Student Posters

The Society of Southwest Archivists invites graduate and undergraduate students to submit  a poster presentation at the 2023 Annual Meeting in Albuquerque, April 26-29, 2023.

Posters will be on view in the Franciscan Ballroom on Friday April 28.

 

Increasing Public Awareness to the Treasures of Edgar L. Hewett’s American Southwest (2022-2024)
Heather McClure, New Mexico History Museum & University of New Mexico-Museum Studies Department 

Utilizing a major grant from the National Historical Publications & Records Commission at the National Archives, the New Mexico History Museum’s Fray Angelico Chavez History Library and the Palace of the Governors Photo Archives will digitize and make available the manuscript and photographic collections of Edgar L. Hewett (1865-1946). This project must navigate how to create a major digital collection, make it accessible through a publicly accessible digital platform, and ensure continual access and preservation.  

Among his many accomplishments, Hewett was at the forefront of modern Southwest archaeology. He trained a new generation of American archaeologists and worked tirelessly for the United States Antiquities Act (1906). He led the Museum of New Mexico and the School of American Archaeology (today known as the School for Advanced Research) and preserved the cultural patrimony of New Mexico.  

The Hewett document collection is 24 linear feet of densely packed boxes containing approximately 108,000 documents. Hewett and his correspondents wrote from offices, from the field, via telegram, dictated to secretaries, scribbled on hotel stationery, and produced carbon copies. The text is in a great variety of presentations—handwritten, typed, hand corrected, hand notated, and on different sizes of paper. Due to the great interest in the Hewett document collection from scholars across the humanities and social sciences, we need to treat all documents as worthy of the best digital imaging processes. Hewett was involved in so many projects to which scholars keep returning and re-evaluating, that we need to fully preserve and clearly present all objects. 

The Hewett photography collection has received mixed treatment in the past. It is unprocessed, partially processed, partially dispersed, and partially inventoried. The project photo archivist will perform inventory and reunification; organizing, processing, and rehousing the collection; and creating a significantly revised finding aid. In addition, they will appraise and prepare materials for digitization and will generate item-level metadata for images. While technical metadata will be generated in the digitization process, descriptive metadata will be applied in ArchivesSpace at the series level and in the DAMS at an item level. The work will occur both in-house and outsourced to a digitization vendor chosen based on their long experience working with historic images and their ability to handle special and delicate formats. Many of the negatives are in the volatile nitrate format and will require specialized handling for digitization. Once the materials are returned, we have procedures in place to safely store the nitrate materials in a dedicated freezer.

 

Archival Spots in Parking Lots 
Shandi Burrows

Abstract:
Parking situations at archives hinder accessibility for outside patrons. While some users
of an academic archive are part of the on-campus community, others are out-of-state
researchers or even people in the community looking to use their local resources. Universities
such as mine, The University of Alabama, are very strict with parking violations and if a car is
parked in the incorrect area it can take as little as twenty minutes for a $50 ticket to be present
on the windshield. So where are archival patrons supposed to park? Using data collected from
public universities in Alabama, it becomes clear that around 45% of patrons that use the archive
are not affiliated with the institution and are likely affected by the parking regulations universities
have in place.

My proposal is that archival institutions, namely university archives, should have two to
three designated spots in a parking lot adjacent to their institution. They could also implement a
parking pass system in which patrons who park in these spots come in to get a day pass from
the special collections reference desk to put on their windshield while using the archive. This
could greatly make the archive more accessible to the public, integrate us into the community,
and lessen the dreaded archival anxiety that patrons tend to have.

