Postcards, Periodicals, and Greetings from Estonia

Happy Fourth of July! Appropriately, the early 20th century postcard collection I’ve begun processing this week has its fair share from the US of A, along with what I’ve determined to be one postcard from what is now the capitol of Estonia. No I'm not spending the holiday weekend in Eastern Europe, but if I had sometime around the turn of the century, I could have sent a postcard much like the one in our collection. I’m putting my archives training to good use (hopefully) and creating a finding aid for a small postcard collection currently housed in the rare books room of the Jean Outland Chrysler Library. The origins of the collection are a bit mysterious, but that won’t keep us from arranging and describing it to provide access for researchers interested in late 19th and early 20th century postcards. The collection is truly a global one, with landscapes, cityscapes, art, and architecture from more than a dozen countries. Most of the postcards are blank, but represent a useful resource for both those interested in postcard manufacture and use and those interested in the scenes they depict. The bulk of the collection is art reproductions and scenic locales so I’m currently arranging the collection into series based on geography and, in the case of the art postcards, Library of Congress classification. The finding aid won’t describe individual postcards, but will provide an overview of the collection and valuable access points to what could otherwise be an overwhelming jumble.

This week I also worked on cataloging art periodicals. In addition to our diverse current periodical subscriptions, the library also holds donated and rare materials and specific issues related to museum collections and shows. More dynamic than single or even multi-volume monographs, periodicals present unique cataloging challenges. Periodicals often change names, absorb other serials, change the frequency of distribution, and shift the place of publication. Cataloger becomes detective!

Finally, a quick shout-out to our new glass door. Museum staff and visitors can now see the friendly faces waiting for them at the reference desk as they enter the reading room. What once appeared to be a particularly foreboding vault door is now a lot more inviting. It may seem like a small detail, but, especially in the case of museum visitors, the new door sends the message that they’re welcome at the library.

--John Curtis, Cataloging Fellow

A View from the Stacks : Interns' Journal - Week 2

Prior to beginning my internship at the Chrysler, I was told to be ready to “get my hands dirty” in the library. With my outsider’s knowledge of libraries and clichéd assumptions about internships I took this to be a metaphor for fixing someone’s coffee or sorting somebody’s mail. Upon starting my internship I was corrected in my assumptions—none of my tasks were menial or useless and “dirty” was meant literally. In the second week of our internship I and fellow intern, Casey, began the dusty work of library preservation with enclosing fragile and rare books in protective folders.

To begin, we donned protective gloves and looked at the 30 shelves of the Moses Myer’s family book collection with a certain level of awe—first over the age of each volume (some over 200 years old), and second over the sheer amount of time it would take ourselves and future students to fit and enclose each individually. Pausing often to study the books’ 18th century ideals of chemistry or the portraits and signatures doodled in margins, we measured each book for a 4-flap enclosure of archival paper. Over the first half of our preservation week we housed 34 books, protecting them from moisture, light, air, bugs, mold, and each-other. Though it felt great to complete our careful folding with a large chunk of the books protected, our next task certainly left a greater spatial impact.

In the latter half of our week Casey and I completed some lighter wrapping for a shelf of old and tattered books. After some organizing and dusting, we cleared 7 shelves previously covered in bits of aging books and German art periodicals to make light enclosures and some room for the museum’s scrapbooks. Previously crowded under shelves of auction catalogues, theses scrapbooks are now better preserved and more accessible to anyone looking for a visual history of the Chrysler museum, or just some amusing vintage photographs. All in all it feels great not only to accomplish so much, but to know and see how our work is serving the library. My week in learning the process and importance of library preservation has given me the valuable work experience I sought, as well as a feeling of achievement I had never expected.

 - Chelsea Reinhardt 2010 Summer Library Intern

Welcome, Summer 2010 Interns!

The staff of the Jean Outland Chrysler Library would like to bid a warm welcome to our Summer 2010 Interns! Casey Nye (Virginia Tech) and Chelsea Reinhardt (Old Dominion University) will spend the summer learning about the care and management of collections in special libraries. They will be helping with some exciting projects! As this photo shows, they are already hard at work on their first big project – working together to create archival 4-flap enclosures for the Myers family library. Updates on their progress and upcoming events, including the July 21st Jean Outland Chrysler Library Open House, will be posted here each week, so stay tuned!

My Fall Internship at the Jean Outland Chrysler Library

This Fall we were very pleased to welcome Sarah Fowler, a senior at Old Dominion University , as a Library Intern.  Sarah assisted with a number of projects in the Library. We'll certainly miss her, but you can look forward to reading some of her observations about the Library on this blog in the coming weeks. Here's what she had to say about some of the projects she completed:

"I have been working on a wide variety of projects while interning at the library. I began by working with the books that were in need of conserving. I had to go through a large stack of books and piece together those that had fallen apart. From there I had to try to identify the books. This was challenging because many of the books were in other languages like German or French. My next step was to wrap them in acid free paper and then to search for them in the library’s catalogue. I enjoyed this project because I am interested in conservation.

My favorite project involved a box of old photographs. For this project, I had to go through a box of photographs and try to determine the date on which they were taken and who was in the photograph. The box I was working on contained a collection of photographs from the 1950’s of a meeting of NATO in Norfolk. There were also hundreds of photographs from the collection of W.L. Parker who was a former director of the Board of Trustees for the Chrysler Museum. The subject of these photographs was often historical places and landmarks. For example, he took many photos of Colonial Williamsburg and the campus of the University of Virginia. This was my favorite project because after opening an ordinary box I got to discover a lot of interesting photographs and learn a little about who took them and why."

 - Sarah Fowler, Fall 2009 Jean Outland Chrysler Library Intern

Welcome, Jean Outland Chrysler Library Interns!

The staff of the Jean Outland Chrysler Library would like to welcome our summer 2009 interns! They are Jessica Dame (Christopher Newport University), Emma Tisdale (New York University), Brendan Higgins (College of William and Mary) and Gabrielle Barr (Johns Hopkins University). We are thrilled to have them, and they have already been a great help to the library. After a brief demonstration this afternoon, the interns tried their hand at creating four-flap enclosures for the Myers books. Enclosures, specially-fitted boxes made of acid-free board, are a safe way to protect delicate books from physical damage. The interns will be using their new skill to help us in the continuing effort to protect the entire Myers library.