Today I started working on cataloging a black album. For the black albums, we are all creating our catalog record on Microsoft Word, which we will cut and paste into ANCS+ when we are finished. The records are not typical catalog records, because if we included careful details about each photo, we would never finish them. Basically, we are making it possible for people to search ANCS+ for which page to look at to see photos by topic. As I mentioned in Monday’s post, many of the photos are already cataloged. These catalog numbers refer to the negatives rather than the photos themselves. The negatives are considered the objects, because they are the originals. Many of the photos, however, do not have catalog numbers. I am responsible for cataloging these photos. Also, many have other catalog numbers, such as those used by the individual photographers.
Black Album (all 131 pages!)
A volunteer, Bob, spent a great deal of time filling out worksheets that detailed the information about each of the photos in the black albums. The worksheets list the photos on each page of each album, which are cataloged, other catalog numbers used to identify the photos, which photographs do not have assigned catalog numbers, a short description of what each photo portrays, and the dates the photos were taken when known. These sheets are very helpful when typing the information into the word documents that will be come the catalog records.
One of the sheets Bob prepared
There were lots of sheets to enter into the catalog record!
After a while, I realized it would be helpful to label each of the photos in the album before typing in the catalog record. At the same time as I did this, I updated Bob’s worksheets (he had left the catalog number section blank in those that weren’t cataloged). These worksheets will be kept in folders along with printouts of our catalog records to be used as finding aids for the black books.
Numbered Photo (I used white pencil to make the numbers on the black paper)
Labeling the photos took much longer than I expected and it became a little frustrating. First, I went through the worksheets and labeled each of the blank catalog number areas with catalog numbers in numerical order (YELL 185319-1, YELL 185319-2, etc). A few small errors in the sheets, as well as missing photos in the albums that I had given catalog numbers to on the worksheets resulted in my having to renumber the sheets over and over again before I labeled the photos. It was a very time consuming process and I worked on that up until the end of the workday. I hope to finish labeling the photos and to complete the catalog record in Word tomorrow so that I can begin photographing the pages next week.
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