| November 2001 |
HAVERFORD COLLEGE |
No. 28 |
Table of Contents
From the Librarian
As readers of this Newsletter know,
the Library established a memorial fund honoring the late Michael
Freeman, Librarian of the College from 1986-1999. In consultation
with his family and the College, the Library decided to use the
fund over several years to recognize the accomplishments of History
Department students in History 361, Seminar on Historical Evidence,
and in the Senior Thesis Seminar. Michael was much involved in
History 361 and was himself a historian both by predilection and
training. The prizes are given to students whose work demonstrates
special achievement in doing research and using archival materials.
In addition to these two prizes, the Freeman funds are also available
to augment History Department funds that students may apply for
to defray the costs of their research.
Michael Freeman, Librarian of
the College, 1986-1999
In academic year 2000/2001, History
Department faculty selected Caroline Boyd '02 to receive the Michael
Freeman Research Prize for work done in History 361 on the letters
of a Philadelphia merchant sailor to his family in the 1820s.
Department faculty also selected Mary Stryker ’01 to receive
the Senior Thesis Prize for her thesis on portraits of Elizabeth
I. The Library extends warm congratulations to both students on
their fine work.
-Bob Kieft is Librarian of the
College
The Paul Strand Collection at Haverford
by William Williams
The first in an occasional series of articles
featuring areas of the collections the Library is building with
old, rare, or unusual items.
When I was appointed to the faculty in 1978 to teach photography,
one of the first things shown to me was the photography book collection
at Magill Library. The selection and range of the books were surprising
and unexpected for a small college library. In addition, photography
had been a recent addition to courses offered by the Fine Arts
Department. The opportunity to teach a studio course was and is
a challenge in a demanding liberal arts environment in which few
students come to the College expecting to major in studio fine
arts courses.
The challenge of designing a curriculum that meets the requirements
of providing students with a satisfying studio art experience
and a firm grounding in a liberal arts college was made easier
by the strong photographic book collection, and a smattering of
original photographs, housed in Magill Library. After reviewing
the photography book holdings, most of which were published in
the 1960's and later, a plan was adopted and supported by Edwin
Bronner, Librarian of the College, to fill in the missing titles
from 1900 on. The period from 1920 to 1950 is considered the golden
age of the photographically illustrated book. It was during this
era that the ability to organize photographic sequences, book
design and technology came together to produce a new type of art
and visual communication.
Paul Strand (1890-1976) is one of the seminal figures
in modern art and photography. He was one of the first to use
books and publications as the primary outlet for the dissemination
of his work beginning with the appearance of his New York City
photographs in "Camera Work Magazine" in 1916 and ending
with the publication of "Ghana, An African Portrait"
in 1976. Strand's photographic reputation was firmly established
at the Twelfth Annual Exhibition of Photographs at
John Wanamaker, Philadelphia in 1916. His retrospective exhibition
at the Philadelphia Museum of Art from November 1971 to January
of 1972, and the publication of Paul Strand: A Retrospective
Monograph. The Years 1915-1968, re-affirmed his pre-eminence.
The show travelled around the country, including a stop in San
Francisco, where Thomas Garver (Haverford '56) supervised the
installation and curated the exhibition for the M.H. de Young
Museum.
In 1972, Mrs. S. Emlen Stokes gave the Magill Library an autographed
copy of Strand's retrospective catalog, signed and dated by him
at the Philadelphia Museum opening. This gift became the foundation
on which the Library's special collection of Strand material was
built. Today, the Library has first edition holdings of all of
Strand's bound books beginning with Time in New England,
published in 1950, and ending with his Ghana book, published in
1976.
The Library staff has tried, whenever possible, to acquire first
editions in superb condition, complete with dust jacket. This
allows students and scholars to experience the book as it reached
its audience when first published. Currently, the Library is searching
for a first edition of Strand's 1945 Museum of Modern Art monograph
by Nancy Newhall, Photographs, 1915-1945: Paul Strand.
This was the first critical monograph published by the Modern
on a photographer. Strand's publications are beautiful in whatever
medium they are published, and so is this one. For Strand, this
book represents both a summing up and a new beginning. From about
1928 on, plants, and in particular Iris flowers, were to become
an important part of his imagery. The dust jacket reproduces his
Iris of 1928 on its front cover, with his name printed in bold
type around the border of the photograph. None of the copies in
the Bryn Mawr or Swarthmore Libraries has retained the dust jacket,
depriving us of primary insights into the chronology of Strand's
iconography, since this image is not reproduced in the book. Strand's
most important publication previous to World War II was the Mexican
Portfolio, published in 1940. Swarthmore College holds
the second printing, published in 1967, but no public collection
in the tri-state region has a first edition of this work. In 2000,
Haverford alums Rafael Fogel and Michael Fogel, provided funds
to purchase one of the twenty plates from the first edition of
the Mexican Portfolio. The Library has placed an
order with the Aperture Foundation to acquire one plate from a
third printing in 2001.
