In July of this year, HSP undertook a project to survey its microform holdings. Microform includes both microfilm and microfiche. Microfilm is like 35mm film, while microfiche is tiny images on a sheet of paper. HSP holds approximately 23,000 microfilm reels and 10,000 microfiche leaves, including facsimiles of serials, vital records, manuscript collections, and other materials.
This project has two primary objectives: 1) compiling an inventory of the microform holdings and related data, including physical condition, image quality, intellectual property status, whether materials has already been digitized elsewhere, and other factors; 2) as time permits, I will assess select microform’s suitability for digitization based on physical condition and intellectual property concerns.
So, where did I start with this project? I began by combining two already existing databases, and updating the new one with fields that help to describe the metadata that HSP wants to collect (physical condition, image quality, intellectual property status, etc). I also took note of the various locations around HSP where there is microfilm (there is film on 4 of our 5 floors!).
My day to day work includes working with film from one of these spaces. I either create or update a record for each film or set of films (collections). I check each individual reel for physical condition and image quality. When there are many reels in a collection, I “spot check”– choosing films from the beginning and end of the collection. In some cases, the collections are quite large, and have been filmed at various points over time. An example of this is the Philadelphia Inquirer, which was filmed in sets over the course of many years. When something like this occurs, I make sure to “spot check” film from each date. One fun part of this job is getting to see the fun colored film that different film companies have used – I have seen blues, red, pinks, and yellow, among others.
What obstacles have I come across during my work? For the most part, the largest obstacle I have run into has been preservation problems. The main preservation problems with microform include degradation (usually redox blemishes – colored dots from oxidation), vinegar syndrome, and discoloration of the film. Vinegar syndrome refers to the smell from the off-gassing and decay of the film, which over time also degrades the film so that it comes brittle and fragile. Other preservation problems stem from eroding tape or rubber bands that have been used to keep the film from unspooling. In these pictures, you can see how the tape leaves residue on the film. You can also see how an old rubber band holds onto the film, and breaks when taken off.
The great news is that the progress of this project is on target. At the end of the six-month project, in late January, there will be a complete inventory of the microform holdings at HSP, ready to be used for reference work and to be consulted for digital projects in the future.
Yesterday, April 5th, 2011, we at HSP hosted an event for the new, Musical Finding Aid. What does this mean, you ask? Do not fret, if all your questions aren’t answered in the next paragraphs please leave a comment!
Last year Matt Shoemaker, director of digital collections and systems, was awarded a grant from the Heritage Philadelphia Program (HPP). This grant helps institutions like HSP do small, creative, out of the box projects. This year’s project, envisioned by Matt, was to select a small group musicians to compose a score no shorter than 1 minute. This score would reflect the feel and subtleties of the Mary Elizabeth Hallock Greenewalt Collection. This would, of course, express aspects of the collection which aren’t available in the neutral voice of the written finding aid. Matt did an excellent job explaining this:
“Now a finding aid, in case you do not know, is a standard research tool at archives. It is a non-interpretive tool for patrons of archives so they can more easily find the materials they would like to use. It provides some background information on the collection and what it deals with, information on how it is organized and has different levels of description to assist people about what they should look at, for their personal purposes…Finding aids are very structured, matter-of-fact, and are very careful to not impart any of the archivist’s preconceptions…When my team first thought of this project we wanted to explore the other methods for people to utilize information for fulfilling their research needs as well as try to give a taste of this feeling to researchers considering the collection.”
His words aptly sum up the trajectory of this project called the Musical Finding Aid. It was brought into fruition by 5 musicians: Willhem Echivarria, Maurice Wright, Ted Houghtaling, Max Lawrence and Andrea Clearfield. To hear their musical creations click on the links below.
This link refers back to an earlier blog and gives great background information about the musicians:
The event last night was graciously made possible by Pennsylvania Humanities Council, HSP staff volunteers, the finding aid musicians, HPP and of course Matt Shoemaker. For those that did make the event and for those that could not be there please feel free to browse the photos below.
Exhibition created by Max Lawrence.
