Category Archives: Preservation

Information on preservation in general and with our collections

4,000 Years and Counting

Did you know that we have a cuneiform messenger tablet in our Rare Book collection? Do you know what a “cuneiform messenger tablet” is? Back in 2350 BCE, a scribe at a temple in Umma, Sumer (present-day Iraq) repeatedly pressed his wedge-shaped stylus into a 3cm x 3cm clay tablet, recording a “list of provisions supplied to the temple, including oil, meat, dates, and grain. On the edge in fine characters is the date.” Picture a frosted mini-wheat, minus the frosting, and that’s kind of what our tablet looks like. It’s basically a 4,000-year old inventory or accounting document, small enough to be easily transported by a messenger who would then deliver it to be read by another scribe.

Can I read cuneiform? No, no I cannot. Can you read it? Well, you can make a research appointment to study it, but you can’t touch it. So how can you study it? Spring semester of 2024 gave us the opportunity to figure that out.

Professor Elizabeth Baughan, Department of Classical Studies, accompanied one of her students on his research visit to study the tablet. They wore gloves while examining the tablet, but their cell phone photos couldn’t quite capture the detail they needed to further study the tablet on their own time. We enlisted the help of our colleague, Warner, in the Digital Scholarship Lab and the DSL’s high-resolution camera. Those photos turned out much better. One of them will even be used for the thumbnail in the tablet’s catalog entry. But high-res photos still don’t solve the problem of getting your hands on history.

We reached out to Nathan Hilliard-Hansen, the Studio Art Lab Manager, to see if he had the tools to scan the tablet and render a 3D model. He did! Natalie & I met up with Prof. Baughan at Nathan’s lab. Even though his equipment has been able to scan many different objects, including coins, with high-fidelity, the texture of our tablet proved too much of a challenge for the scanning software.

Undaunted, Prof. Baughan reached out to her colleague at VCU, Bernard Means of the Virtual Curation Lab. Natalie escorted the tablet to Prof. Baughan’s lab where Bernard had his equipment set up. A few weeks later, he produced digital files and two 3D-printed models! One life-sized, and one jumbo-sized. The 3D prints don’t quite capture the full detail of the cuneiform, but it’s a tablet you can hold without giving us in the Rare Book Room a heart attack!

Walk You Through The Process

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When I tell people my job title, Processing & Reference Archivist, there is always a little pause as they try to figure out what that means. I usually quickly follow up with, “What does that mean?” and give a quick explanation of Reference Archivist and Processing Archivist. The Reference part most people get; it’s the Processing part that most people don’t.

Processing a collection basically means making it usable and discoverable by researchers. There are a variety of actions a collection may or may not require, depending on what state it’s in when we acquire it. One of the basic preservation tasks I undertake is called re-housing. I remove documents from their original folder and place them in a new, archival folder. I transcribe any original information recorded on the old folder onto the new folder, in addition to any information required to identify the folder in our collection.

So, yes, I get paid to move papers from one folder to another. The photo I’ve included helps illustrate why I do that. This badly over-stuffed folder had been sitting in its records carton for about 60 years. It was the first folder in line so had been pressed up against the inside of the box. The “tan lines” on the visible pages demonstrate why archival folders and boxes are different from regular everyday folders and boxes. The folder had protected part of the pages from the surface of the box. Archival folders and boxes are engineered to be free of the acids and lignins that naturally occur in most paper products. You can also see where a rubber band had valiantly tried to hold it together before degrading. Pro tip: do not use a rubber band to hold your documents together. If the rubber band doesn’t tear the edges of the papers, it will inevitably degrade and either stick to whatever surface it’s touching, or come apart just as you’re removing the folder from the box, thereby spilling the papers onto the table, the floor and just all over the place.

I re-housed this beast into five archival folders. As part of that work, I smoothed out any wrinkles and creases, unfolded folded-up documents, removed paperclips (they rust and tear paper), and placed barriers between newspaper or telegrams and adjoining documents. Newspaper, telegrams and similar materials were not intended to last long. They’re cheap, mass-produced materials which quickly degrade and will stain, and weaken, whatever papers they’re filed against because they are not, you guessed it, acid-free or lignin-free.

