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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