Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Brad was out sick, so I didn't get to go back to the off-site storage facility today.

Instead, I worked on filling an order for images of the Forest Quad dorm. The requester had selected particular images, so I just had to pull the negatives and scan them. Once the images were scanned, Dina placed them on a website where the patron could download them.

I then entered some more items from the memorabilia cabinet into the accessions database.

Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Today, Brad and I continued going through patron requests and he showed me how he goes about filling these requests by selecting appropriate images and informing the requester of the Archives' policies regarding the use of images. I scanned two negatives and a photograph of two Indiana University chemistry professors for an article, and tomorrow I will probably select images for a requester.

I also accessioned some more items from the memorabilia cabinet.

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Today, Brad explained to me how he orders supplies for the University Archives (things like negative sleeves and envelopes, acid-free folders and boxes, brushes to clean negatives, etc.) and showed me some of the suppliers he uses. It's important for me to be familiar with things like this since many of the places at which I might find employment after graduation, such as most university archives, will be small institutions or departments and I may be responsible for ordering these kinds of supplies.

We looked at some catalogs of supplies, as well as websites for those suppliers. These were the main suppliers Brad showed me:

Gaylord: http://www.gaylord.com/

Hollinger Metal Edge: http://www.hollingermetaledge.com/

Light Impressions: http://www.lightimpressionsdirect.com/

I also scanned some images of Indiana University gymnasts for the new sports facility. Most of the images I scanned were of a man who was known for his skills on the trampoline, so there were lots of interesting shots of him tumbling in the air.

One of the negatives I scanned had what looked like some dried liquid on it. Since it wasn't just stuck on the negative but rather seemed to be partially embedded in the negative, Brad thought it was probably a result of an error during development. I was able to clean a little of the substance off the negative using PEC-12 photographic emulsion cleaner. A product that looks similar to the one I used can be found on Amazon.com. Fortunately, the substance was not on the emulsion side of the negative, so it was not very visible in the scanned image.

Tuesday, March 9, 2010

Today I continued working on filling the patron request for the opera images. This time I scanned slides of the same productions from yesterday. I also continued working on transferring information from the backs the the Photoservices prints to the negative envelopes in preparation for entering the information into the new database and putting the negatives into sleeves.

Monday, March 8, 2010

I spent today scanning negatives of opera productions again, which was a nice change from scanning sports negatives. Going through these images really makes me wish I'd had the opportunity to see more operas at Indiana University during my time here--it looks like they always put on amazing productions.

I scanned images of the 1999 production of Gianni Schicchi, the 1999 production of Suor Angelica, and the 2001 production of Faust. In this post, you can see one image from Suor Angelica (the nuns) and two images from Faust.

Monday, March 1

I started today by scanning a few negatives of a football game and a football player for the Hall of Champions, another sports exhibit which is being installed on the Indiana University campus. This project will require images of all university sports rather than just basketball.

I also continued working on going through the Photoservices contact sheets and transferring the information from the contact sheets to the negative envelopes in preparation for scanning these negatives and entering them into the new photographs database.

Today I worked on images of the construction of the Herman B. Wells Library. It was really interesting to see areas I walk through every day under construction! Here you can see a photograph taken on August 3rd, 1967 of a partially completed Main Library. This is a scan of the contact sheet. Once all the negatives have been scanned, the images added to the new photographs database, and the information entered into the database, these prints will no longer be needed except for exhibit purposes.

Monday, February 22, 2010

Today I finished going through all the sports contact sheets, which end in 1997. Once I had all the contact sheets that included photographs of IU women's basketball teams, I pulled the corresponding negative envelopes and began scanning them.

I am including in this post an image of a contact sheet like the ones I have been examining. These contact sheets reproduce the negatives in actual size, but as positive images. While these images are small, they are much easier to examine than the negatives and, unlike the negatives, they do not require careful handling since they are only reference prints.

This particular contact sheet shows a men's basketball game at Indiana University on February 5th, 1972 during which Indiana University played against Michigan State.

At the upper right corner, you can see the negative number. Both the contact sheets and the negative envelopes are arranged by these numbers.

Wednesday, February 3, 2010

Today I continued working on scanning negatives and slides of women's basketball for the exhibits in the basketball practice facility, which is scheduled to open sometime in March. So far, I have scanned all the images of women's basketball from 1972 to the beginning of 1976 that looked like they might be acceptable for use in the exhibit.



Since it takes time for each batch of negatives and slides to scan, I continued working on transferring information from the Photosevices collection prints to the negative envelopes while the scanner was working. This time I was working on a folder of prints showing the construction of a power plant on campus.

The new computer and scanner have also been installed in the photo archives (see pictures at right). I haven't used the new scanner yet, but it is supposed to be better for scanning slides. Also, now that we have three workstations, we will be able to work on projects requiring the use the Ask Sam database while the other computer and scanner are occupied with scanning. (No other programs can be used while images are being scanned.)

Monday, February 1, 2010 and Tuesday, February 2, 2010

We're still working mostly on finding images for the exhibits in the new basketball practice facility. Yesterday and today, I worked on finding images of the early years of women's basketball. While women's basketball began at IU early in the 1970s, these first games were not frequently photographed, so images are a little scarce.

For some of the earliest years, I checked all the sports negatives individually for shots of women's basketball. Since many of these envelopes are unlabeled, I added labels identifying the sports pictured to each of the envelopes as I went through them. For later years, we used the "Ask Sam" database to identify and pull the negatives of women's basketball. I then went through all the negatives I'd pulled and looked for good-quality images--images that were clear and showed the faces of IU players. I scanned these and, if they still looked clear when scanned at 2400 dpi, I saved them.

