th Century
Prints - Major artists - 17 & 18th Century
Prints - Major artists - 19th Century
Prints - Major artists - 20th Century
Prints - contemporary artists with ties to Boston / alphabetical by name
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Photographs
With the expectation that all the photographic negatives will be moved to off-­‐site storage, the next consideration is how to arrange the collections of photographic prints. We must consider arrangement by: !
Photographer / by photographer, A-Z,
followed by the large collections, also alphabetically
• Aarons
• Abdalian
• Chamberlain
• Jones
Geographic area /
Unlike the practice with print collections, photographs arranged by geographic area are reflecting the area
depicted, not the nationality of the photographer; yes, it is inconsistent. Here you would put highest use
materials first followed by a logical order reflecting the quantity of materials represented rather than political
divisions, such as:
• Boston / Boston Pictorial Archive
• Massachusetts
• New England
• U.S.
• England
• Europe
• Canada
• Latin America
• Asia !
Topics depicted
This will need careful consideration as I think we have too many of these and we need to pare this down. Some
topical collections that we have now include:
• Views of Ireland
• Worlds Fairs and Expos
• American Yachts
• Railroads
• Colleges
• The Passion Play at Oberammergau
• New England Gravestones !
Portraits / A-Z by sitter is the commonest, with sub-sections for format
• Cased images
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• Cabinet cards
• Cartes de visite
Format / because of the particular dimensions of some photographic objects it is expedient and desirable to keep
them together rather than interspersed with other formats
• Stereo views
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• Albums
Postcards
Postcards are both prints and photographs, and we have an enormous collection, which makes it worth keeping as its own section, although as these are lower use collection, relocation to off-­‐
site storage should be considered. • Geographic
• Boston
• US by State
• Europe
• Asia
• By Collector/Firm
• Kattenburg
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• Tichnor Brothers
Ephemera
The Library of Congress’ Thesaurus for Graphic Materials de>ines ephemera as: Transient everyday items, usually printed and on paper, that are manufactured for a speci>ic limited use, then often discarded. Includes everyday items that are meant to be saved, at least for a while, such as KEEPSAKES and STOCK CERTIFICATES While this can be a catch-­‐all category for everything that doesn’t >it anywhere else, there are several popular collections that >it legitimately into this category. They generally conform to a standard size and this is not expected to take up a large amount of space. Typical sub-­‐headings under ephemera include: • matchbook covers
• trade cards (note these may be found in quantity in other parts of the collection, especially the Prang
collection)
• broadsides
• sample books
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CURRENT FORMS OF INTELLECTUAL ACCESS
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Intellectual access to image collections has always been a challenge. Trying to apply rules for bibliographic or archival description to pictures has not been notably successful. One problem that we face today is that we may expect too much of our tools. We need to provide access to our users, we need to keep track of the incoming and out-­‐going of materials, we need to track the provenance of our collections, and we need to be able to >ind the items on the shelves. Users will want access through a public web site, and will not want to learn a complicated new system but rather would like to just “google it.” This means that whatever decisions we make for the Print Department must be compatible with existing online catalogues for the Library. For a collection as under-­‐described as this one we have the opportunity to make some decisions based on what others have learned and implement best practices from the outset. In future reports I will address standards for descriptive metadata for image collections. Here I will lay the groundwork by describing the currently available tools for discovery of the print and photographic collections. !
Online
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It should come as no surprise that while there are all sorts of discovery tools or >inding aids available for parts of the Print Collection few of them are available online. What the public can see on the web site landing page (at http://www.bpl.org/research/print/index.htm) is little more than boiler-­‐plate overview of the collection highlights. Prints are featured prominently and major photographic collections less so. Still, the page leaves much to be desired. The persistent user may >ind her way to the list of special collections (although not from a link on the Print Collection’s page). The page listing special collections includes links to the image collections made available on >lickr (https://www.>lickr.com/photos/boston_public_library/) and then provides several options for viewing the >lickr images. Scrolling down one arrives at an alphabetical listing of “Physical Collections,” the >irst item of which happens to be the Jules Aarons Collection of photographs in the Print Collection. A single sentence description is included along with a less useful link back to the Print Collection’s landing page. In all, approximately 48 collections from the Print Department are included in this listing and are accompanied by short descriptions. These short descriptions and the extensive spreadsheets prepared during the digitization project will form the nucleus from which more comprehensive access to the collection will be provided. !