Display of Art by Max Lawrence
Mary Elizabeth Hallock Greenewalt
Materials from the Greenewalt and Adopt-a-Collection on View
In case you’re not familiar, a finding aid is a descriptive, but purposely non-interpretive, tool used by researchers to help identify and locate material within an archival collection. Anyone who has done research in an archive has used a finding aid in order to give them a guiding point for their research with collection materials. For many collections, the finding aid and organization of the collection is broken down into series; groups of materials that share a theme, format, or some other similarity.
Our goal with this project was to take a collection with a well developed finding aid, in this case the Greenewalt collection, and create an interpretive supplement through music that could serve as an emotional guide to materials within each series. Five artists, Andrea Clearfield, Willhem Echevarria, Ted Houghtaling, Max Lawrence and Maurice Wright, participated in this project. Each pulled inspiration from materials in the different series and created music and video based on the experience. Their pieces were then tied to a finding aid generated by Archivists’ Toolkit, resulting in the musical finding aid.
I hope that anyone interested in using the Greenewalt collection for research finds this supplement useful in their research. This was the perfect collection for such a project considering Greenewalt’s background and interests in life. Greenewalt, a Lebanese woman born in the late 19th century, was a pioneer in the arts with her interests in music, light and color. She developed a color organ for displaying colored light scored to music and a notation system for this art which she called nourathar. In order to fulfill her musical pursuits, Greenewalt had to enter the engineering world and was awarded several patents, including one for an improved rheostat (you may know this best as the light dimmer switch). In the 1930s she spent much of her time in court, suing others for patent infringement.
As this project and its product is an archival experiment, I encourage readers to please comment and discuss the project via the comments section of this post. HSP will also be hosting a composers’ panel for this project starting at 6pm on the evening of April 5th, 2011 where we will bring the artists together, have a discussion about the project, listen to the music created and have the Greenewalt collection on display. More details on this event will follow when they are available.
Below is the music and video created for this project, as well as notes about the pieces primarily by the artists. The musical finding aid itself can be used by following this link. I would also like to thank the Heritage Philadelphia Program, without which this project would not have been possible.
Reviewing the papers of Mary Hallock Greenewalt, as well as the finding aid by HSP staff, I noticed several “characteristics” of Greenewalt’s personality and work that I thought could be translated well to a study of musical contrasts. I decided to focus on contrasts instead of colors since I find the concept of colors in music a very subjective way of “looking” at music. Greenewalt being a pianist herself , once I got involved with the project I wanted to write for the piano. I picked some of the “characteristics” that I found reflected in the papers-piano music, Impressionism, the waltz from Chopin’s perspective but also a little bit of Ravel’s Valses Nobles et Sentimentales, pulse-rhythm studies, her Middle-Eastern background-and started to combine different ideas in several different sequences in order to achieve the contrasts that I wanted. I want to offer my special gratitude to Jay Fluellen, pianist and a notable composer himself, for understanding my vision and translating it beautifully with his performance.
Willhem Echevarria was born in Puerto Rico, studied at University of the Arts under John Swana and Dennis Wasko, and worked for years as a trumpet player, arranger, and composer in a commercial studio setting. Always wanting to work in libraries in general, and music libraries in particular, he finished a Master in Library Sciences and worked at the University of Puerto Rico as a librarian before returning to Philadelphia in 2007. A professional librarian/archivist during the day, he still dedicates his evenings to music (performance, arranging, composing, and a little bit of ethno musicological research on the Caribbean).
The above video, entitled “Light-Color Play,” utilizes a painted board by Mary Elizabeth Hallock Greenwalt which can be found in Box 12, Folder 3 of this collection.