The Paul Strand collection was also augmented by Thomas Garver's
gift of letters from Strand in regard to Garver's work on Strand's
retrospective at the de Young Museum. He also gave a copy of the
exhibition check list with his accompanying critical essay on
Strand's significance as a photographer. These gifts came in 2000.
The Library also has holdings of Strand's silver gelatin prints
made late in his career in Morocco in the 1960s and in Scotland
in the mid-1950s. These two prints are the 1989 gifts of Walter
and Naomi Rosenblum. The Rosenblums were friends of Strand; Walter
was a student and Naomi a leading scholar and expert on Strand's
life and photography.
The Paul Strand collection at Haverford is used in all phases
of teaching photography and the humanities at the College. Books,
prints, and letters are used in the classroom. It is fitting that
the College has material by one of the seminal figures in art
from the last century, who also has deep roots in the Philadelphia
area, as well as Haverford College connections. The depth and
uniqueness of these holdings is a prime example of how, with luck
and gifts from friends, an important part of the life blood of
an academic library is sustained by building on what is here,
so that future generations of faculty and students can adapt them
to changing needs in teaching, scholarship, and the preservation
of culture.
-William Williams is Professor of Fine Arts, Curator of Photography
A View from Inside: A Haverford Alum Looks at
College History
by Joanna Frang, HC ‘01
At Haverford, in the short span between the Saturday
evening deadline to hand in written work and our graduation ceremony
eight days later, otherwise known as "Senior Week,"
senior class members typically take advantage of a rare taste
of "free-time" gathered together on Lloyd Green playing
stickball or simply lying out in the sun. I, however, chose to
spend my Senior Week in Magill Library, engaged in a "laying
out" of quite a different sort. I was busy working on the
layout for an exhibit entitled "Prismatic Memories: Considering
the Contexts of Haverford’s Past," a project that I
worked on during my senior year as a part of my job as a student
assistant in Haverford’s Special Collections Library.
Special Collections is typically responsible for
the development and installation of such Library exhibits, and,
as a result of my two-year affiliation with the department, I
was able to research and prepare the exhibit with the guidance
and encouragement of Manuscripts Librarian and College Archivist,
Diana Franzusoff Peterson, and Quaker Collections Curator, Emma
Lapsansky. I was able to research and plan this exhibit with a
grant provided in memory of Librarian, Michael Freeman. Creating
the exhibit was more of a treat than a chore; it allowed me to
"indulge" my academic and career interests in material
culture and museums with hands-on experience.
Part of the exhibit entitled "Prismatic
Memories: Considering the Contexts of Haverford's Past"
The exhibit took its initial inspiration from questions
raised by the discovery of a medal commissioned by the Class of
1869 in memory of the Class of 1862. The journey from a commemorative
medal to a "finished" exhibit was a long one, and involved
more research, reading, and analysis than I anticipated. In concert
with Diana Franzusoff Peterson, I initially defined what materials
from Special Collections and the Haverford Archives could be used
as artifacts, finally creating a definition that included not
only objects, but also manuscripts, printed works, and photographs.
We also created a paragraph for the exhibit that outlined the
conceptual framework, and I subsequently used this paragraph to
help me select and interpret the artifacts used in the exhibit.
While a major portion of my interest in material
culture and objects is in the multiple ways an object can be approached
and interpreted as historical evidence, our pre-articulated framework
for the exhibit helped me to keep (and occasionally when I got
side-tracked, re-discover) a guiding focus for my research. Despite
coherent conceptual goals and focused research, the final exhibit
actually only displayed about one quarter of the information I
learned during hours of research and reading.
Alongside the historical knowledge I gained through research,
my work on the exhibit also taught me that I have a great deal
more to learn about artifact interpretation and presentation in
the museum setting. It is with the insight that I gained through
the rare opportunity to create and install a history exhibit as
an undergraduate student at Haverford College that I now embark
on my newest journey as a graduate fellow working towards a Master’s
degree from the Winterthur Program in Early American Culture,
a program affiliated with the Museum Studies Department at the
University of Delaware.
Special Collections: from Paper to Digital
by Bob Kieft and Emma Lapsansky
Many libraries today are considering how to make it easier for
the public to have access to the information in manuscripts and
other rare materials. Although scholars, students, and genealogists
continue to travel the globe to work in special collections and
archival repositories, libraries are increasingly looking to digital
means to make more of their materials available to remote users
from their home location.
