Final Thoughts about the internship

I am looking forward to the end of this internship. I have worked harder than on any other class so far. But I am taking with me more than I can even begin to identify. The Long Branch PL Local History Room is a work in process but it has the strong foundations already in place. This means that I had the amazing opportunity to explore solutions within an defined structure which provided grounding but allowed me to push the boundaries because there was not yet a rigid standardization of process. There is a very complete list of policies and procedures for using the room - but an evolving set of standards for processing the collections. I feel that I was part of the development of the standards by virtue of being one of the first people to document a collection and create a Finding Aid.

I will be creating a pathfinder to the collection files on the computer so they can be accessed and updated after I am gone. The Elsalyn Palmisano Collection is an active collection and will be continually changing. The files will need to be updated periodically to reflect this.

We are also going to combine all the files that make up the Elsalyn Palmisano collection and create one file for Tonya Badillo who will create a .pdf file. This file will then be linked to the web page so that the finding aids will be available online.

Future volunteers will need a copy of the pathfinder and the steps to follow to update existing files or to process a new collection and document it according to the Local History Room new standards. I will create some kind of instruction manual.

*****

This is my last post - I would like to thank the Long Branch Public Library for being the host for my SCILS internship. Ingrid Bruck supported all my educational efforts throughout the past year. Francine Marks supported the entire internship by providing an environment that is technically top notch. Supplies, cataloging, computer support, whatever - we asked for it, we got it. And finally I would like to thank my mentor and supervisor, Elsalyn Palmisano, for not only agreeing to give up her time to be with me in the Local History Room, but also providing guidance, advice, training, wisdom and experience above and beyond what was expected. I not only will finish this internship with a wealth of new experience but I will have a large portfolio of material that I have created and that Elsalyn has encouraged me to collect. In even the tiniest things, Elsalyn finds a lesson and provides her intern with a toolkit that travels far beyond the walls of the Local History Room.

Always changing, never ending

At NJLA (4/30/08) I attended a workshop "Trash or Treasure" presented by Chad Leinaweaver (Newark PL) and Tim Corlis (Rutgers Special Collections). Tim spoke mostly about mold and the ruinous affect it can have on your collections. Don't accept moldy items which can infect the rest of your collection. Tim provided the terminology for a mold policy that Elsalyn P wrote down and presented to the LBPL director who will then go to the Board of Trustees. If the Board adopts the policy, the library has a position to take with all future donors. If a gift is even suspected of containing mold, will the donor provide funding so that measures can be taken immediately to remove the mold? If not, the library can refuse a gift unless they deem the gift valuable enough to use library funds to restore item.

New books being processed - cataloged, stamped and displayed.....older books being moved to shelves from display areas and duplicates removed from shelves (remember from an earlier post, not necessarily removed from the library).

In March I posted that the library director and volunteer consultant went to investigate the old photographs from Long Branch that were to be auctioned. The Board agreed to fund $175 - unfortunately we later found out that the winning bid was $185. Too bad! But worse the scuttle butt about the pictures is that the purchaser only wanted the frames. So upon taking the newly purchased antiquities home, the new owner removed the photographs from the frames and threw them away. Lessons learned? Make your interests known when purchasing a collection - you never know when the competition is competing for something completely different. Also, if possible, have some flexibility with price. Would $25 more dollars have made any difference?

Local History Room Transformation

Pre- Internship

Filing cabinets were unmarked, several collections were housed in boxes on the floor. There was no order to the collection of material, just years of accumulation.




Post - Internship

Vertical file collections are displayed neatly throughout the room. Boxes that were previously full of material are now stored in the attic ready to be reused. The Local History room has a good supply of archival material - clear sleeves, acid free folders, boxes and Hollinger style boxes. The room is well setup to process additional collections most of which are stored in the tall metal cabinets.




Filing cabinets are labeled with the name of the collection, binders hold the finding aids for the collections and title pages clearly identify each collection in the binder. The drawers originally had no identification of any kind. Now the drawers are well marked.

Parting Shots

In January, the Local History Room was full of boxes of materials.