Concept:
– Where can people park when they try to use the archive (specific case study Hoole)?
– Strict parking at UA, is this unique to UA or other institutions? Not unique sadly
– Hours of operation (9 – 4:45pm) but you can only park on campus without a parking pass
after 5pm so they only overlap on Tuesdays (when the special collection is operating
from 9am – 7pm)

Notes:
– Our patrons include (older people in the community, out of state researchers, UA
affiliated) *I would like to include a pie graph about the exact number and currently
talking to a couple more institutions to collect their data*

Solutions:
– Have three spots like the museum has
– Notarize a piece of paper with the date such as the counseling center has

 

The Digital Reference Desk: Creating a Resource Guide at the Center for Southwest Research
 Mathieu Debic

Purpose of project: To create a guide to in-person and online resources available at the Center for
Southwest Research (CSWR) and create comprehensive tutorials on using these tools aimed at
researchers, students, and University of New Mexico (UNM) faculty and staff. Why? Several different
resources and tools exist under the aegis of the CSWR and UNM University Libraries, and they can be
complicated to use. This project fills a gap by putting comprehensive information about these resources
in one place, allowing researchers to get more out of their visits to the reading room by reducing the
learning curve of the CSWR’s materials.

Description of project: This project consisted of designing, organizing, and composing a public-facing
libguide explaining the CSWR’s resources and offering information on archival research in general. In
my capacity as the 2022-2023 Clinton P. Anderson Reading Room Fellow I have been responsible for
twice-weekly reference shifts in the reading room, answering patron questions in person as well as by
phone and via email. I knew from my experience pulling requested materials that the CSWR’s collections
could be quite confusing, and so worked with the UNM university archivist to create a guide.

I started by making a list of the major CSWR resources, including how diverse collections are assigned identifiers,
and what kinds of materials can be found through different resources. I spent quite some time at this stage of the process
because I wanted to be sure that, if I had to make changes later in the process, these could be accomplished within the
existing framework rather than starting over from scratch. Then, I spent some time organizing these resources and
sketching format possibilities within the constraints of the Springer libguides platform. After deciding on a general format,
I began by creating high-level pages within the libguide, then continued by filling in the more detailed content within each
high-level page. I revised the guide organization as I worked in response to new findings and feedback and used examples
from collections housed by the CSWR to illustrate the guide throughout. Given the guide’s broad intended audience – from
undergraduate students to postdocs, faculty, and community researchers – I designed the guide to be accessible in either a
linear fashion, working down the high-level page menu, or randomly from any individual page in the menu based on specific
interests or questions. Aside from some orienting text on the home page, links within pages to other pages, and occasional
sequential numbering of content blocks, I avoided imposing any specific structure on how patrons might use the guide.
This involved gaining extensive knowledge of the CSWR’s collections, including materials that are not requested often. Finally,
after several months of working on the guide alongside other projects and reference shifts, I submitted the guide for a final review
from the UNM university archivist. I expect the guide to be live and available at the UNM libraries research guide page soon.

Conclusions of project: I doubt that any guide, no matter how detailed, could exhaustively explain the
ins and outs of an archives. The CSWR’s collections are extensive and reflect complex institutional
histories. This project has also demonstrated to me that exercises like this project that involve creating
an explicit roadmap of resources before beginning a long-term research project, can play a strong role in
archival pedagogy by accomplishing two goals at once: familiarizing students with resources available
and potential starting points in their research; as well as helping students develop information
management and curatorial skills. This project has also helped me develop in my archival education by
clearly demonstrating the importance of consistent collections identification.

 

New Mexico Public Media Digitization Project
Rachel Snow

Purpose of project/research
The New Mexico Public Media Digitization Project answers the needs of preservation,
cataloging, description, accessibility, and interpretation of a vital collection of audio/visual
materials spanning fifty years of public broadcasting in New Mexico.

• The first goal of the New Mexico Public Media Digitization Project is to catalog,
  describe, and preserve the content of approximately 9,000 audio-visual assets from
  1970-2021 and to make those digital assets open and freely accessible to the public
  online.
•  The second goal is to create an online exhibition highlighting collection contents. The
  exhibition objectives are twofold 1) to provide a broad interpretation of the collection’s
  significance 2) to encourage public use and exploration of the newly digitized collection,
  available through the American Archive of Public Broadcasting’s online database.

Description of project/research
For decades, New Mexico public media stations recorded programs utilizing broadcast
formats that have fallen by the wayside as technology advanced. These programs exist on
obsolete and deteriorating video and audio formats that are no longer produced, like one-inch
video reels, U-matics, Betacam, MiniDVs, ¼ inch audio reels, and audiocassettes. In 2019,
Michael Kamins, NMPBS Executive Producer for Arts and Cultural Affairs, in collaboration
with Casey Davis Kaufman, MLA Associate Director and American Archive of Public
Broadcasting Manager, with input from Karen Cariani, AAPB Project Director and WGBH
Senior Director at the WGBH Media Library & Archives, applied for and received a generous
grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) to preserve these materials
and give them a new life as open access digital files in the public domain.