If you have newspaper clippings stored somewhere at home, don’t expect them to last forever unless you put in a little preservation effort. If it’s just the information you want to keep, consider making a photocopy or digital scan. If the clipping or newspaper itself has intrinsic value, there are polypropylene sleeves of various sizes available from reputable archival supply companies. It’s best to store the newspaper as flat and unfolded as possible. The paper becomes brittle as it degrades, so if you have a clipping folded up in an envelope, be prepared for that envelope to eventually contain newspaper confetti.

If I didn’t take any of these actions, the researchers would be left digging through all the boxes (and for this collection, that’s around 300 records cartons). More likely, I would be the one doing the digging. But taking these actions means I can quickly provide the researcher the information they are looking for. Being a Processing Archivist makes my job as a Reference Archivist much easier.

Preservation, Physical and Digital

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(Note: This post was authored by Taylor McNeilly, Processing & Reference Archivist.) Happy #WyattWalkerWednesday, and welcome to another post on the Something Uncommon blog. This week, I’d like to take the opportunity to discuss a question some of our readers have asked me about the audio cassette tapes in the Dr. and Mrs. Wyatt Tee Walker Collection. I’ll give a bit of background to the question and then we’ll dive right in!

Some of you have picked up on how often I discuss the preservation of physical materials, including the longevity of certain formats. I’ve mentioned in previous blog posts, for instance, that audio cassette tapes are generally expected to hold their recording for 20-50 years, depending on how often they are played and the environment they’re stored in. This was part of the reason we digitized the cassette tapes as quickly as we did: many of them are well past that initial 20 years, so we knew we could be losing data every minute we waited.

This brings us to the question some of our readers have asked: how long will the digital formats last? Will we be back here in 20 years changing the format of these recordings to avoid data loss? The Walker collection will certainly still be here in 20 years, and it is the duty of archivists everywhere to think about the long term (think “forever”), so how long will digitized material last?

Data loss in the digital world is colloquially known as bit rot, and it’s actually much closer to how cassette tapes lose data than you might guess. Hard drives and cassette tapes record data in similar but different ways: both use magnetic charges to store the data, but how they use the charges is different. Hard drives use a positive or negative magnetic charge to store data in binary, the coding language that is the basis for all computer work. As you might guess from the name, binary has two “letters” in the language: 1 and 0. Using positive and negative charges for the 1 and 0, computers magnetically store information on hard drives. Every file on every computer is a series of 1s and 0s strung together, much the way that a cassette tape is a series of magnetic data stored along the magnetic tape itself.

Since both formats store data magnetically, data loss is surprisingly similar: the storage medium, whether it be the magnetic tape in a cassette or the hard drive of a computer, loses that charge – or switches it. With a cassette tape, there’s not much you can do about this except copy it onto a new tape before it starts to happen, thereby restarting that 20-year countdown to data loss. An archives would maintain an appropriate storage environment for cassettes, extending that 20 years as long as possible, but eventually the physical preservation would require what archivists called migration. Migration can occur from one physical format to another, called format migration (such as from a wax cylinder to a vinyl LP to a cassette), or it can be a migration from one instance of a format to another instance of the same format (an old cassette to a new cassette). There is a lot of discussion in the archives profession about format migration and the loss of contextual information (what does it tell you about a recording that it is on vinyl instead of a cassette, and how do we ensure that information is included if we change formats?), but format migration is recognized as necessary to preserve material indefinitely.

You may recall that I’ve mentioned that the Birmingham Campaign recordings we have were recorded onto cassette in the early ’90s, so this material had actually undergone one migration before they came into our possession (and were also 25+ years old). Since audio cassettes weren’t commercially available in the U.S. in 1963, I can be fairly confident in calling this a format migration – probably from audio reel to cassette tape, although we can’t be certain without doing some investigation.

With computers, the answer isn’t much different – but it is much easier. If you’ve ever moved a file from one computer to another, or uploaded it into the cloud, or sent it in an email to yourself or someone else, then you might have performed a basic function of digital preservation. Data migration is obviously much easier on a computer than a cassette – all you have to do is copy and paste the file, and you’ve created a new, second copy. Many computers have the ability to hold multiple hard drives, so as one hard drive ages a newer one can be installed and the files can be copied over, ensuring that the information is safe.