Now the boxes are empty and the material has been processed into vertical files. It is the Elsalyn Palmisano Collection of Monmouth County and New Jersey

April activities more than slow budding of flowers

Okay – I am continuing this journal from my last entry as if no time as passed because it hasn’t. I just had to get that first part posted because I am so busy I can barely stop to keep the record of what I am doing but it is important to do. And I must get my thoughts down before more things happen….because they do keep happening. Just when we think the path is straight we get thrown a curve ball.

Space was a big curve ball in the previous entry. More weeding required, more creative thinking, more use of space “up top”. So Elsalyn requested a step ladder with thoughts towards how we will reach this crows nest of storage.

Another realization for me is that new books and donations are constantly coming. This is a dynamic environment. New books are cataloged and then put on display a top the filing cabinets so they can be “seen” before being relegated to the shelves. New book on New Jersey Baseball being ordered (2 copies – one for circulating). Very important to have this book as the author has been asked to speak at the annual Friends Dinner in June. The books will likely be signed by the author at that time. Also purchased the 2 Volume Encyclopedia of New Jersey. 2 copies also purchased of new book “Murders in Monmouth” and “Railroads of Monmouth County”. I went to hear the author of “Murders in Monmouth” speak at a local Borders store. He is incredibly friendly, works at the Monmouth County Library in the Art Dept, did his research at the Monmouth County Archives where I got my start and he is very eager to do speaking engagements as he loves to speak about his book. What could be better? Line up a program! I am finding the network of local authors is very small and very friendly. Everyone knows each other! Helen Pike, a lecturer at SCILS (in Communication) and author of several local books, did a great presentation last month at Monmouth Genealogy Society on getting published. I digress here. Suffice to say that my time in the Local History room is having benefits I never dreamed of.

Back to work.

Other items coming in need donation sheets – these items are valuable, or old, and become the property of the library after donation. We have to decide whether we can keep the item on display or store it away. If it is stored, how do we keep track of it? That is getting ahead of my internship but something Elsalyn and I speak about regularly. At a minimum, the location of the item is written on the donation sheet so we have some idea of where things are.

One recent donation was the picture of the first female postmistress of Long Branch – Ida Scholes or Showles. The date is unknown but the roads are dirt, the carriage is horse drawn and the clothing seems turn of the century. I’m sure there are web sites that use clothing to date pictures…..I’ll have to take a look in my spare time….. The interesting anecdote about this donation is that Elsalyn thought this woman looked familiar and she went rummaging in another collection of photos and pulled out a group photo of several postmasters and postmistresses. Elsalyn had remembered this photo existed somewhere in the Local History room and made the connection. Without a consultant/librarian overseeing a collection, this type of “connecting of the dots” would not happen. These two photos that link together (but have different spellings of the name and require further research) might never have been pulled together.

We have a second Microfilm machine now. 2 researchers can be researching 100 years of newspaper history at one time. This is great because we have a diligent volunteer who is always on one machine…..other people can get some viewing time now too.

Upcoming events. I am scheduled to attend a free all day workshop offered by NJSL and run by NEDCC on Preservation. This fits in perfectly with the internship. Last October I took the workshop on Disaster Planning, also run by the same group. It was a great day so I am looking forward to this upcoming event in May. I am also looking forward to the History and Preservation Section programs at NJLA. Of course, I am also looking forward to the Reference Section programs. My loyalty is split since I am the Student at Large on the Reference Section Board and I am interested in both sections events.

Other Local events that are coming up should be attended by the Local History Librarian. My time at LB as a volunteer may or may not come to end but someone should attend events held, for example, by the Long Branch Historical Association. The Slocum Murder evening program will be April 30^th and will be at Boro Hall in LB. We usually get a representative from LBHA coming to the library’s programs, so reciprocation is important.

Another thing that would have been nice for me to do and should be done by the local history librarian is putting a tidbit of history in the local paper each month. While I was working on Outreach I had to get news about the library’s programs in to the newspapers – I could have taken advantage of the time and maybe pulled some local history information. But that is not part of my internship and there wasn’t time in my work hours to cover the research. Also, it might have required that the local paper and I setup a schedule and set aside some space for the “monthly history corner” or some such space. But certainly food for thought for future work and publicity possibilities.