To this end, KNME created a partnership with the American Archive of Public Broadcasting (AAPB) to digitize, preserve, and provide open online access to the collections of five leading public media stations in New Mexico: NMPBS/KNME in Albuquerque; KRWG (PBS) in southwestern New Mexico; KENW (PBS) in eastern New Mexico; KUNM (FM) at the University of New Mexico; and KANW (FM) in Albuquerque.

The collection contains in-depth coverage of New Mexico news, elections, science, health, medicine, arts and humanities television, and radio programming from 1970-2020. The collection includes entire runs of longstanding series, such as KNME’s New Mexico in Focus, The Illustrated Daily, Public Square, ¡COLORES!, Stateline New Mexico, The Line, On Assignment; KENW’s Report from Santa Fe, You Should Know; KRWG’s Aggie Almanac; and KUNM’s Espejos de Aztlán. Other strengths include in-depth documentaries and programs, many of which have won prestigious awards, notably: KNME’s Surviving Columbus: The Story of the Pueblo People, Behind the Pickett Fence, Monuments to Failure, and KRWG’s Emmy Award-winning documentary, Crossing. The collection also includes extensive amounts of raw footage that has never been available to the public before, including live audio recordings documenting University of New Mexico student protests in the 1970s made by student journalists, footage of the February 1980 New Mexico State Penitentiary riot and its aftermath, and field interviews recorded during the production of Surviving Columbus. To this end, KNME created a partnership with the American Archive of Public Broadcasting (AAPB) to digitize, preserve, and provide open online access to the collections of five leading public media stations in New Mexico: NMPBS/KNME in Albuquerque; KRWG (PBS) in southwestern New Mexico; KENW (PBS) in eastern New Mexico; KUNM (FM) at the University of New Mexico; and KANW (FM) in Albuquerque.

This digitization project fills this gap and promises to provide a substantive look at New Mexico
and its unique contributions to U.S. history. Outcome and significance of the project include:

• Preservation of fragile historical materials through digitization of 9,000 programs that
  collectively form a vital picture of New Mexico.
•  Open access to materials by digitizing and cataloging previously inaccessible audio-
  visual resources and making them discoverable on stable online databases.
•  Education. The 9,000 programs we digitized, cataloged, and put online will be an
  invaluable resource to educators at all levels and to community groups and members who
  are interested in self-guided learning and research.
• Interpretation. The online exhibition Witnessing New Mexico serves as an example of
  how resources in the archive can shed light on contemporary issues and experiences.
  While the exhibition only provides one interpretation, the process itself demonstrates that
  these are resources to be examined and reexamined through multiple interpretive lens
  indefinitely into the future.
• Methodological innovation. We hope that our project will serve of a model of its kind
  for future AAPB exhibitions in terms of prioritizing viewer experience, engagement, and
  participation.
• Opportunities for public outreach and engagement. Connecting the public media
  stations involved with new and existing audiences.

 

Finding an Effective Workflow: De-accessioning and Re-accessioning
Juliette Robinson

Abstract:
In the fall of 2022, the University of Arkansas’ Special Collections took on an overwhelming task:
safely move over 100,000 items to an off-site storage location (named LINX) before winter break. In
January 2023 Mullins Library would finally begin a complete renovation on their floor that was
scheduled to last at least two years. Since the library’s opening in 1968, the cramped Special Collections
space steadily built up an impressive collection of books, maps, broadsides, periodicals, manuscripts,
photographs, and various other historical curiosities. One filing cabinet was stuffed with birthday cards
from the 1980s. Another cabinet was so rusted shut that it took three days to pry open. Inside: CVS
receipts.