To make copying a file actual preservation, you need to do more than just put it on a new hard drive. Digital archivists function under a basic principle, called LOCKSS. LOCKSS stands for Lots Of Copies Keep Stuff Safe. Essentially, if you have three or more copies, you can be certain that bit rot won’t get all of them – and if it does, it won’t get all of them at the same time, allowing you to make three new copies of whichever version survived. Once cloud services became a thing in the 2000s, LOCKSS became very easy to handle: just keep a file on your hard drive and upload another copy onto a cloud service.

Some cloud services take an extra step, backing up data in the cloud to three servers. Some go even further, checking the files periodically to ensure that none of them have suffered bit rot. If one version of a file has been damaged, it can be restored using the other two. Cloud services that perform this sort of automated maintenance on files are very helpful for archives, assuring that digitized material will survive as long as the service is available. So to answer the question “how long will the digitized versions of the cassette tapes last,” I can confidently say “for the foreseeable future.”

Things get much more complicated than just ensuring a file’s integrity using LOCKSS, including different ways to verify a file’s integrity. There are also concerns about file format obsolescence, and because of this digital format migration is also a practice in archives. I can address these questions at a later date, but for now we can all rest easy knowing that, by being digitized and properly safeguarded, the Birmingham mass meetings and other recordings will be safely preserved and accessible well into the future.

As always, thanks for checking in on the Dr. and Mrs. Wyatt Tee Walker Collection this #WyattWalkerWednesday. Feel free to ask any questions or leave any comments you have, and follow Boatwright Library’s other social media, including Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

Walker Sermons Available On-site

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(Note: This post was authored by Taylor McNeilly, Processing & Reference Archivist.) Welcome to another #WyattWalkerWednesday post! This week, I have another big announcement to make: all 800+ audio cassettes included in the Dr. and Mrs. Wyatt Tee Walker Collection have been successfully digitized and are available to listen to here at the University of Richmond.

Longtime readers may recall that the Birmingham Campaign recordings that I discussed and linked to last week were part of a much larger number of audio cassettes, roughly 835 in total. The Birmingham Campaign recordings were digitized first as a test batch, sent to the vendor while the remaining 825 were being prepared for digitization. These were selected as the test batch primarily because of their extreme age: although the cassettes turned out to have been recorded in 1991, their labels listed the dates of the original recordings, 1963, making them the oldest cassettes in the collection.

Another distinction between the Birmingham Campaign recordings and the remainder of the cassettes was their content. While Dr. Walker speaks at most of the mass meetings, the remaining cassettes are almost exclusively sermons preached by Dr. Walker during his time at Canaan Baptist Church of Christ in Harlem. These provide an amazingly rich resource for research on a variety of topics, including Baptist theology, the ongoing national and international civil rights movements, and current events in Harlem from 1980 through 2002.

While the test batch of materials was sent out much earlier in 2018, preparing the remaining 800+ cassettes took much more time, so they were sent out for digitization much later. Luckily, the vendor moved through them quickly and returned them to us recently. I’ve been hard at work doing what’s called fixity checks to ensure the files were not damaged or corrupted during delivery and transfer, but this work is finishing up and everything has checked out (so far).

If you read last week’s entry, you know that it takes additional work to have files prepared for online access. The first step is usually to get the recordings transcribed, which not only creates easier access but also helps with our metadata work with the files. Due to the magnitude of the project, this work won’t be done anytime soon. While we’ll be posting the files in batches as the work is completed, I wanted to make sure people who are interested in the cassettes knew that they are accessible on-site as soon as possible.

Let me explain what I mean by “accessible on-site.” As part of the preparation for digitization, these cassettes were inventoried and given filenames for their digital file counterparts. This means that, even though we don’t have full metadata and therefore can’t put the files up online, we do know the title of all the labeled cassettes and which files that cassette turned into. With this information, a researcher can come to the library, look through the inventory, and ask to listen to specific files. While we can’t guarantee that the recording will match the label, it at least gives basic access to this amazing resource.

As always, keep an eye on this blog and the library’s social media feeds for further updates!

Birmingham Recordings Available

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(Note: This post was authored by Taylor McNeilly, Processing & Reference Archivist.) Hi all! I know it’s been awhile since I’ve posted an update on the Dr. and Mrs. Wyatt Tee Walker Collection, but don’t worry – we’ve been hard at work behind the scenes getting a number of things ready to go public. One of these is the set of cassette tapes containing recordings of mass meetings held during the Birmingham Campaign in 1963.