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Machine Readable
Lists that have been compiled over the years exist in hard copy and in some cases in machine readable >iles. Word documents for lists of important photographic collections including early photographs of the American west, photographs of Native Americans, photographs by various photographers including Yousef Karsh, Lewis Hine, Alexander Gardner, Carlotta Duarte, J. W. Black and others. To date I have located twenty-­‐>ive word document lists of photographs, three of print collections, and one listing acquisitions for 2010. Although compiled as lists and not consistent in the types of data collected these word documents will translate quite adequately into spreadsheets which can be edited and converted to a standard set of >ields. Work on the conversion to spreadsheets began this summer in collaboration with the Metadata Lab and another Simmons intern. Spreadsheets exist for the parts of the collection that have been digitized. The data on these sheets is not necessarily consistent with the data structure standard that will evolve in the process of this study but they are a huge head start. Excellent work has been done on them to ensure that standardized vocabularies have been used correctly. Some authority work on names has been accomplished as well. More needs to be done that is outside the scope of the Metadata Lab, requiring subject or genre expertise. !
Typescripts
The unpublished typescript list of the Wiggin Collection is a treasured artifact. It exists on brittle, legal-­‐size, onion-­‐skin paper. I was recently able to scan the typescript and now we have a back-­‐up in the form of a pdf >ile and a new print-­‐out. Although the typescript holds an important place among the department’s records, the information it contains does in fact exist elsewhere. Most of the prints from the original donation as well as subsequent gifts have catalogue cards with the relevant information. What makes this list special, is the interweaving of books related to the prints, comments on various artists, erudite assessments of the quality of particular set, and how the work came to be acquired. Among the most striking that I came across in my perusal of the list was the note that the complete set of The Life of the Virgin by Albrecht Dürer (published in 1511) is “a very >ine set which once belonged to William Morris and was bound in vellum at his Kelmscott Press.” !
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Highlights from the “Survey of the Complete Collection of Prints, Drawings and Books in the
Possession of Albert H. Wiggin, Esq.”
Rembrandt, p. 11
Notes have been made by Mr. Wiggin giving his card catalogue
number in the margin of both the text and the reproduction of the
prints that he owns.
Francis Wheatley “The Cries of London,” Without doubt the most famous English coloured prints of the 18th
p. 21
century. This is a very fine set complete with the 13 subjects. A
number of sets appear with only 12 titles…
Felix Fuhot, p. 32
This is by far the most complete collection of Buhot etchings in this
country. There are 236 etchings, many of which are exceedingly rare
trial proofs or early states, some of which were unknown to
Bourcard who made the definitive catalogue of Buhot’s etched
work…
James A. McNeil Whistler, p. 49
A collection of 57 etchings from the cancelled plates. From the
Dodswell collection. This contains 12 things of which no
impressions were taken before the plates were cancelled, which are
known to exist…
I include these notes to call attention to the kinds of information that is typically essential to the study of prints. Beyond the basics of what we think of as “bibliographic” data (artist, artist’s dates, country of birth, title, published date, place) there is a wealth of important information that has accumulated around each historical piece. We must ensure that this information continues to connect to the original objects. Another typescript of interest is the four-­‐volume set of binders containing John Merriam’s personal record of his collection. Sometime in the late 1990s a group of interns from the Art Institute of Boston went through all the boxes of the Merriam collection then on the shelves and created an inventory.8 As I examined this notebook it was obvious that the majority of the text was a computer printout, although it is heavily interleaved with handwritten notes and the state of completion is unclear. Upon enquiry the print collection staff was able to produce the seven three-­‐and-­‐a-­‐half inch >loppy discs on which the data was stored. We are currently trying to determine if this data can be salvaged as it would constitute a huge savings of time if we could base our survey of the Merriam collection shelves on the work already done. If the data is not salvageable a scanned copy of the printout might yield satisfactory results. !
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8
Note for the future, art students, delightful though they may be, should not be entrusted with the creation of bibliographic records or any kind
of standardized description for which they are not trained. These bibliographies were apparently never reviewed and because of their chaotic
lack of standardization are almost impossible to use. Better supervision and training, plus use of graduate library & information science students
essential for this type of task.
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Card catalogues
There are approximately 48 drawers of catalogue cards documenting the print collection and another dozen for the collection of photographs. Cards were made for some special collections, such as the Louis Prang collection. Cards were reported to have been made for the prints in the Tosti collection, but these have not yet surfaced (although we do have some leads). The main card catalogue is divided into two sections, each alphabetical by artist. One is devoted to artists for whom catalogues raisonnés (CR) have been published, and for whom the cards have been appropriately annotated with the CR numbers. When showing me the catalogue a staff member mentioned that she thought that there had been “some slippage” in this distinction and my examination of the cards con>irms this suspicion. One very important feature of the cards is that on the verso there is acquisition information. It seems likely that scanning these cards would be very useful. What the cards are not helpful with is the location of the objects, for that we remain dependent on the print collection staff. !
