Typical Work at Special Collection

Joan Steinly-Marks

For my internship in Summer 2024, I worked at Special Collections at the Albin O. Kuhn Library at UMBC. My main project involved scanning and organizing the photos in the Robert Peary collection. This meant going through each photo in the collection, taking notes on its appearance, source, size, and more, and creating a high-resolution scan. Each photo is assigned an Object ID number, which allows for easy searching and identification of a specific photo. For the majority of the images, I had to assign them an Object ID, as they had never been assigned one. It was important to take good notes on what the image depicted as duplicate images are assigned the same Object ID followed by a, b, c, etc. By having descriptive notes of the photo’s contents I could easily identify if an image was likely a duplicate and find the original image to confirm.

Some tasks took priority over my main project. Maintenance tasks are especially important. This includes things like reshelving books and other items, processing new items, and creating protective casings for items that require them. A new collection, the Garrett collection, often took priority. Carts full of new books would come in for me to process and shelve. Many of these books are older, which meant they required protective casing. I spent several days creating box-type casings made of thick folded paper to protect these books. Books with dust covers are protected using a specific type of plastic that is folded to form a second dust cover over the original one that keeps it clean and safe. Staying on the same project every day can get tiring, so it was nice to have these maintenance tasks occasionally pop up to give me something new to do. Then I would return to the Peary collection with renewed excitement.

In my next post, I will go into detail on the Peary project and my tasks relating to it. I will discuss the difficulties I experienced in dealing with some photos, the research I did to find information on the images, and how I learned to properly handle photos.