Autographs for Freedom and Reaching a New Abolitionist Audience

Scholars correctly appreciate Frederick Douglass’s novella The Heroic Slave (1853) as an important early work of African American literature and as a significant indicator of its author’s endorsement of violent tactics to end slavery in the United States.1 This essay will literally step back farther from the text of Douglass’s only fictional work, and examine The Heroic Slave as a component of a larger project—the gift book Autographs for Freedom—edited by Douglass and his closest ally in the early 1850s, British abolitionist Julia Griffiths. The thirty-nine pieces of short fiction, poetry, essays, and correspondence in the 263-page anthology were envisioned as tools to construct a wider and politically more potent antislavery alliance than any in which the two abolitionists had previously participated. In the diverse composition of its collection of authors and antislavery themes, Autographs for Freedom was both a cultural and political tool designed by Douglass and Griffiths to help assemble a more powerful antislavery coalition from the volume’s reading audience

Maximizing Good: An Inquiry-Based Approach to Minimal Description for Online Archives

Minimal descriptive practices have been embraced by archives over the past fifteen years for their efficiency and practicality. This paper explores the strengths and weaknesses of minimal description within the context of digitized collections and evaluates them against the assumptions made by cultural heritage professionals. It considers whether minimal description provides digitized collections with sufficient metadata to meet MPLP’s user-centered goals of improving access, sufficient context to ensure collections are understandable within their digital environments, and sufficient framework to facilitate data exchange across systems, all while considering MPLP within archival ecosystems that impact labor and resource allocation. The authors offer a set of questions under four themes that challenge these assumptions and promote critical evaluation of professional norms related to minimal description of digitized collections. Recommendations are presented that realign methods to develop nuanced strategies that maximize our ability to steward our collections, respect our labor, and serve our users

Overcoming legacy processing in photographic collections through collaboration and digital technologies.

In the 1960s, a Louisville photography studio began donating its negatives, prints, and invoices to the University of Louisville Photographic Archives. The Caufield & Shook Collection remains a significant primary source for local history and a prime candidate for digitization. Unfortunately, on its receipt non-archivists processed the collection with little documentation of original order or organizational decision making. Additionally, workflow choices were determined largely by the desire to maximize student labor. In 2017, the Digital Initiatives Librarian worked with in-house application developers and archives staff to create a workflow that has significantly sped up the process of making this valuable photographic collection accessible online. This article describes how archivists recovered from the poor processing decisions, used technology to enhance the digitization workflow, and developed a list of best practices for future processing and digitization of large photographic collections

Breaking Out of the Box: Transforming Archival Collections and Workflows through Collaborative Description Projects

Archivists and archival collections can often be siloed into the “special” corner of their parent library: under described, underutilized, and often even unknown. Finding a path out of isolation may require taking a new look at collection management needs and considering new partners in the work. Collaboration with colleagues can result in positive ripple effects that extend beyond the initial project goals. This session will highlight three innovative description projects where archivists partnered with non-archivists to improve access to targeted collections and will detail how their collaborations transformed their archival collections, work structures and relationships, and, ultimately, their users. After the three presentations, the session audience will have the opportunity to brainstorm with the presenters and with each other about where their opportunities for collaboration and transformation lie. What underutilized collections in your repository are just waiting for that perfect combination of excitement and expertise to blossom into wonderful research resources? Which person down the hall from you, in the next cubicle, or in a separate building could be your next transformation partner

Preserving and Integrating Conservation Photography at the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields as the 2016-2017 VRAF Intern

The Clowes Collection of Old Master Paintings housed at the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields (IMA) includes seventy-eight works by Flemish, Spanish, English, Dutch, and Italian masters, comprising some of the museum’s most important artworks. The IMA recently embarked on an interdepartmental project to create a new digital catalogue that will highlight the history of each piece. What makes this publication unique is an emphasis on the conservation history as documented in thousands of images, including X-ray, infrared, and UV photographs. In order to facilitate this project, it became necessary to bring together all conversation imagery regarding the Clowes Collection, apply appropriate metadata, create new metadata workflows for Conservation staff, and ingest the images into Piction, the museum’s DAMS. Over the course of six months, the author worked collaboratively with the Conservation, Photography, and Archives department at the IMA to integrate Conservation assets into Piction. This work involved consulting multiple standards for visual resource management, building a custom schema, creating a custom controlled vocabulary, and working with the DAMS vendor, all within a set time frame. Acknowledgements: The author would like to thank the Kress Foundation and the Visual Resources Association Foundation for whom this project was possible due to their generous funding. At the 2017 Visual Resources Association annual conference in Louisville, Kentucky, the author presented the following work as the VRAF Intern at the poster session. Sharing the experience, including the successes and challenges of the project, with others in the visual resources field provided the author with invaluable professional development growth. The practical experience gained from the internship not only solidified the author’s metadata skills, but gave her the opportunity to develop project management, communication, and training skills, all of which has been integral to her professional growth. She would also like to thank Samantha Norling, Tascha Horowitz, Anne Young, Annette Schlagenhauff, David Miller, Fiona Beckett, Erica Schuler, and the entire Conservation department at the IMA for their expertise and enthusiasm during this collaborative project