Cataloging problem that is a holdover from the conversion to SIRSI system. An anonymous MARC record has as many as 50 sub entries – books that couldn’t be easily converted because a MARC record didn’t exist that books could be attached to. It costs $10 to create a new MARC record so many of these unique reference books were relegated to the anonymous MARC with I’m sure the intent to resolve it once everything was up and running. But guess what – no one ever had time to go back, find the books, find the records, recatalog them as appropriate. So if a patron comes in looking for a book on Healey Poetry for example, the Long Branch copy is not in the catalog. It is not searchable by title – but they own it. And if someone could pull all the books in this limbo status and fix them it would be great. Another job for a volunteer……

Glassine folder from Gaylord. These are archival folders for photographs. We have a pretty good supply of materials in the Local History Room thanks to the forethought of Elsalyn. She has a good relationship with the staff at LB so asks for supplies whenever she needs them.

“Artifacts” - Long Branch Marathon T Shirts were in archival box. NOT the sort of thing the Local History has room for. Great material for a display since the next marathon is coming up. We gave these T Shirts to the director and kept any paper record of the marathon for the collection.

I thought I was going into April with my foot on the brake....

Journal – finishing up March moving into April and some serious decision making

The internship is getting harder – or perhaps more thought provoking is a better way to say it. It is an iterative process. Revisiting decisions and changing them when appropriate. If I was forced to stick with all the previous decisions I might have been frozen by fear of making mistake. But in fact we made decisions as necessary to move forward, discovered new things and found better ways to describe, order, label or organize the information. An onion or artichoke of a project.

One change has become clear that could only have occurred when we reached this point of filing away all the boxes of paper. We don’t have enough room. We need more filing cabinets to store the collections but there is no room, nor are there any spare filing cabinets around. Elsalyn is rapidly rethinking the design of the room and her collections. Should Library Archives remain downstairs in Reference and what other material might be combined there? How can the collections be logically organized so they are easily accessed and described so people can find things easily.? We are mainly concerned with the materials in the vertical files. Material that will be housed separately in acid free boxes will definitely remain in the Local History Room. But perhaps the Long Branch Library and City of Long Branch part of the Elsalyn Palmisano Collection will be moved to filing cabinets in the Reference area, freeing up space in the local history room for some expansion of the Monmouth County and New Jersey Collection. This makes sense since the Library archives are stored in Reference and the newspaper clipping files of Long Branch are stored in Reference.

We’ve been doing a little peeking at some of the other collections that need processing. BIG MISTAKE! So tempting to take things out and look for treasures. This material has been stored for years and never processed. It is all manuscript or photographic material with a few unrelated books thrown in. Future volunteer work for my spare time!

Speaking of unrelated: We have seen the importance of a clear mission statement several times in the past few weeks. Both with recent donations and with some of the items we uncovered while exploring the older treasures. You can’t keep everything and you can’t accept everything that is offered. I’ve mentioned before that books were sold that weren’t part of the mission of the special collection and this money was used to improve the room. As mentioned above we have a space problem. You want to keep anything that improves the collection and maintains the focus of Long Branch, Monmouth County, New Jersey. But it is imperative that ownership of an item is transferred from the donor so the library has every right to sell anything that doesn’t enhance the collection. Sometimes duplicate items provide an opportunity to select the better item, antique books are fun but might be better appreciated in a different collection. Photographs need special care – too many unknown photos just create a storage problem.

And more iterations of naming conventions. We are making more decisions about folder titles and even about the best way to go about quickly labeling several hundred folders. Teamwork helps. One person reads and the other one types. It is much quicker than handwriting a list by yourself. And more fun and interactive. The fun begins when the “discussions ensue”.

One thing EP mentioned that would be important to store away for future reference is her hindsight shared with me the other day. The Elsalyn Palmisano Collection covers all of Monmouth County and all of New Jersey. Instead of creating folders as we uncover material and wondering if we already had a folder for this subject or geographic area, EP would have made a list of municipalities and counties in the region and automatically setup a folder for each one. This way we would know we have a folder for any material and any new material would already have a folder. These folders would be part of the Finding Aid and Authority List and would not have to added later. The prework would have saved some effort later. But we didn’t think of it.

Seeing the forest through the trees.....

Another busy day – March 10, 2008

More labels, more sorting of the collection into logical files. Papers everywhere on the table, slips of paper on each pile identifying the folder title. Logically trying to get the folders into the drawers where they might eventually reside. This makes it easier to find things, see the space remaining, continually revisit the breakdown of the series within the collection.