Maurice Wright was introduced to the craft and technology of film when he met Director Gene Searchinger in 1976 and contributed an electronic score for an unusual film about recycled aluminum, “Metallic Tales: The Social Life of a Non-Ferrous Metal,” which received a Golden Eagle Award. Over the next two decades Wright continued to work with Searchinger, most recently contributing music and special sound for the three-program series about linguistics, “The Human Language,” broadcast in the United States and Japan. You can learn more at www.mauricewright.org
In the writings of Mary Elizabeth Hallock Greenewalt, great length is taken to explain that there is no direct correspondence between sound and color. According to her, they “speak in different ways” and are always subject to the interpretation of the artist and the experiences they bring to each piece. I’m not certain if Mrs. Greenewalt was a synesthetic. This piece, instead of relying on historical verisimilitude assumes she might have been. If not, I can only wonder what drives someone to spend the majority of their life exploring the bridge between the worlds of the seen and the heard. I thought it would be an interesting idea to put aside any pressure to provide a strict textual interpretation and instead attempt to explore the dream world of Mrs. Greenewalt. The very place where her thoughts, with all their meanings, resonances and impressions would have gestated and found themselves expressed in the light of day. She would later take these ideas and call her art, nourathar, derived from Arabic and literally translated as ‘essence of light’.
Ted Houghtaling is a sound designer working in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. You can learn more about him and his music at tedhoughtaling.blogspot.com.
Maximillian P. Lawrence earned his BFA in painting from The Rhode Island School of Design. He is a founding member of Space 1026, an artists’ collective that focuses in silk-screening, painting, audio/video production and graphic design. His work has been exhibited at the The Institute of Contemporary Art, Spector Gallery and Vox Populi, Philadelphia; Jasmine Pasquill, Jonathon Levine Gallery, and DUMBO Art Center, New York City; Lump Gallery, NC; The Butcher Shop, Chicago; Mina Gallery, San Francisco; Antisocial, Vancouver; and in Europe. His work is featured in publications 8 ½ by 11, 55DSL Book; and Rockpile Magazine. His work is in the collection of 55DSL Corporate.
I was inspired by writings and graphs by Mary Hallock Greenewalt, as well as one of her paintings with a fragment of a score by Claude Debussy (Volume 25). Ms. Greenewalt indicates “music for the ‘sigh’” under the sketch. My work is built around excerpts from Debussy’s “Soupir” (Sigh), for soprano and piano, set to the poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé in 1864. The title of my piece is taken from a line in Mallermé’s poem.
The music from “Soupir” is alluded to throughout the work as well as Debussy’s “And the Moon Descends on the Temple That Was.” I also recorded myself at the piano, playing the musical excerpt that she transcribed, a series of descending dream-like chords. In her writings, she references music with a “moon” theme: “Et La Lune” by Debussy and the “Moonlight” Sonata by Beethoven. Layered in the music are fragments of these works and others, including Ms. Greenewalt’s own performances of Chopin and Beethoven. Also woven through the texture are various sounds of organ music.
I wanted to create a luminous soundscape, reminiscent of the “jeweled world” that Ms. Greenewalt describes in her vision of a new art form: Nourathar (essence of light). She imagines people “sitting within a huge living every-color jewel” while this “spoke the music of one’s soul”. She also speaks of the “shifting tones of light and color”, the “now brightening, now darkening, now a Jasper sea on the warm water”. Moon, soul, pulsing rhythm, color, light, dream, gems and water are recurring themes in her writings.
This piece is a creative response to her words, sketches and vision. In addition to the elements above, my own synesthesia (seeing colors to musical notes) helped inform the musical “color” of the work. There is a fluid progression from Debussy’s sigh-like chords to a high female voice singing “mon âme” (my soul) appearing and retreating into the distance like fleeting memories, an hommage to Mary Hallock Greenewalt and her extraordinary vision and creation.
