Assistant Librarian Technician at the National Gallery of Art's Vertical Files | Blog #1

Brief Introduction

Working at the National Gallery of Art's Library for ten months so far, it has allowed me to get through most of training and immerse myself further within this research library. In particular, I work as a student assistant under the Vertical Files – this is a collection of ephemera such as exhibition notices, brochures, group exhibitions, invitations and other documents under 50-pages stored in our collection. The nature of these materials is fragile, yet essential to many art historians' research. They are the materials we often discard, throwing them away because their purpose is often temporary. However, they serve as valuable materials which can help researchers learn about artists' exhibitions, how such artists' works were presented and even key us into these documents as artistic works themselves.

What gives significance to the materials within the Vertical Files is that, while there are number that are digitized, the sensitivity of these objects makes for circulating these materials difficult. There is never a guarantee another copy can be found easily so many researchers have appointments to look through the collection themselves. As a librarian assistant here, I manage the collection through adding new materials, labeling them appropriately and filing them away within our various drawers. There are guidelines to label and organize such works, making files for individual artists & institutions who accumulate enough ephemera. And that is only a brief summary of the many responsibilities and tasks I've been put up to!

To put it simply, being a librarian here means making the materials in our collection the most accessible for our patrons. That is the goal when working as a librarian technician at the Vertical Files here!

Goals as a Librarian Technician Assistant

It is important to remember that there are multiple roles that different kinds of librarian serve in a library – especially like the museum library within the NGA. The most common librarian people think of is a circulation librarian. They often check out book materials to patrons, shelf them in their appropriate places among other things. Sometimes, they handle the cataloging of new books, which means creating a digital record for these materials so they can be searched for and tracked within the library system. As you saw previously, the work as a librarian technician at the Vertical Files is noticeably different and it is this difference that interested me in the position. 

The biggest learning goal I had coming into this position, the one that I still maintain even now, is learning more about how a research library functions differently from public libraries. Choosing the National Gallery of Art felt like a dream because it takes a particular focus on Western art (although not exclusive to just this) and this reflects in its library. As a result, the National Gallery of Art's library particularly focuses on the scholarship revolving around this Western art and the Vertical Files goes into this further. As a department within the library, it houses material culture that largely dates from the mid 20th century onward and it has a number of sub-collections such as the Evans-Tibbs collection (primarily focusing on African American Art, local Washington D.C. artists and Turlow Tibbs himself). 

Learning about the differences between these kinds of libraries is important to me because I like to think about how learning spaces are designed. Constructing this spaces and playing a role in building the collection bares much relevance to desire to eventually work as a museum curator. Personally, I believe that organizing information like the Vertical Files' materials has an artful approach to it, that it takes my own personal decision-making to label & file such works accordingly. It means thinking like a researcher and understanding their needs. In analyzing these materials, I am able to think about how they should be categorized, whether these are useful to our patrons and consider whether these materials stand out on their own. Some materials are not simple pieces of cardstock. Some fold, some have pop-out images, others containing digital media, or having text printed on soft tissue paper. Some are press releases, others invitations with the signature & writing of the artist themselves. It's in this way that I have to constantly challenge my ideas of what it means for something to be "rare", for something to be "useful" to a researcher, and most importantly, for something to be considered as valuable enough to archive in this way.

That is one of most important things I've been learning in my employment here. It is the most important thing to me to constantly expand my definitions and worldview regarding such research materials. That, to me, is an art.

Past Projects

Being brief, I have worked on a number of projects in my time here. I have linked Library of Congress name headers to artists who didn't have them.

I have worked on putting together a digital collection on Evans-Tibbs Artists, primarily those featured in David C. Driskell's Two Centuries of Black Art (1976). You can view that here, if you are interested.

I have worked on sorting a shipment of ephemera from the Pace Gallery in New York, labeling and filing them accordingly into our collection before shipping duplicates to the Maryland Institute College of Art. 

I have recently done Vertical Files orientations for our CASVA members.

I have completed shared digital project with the Circulation team, editing book volume' material information., completing 7,843 entries in that time.

