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Materials from the Bafford Photography Book Collection on display for the rotunda exhibition
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As the digital content coordinator for Special Collections, many of the assignments for the duration of my internship had been pre-planned in a set schedule. For example, my first assignment was to be posted in correspondence with Black History Month as it detailed the history of UMBC’s Africana Studies department and records associated with such, and the next post about new accessions received by Special Collections would be posted thereafter in order to promote the corresponding rotunda exhibit up for display until mid-March. For both of these posts and others like them, they would be written and have images curated by another member of the Special Collections staff. Therefore, my job would primarily be to make any “finishing touch” edits, have them posted onto our blog, and make accompanying announcement posts for them on Instagram as a way to advertise to our followers.
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| Transformations (2009) by Joyce Tenneson pictured next to “Suzanne with Wreath” in the Special Collections reading room. |
Beyond these projects, I was encouraged to contribute content of my own to the 50th anniversary project. As previously mentioned in my first blog post, I got to know a lot about some of the photographers in our archives when I was an undergraduate assistant. My favorite one of all had to be Joyce Tenneson; I really appreciate the soft, ethereal quality of her work. One of the first assignments for my internship was to create a post for our Instagram page, so when I got the chance to contribute to the #PhotoBookFriday series, showcasing some of Tenneson’s photographs immediately came to mind. The process started off pretty simple: first, I searched our database records for exactly what items we had belonging to Tenneson. I envisioned the post featuring not only one of her photo books, Transformations, and select pages within, but a full-size version of one of the photographs to be displayed next to it. What I overlooked when browsing the database and devising this plan, though, was that the Tenneson photograph I wanted was quite large — 120 cm x 120 cm to be exact! There was absolutely no way I was going to be able to pull this photograph on my own considering its size, and the thought of even attempting to do so was out of the question as I feared potentially damaging it in the process. Luckily, Lindsay was there to assist me in carrying it to the main area of the reading room, as well as providing me with display props such as the wooden book stand.
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| Heart Throbs: The Best of DC Romance Comics, which served as the main source material for my blog post |
Over the weeks, I continued to post more for #PhotobookFriday while devising a plan for the most important project of all: my very own blog post! As advised, I decided to write about something in Special Collections that was both unique and fell in line with my personal and/or research interests, so I chose the romance comics we have in the Rosenfeld collection. After preliminary research about the topic, I was able to narrow my focus down to romance comics specifically in the postwar era and what messages concerning gender and sexuality they communicated to their audience. Next, came the process of actually analyzing the comics themselves — this was my favorite part as reading the comic strips was so much fun that it didn’t feel like work at all! Afterwards, I took pictures and scans that were to be included in the blog post itself as well as on its Instagram post. Seeing all of my research and other work in the reading room come together was satisfying and I’m really proud of how the post came out in the end.
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