Published descriptions
One particularly helpful aspect of the world of print collections is that unlike other works of art, by their very nature prints were issued in multiple copies. Works such as Bartsch’s Le Peintre Graveur and the published catalogues of major collections set a standard for the description of prints. The political caricatures in the Wiggin collection, for example, were not given a new typed list but photocopies of the appropriate pages from the British Museum’s Catalogue Of Political and Personal Satires with annotations about the Wiggin copy were appended instead. There are many essential published references for a print collection, Wiggin’s book collection included the most important published in the early twentieth-­‐century. And fortunately many large collections have made their collections and published descriptions available online. This doesn’t quite add up to the same thing as copy-­‐cataloguing from World Cat but it holds considerable promise for improving the data that we have available in an ef>icient way. In addition to these massive authorities there are multiple examples of exhibition catalogues in which items from the collection have been featured. Descriptions compiled for such catalogues often represent the latest scholarship on an artist or a topic and we have begun to compile a listing of major exhibitions to which materials have been loaned. One interesting example is the heavily illustrated American Printmaking: The First 150 Years, an exhibition organized by the Museum of Graphic Art in 1969. The exhibition was clearly designed to showcase a private collection, that of J. William Middendorf III, but the documentation is exceptionally useful as each entry notes where other copies or impressions are located. Thus it is possible to learn, for example, that copies of the mezzotint attributed to Philip Dawe known as “The Bostonians Paying the Excise-­‐Man, or Tarring & Feathering” exist at the American Antiquarian Society, the Mahard Report 1
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BPL, the New York Historical Society, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, among others. !
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Departmental correspondence files
Invoices
File cabinets labeled “Invoices 1941-­‐1961” raised my hope considerably until I began investigating them in more detail. They will need some attention before we can tell if they will be truly useful. I saw a lot of handwritten notes and carbons but not a lot of order to them. At some point the department’s correspondence was divided up and the invoices were separated out but it is still quite chaotic. An archival intern is needed here. !
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Side note about the search for a specific purchase — to be continued After reading about the Middendorf collection mentioned above I became curious to know what had happened to the collection. A bit of digging revealed that the collection had been sold at Sotheby’s in 1973. A colleague at Harvard supplied me with a copy of the catalogue from the sale. It looked as though they had simply copied the entries right out of the exhibition catalogue for the sale. Of course I then wanted to know whether Sinclair Hitchings had been able to purchase any items from the sale to >ill in some of the gaps in BPL’s collection. The story of the sale is perhaps best saved for another time, but I was able to locate in the departmental >iles two pieces of correspondence related to the sale — one to George Goodspeed asking him to bid on four speci>ic prints and expressing faint hopes on one or two others. The second carbon was of a letter to librarian Philip McNiff asking for an appointment to discuss what funds might be used to allow them to bid at the sale. And that is all I could >ind. In the next installment I will report on my continued search for items possibly acquired from this sale. Mahard Report 1
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Other than the >iles that purport to have inventories an interesting set of notebooks, currently shelved in the Jordan Room, makes somewhat better use of invoices from the late 1980s and into the 1990s. The invoices were simply photocopied (1 copy for each artist represented on the list of purchased items) and then >iled alphabetically with artist’s names highlighted. This is a system I have not encountered before and indeed the multiplication of pieces of paper makes it an awkward one. I think that an index to the contents would be possible, and since this covers a fairly recent time period, would be extremely useful. Another potential internship project. !
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CONCLUDING REMARKS
The work of three months is covered by this report. Groundwork has been laid for further stages. I will wait until the project is completed to formulate suggestions for changes or improvements to the overall situation. I can see several steps that would make good sense from a preservation point of view and might be put into action sooner rather than later. !
PRELIMINARY RECOMMENDATIONS AND SOME OPTIONS TO CONSIDER
The various collections of photographic negatives currently stored in the print stack should be moved to off-­‐site storage with appropriate climate control. !
A large percentage of these have already been digitized and the negatives need never be handled again. This would free up some space and allow some strategic shifting to take place. Priority should also be given to getting the framed objects (and the empty frames which must be retained for future use) out of this area. They are the least used (after the photographic negatives perhaps) but are currently the most in the way of access to the shelves. I believe that there are also framed art works stored here that do not belong to the print collection and these should be candidates for off-­‐
site storage as well. A variety of storage solutions for framed art are available including screen storage and integrated shelving options. !
Determine what size containers, and how many, are needed to house the matted prints that are currently piled on shelves. Depending on the size, some of these may need to be put in drawers rather than boxes. A major step toward improving the overall condition of the stacks would be to get everything into the proper containers. !
Identify a proper workspace where items from the collection can be examined and processed without risk. !
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