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Photo Documentation in the Preservation Lab
By Jessica Ebert, Conservation Technician in the Preservation Lab As the lead photographic documentation technician for the Preservation Lab, one of my primary responsibilities is creating visual representations of the conservation treatments performed, and housing created, in the Lab. This generally means capturing the condition of the object before treatment, anticipating how it will change once treatment is completed, and then capturing that transformation. We refer to this as before/after photography. The goal is to represent the object, with all its imperfections, accurately. Therefore, little modification is made to the captured before/after (and sometimes during) images. This allows the transition between the before image and its corresponding after image to…
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UC Professors’ Unique Collection Finds Home in the Libraries
Article courtesy the University of Cincinnati Foundation The first time Richard Kretschmer stepped off a plane in New Mexico, he felt an immediate connection to the mountains. It was on this same trip, more than 40 years ago, that he also became interested in Native American culture. This quickly developed into a passion for Native American children’s literature that his wife and fellow educator Laura grew to share. The now-retired UC professors—Richard, professor emeritus in the College of Education, Criminal Justice and Human Services (CECH), and Laura, professor emerita in the College of Allied Health Sciences—began purchasing these rare and unique books during their travels in 1975. “We were always…
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A Note from the Dean: Celebrating Special Collections
In this edition of Source we highlight some of the University of Cincinnati Libraries’ newest endeavors in digital collections. From the latest version of the university’s digital repository, Scholar@UC, to a new archive space for special collections, to our recent membership in the large-scale collaborative repository HathiTrust, UC Libraries has made great strides in increasing our digital footprint and exploring new ways to enhance our user’s scholarship and the ways they can access and utilize our collections. As the materials in our collections become more accessible online, our rare and special collections become even more valuable to the identities of our libraries and the university. Each of UC Libraries’ 10…
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The University of Cincinnati Libraries Have Joined HathiTrust
The University of Cincinnati Libraries have joined HathiTrust, a partnership of major research institutions and libraries working to ensure that the cultural record is preserved and accessible long into the future by collaboratively collecting, organizing, preserving, communicating and sharing the record of human knowledge. UC Libraries joins more than 130 international research libraries in HathiTrust, and is the third Ohio library to join along with The Ohio State University and Case Western Reserve University. “Membership in HathiTrust will enable the University of Cincinnati Libraries to partner with national and international collaborators with similar missions to preserve, protect and make accessible the scholarly record,” said Xuemao Wang, dean and university librarian.…
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Managing University Archives in a Digital World
By Eira Tansey, Digital Archivist/Records Manager, Archives and Rare Books Library “What College-Conservatory of Music musicals were staged in 1986?” “When did the university begin offering a dental insurance plan?” “What dorms have served as polling places?” These are just a handful of the university-history related questions I’ve encountered since starting work at the Archives and Rare Books (ARB) Library nearly five years ago. The questions we receive concern events at all times in campus history – from the earliest days of UC’s predecessor colleges to events that took place just a couple years ago. ARB is the official home for University Archives, making us the obvious place to go…
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Streamlined Searching and Management of Archival Collections Implemented at UC Libraries
By Suzanne Reller, Reference/Collections Librarian in the Archives and Rare Books Library. What do the polio vaccine, animated film music, folklore, the Heimlich maneuver and labor unions have in common? They are all subjects of archival collections in the Archives and Rare Books Library and at the Henry R. Winkler Center for the History of the Health Professions. Archival collections are papers or records of a person, family or organization and includes things like correspondence, photographs, meeting minutes and reports. Archives can be digital or hard copy, and they can encompass just few folders to hundreds of boxes or a few megabytes to terabytes of data. Since these collections are…
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Preserving Taft
The mission of the Preservation Lab is to preserve and conserve the collections of the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County and the University of Cincinnati Libraries – a collaboration begun in January 2012 to provide conservation and preservation treatments in an equally managed, staffed and equipped preservation lab on the University of Cincinnati’s campus. A recent collaboration with the Archives and Rare Books Library on a collection of letters and artifacts pertaining to William Howard Taft demonstrates the valuable role the Lab takes in both preserving a collection for posterity while also making it available for study today. The work of the Preservation Lab varies depending on the…
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The E.B. White Collection
By Kevin Grace, University Archivist and Head of the Archives and Rare Books Library So you want to be a writer? Whatever for?? Has someone unduly directed you toward that endeavor? Author Flannery O’Connor once offered her own opinion on budding writers: “Everywhere I go, I’m asked if the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them.” A bit harsh, that, but there was encouragement of a sort from Dorothy Parker, known more for her witticisms today than her short stories and poetry: “If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present…