Andrea Clearfield is an award winning composer of music for orchestra, chorus, chamber ensembles, dance and multi-media collaborations. Her works are performed widely in the U.S. and abroad. She has composed 8 cantatas for chorus and orchestra and is working on a new cantata for premiere at the Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts this spring. Recent premieres include Kawa Ma Gyur, a chamber work inspired by her 2010 trek documenting the Tibetan music in the restricted northern Himalayan region of Lo Monthang, Nepal, commissioned by Network for New Music. She was a fellow at the American Academy in Rome last fall, where she composed this work. She serves on the composition faculty at The University of the Arts and is the pianist in the new music ensemble, Relâche. She is also the founder and host of the Salon concert series featuring contemporary, classical, jazz, electronic, and world music, celebrating its 24th year and winner of the Best of Philadelphia Award, 2008. More information at www.andreaclearfield.com
One of the major challenges we face at HSP with the Digital Center for Americana project is just how to deal with pesky legacy data. Getting information online to improve access is great and all, but it takes a lot of effort to select, customize, and design systems so they can function together, integrate data from older systems (legacy data) and then provide the easy online access we have all come to expect. One such system we are trying to port over, hopefully familiar to everyone over the age of 25, is HSP’s card catalog. Consisting of over one million cards, it is too big to tackle in its entirety for this project. Instead, we are charged with porting over 17,000 records relating to graphics items for the DCA and then another ~40,000 records as part of a separate project.
These card marking assistants are helping weed out duplicates for the retrospective conversion of HSP's graphics cards
This card didn't survive the selection process
There are many separate issues when it comes to converting these paper cards to electronic records; the first being data integrity. Some of the cards we are dealing with are over 100 years old and many of them have not been properly updated. As time goes on, certain items change location on shelves, or perhaps are moved to entirely different collections or institutions. It is not uncommon for the card pointing to the physical item to be forgotten when such a shift is made. Additionally, methods necessary to find information in a card catalog are handled differently in an electronic database. In most database systems you can simply keyword search to find a record based on a specific morsel of information. With a card catalog, however, to achieve the same task you need a separate subject, creator, title, geographic, and publisher cards; just to name a few. This is why our graphics card catalog, known as PC4, is bloated at over 95,000 cards for roughly 50,000 unique records. In order to ensure a speedy turnaround time by our conversion vendor, MARCIVE, a small army of volunteers and assistants carefully check each card in PC4 for duplicates and obvious inaccuracies, marking duplicate cards with a big X in highlighter. This process should take roughly 1200 hours worth of labor to complete.
There is much back and forth between us and our vendor for the card conversion. Its not as clear as one would think as to where information from these cards should fit into MARC fields
Once we have the duplicates removed, we have to send the cards off for conversion to MARC records. The MARC format has been around for the better part of 50 years in the library world, but it is not a standard utilized by most archives. We are using MARC because it is a system our vendor understands, and can serve as a sort of Rosetta Stone between the four systems (Archivists’ Toolkit, Collective Access, Voyager OPAC, and VuFind) that are being implemented or tweaked as part of the DCA. For systems that do not utilize MARC already, such as Collective Access or the card catalog itself, we have to develop field maps to make certain the data goes where it needs to.
A MARC record for one of the thousands of converted cards
All in all, it takes a lot of work to move data from one form of technology to another. When it’s all finished the greatly increased amount of manageability and access to HSP records, and by extension HSP’s collections, makes the effort worth it.
A record displayed by Collective Access from philaplace.org. The same software we will be using for HSP's DAMS
Following the success of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania’s Chew Family Papers blog, which chronicled the processing of one of our largest collections of family papers, we have decided to share with you a broader behind-the-scenes view of our archives and conservation departments. Our staff are working on a wide variety of projects–installing and putting into operation our new digital camera; metadata cleanup in MANX (our manuscripts database); conservation of books, pamphlets, maps, photographs, and posters; processing collections; digitizing maps and surveys; and rethinking ways of processing pre-twentieth century collections.
We have a lot to share with you, especially since we are at the start of our pilot project to launch the new Digital Center for Americana. We are beginning this exciting venture with 51 Civil War collections, which will be processed, conserved, described, and selectively digitized. We will share more news on this project in the coming months. We are also participating in the PACSCL Hidden Collections Processing Project, which will make accessible some of Philadelphia’s richest collections. Of course, aside from these projects, there are many individual collections and items that receive our routine attention and care. We will update you about recently processed collections, tell you about the things that excite us in our collections, and discuss the important work being done at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania to make our collections accessible and available to researchers.
We hope you will enjoy this window into the archives and conservation departments at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.
Fondly, Pennsylvania: Notes from Archives and Conservation 
