Spring 2022 Internship: Special Collections Part III

 As the Spring 2022 semester draws to a close, my work in UMBC's Special Collections department with the Lewis Hine collection of photographs continues. I have previously described the scope of my digitization work and its importance, especially at a time when travel and access to material is limited. 

The digitization is nearing the halfway point - since beginning my internship in March, I and another student have photographed the back of almost two thousand of the approximately five thousand prints in UMBC's Hine collection. I will keep photographing them over the summer; others on the team in Special Collections have already begun some of the rehousing work associated with the project and the NEH grant. Just as my work is preserving the prints' contents digitally, the rehousing work will help to protect the physical media. I may have an opportunity to help with that part of the project later in the summer. 

I have gained some interesting new skills through this internship. In addition to clarifying my understanding of the mechanics of copy stand photography, I have gained some wonderful insight about the work that goes into digitizing records for research use. As a student and researcher who often relies on digital versions of the sources I use for my own projects, it is helpful to be on the other side of the desk, to understand all of the moving pieces involved in a request to scan or otherwise document some record in an archive. 

A portion of my work feels very mechanical: add the print's metadata to the project spreadsheet, place the print on the copy stand, take a photograph of its verso [its back], crop the resulting image, and save the new digital photograph in the database drive. Other aspects of my work, though, are fascinating and unusual just like the best research problems and projects that I enjoy outside of this internship. What's the best workflow for this task I need to complete? What states and cities will we visit with today's section of Hine prints? They are organized based on their object number, rather than their subject matter, so it's possible for one session of digitization to involve a whirlwind tour of as many as five or six destinations.

Hine spent a lot of time documenting mill workers in New England, fishermen, crabbers and oyster shuckers along the coast, and agricultural workers in the deep south. Given the diversity of industry in many of the places Hine visited, it seems surprising (and sad) that despite his travel to cities and areas which have majority Black populations, there are vanishingly few Black subjects in the prints I've encountered so far. As Hine's work looks at child labor, the oversight seems especially egregious. Where are the Black children toiling long hours in factories, or in the fields? Is this gap in his subject an intentional one on Hine's part, or just an accident? 

I do not have those answers. 

The Hine collection is fascinating, even for someone like me who has very little free time. On their surfaces, the prints are often blurry, chaotic images of a single child or group of children looking small and proud and defiant. The contextual information from Hine on the back of each print is also important, in a different way. I am eager to continue digitizing the backs of these images through the summer! 

The Civil Rights History of Baltimore at the MCHC: Part 2

The thing about oral history is that you have the opportunity of learning from different people and hear different perspectives on particular topics and issues of society. Baltimore has a rich history that many don’t know or heard about. The McKeldin-Jackson Project showed and explained the history of segregation during the civil rights movement.

Upon reading and listening to the interviews, I was able to get a better understanding of Theodore McKeldin, the people on his team, and civil rights leaders such as Lily May Jackson and her family. The transcription and translation process of these interviews gave us new perspectives on how African Americans were treated in society and the way Governor McKeldin worked with race leaders to bring change into Baltimore. Not just that but most of the summaries that I was able to create from the interviews were concerns about African American disenfranchisement; education and employment of African Americans; black relations with the police and with Jews; public accommodation of African Americans, black political action, and black women. This opened a doorway for me to learn more about Ford and Lyric theatres in Baltimore; desegregation; restaurant discrimination; the Urban League; Gov. Theodore R. McKeldin's appointments. I think it was truly interesting to see different groups of people come together to fight for a common and rebuild a community that wasn’t getting any respect from society.

I think it was quite inspiring to see a black woman like Lillie May Jackson, working closely with the governor of Maryland to create opportunities and change for the black community. It was amazing to see her support Louise Kerr Hines, who was discriminated against at the Enoch Pratt Free Library, as she wasn't offered a position for a free library training course due to the color of her skin. It was quite significant to see Carl Murphy of the Baltimore Afro-American newspaper and Lillie Mae Carroll Jackson of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People suing the library for their discriminatory actions towards the black community.