The problem: how to efficiently pack every item in a way that allowed safe transport to LINX. These
items also still needed to be accessible to patrons, so the team needed to come up with a way to track
their location at LINX, which also meant the containers had to be re-usable (i.e. easy to open and close
as needed). Also, many of these items were uncatalogued and needed to be swiftly and carefully
cataloged while also being packed. To make it harder, this team consisted of less than 10 people, half
being temporary staff. Two main workflow problems needed to be solved: de-accessioning, re-
accessioning, cataloguing and packing the entire collection. The other problem was establishing a
workflow at LINX when a patron or researcher requested an item. To paint the picture, LINX feels about
as long as a football field and taller than a mountain. It has 27,000 square footage and can hold 1.8
million items. Before the move, 1.3 million items were already stored. So, trying to find an improperly
accessioned item would be akin to finding a needle in a haystack.

A working workflow, after much trial and error: first, temporary and appointed staff hand packed books
and other items in appropriately sized boxes, typically bankers boxes. The books were lined down the
middle with acid-free packing paper balled up in the sides as a cushion. When being placed in the boxes,
the item’s barcode was scanned into an excel spreadsheet, or “de-accessioned”. Each of these boxes
were labeled and numbered. Next, another team member would accession the box into CaiaSoft. This
gave the book a digital footprint that was traceable at LINX. One problem we faced was how to
accession boxes quickly and efficiently into CaiaSoft. Often the packers would fill boxes faster than the
single accesioner could upload containers. Originally, the person accessioning hand-scanned each box.
That eventually proved too tedious and would have meant missing the winter break deadline. So, with
some help from the software engineers at CaiaSoft, a new feature was added to allow entire
spreadsheets of containers to be accessioned at one time (for example, before this new feature it would
take an hour to upload five boxes. After the feature, it took five minutes to upload 100 boxes).

If an item wasn’t cataloged, a Special Collections staff member quickly got in in the system. Many flat
files had never been accessioned, so teams spent weeks organizing and compiling the files into
collections. Finally, the containers were sent to LINX. Once there, the items were re-accessioned, sorted
into trays or kept in boxes depending on size (eventually LINX ran out of trays and were forced to keep
all items in bankers boxes), and placed on a shelf. Now, when an item is needed, it is first searched in
Alma. There, we can see where it is located. Then, an order is sent to LINX via Aeon. A LINX staff
member uses the digital footprint in CaiaSoft to find the item. Thus, an entire library’s collection is
organized and remains accessible, thanks to the devised workflow. The best part: we met our deadline.

 

The Donald Woodman Archive Project
Mikaila Dart, Asjann Hentsch

Purpose of project research:
Donald Woodman has been working as a photographer for over five decades and has lived in
New Mexico for much of that time. The Donald Woodman Archive Project, launched in the
summer of 2022, seeks to create, for the first time ever, a complete inventory and catalog of his
long and prolific career. This project aims to contextualize his life and career within the history
of photography at large and facilitate its entry into institutional archives and museums.
Woodman’s work encompasses many different genres and disciplines, including fine art,
commercial photography, and architectural photography. The collection includes many different
photographic formats: photographic prints, large-scale prints, negatives, 35 mm slides, Polaroid
prints, photogravures, and the photographer’s personal and professional papers.
 
His work has been exhibited and collected both nationally and internationally and published in
numerous magazines and books. Highlights of the collection include the Holocaust Project:
From Darkness Into Light with Judy Chicago; The Rodeo and the West; Gay Rodeo; The
Therapist; Harbingers of Which Future; The Selling of the West; Attractions…Addictions…and
other Kodak Moments. In 2015, he published Agnes Martin and Me, an engaging illustrated
memoir of the celebrated painter, Agnes Martin.
 
The materials in the private collection are being processed to eventually prepare them for
acquisition by museums and institutional archives, where they will be preserved and made
available for public use.

Description of project research:
Phase one of The Donald Woodman Archive Project includes processing and cataloging a series
of 35 mm slides spanning 20 years from 1965 to 1988. The content of this early work features
Woodman’s architectural photography created in Europe and the United States. This phase of the
project also includes organizing, arranging, and re-sleeving the slides, making sure content
across multiple formats is linked together appropriately, and adding metadata to the previously
undescribed slides.