These tapes are actually re-recordings of the original audio reels, a fact I suspected when I did some research into audio cassettes and discovered that they weren’t commercially available until a few years later. Luckily, the man in charge of transferring the recordings onto cassette annotated the recordings, which lets us know who did the originals and the transfer, as well as some basic information about the recordings – namely when and where they were recorded.

The original recordings were done by C. Herbert Oliver, who is also working on the cassette recordings alongside Charles H. Oliver II. C. Herbert Oliver annotates each recording, usually giving a date and where each recording was made, which is often the 6th Avenue Baptist Church. The recordings date from April 9 through May 10, which spans almost the entire length of the Birmingham Campaign.

These files were digitized late last year and we’ve been working to get them online ever since. This work has included metadata creation, including description work, as well as getting the recordings professionally transcribed for accessibility. Many folks these days may not have ever heard the unique sound known as “cassette tape hiss,” so transcription can be incredibly useful – not to mention faster for researchers to skim.

Once the transcription was finished, it was easier to do what librarians call subject analysis. For these recordings, that mostly meant reading through the transcriptions to see what the various speakers discussed, who was speaking and who was mentioned, then putting this information into structured subject headings. These subject headings are displayed online, so researchers can get a general idea of what’s being discussed in each recording even before looking at the transcription or listening to the audio.

All ten recordings – each cassette, front and back – are available online through our Digital Collections site, which is also where the oral histories have been put online. Future digital material, including born digital and digitized, will also be made available on this site, so keeping it bookmarked might not be a bad idea. For the Birmingham recordings, however, I recommend going through the library’s Walker Collection Birmingham tapes webpage. The recordings weren’t transferred to cassette in perfect chronological order, so trying to sort through them without any guidance can get a little confusing. To help listeners out, we created the Birmingham tapes page to give direct links to each meeting and its transcription. Feel free to listen and read at your leisure!

I will be back soon with another #WyattWalkerWednesday post, so keep an eye on this spot – and on the library’s Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter feeds – for more updates!

An Update on the Walker Cassettes

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(Note: This post was authored by Taylor McNeilly, Processing & Reference Archivist.) Welcome back to another #WyattWalkerWednesday post! I know it’s been awhile since our last installment, but that doesn’t mean we haven’t been busy. Since the library is closed the next two weeks for Winter Break, I wanted to leave you all with at least one more blog post before 2019.

One of the most exciting things that’s been happening behind the scenes here at RBSC with the Walker Collection is the return of the audio cassettes that comprised the test batch for digitization. These ten cassettes were the earliest recordings donated as part of the Dr. and Mrs. Wyatt Tee Walker Collection, including some recordings dating to 1963. This year was a momentous one for both the Walkers and the Civil Rights Movement, and is also the year that audio cassettes first hit public retail. Due to some preservation concerns with magnetic tape and its durability over 50 years, we wanted to make sure these tapes got digitized first and any audio left on them could be safely digitized, thereby making these recordings accessible into the future. (Of course, digitization alone isn’t enough to preserve digital files forever – you need digital preservation for that. But that’s a different topic for another day!)

I’m happy to report that all ten of these earliest recordings were salvageable, although the audio isn’t perfect quality by today’s standards. Of the ten cassettes sent as the test batch, eight of them included a total of five recordings from April and early May 1963 – the beginning of Project C, the Birmingham, AL campaign that Dr. Walker was chief strategist for. These are therefore very exciting for a variety of reasons, and we’re working at top speed to make these publicly accessible as soon as possible.

While work on these ten recordings to make them publicly accessible continues, I’m also wrapping up the work necessary to send the remaining cassettes out to our digitization vendor to undergo the same process. Due to the high volume of shipping that happens around the holidays and the library’s closure for the next few weeks, these cassettes will be shipped out in early January. The total number of cassettes in this shipment will be around 750 (some of the remaining cassettes will not be digitized because they are commercial recordings still in their sealed packaging), so the time needed to digitize them all will obviously be much longer. Nonetheless, I hope that work on making these available to the public can begin in the early springtime of 2019.

While this work on the audio cassettes has gone on, I haven’t been ignoring the manuscript portion of the collection, either. As you may recall, our main focus has been on the manuscript material this past year, and work will continue into 2019 until this portion of the collection can be opened for research. RBSC expects at least one more, large-scale donation to the collection, after which a revised timeline can be devised. As always, please check back here for progress on that front as well as any other news on the Walker Collection or other posts about RBSC and our activities!

