Spring is here!

Cleaning the studio!

We've been doing some Spring cleaning both here in the archives, as well as in the Norman Rockwell studio, which officially opens for the season this weekend.  A team of us spent the day scrubbing and vacuuming the studio yesterday to ensure that visitors will have a dust free visit.

Here in the archives, the purchase of two new shelving units means that, at last, there are no more boxes on the floor!  I can assure you that few things make an archivist happier than new shelving units. The aisles have been vacuumed and straightened up and look so much better.   

Aisle before

After rearranging boxes and putting things in their proper places, I actually came across a missing box that I had been searching for over the past several months.  I was certain this box was never to be seen again, but apparently it was just obscured from view by the 10 or so boxes that were piled up in front of the bottom shelf on which it was residing.  I'm happy to report that it has now re-joined the rest of its collection. 

This year, the arrival of Spring also means that  our latest progress report is due to the NHPRC as we enter the last six months of our two year basic processing project.  Things have gone extremely well so far and we've completed 35 finding aids out of our target goal of 40.  Once completed, the finding aids will be available to researchers online through ArchiveGrid.  More details to come soon!



Aisle after

 

Making progess with the Magnetic Tape Collection

We've just passed the six month mark of our magnetic tape digitization project and things are going great! All of the materials have now been digitized, and the digital files have been delivered to us.  The dvds have found a home on the top shelf and will have their "official" labels attached in the very near future. 

Still to be done is the completion of the finding aid, and usability testing of the web accessible .mov files.  I've played  several of them and all looks well.  I hate to jinx it, but I'm thinking we might even finish ahead of schedule...

Norman Rockwell Museum Receives Archival Support from the National Endowment for Humanities

This just in!

Norman Rockwell Museum has been awarded archival support through a generous grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). The $85,000 grant will be used to reformat and process the Museum’s collection of magnetic videotapes, which contain hundreds of hours of important oral history and documentation related to Norman Rockwell and the art of illustration. The reformatting of the tapes will be handled by George Blood Safe Sound Archive in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, with plans to make select films freely accessible to the public through the Museum’s website. Most of these tapes have not been viewed by the public before. They include unique interviews with Rockwell, his three sons, friends, colleagues, models, studio assistants and photographers, and other artists including Jan and Stan Berenstain, David Macaulay, New Yorker illustrators, and many more.

Why Archival Collections Matter in a Museum!

My goal! (image from the University of Maryland Archives)

Part of the role of the museum archivist is justification. The cultural history of museums, as institutions, relies fully on item level description. Often, this is how the museum archives were organized prior to the hiring of an archival professional. Item level description, for archival records, overwhelms the scholar with unnecessary detail. Knowing that groups of records share certain characteristics, collective description relates the more important aspects of the archival material without repetition.

Deborah Wythe writes in her seminal book "Museum Archives- An Introduction:" (2004) "one of the greatest administrative challenges a museum archivist faces is the pressure towards item description. Museums thrive on item-level description. A ceremonial pot containing seventeen pebbles will be described as such, and each pebble receives accession numbers so that they can be tracked. Even in the context of the other, related vessels, it is most important as a single, unique item. You may be encouraged to 'catalog' individual items this way, a method that does not fully exploit the full power of archival description. A cubic foot of correspondence files is not equivalent to one pot, or several hundred pots, and an important part of your job will be to justify describing archival collections as groups, not items."

Facing the daunting challenge of the Norman Rockwell Museum Archives, where literally none of the records were organized according archival standard, is an immense undertaking. Acting as an archival detective, I must discover the provenance and "find" their corresponding collection. This is the exciting part of my job. For instance, some collections make sense in regards to donor and other collections are based on item type, others to provenance (Example: Norman Rockwell Photographic Print Collection, Norman Rockwell Collected Correspondence, Norman Rockwell Museum Moving Image Collection). These are the meaningful relationships that make archival descriptions for archival material non-negotiable in a museum environment.

An archival digital image, as an item floating in collections management software may be searchable via item type, name, accession number, or donor. But, this item makes much more sense if we can view it based on archival hierarchy. When we see the image with other images in the manner of organization the creator of the records intended, a story begins to emerge. In the particular case of Norman Rockwell, his archival material as collections allows a researcher to see his development as an artist; hence, new revisionist viewpoints emerge beyond traditional understandings of history, contributing to an evolving discourse.

Archival collections remind us that history is interrelated, not set in stone, and always an interpretation.