The most important part of the internship was the opportunity to listen to and transcribe old audio from the 90s. It was a long and difficult process but it was worthwhile for any future historian who was trying to get into the field of transcribing works of others from any time period. Overall, though the internship wasn’t too long of an experience, I still found all the projects and work that we did to be quite interesting and such a contribution to my field of study as a future historian.

The Civil Rights History of Baltimore: MCHC Part 1

 

Public History uses historical skills and getting around communities to learn and study history. I learned public history by making history with people who know and understand the field. From my experience doing a public history summer internship with the UMBC history department, I could fill some gaps in history that I didn’t know about history by doing fieldwork and conducting oral history interviews of those who were a part of the Freddie Gray uprising in Baltimore. The boot camp internship is a history internship, designed as a way for students to practice the work of public historians and the aspect of oral history and why it is essential for us to make history.

The Maryland Center for History and Culture (MCHC) is the internship's location; It was founded in March of 1844.it is an excellent place of history and has a lot of documents that historians can use to conduct a research projects, etc. As the museum was in the process of creating a civil rights exhibition, the translation of interviews done about the history of the Civil rights movement in Baltimore was needed as a way for the public and citizens to learn more about the history of Baltimore.

The internship was designed as a way for students to work on interviews that were done in the past, to create short summaries for the public to see if they have an interest in a specific person. It further taught us how to do the transcription and translation of old interviews as a way for the public to have easy access to information. It was the McKeldin-Jackson Project Oral History Collection that we were working on to create short summaries for the community to have an interest in it. The use of audio recordings to craft a story or a summary can be challenging, and sometimes you might perhaps record information that might not be the truth or not to the extent of what the interviewee said. This internship is an excellent opportunity for history students to practice history and the different ways that historians make history. We tend to associate just being behind a desk with the study of history, but there are many ways that we make history. Fieldwork and the inducting of an oral interview are methods that the internship was teaching us in a sense for us to be great historians in the future.

Spring 2022 Internship: UMBC Special Collections, Part II

The Covid-19 pandemic has been a strange time to pursue a graduate degree. For the past several years, students' ability to travel for research (or any other reason) has been severely limited, due to public health needs and concerns. In addition to impacting my ability to conduct in-person research for my degree, the pandemic of course has had a staggering effect on the world at large, including the global supply chain. Items as commonplace as paper towels, or as complicated as the microchips needed to manufacture almost any modern automobile, have sometimes become scarce or altogether impossible to find. 

My internship with Special Collections has faced this hurdle, too. Part of my work with the Lewis Hine collection will involve rehousing the fragile old photographs in new, safer enclosures. The prints are currently kept in mylar sleeves, ten sleeves per file folder in archive-safe boxes: imagine a highly-specialized sort of baseball card collection, and you've got the right general idea. 

The current enclosures, however, used adhesive to create a pocket in the mylar sleeve for the photograph, and the adhesive has started to break down over time. This sometimes leads to the adhesive wandering out from its original location and "attacking" the photograph, trapping it along a sticky seam. Unfortunately, I have already found several photographs whose rescue from these enclosures will require the specialist experience of a photographs conservator.  

Lewis Hine, School #9 and #12: Some of the boys who work in the glass works at night and go to school in day time, October 1908 (acc. no. P214). The Photography Collections, University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

The image above is one of the "stuck" photographs. If you look carefully along the bottom edge of the print in this old digital copy, particularly above the "Ind." notation in the caption, you can see the mylar sleeve's edges running right up to the print and the second copy of it which is also kept in this sleeve, and the slightly more opaque areas where the adhesive is breaking down with age. Despite gentle efforts, I was unable to free this print today; however, as the copy was not stuck, I was still able to photograph the reverse of each print. The staff and I are hopeful that the new enclosures will help to protect those prints which currently are free and unstuck, and will be safe new homes for stuck prints once a specialist helps to free them safely. 