Rare Book Room Renovations Completed

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(Note: This post was authored by Taylor McNeilly, Processing & Reference Archivist.) Happy #WyattWalkerWednesday, everyone! This week, I have a very exciting announcement: the Rare Book Room renovations I discussed a month or so ago have been completed!

As I’ve mentioned in many previous posts here on Something Uncommon, the Dr. and Mrs. Wyatt Tee Walker Collection is…kind of enormous. And there is a lot of variety in the different formats of materials. We have foam board and posters, large photographs and hand drawn art, negatives and photographic slides, metal keys and glass awards, paper and onion skin and floppy disks and vinyl records and audio reels and cloth robes and VHS tapes and audio cassette tapes and and and… And the list just keeps going. It’s a lot of different items, in a lot of different formats, which complicates our storage and preservation. And since the Walker Collection is hardly the only collection the Rare Books and Special Collections houses and maintains, we have to keep a close eye on our storage space.

To that end, RBSC has been working for years to improve our spaces for storage, education, and research. As I mentioned in my earlier post, the Rare Book Room and the Rare Book Seminar Room are both products of this work. And, starting in March of this year, the Rare Book Room Vault – where the collections are housed in an environmentally stable, controlled access room – was upgraded. That work was completed last week. This expansion brings our in-vault storage from 1200 linear feet to 6000 linear feet, a massive improvement. This is mostly due to a shift from traditional shelving, i.e. static shelves lining the walls, to compact shelving. You can read the full details in the earlier blog post I linked to above.

Now that the renovation is complete, there’s a huge project that’s already underway: moving our collections into the updated space. And of course, this includes the Walker collection! However, the vault is primarily intended for processed collections, so the Walker material won’t be finding its way in for a little while yet. In the meantime, it has shifted into a larger processing space freed up by the renovation, allowing for more efficient processing and hopefully a shortened wait time for the collection to be opened to researchers.

As always, I’ll be posting updates on how all these different projects are progressing, including getting the collections into the vault, processing the Walker collection, and everything else going on with us. So keep an eye out for more blog posts!

Setting Up a Quarantine

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(Note: This post was authored by Taylor McNeilly, Processing & Reference Archivist.) There is a darker side to processing any collection. One that archivists often try not to talk about. It’s dark, it’s dirty, and it doesn’t always make for good PR. But it’s almost always necessary. This week’s #WyattWalkerWednesday post is about that darker side. This week, I’m going to talk about…moldy material.

Moldy material comes in with a lot of collections. And even in collections where there isn’t any mold, it’s an archivist’s solemn duty to check the collection carefully. Mold is incredibly commonplace and can easily grow on almost any surface. Your first thought is probably moldy paper, but photographs, textiles (clothing and the like), posters, even some digital media storage formats (usually magnetic tape, so floppy disks) can house mold. And anything anybody has ever eaten something near or held in unclean hands can end up moldy. Because not every single human being on the planet is an archivist obsessed with the long-term preservation of every document or object they come in contact with, it’s a safe assumption that at least some of the material in any collection may have come in contact with food or otherwise been exposed to mold.

Mold also spreads incredibly easily. This means that, should an object with mold be moved into a storage space with other archival collections, it can contaminate and infect all the other material around it. This can destroy an entire archives, if left unchecked. Archivists are of course very vigilant about ensuring this never happens.

The Walker Collection is no exception to this constant fear of mold. Because some items in the collection date as far back as the 1950s, and since the items weren’t kept in archival conditions for their entire 60+ year lifespan, there’s a high fear of mold. Because of this, and because of the sheer size of the donation, the material was held offsite until we could check it for mold and bring it on-site for processing in chunks. This week, I spent about 3 hours in off-site storage with Lynda, the Head of Rare Books and Special Collections, sorting through previously unchecked material in the collection. It was hot, dusty, dirty work. But we were successful! Lynda and I managed to look through all the remaining material for contamination, and we brought back a car load of manuscript material to continue processing.

This stuff doesn't have mold! And is probably very important.

Manuscript materials checked for mold and cleared for immediate processing.

