Black Album Project

This morning until lunch I rehoused several objects. As it turns out, this may be one of the last days I will be rehousing. After lunch, Bridgette showed us our next project - cataloging the "black albums." These large photo albums were likely put together sometime in the 1950's. They hold photos of the park that span the decades. The photos are held in the albums by photo corners, and most photos have short labels and captions glued underneath. The albums are arranged by subject. Topics include rivers, geysers, park employees, and roads. Each of the seasonals and interns will be responsible for cataloging one of these albums, which are about 140 pages each. 

Like many projects here at the HRC, things are not as straightforward as they seem. We have to catalog each photo in our respective albums as part of the larger catalog entry for each album. So, if my album had the overarching catalog number YELL 133867, I would label it YELL 133867-1, and each photo in the album would follow in consecutive order (YELL 133867-2, YELL 133867-3, etc.). However, many of the individual photos within each album have already been catalogued with their own individual catalog numbers. 

Therefore, we are to skip these photos in the numbering process, but still need to include their catalog numbers in ANCS+. We have to go through our album page by page and describe each page in ANCS+. We don't need to go into excruciating detail but do need to say what the page of photos is about, any famous figures in them, how many are on each page, and list the catalog numbers on each page (those already cataloged as well as those we are numbering). 

We also have to interleave each page with acid free paper and scan each page into the computer. We will link these scanned images into the catalog record as smaller files, and also keep a separate folder on the shared drive for the scans from each album. The larger files will be non-compressible to ensure their detail and quality lasts as long as possible. Unfortunately, there is only one scanner that four of us will be sharing for this project. Therefore, we will each have one day a week where we are solely responsible for scanning our albums. Each page takes 20+ minutes to scan, not to mention saving it in ANCS+, changing the orientation to portrait so they will be right side up, and saving them under their new file names. 

Bridgette told us these albums will from here on out be one of our primary focuses, but doesn't expect us to finish them by the end of the summer. She just wants us to get as far into them as possible. Our other focus will be working on a new exhibit for the lobby, which we will find out more about tomorrow.