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Volunteers in the archives



At the moment, we have 11 volunteers and one intern.  We've had as many as thirteen but it became impossible to supervise that many.  Some projects and individuals require more supervision than others.

To place us in context--with a staff of three, Special Collections is responsible for the Photographic, Film, Art and Memorabilia collections of the Museum.  Central Archives also resides in Special Collections and we function as the de facto archives of the Museum, which has no records manager or retention schedule.  We also function as a stock photo and film agency which takes up probably 80% of the non professional staff time. 

We've had two major projects accomplished by volunteer help. 
The first: the Photographic Print Collections were identified, arranged, numbered and entered in a MS Access database by Matt, a graduate student in history who volunteered here one day a week-- until we hired him.
The second: over the past three and a half years, our lantern slides have been cleaned, re-housed, numbered and their data entered into a database by a small army of volunteers and summer interns, notably Jean, so we now have minimal level access to over 20,000 images.

Right now this is what our volunteers are doing:

Cynthia, a former teacher, is reviewing our boxed slide collections; arranging the slides (e.g. exhibition installation shots) in sequences when possible, numbering them and identifying duplications of identical images.  This is excellent prep work for collection level cataloging and digitizing these collections.

Eleanor, retired journalist, has created a number of finding aids including one well over a hundred pages for one of the more important collections. 

Leon, retired MD, has been working on a finding aid for another large collection of the papers of a physical anthropologist.

Sonya, retired librarian, is creating an electronic index for our early letter books.

The meticulous Louis dry mounts reference prints onto cards and cleans and numbers lantern slides.  He will likely be sleeving vintage photographic prints in the future.

Bea, retired photographer, (age 95 and around here longer than even she can remember) carefully and neatly numbers slides in the boxed collections so they can be replaced when loaned out to be copied.

Judy, an author, is very versatile.  She enters data for our video collections, has organized our extra print files, and reviewed our negative lists to derive an estimated number of characters.  The latter has made it possible for us to estimate the cost of sending the lists out to be converted into a database. She will soon be placed in charge of updating our vertical files on an ongoing basis.

Royal, a retired librarian, has been indexing early correspondence.

Tom, a retired photographer, is on loan to us from the photo studio.  He's happily cataloging our collection of old cameras and hoping to link some of them to photographers whose work is in our collection.

We have a new volunteer, Matt, just borrowed temporarily from the Digital Library.  He'll be doing data entry for our vertical files and possibly in the future (if we can keep him) refining the data in our color image database.

We also have a college summer intern, Jill, who pulled slides to be sent to our scanning vendor.  She also created a simple MS Access database for our bio vertical files which when finished will go up on the web.

Nancy, a retired editor, is using the material in our bio files to create simple one or two page biographical notes which we can link to Jill's database.

Without our volunteers, very little of our organizational or basic preservation work would be possible.  Each individual brings his or her own personality and set of skills, manual and/or intellectual.  We get people to work on projects that they like and enjoy because one is always best at something one loves to do.

Barbara Mathe
Senior Special Collections Librarian
        
        American Museum of Natural History
        79 Street and Central Park West
        New York, New York 10024
        phone   212 769-5419
        fax     212 769-5009