While there was some contaminated material found that has to be separated from the rest of the collection, this material is not immediately thrown away. Typically when an archivist finds moldy items, the material is put into a quarantine where it can be observed over time to help us see whether it is active or inactive. From there, an archives can take different remediation steps to hopefully salvage the material and reintroduce it to the collection. This can include freezing the material, cleaning it thoroughly, and maintaining specific environmental settings (relative humidity and temperature) to inhibit mold spore activation and growth. If the mold is found to be already inactive, many of these steps can be foregone and reintroduction to the main collection can occur.

Because it takes time to see if the mold is active or inactive, we won’t be able to tell for a little while what damage might have been done. Mold is also often mistaken for what’s called foxing, a natural process in paper that occurs as it ages, leaving brown dots, spots, and stains on the paper. This is neither contagious nor dangerous for the paper, and the mistaken identification goes both ways. That is to say, many of the materials Lynda and I quarantined for fear of mold may in fact just be foxed, meaning it can be added back into the collection almost immediately. Only time will tell.

So there you have it: the dark, dirty business including in the processing of any collection. With luck, we’ll be able to identify any active mold in the items we’ve quarantined by the end of summer and begin working towards cleaning and reintroducing them to the rest of the collection. In the meantime, there’s plenty of clean manuscript materials to process, so I’m sure I’ll be busy no matter what!

Audio Cassette Processing

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(Note: This post was authored by Taylor McNeilly, Processing & Reference Archivist.) Happy #WyattWalkerWednesday! (Editor’s note: due to technical difficulties with the blog, this week’s post didn’t go up until Thursday. Our apologies on the delay.) This week, I’ve been continuing my work on processing the audio cassettes in the Dr. and Mrs. Wyatt Tee Walker Collection to prepare them for digitization with our vendor.

As I mentioned last week, we’ve begun to move forward with digitization of the audio cassettes (about 800 of them) as well as a small number of 8mm and 16mm films. We also recently found a reel-to-reel audio reel dated 1967, which will be digitized as well. This material was prioritized for digitization due to the average lifespan of magnetic tape media, generally considered to be 10-30 years. We are still hopeful that the earliest tapes from the 1960s and 1970s will still have enough audio integrity to be digitized, but obviously needed to move on this as quickly as possible.

Thanks to the hard work of our student workers who created the original inventory of audio cassettes, we were able to get several competitive quotes from various digitization vendors. In the end, we selected a well-known vendor who has worked with LYRASIS (the hosting company for ArchivesSpace), the Library of Congress, and other well known, high quality institutions. Several Boatwright Library staff have also worked with the vendor at previous jobs, so we have high confidence in their work.

Unfortunately, the inventory the student workers created was not in the order in which the cassette tapes were arranged. This means that, in order to have the audio cassettes packed and listed in the same order, both the inventory and the physical cassettes need to be rearranged into the same order. Since they will be digitized and the files named in the order that they are received, it makes things much easier moving forward with handling the digital files if they’re organized into a logical and consistent order. Because of this, my boss Lynda and I put our heads together to make sure we started this project out on the right foot with this cassette arrangement work.

Off-screen to the left is another three boxes of tapes waiting to be added to the current arrangement.

Audio cassette tapes from the Dr. and Mrs. Wyatt Tee Walker Collection being arranged into chronological order.

After discussing our options, Lynda and I agreed that the following order makes the most sense. Because some of the cassette tapes appear to be commercially produced, we don’t hold the copyright and digitizing and making them available online would move the library into some murky waters. These were separated out from the other tapes in order to be addressed by the vendor more easily. The remaining recordings, according to their labels, appear to be primarily sermons Dr. Walker gave on Sundays. In fact, we seem to have a nearly full run of every single sermon he gave between 1984 and 2002. (My arrangement work isn’t yet finished, so I can’t say with certainty if we have them all or not just yet.) I am arranging the sermon tapes into chronological order, allowing them to be digitized and easily made available online in the most straightforward way. This will allow future listeners to follow Dr. Walker’s sermons through time, creating the easiest way to trace his development as a theologian and pastor.

An observant viewer may notice the sticky notes labeling the different groups of tapes.

Audio cassette tapes from the Dr. and Mrs. Wyatt Tee Walker Collection that were either commercially published, undated, or unlabeled.