Current Projects

Telework

Currently, I am doing research on our Evans-Tibbs artist who have poorly-sourced or under-sourced Wikidata pages. Wikidata is one of the platforms under the Wikimedia Foundation and it provides a structure to the data present on other Wikimedia platforms such as Wikipedia. There are guidelines to sourcing information for these artists' background, namely according to Wikidata's standards.

In addition to this, I am working on an Auction Catalogs' project where I am doing simple edits on auction catalog's MARC records. A MARC (standing for Machine-Readable Cataloging) record is a bibliographic record which describes the material, main + added entries, subject headings and what is it classified as. In particular, I am making these Auction catalogs' place of sale & date of sale fields human readable, and changing their indicators.

In-Person Work

My foremost responsibilities within the Vertical Files are

• labeling new materials into our Artist & Institutional Files, both general & artist/institution-specific folders
• weeding duplicates from the collection to create more space
• returning checked-in files & materials into their original place
• creating labels +  making records for artists and institutions who accumulate enough materials to 'graduate' into their own folder

Maryland State Archives The Legacy of Slavery in Maryland Program: Penitentiary Records- Blog #1

 

   Maryland State Archives Penitentiary Records- The Legacy of Slavery in Maryland

         The internship I am undertaking is for the Maryland State Archives Legacy of Slavery in Maryland Program. While other members of this internship are fulfilling roles in mining and examining census records, I am focusing on the Maryland Penitentiary records. My intern supervisor is Mr. Christopher Haley, the Director of the Legacy of Slavery in Maryland Program. I will be responsible for examining the digitized Maryland Penitentiary records from 1811-1869. I will transcribe these ledgers of inmates to prepare them for a separate database which researchers would then be able to access with ease of use to locate specific areas of interest. In addition, I will need to take note of any trends that I see developing or odd features to entries and discuss it with Mr. Haley, and those of my internship cohort on our Friday meetings. These features are likely among the most important aspects of the internship as recognizing them can open new avenues of research while others can help to explain racial injustice within the prison system. This internship also has a secondary aspect in which I will assist the Maryland Lynching Truth and Reconciliation Commission in their task of telling the history of Maryland lynchings and its victims. I will do so by the creation of biographies for those victims.

            I intend for this internship to help further my interest and study of racial injustice in Maryland. My interest was sparked by the current culture facing this country today, with the issues of racial shootings and the disproportionate sentences and number of African Americans imprisoned. These are big issues which are evident within our society and have their roots in the past. I have been able to better understand the roots of racial injustice of the past because of my previous work with two other graduate students on the five known lynching cases of Anne Arundel County, John Simms, George Briscoe, Wright Smith, Henry Davis, and King Johnson. With this internship, I will be able to better understand another element of racial injustice with the prison system directly from primary sources.

            I specifically chose the Maryland State Archives for this internship because I wanted to get to know the people and community of the institution. It seems to be a great place to work, and I have seen that the work that is done there greatly matters. The Legacy of Slavery Program alone seems to be of vital importance to the local community and reconciliation, and it is only one of many projects which the Maryland State Archives is currently researching and investigating. More than this, it is a local institution with a focus on local history, which does attract my attention as I enjoy the idea of helping investigate, research, and write about the local history of Maryland.

The reason I was interested in this internship was because it would focus on the study of racial injustice in the prison system as well as because I feel the internship itself focusses on what I feel is the core of archives. In terms of racial injustice in the prison system in the 1800s, I feel that it is a major, and local Maryland issue which I understand the basics of but not the specifics. This internship would allow me to delve deeper into the lives and stories of those who were imprisoned and to understand the depths of racial injustice during the 1800s. In addition, I personally believe that the core idea of archives which I would be accomplishing would be facilitating future historians by making the records of the Maryland Penitentiary more accessible. By transcribing and preparing the records for use in a database, the records would be able to reach many more historians than before and would be easier to access and search for specific areas of interest. I would be able to shed light on these records, and gain both the benefit of facilitating my own understanding as well as making the records easier for others to understand and access.