Phase two of The Donald Woodman Project involves inventorying and cataloging hundreds of
photographic prints, preliminary studies, and technical experiments. These prints represent all of
Woodman’s major series. Inventoried prints will be entered into Embark, the in-house digital
asset management system, where they will be easily discoverable in a visual database.

Conclusions of research
To date The Donald Woodman archival project has been successful in reconstructing,
processing, preserving, and cataloging approximately 6,000 35 mm slides. In addition, 486
photographs have been inventoried and contextualized with relevant metadata. upon completion
of these two phases of the project, users will be able to easily find cross-references within this
complex and vast body of photographic materials, facilitating its eventual entry into the
institutional archival context.

 

Telling Fuller Histories: Application of Reparative Descriptions
Katrina L. Gallegos

This project’s overarching purpose was to gain professional archival processing experience
through experiential learning in a graduate level archival course. Since then, it has evolved into
an independent professional project whose goal is to explore, through written critical analysis,
the dynamics of work and the intellectual authority of emerging cultural heritage professionals.
Another goal of this project is to present the completed archival work stage of the project at a
professional conference.

This project has two phases. The first involved planning, research, and direct application of
reparative description methodology. During the fall 2022 semester I took Archival Arrangement
and Description and processed an archival collection from The Texas Collection, a specialty
library within Baylor University Libraries. My professor worked with a resident archivist to find
a collection which aligned with my professional and academic interests namely, preserving
Chicano/Hispano culture. Together they selected a collection which exemplifies Mexican
American and Anglo race relations in early 20th century Texas. This collection is small, one
folder, and contains legal correspondence between a county attorney, a Mexican Consulate
attorney, and former Texas governor Pat Neff via a former US Secretary of State Charles E.
Hughes. This story is quite the game of telephone and at its heart is a dispute about crops
between Francisco Banda, a Mexican sharecropper, and Clark Herring, a landowner in Medina
County, Texas.

After reading through the documents, I created a processing plan whose goals included
changing the collection’s title, updating the finding aid’s biographical history, and updating the
subject headings. In this collection’s correspondence I encountered references to historic figures
and important Mexican civic associations. However, the finding aid’s subject headings and
biographical history did not reflect these deeper connections thereby not presenting a full history.
I then researched each of the correspondence’s referenced persons, political bodies, and civic
associations to ascertain the availability of historic documents. I located some electronic
information about the Mexican civic association, and I found Banda and Herring’s gravestones. I
also found an archival collection of the former US Secretary of State and requested items from it
via Interlibrary Loan. Combing through the microfiche did not result in any direct connections
with my collection rather it aided my rewriting of the biographical history; I will also use some
of documents for the writing phase of my project. The first half of this project is complete. I
updated the finding aid’s subject headings and recomposed the biographical note. The second
phase of my project is ongoing, I have completed a literature review and am in the writing stage.

My preliminary conclusions are documentation, particularly subject headings, can be non-
inclusive especially when the subject matter intersects along the lines of ethnicity and race.

Furthermore, institutional archives must allow and encourage reparative documentation within
existing collections should they wish to be more inclusive and share fuller histories. Finally, the
next step for the second half of this project is to submit an article for publication in a professional
journal.

 

GIS, 20th Century Pandemics and Virtual Reality
Jessica Cummins

Purpose of project/research
To help the world prepare for pandemics of the future. To help scientists, researchers,
policymakers, and citizens understand how to better prevent pandemics by increasing awareness,
understanding pandemics via a historical perspective, and learning about recent advancements
and current challenges in public health and epidemiology.

Description of project/research
The 20th Century Pandemics exhibit aims to combine GIS and Virtual Reality to visually present
how our world has been affected by pandemics throughout the last century including the social,
economic, and political, aspects to determine the geographic areas that have been the most
adversely affected by pandemics so that organizations can concentrate their resources towards
assisting these areas more adequately in the future. The virtual reality exhibit would include
layered elements of information from GIS, but instead of presenting that information on a flat
map, the information would be presented on a spherical globe that also shows the progression of
pandemics over time and how pandemics have spread from one continent to another.

Conclusions/findings of project/research
The project is still in progress.