However, not all cassette tapes are so easily arranged. There are quite a few that are labeled with the title of the sermon, but only a month and year. Others have no date at all. And some have no descriptive information at all, leaving us with no guess as to what it might contain or when it was recorded (although comparing the physical cassette to labeled and dated cassettes can give us an estimate on the when, at least to within a few years). These tapes were separated out as well, into one pile of labeled-but-undated and another pile of completely-unknown. The vendor will receive the sermons in chronological order, followed by labeled-but-undated, followed by complete-unknown, and finishing with those tapes that appear to contain copyright material. This allows us to more easily manage the digital files, meaning it’s much faster and easier work to get them available online to researchers – always a major focus on digitization projects in particular and processing work in general.

It’s important to note that audio cassettes are a lot like folders in a filing cabinet. While it makes sense to have labeled a folder and kept its intended contents within it, occasionally people reuse old folders for new material – meaning the label might not be accurate anymore. Cassette tapes are similar, although the tendency to record over might perhaps be a bit stronger: brand new cassettes cost a bit more than brand new folders, after all. This is why we’ll be sending the commercially recorded cassette tapes for digitization; you never know if they’ve been overwritten with something. And of course, the same goes for the chronologically ordered sermons. There’s nothing to say that they weren’t accidentally recorded over, like when a children’s program is stuck onto your favorite movie’s VHS (sorry, kids, you probably don’t understand that one!).

Work on arranging the cassette tapes, arranging the list to match, and packing the tapes is ongoing. I’ll of course keep you all updated on progress, so look for more posts in the future!

Rare Book Room Renovations and the Walker Collection

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(Note: This post was authored by Taylor McNeilly, Processing & Reference Archivist.) As I hope I’ve expressed in previous posts, the Dr. and Mrs. Wyatt Tee Walker Collection is pretty large, and includes a wide array of different formats for material. All of this, of course, has to fit into the Rare Books and Special Collections spaces here in Boatwright Library, and, coupled with the other collections and 23,000 volumes of rare books the division holds, space has been getting a little tight. So, this #WyattWalkerWednesday, I’d like to talk a little about some renovations to the RBSC space in Boatwright happening to help us expand our storage space and improve our research and instructions areas as well!

Now, some of these renovations you might have already seen if you’ve been on campus. And we can’t credit the Walker collection as the only motivation behind them, as some of it happened even before the 2015 donation. Nonetheless, the work going on now has built upon what’s come before, so let’s start with those earlier projects.

First and foremost is the Rare Book Seminar Room. This is a new classroom that was put up a few years ago to help with instruction within our division, and it’s been very helpful. As I’ve mentioned before, Dr. Walker was adamant that his collection not be used just for research, but for instruction as well. Having this room has meant that as we process materials, we can use them to help teach students about Dr. Walker’s life and work.

At the same time as the Rare Book Seminar Room was put together, our Rare Book Room also got a makeover. This included a nice redesign of the space. The Rare Book Room’s open hours have been canceled this academic year as we prepared for the renovations, so you might not have had the chance to see it. We’ve also rearranged the room in preparation for some renovations occurring — including the installation of some new shelving along one wall — so it looks very new and exciting! The room is already a great place to conduct research, but the new addition will help with staging material for research appointments. We’ll be reopening the room this fall, and we’re always open by appointment.

The Rare Book Room collections being packed and moved into storage in preparation for the renovation.

The new shelves in the Rare Book Room are part of a larger renovation project that we’ve been prepping for since last semester, and which began officially over Spring Break in March. Throughout the beginning of the semester, I worked with some student workers to help pack up the entire contents of our Rare Book Room vault, where the main portion of our collections are held. All of this material was packed up and shifted into some storage rooms by Spring Break, at which point all the shelves and furniture in the vault were stripped out. This was to make room for a new set of compact shelving, which will all but fill the space. The new compact shelving will take our storage space in the vault from 1200 linear feet to 6000 linear feet! With as large a collection as the Walker collection is, you can understand why we might be excited about all that extra footage.

The Rare Book Room vault awaiting its new compact shelving after deep cleaning and paint touchups.

Overall, this will be helping to keep all of our collections in a more secure, environmentally controlled and stable environment, ensuring that our collections will last longer and that we will have faster access for researchers and instruction. This is just another way that we are showing our dedication to preserving Dr. Walker’s unique legacy while maintaining access for instruction use and research into his many, varied accomplishments.