Initial steps in this direction have been taken
already by the Library as it has mounted finding aids for its
archival collections on its website. Much of this work has been
done through the generosity of J. Morris Evans ’43 (See
the The
J.M. and A.T. Evans Fund Project)and some of it through a
Delmas Foundation grant to a group of special collections libraries
in the Philadelphia area. (See the November
1996, April
1997, and November
1997 issues of this Newsletter for articles about these projects.)
Now, with the continued generosity of Morrie Evans
and the SNAVE Foundation, combined with some seed money from the
Mellon Foundation, the Byrn Mawr and Swarthmore Libraries will
join us in taking the next step: mounting on a website word-searchable
facsimiles and transcriptions of the very documents to which the
finding aids point.
The Library will begin with a pilot project that,
in digitizing a subset of the Cope Evans family papers, will develop
protocols and standards so that we not only have a collection
to serve as the nucleus for the digital archive but also a consistent
technical framework by which to add to it. Taking inspiration
from the leadership of such efforts as the Library of Congress’s
American Memory
Project, the collaborative William
Blake Archive, Edward Ayers’ Valley
of the Shadow project at the University of Virginia, and the
retrospective work of Accessible Archives and ArchivesUSA, the
project will seek to create a coherent intellectual product backed
by documented and reproducible technical standards such as those
developed by Columbia University (http://www.columbia.edu/cu/libraries/digital/criteria.htm),
Cornell University (http://www.library.cornell.edu/preservation/tutorial/selection/selection-01.html),
Duke University (http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/williamson/),
the University of California Digital Library's "Digital
Library Standards and Draft Standards or Dreams of Standards,"
and others.
At this point we foresee hiring someone for two
years to run the project, in tandem with two subcommittees of
Library staff. The first will design a product that will be visually
appealing as well as of maximum scholarly flexibility, assemble
a focus group of faculty and other researchers to help shape the
user’s view of the archive, and assess the software packages
available for managing the central database of the project. This
subcommittee will also research and make recommendations about
how to conceive the collateral data that will maximize the value
of the central project (e.g., investigate the possibility of using
software that would be compatible for linking and/or exporting
genealogical data or visual images, allow "browsing,"
link with such other databases as Accessible Archives, etc.).
The committee will carefully examine software currently used by
museums for tracking exhibitions, exhibition labels, and other
peripheral information in a way that traditional cataloging software
does not. They will also look for software that will allow for
additions and changes as the project grows and evolves and that
can be manipulated by local Library staff for inputting new information
or adjusting existing records or fields. The second subcommittee
will research and codify guidelines for the mechanics of creating
the digital library, e.g., the optimal format, resolution, storage,
and delivery system for digital files in the Tri-College context.
This group will also investigate The Society of American Archivists’
guidelines and standards for EAD markup, appropriate metadata,
etc.; make recommendations about formats that have worked well
for other projects; assess the suitability of existing models
for the collection goals and the economic, personnel, and geographical
limitations of the Tri-Colleges; and consider both the ways in
which we want the archive to be searchable and the structures
needed to allow a user to sort the database in a variety of ways.
In addition to a project coordinator and library
staff, we hope to involve student researchers in this work, not
only because they can bring work skills and a sense of how users
want to interact with such an archive but because this kind of
creative and problem-solving research experience is a hallmark
of the Colleges’ approach to liberal arts education. The
project planning committee includes staff from all three colleges’
special collections departments and Linda Bills, Tri-College Consortium
Special Projects Coordinator. Diana Franzusoff-Peterson and Emma
Lapsansky from Haverford are joined in this planning process by
Chris Densmore, Wendy Chmielewski, Suzanne Morikawa, and Pat O’Donnell
from Swarthmore, and by Eric Pumroy and Marianne Hansen from Bryn
Mawr.
We look forward to an exciting and challenging time
in the next few years, experimenting with the Cope Evans Family
Papers as we begin to build an online archive that will benefit
researchers who work not only on the history of Quakers and Quakerism
but on the whole range of social and historical issues with which
the Quakers are associated.
-Bob Kieft is Librarian of the
College and Emma Lapsansky is Curator of Special Collections
Preserving The Amazon
by Bruce Bumbarger
For each of the past several summers, the Magill
Library Bindery has hosted an intern from Boston’s North
Bennet Street School’s bookbinding and conservation program.
(See Library
Newsletter, No. 24) Under the guidance of Library Conservator,
Bruce Bumbarger, the visitors develop their skills while working
on our collections. As part of their work, each intern is encouraged
to focus on one or two treatment procedures, and some of the projects
on which they work are chosen with these in mind. Syd Fadner,
this summer’s intern, asked to work on techniques used to
conserve nineteenth- century cloth bindings.
William Lewis Herndon’s Exploration
of the Valley of the Amazon (1854) was an ideal candidate
for her project. Published by the U.S. House of Representatives,
the work chronicles an 1851-52 Navy expedition through the watershed
of the Amazon River and its tributaries. Consisting of two text
volumes and a portfolio of maps, our copies showed extensive wear.