For example, the collection of Monmouth County and New Jersey History has already been broken out into an Administration series which includes all kinds of information on special collections around New Jersey. This is a “how to” collection with reference material from places like Rutgers Special Collection and Newark Public Library. It is very interesting to see different collections and different write ups of these collections.

Also, the Long Branch specific material has been broken out into its own series. It has turned out to be a serious collection of material so didn’t fit into a folder or two within Monmouth County. This evolution of design happened after exploring the material and examining the detail of the content. This would not have been possible by just going by the original collection description. Sometimes material is well organized and folders already exist and just need to be examined for paperclips and perhaps re-housed in acid free folders. And sometimes a collection might be huge, containing many thousands of items and the process I’ve been going through with Elsalyn P might take years.

Some of the material in the folders may need repair. Folded manuscripts should be opened if possible and stored that way to limit the wear on the folded section of the paper. Newspapers should be copied onto acid free paper if possible. Put the name and date on the paper if it is known. Its not always possible to get this information from a scrap of newsprint. Whether you throw away the original once you have a copy is a matter of policy generally. In our case we are only removing duplicate information – and even duplicate information may not be thrown away. It may be given to other repositories or even to the reference department for their archives. Every item is reviewed.

While sorting the material into folders, we are also identifying as we go the authority file or index. We are doing this on slips of paper also. If this collection was hundreds of boxes in size, this solution would not work. I think a laptop on the table with entries made immediately would be a solution or perhaps index cards that are constantly updated and reshuffled according to changes. In hindsight, I think I would have been comfortable with index cards with this collection, wrapping a big rubber band around the stack each night, everything sorted and tagged, ready for the next visit.

I had an interesting opportunity to witness the proposed accession of some material for the LB Special Collection. The director received an offer from a customer who knew of an auction of some material and had put in a silent bid for the grouping. The director asked Elsalyn Palmisano, consultant for the Special Collection, and the librarian responsible for the collection what their thoughts were on the topic. Elsalyn immediately posed, in writing, several questions about appraisal.

1) Had anyone actually seen the photographs that were being offered?

2) Do we know who is in the photos?

3) What is the size of each of the photos?

4) What is the condition of the photos and the frames?

5) Are they part of a bigger collection?

6) Where would the money come from to purchase these photos?

7) Where would we put them?

My initial reaction was kind of negative since the walls in the room are full and I couldn’t conceive of how we’d store these additions but Elsalyn’s logical questions clarified the situation. First, if we know who these are pictures of they become more valuable to library. We can do an exhibit, we can place them properly in the collection, we can confirm our mission statement and confirm that they fit within our collection policy. Size is an issue if we have to store the items and condition is imperative to know. If the material is damaged then how much money will it cost to repair them? Conservation can be very costly – do we have the budget to purchase AND preserve these items? This ties into the budget line question and where exactly would we get the money from. Is there money available in the budget? The question about whether the photos were part of a bigger collection is interesting. It raises other questions about provenance and rights to ownership along with possibilities that there might be more pictures we would eventually consider purchasing. So many issue stemming from one seemingly simple question.

In the end, the Board makes the decision to buy or not. They must approve the expenditure so all the answers to the above questions must be provided to them so they make their decision with full knowledge of the situation.

Another discussion item – we sometimes change our minds but its fun to talk through a problem and come up with a solution. Anyway, we have several very famous women who have their own folder of materials. Dorothy Parker (annual event in Long Branch is Dorothy Parker Day), Alice Paul, Mary Philbrook. We also have one very famous rock musician, Bruce Springsteen. The question is, do I file them under their last name or first name? Right now I’ve put them under their first name with a See Also entry requirement by last name. But this may change…..

Ok - more stuff on what to keep and what to remove.
Duplicates - what is retention policy of non unique material? For Long Branch the policy is two for the file (in case one gets lost) and one for an exhibit. If you have more than three of anything you consider tossing it or bartering it with another organization. Or even giving it to another organization.

What about collecting outside the policy? Maybe another repository can use it - dont' keep anything that doesn't fit nicely into your collection otherwise you'll wind up with no "collection" but a mass of unrelated material.