Because of Covid-19, supplies for this rehousing project took more than four months to arrive to campus from the specialty vendors that Special Collections uses. This is an extraordinary amount of time! It has been extremely rewarding to contribute to the overarching goal of digitizing these photographs and making them more accessible for scholars and interested members of the public. Additionally, I have enjoyed being "behind the scenes" in Special Collections and learning about all of the unexpected, occasionally complicated or fraught, processes involved in digitizing and storing unusual materials. Whether it's something internal like wandering adhesive in archival storage, or something external like a global pandemic's effect on the timeline for receiving orders and supplies, protecting valuable and unique resources like the Hine Collection takes considerable planning, dedication, and special skills. I look forward to continuing my work for the remainder of the semester! 

(As a quick note, I do want to clarify that the existing enclosures for the Hine Collection are generally safe for the prints, and were designed and implemented by professionals with training in caring for and storing photographic materials. Even the best and most groundbreaking storage solutions will deteriorate over time and need to be updated or replaced - this is true for the storage of all art and historic materials. By undertaking this work now, Special Collections is ensuring that the photographs will be safe and protected for a long time into the future.) 

Spring 2022 Internship: UMBC Special Collections

Hello! My name is Meredith; I am an alumna of UMBC's undergraduate History program (2021) and began in their Historical Studies MA this past fall. Most of my research is focused on medieval Europe, but I also have an interest in art and art history. This secondary interest led me to an internship in the Special Collections department of the Albin O. Kuhn Library on campus, which I started earlier this month. My work for this internship will focus on the library's extraordinary Lewis Hine collection of photographs. 

Hine (1874-1940), who worked as a teacher in the New York City area before picking up his camera full-time, traveled across the United States in the early twentieth century. His employer, the National Child Labor Committee, asked him to document the working conditions that children endured in factories, mills, mines, and other businesses around the country. The NCLC hoped that Hine's photographs would cause enough of a shift in public opinion that legislation prohibiting child labor could pass.  

For more than ten years, Hine criss-crossed the country, stopping in at tenement apartments, furniture factories, newspaper offices, and other places where children worked. He brought not just his camera but also an arresting, innate sense of photographic composition. Though he did not sugar-coat or overplay his subjects' circumstances, he also did not try to sugarcoat or exaggerate them. Children - some not more than five years old, some in their teens - gaze out of the thousands of images Hine produced, caught in a moment of rest in their day. Some of the images are joyful or whimsical. Some are heart-wrenching. Hine's work for the NCLC constitutes one of the first times that photography was put to work for reformers' causes. 

Lewis Hine, Young Chicken Venders [sic], Sixth St. Market, Cincinnati, 1908 (acc. no. P33).
The Photography Collections, University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

UMBC's collection of approximately five thousand of Hine's NCLC prints is unique among other collections, because the back of the prints are visible and accessible. My work for this internship will involve using a copy stand to take photographs of the back of each print, notating the relevant digital metadata, and perhaps, eventually, also assisting with rehousing some of the prints in new storage containers. Covid-related supply chain issues mean that the project is off to a slower start than the Special Collections staff and I had hoped, but I found my rhythm last week and made it through approximately sixty of the photographs! 

Each unique photograph must be carefully removed from its archival folder, transported to the copy stand's platform, and arranged so that the camera can see it in its entirety. For many of these, that is a fairly straightforward task, but a notable number of the photographs have multiple prints - copies - of the image in their sleeves. In this case, I also document the back of each copy. It is work that requires significant attention to detail and concentration, both to ensure that the fragile photographs are handled safely and to prevent any mistakes in the digital data entry. I am enjoying it so far and look forward to continuing through the semester and beyond. My work will not only increase public access to this important collection of early twentieth century photographs, but also will help to preserve them for future scholars and others with an interest in photography and history. 

For more information about Lewis Hine, visit the Library's Hine Collection page and online database.