As a visitor to the Library Company, you might see any of
the thousands of objects in our collection in a variety of ways. You could view prints, pamphlets, and
paintings as part of an exhibition in the gallery, study rare books in the
reading room, or unfold a map from the 18th century in the print room. What you probably won’t see is what these
objects looked like before they were framed, organized and cataloged into the
collection. In fact, many items arrive
at the Library Company like this:
So how does a box like this become a collection ready for
researchers or an exhibition? For the
answer we must step into what some would call the less than glamorous (this blogger
disagrees!) world of processing.
The Library Company received this box full of glass and film
negatives, photographic prints, and journals from the Morris family to augment
the Marriott C. Morris Photograph Collection already at the Library Company. In order to integrate these new works into the
Print Department, a lot of work needs to be done. First, each negative and photographic print must
be housed in its own acid-free paper envelope for preservation. Then the envelopes are ordered chronologically
in specially made archival boxes.
In order to find information
like date, location and subject of the photos we have a few resources at our
disposal. Negatives can be placed on a
lightbox like this one which allow the photograph to come to life even when
there is no print. Certain small details
may not be visible until the negative is digitized, but the lightbox allows us
to get a general idea of the photo’s subject.
In many cases, this part of the
process needs to be completed rapidly.
Outside their original housing perhaps for the first time in years, some
film negatives begin to curl and warp.
Similarly, if the emulsion on a glass negative is starting to flake
sitting out on a lightbox could potentially speed up the damage.
In the case of this
collection, information such as the date and location of the photograph are
often easy to find thanks to Marriott C. Morris’s meticulous notes and the
Morris family’s dedication to preserving his work. Morris kept journals and recorded the date,
time, lighting, subject and camera used for many of his photographs. He also
wrote basic information like location and date on the original envelopes
and sometimes scratched a title into the border of the negative. If a negative matches up with a journal
entry, we have all the information we need.
If not, we garner what we can from the envelope and give the negative a
title drawn from the subject of the photograph.
Once the negative is digitized, new details may emerge allowing us to
title the photograph more specifically.
For example, Morris took many images of his family. Recognizing a person in an unlabeled
photograph would change the title from [Baby girl] to [Janet, 10 months].
Once all the negatives have
been housed and organized, they will be given accession numbers and the next
phase of the project can begin. The
negatives are scanned and placed into a database of high quality digital images
on the Library Company’s server. We
create another database with all the information gleaned from the journals and
the negatives themselves, as well as the digital filenames of the scans, so
that the collection can easily be cataloged.
Catalog records and the digital images will be made available online to
the public through the Library Company’s catalogs WolfPAC and ImPAC, which can
be found on the homepage of our website.
With the collection finally organized, accessioned, rehoused, and
labeled researchers can easily use these resources and Library Company staff
can display the items in exhibitions both in the gallery and online.
All of this important work
for the Morris Collection could not be done without the generosity of the
Morris family. With their donation of
their grandfather’s work, David Marriott Morris, Eleanor Rhoads Morris Cox, and
William Perot Morris also donated the funds to process and preserve the
collection. Thanks to the Morris family,
people across Philadelphia and the world will be able to enjoy and learn from
Marriott C. Morris’s photographs both at the Library Company and online.
Alison Van Denend
Assistant Project Manager
The Marriott C. Morris Photograph Collection
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