The covers were detached, sections of the outer spine on both
volumes were missing, the texts were torn and acidic, and the
sewing structures had failed.
Syd began treatment by washing and deacidifying the text in buffered
deionized water and magnesium bicarbonate baths. After repairing
the many tears and losses with Japanese paper and wheat starch
paste, she resewed both textblocks.
To rebuild the original covers, Syd
used unbleached muslin, acrylic paints, and embossing with wire
screen to simulate the color and texture of the original cloth.
Her goal was not an exact match, as the original embossed patterns
cannot be copied without great expense. Different levels of wear
and color fading on the spine and sides of the books further complicated
the process. After experimentation, she did produce a cloth that
blended "sympathetically" with the original, and used
this to form new spine pieces over which she attached the originals.
The textblocks were then cased into the reconstructed covers.
The maps will now be repaired, a box
will be constructed to house the text volumes and maps, and the
set will be returned to the shelves of the Philips Wing, there
to await the arrival of future scholarly explorers.
-Bruce Bumbarger is Library Conservator
Staff News and Announcements
by Mike Persick
Rich Aldred, Catalog Librarian, was elected in March to
serve on the Steering Committee of the Innovative Interfaces Users
Group. The committee primarily plans and executes its annual meeting,
involving approximately 1400 attendees, to be held in 2002 in
Houston. Rich's primary responsibility is Enhancements Coordinator.
The Users Group compiles and submits a list of proposed enhancements
to the III system software. III uses many of these requests in
its software upgrades.
John Anderies, Music Librarian, will be presenting
a paper entitled "Ethel Louise Lyman and the Early History
of the Indiana University Music Library" at the Music LibraryAssociation
Midwest Chapter Annual Meeting, Indiana University, Bloomington,
Indiana, October 18-20.
Linda Bills, who until recently served as
the Tri-College Library Automation Coordinator, has had a change
of job title and address. She now makes her home at Magill Library
and holds the title of Tri-College Consortium Special Projects
Coordinator.
Jon Mark Bolthouse has joined the Tri-College
Library community as Systems Librarian. Jon Mark comes to us from
the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington, where he
served as Library Systems Coordinator. He will be occupying Linda’s
old office in Canaday Library at Bryn Mawr College.
Bob Kieft, Librarian of the College, closed
his year as Chair of the Collection Development and Evaluation
Section of ALA's Reference and User Services Association with
a program entitled "But I Don't Want a Book; I Need Information"
at ALA's Annual Conference in San Francisco. Five panelists representing
the information provider, mediator, and user communities discussed
the social, economic, and technological forces that are today
shaping information seeking behaviors. Bob also delivered a paper
based on his work with the Guide to Reference Books
for a session about the future of reference publishing at the
Society for Scholarly Publishing's Annual Conference in San Francisco.
November, 2000, saw the publication of his bibliographic essay
"Lit Crit, Snip Crit, the Nitty Grit and the Work of Learning
Literature" in Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries.
Norm Medeiros, Coordinator for Bibliographic
and Digital Services, presented a paper entitled "Academic
Libraries: Hub of Institutional Metadata Deployment" at the
October meeting of the Association of College and Research Libraries,
Delaware Valley Chapter.
Julie Miran, Science Librarian, and Norm
Medeiros co-authored "Glory Days: Managing Scientific
Journals in a Liberal Arts College," a paper that appears
in the Summer 2001 edition of Issues in Science and Technology
Librarianship.
Mary Lynn Morris, Digital Services Librarian,
returned from Pune, Maharashtra, India with her newly adopted
daughter, Runa, on August 15. While in India, Mary Lynn, Runa,
and Marilyn Creamer (Serials Specialist), who accompanied
the new Mom on her trip, took the opportunity to do some sightseeing
in India and experienced some of the sights, smells, and flavors
of Pune, New Delhi, and Agra.
Mike Persick, Assistant Cataloger/Head of
Acquisitions, married Jenna Brown, Business Reference Librarian
at Chester County Library, in August.
Diana Franzusoff Peterson, Manuscripts Cataloger,
gave a workshop called "Mediator on the Ground: Performing
Reference in an Archives or Special Collections Setting"
at the MARAC (Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference) meeting
in Philadelphia in May.
Greg Posey, Tri-College Library Consortium
Web Developer, comes to us from a marketing consulting company
called TPG Telemanagement. He gained his web development experience
primarily with Klatha.com Community Computing based out of Mount
Airy, Pennsylvania and is excited to be able to translate his
diverse interests and background into the library setting.
-Mike Persick is Assistant Cataloger/Head
of Acquisitions