Wednesday, January 20 and Monday, January 25, 2010

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

On Wednesday, I finished going through the Biology and Botany prints and negatives, transferred all the information on those prints to the negative envelopes, and sleeved the negatives. I'll be doing this throughout my internship in preparation for the new database, into which we should be able to start entering images from the Photographic Services collection in mid-February, according to the Digital Library Program.

Photographic Services (or Photoservices), an Indiana University service which provides photographers for university events and creates large, high-quality prints of images, today exists as IU Photographics.

I also continued working on locating negatives for the basketball project. This time I was looking at images of men's basketball from the 1960s and 1970s.


Monday, January 25, 2010

Today, I continued scanning negatives of men's basketball from the 1970s. I worked on locating images of a particular player. In general, we will try to work from a student's final year on the team backwards to his or her earlier years, since the best shots of players are usually taken during their later years on the team.

As part of the ongoing preparation for the new database, I also pulled the Photoservices prints and negatives of the construction of Beck Chapel, transferred the information from the prints to the negative envelopes, and sleeved the negatives.

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Today I finished scanning the slides of opera productions. I'm including an image from a 2001 production of Madame Butterfly. It looks like it was a really beautiful show! To give you an idea of the level of detail in the actual scans we're creating for the opera department, that image is saved at 400 dpi (it's been shrunk a little even from that for this blog--click on it to see it at 400 dpi). The full-sized scans are 2400 dpi.

Now that the opera project is complete, I'll be working on scanning images of IU basketball games and players for the new basketball practice facility near Assembly Hall. The lobby of the practice facility will include exhibits on basketball throughout IU's history, so we are finding and scanning images to be used in the exhibits.

The previous negatives I'd worked with were all 35mm, but many of the basketball images are 120mm. The process for scanning them is basically the same, but they are scanned at 1400 dpi rather than 2400 dpi, since they are larger.

Tracking down the images for these basketball exhibits can be a pretty elaborate process. We're given the names of players and games of which the athletic department would like to have pictures, and then we try to locate appropriate images. Photographs in which each subject is identified, such as photographs of the entire team or individual portraits, can be located relatively easily by searching the IU Archives' "Ask Sam" database, but action shots of particular players are a little more difficult to find. Brad keeps the media guides released each year for the sports played at IU, and we have a guide put together by a local IU basketball enthusiast that lists by season every basketball game played at IU with the date and final score for each game, as well as all the people on the team that season with their jersey numbers. It's a really fantastic tool.

When someone wants images of a particular player, we use this guide to determine what years he played and what his jersey number was. Photographic Services photographed IU home games, so we go to the files of reference prints in the Photographic Services sports collection, and start going through the file for each year during which the player was on the team to locate the photographs of basketball games. These reference prints often contain many images on one sheet, so we use a loupe (a kind of magnifier) to examine each image for good shots of that player, whom we identify by his jersey number. It can be pretty painstaking work. I spent part of my day today going through photographs of games from the 1960s looking for good images of two particular players.

Tomorrow we're supposed to get a new computer and scanner installed, so it should be an exciting day!

Monday, January 18, 2010

Today I learned how to scan slides, which was pretty similar to scanning negatives. Most of the settings are the same--Color, transparency, 2400 dpi for the resolution--but the program has to be set to "positive" rather than "negative." The slides were a little easier to handle than the negatives, they scan more quickly, and they seem to attract less dust, so I had much less clean-up to do in Photoshop. However, the colors on some of the slides appeared a little dull and faded, so we sometimes increase the contrast a bit to make them look sharper. I was working on images of opera productions again, and I enjoyed seeing more pictures of previous shows. They've had some really beautiful sets and costumes.

I also started pulling some reference prints and negatives from the Indiana University Photoservices collection in preparation for entering scanned negatives into the new database we will start using soon. Since only the negatives will be scanned, we need to make sure all the information on the reference prints is also written on the envelopes of negatives so it can be included in the database. A lot of the reference prints have notes on the back about the subject of the photograph.

Today I worked on pulling negatives for the prints in one of the "Biology and Botany" folders, and Brad and I discussed some of the strange images that appear in older collections of photo-archives, particularly in photographs of experiments in science departments. I'm a little nervous at the prospect of running across images of animal experiments in some of the earlier photographs. Fortunately, the folder I was working with had nothing more unusual than some images from the 1930s of what looked like mold growing in Petri dishes. Most of the images are either portraits of faculty or show students and faculty at work, often surrounded by racks of test tubes. It's a fascinating glimpse of some of IU's science programs in the 1930s and 1940s.

First Week

I started my internship at Indiana University's Office of University Archives and Records Management on Monday, January 11th. For the rest of the semester, I will be spending my Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday mornings working under the supervision of the Photograph Curator, Brad Cook. Most of my previous archival experience is in processing collections containing few photographs, so this internship will give me an opportunity to learn more about working with photographs, slides, and negatives, as well as methods for digitizing those materials. My work will include pulling materials for researchers, scanning those materials, and adding metadata to digital images. I will also be learning about how to fulfill researcher requests for materials and how to handle requests for permission to publish images from the collections of the University Archives.

The Indiana University Archives photographs collections are located in an office one floor above the main office, so on Monday morning I headed upstairs, where Brad gave me a tour of the space and an orientation to the largest collections. The collections include photographs, slides, negatives, and reference prints for some of the negatives. I spent the rest of my time that day filing envelopes of photographs, reference prints, and negatives to familiarize myself with the location and organization of each of the main collections. I'll be spending a little time each day refiling these envelopes of materials requested by researchers.

On Tuesday, I started working on fulfilling my first request. Since the request came from a university department and is submitted every year, my supervisor gave me permission to write about it in some detail.

It came from the Indiana University Opera department, which requests images of previous opera productions each year in preparation for publicizing the upcoming season. After I located all the negatives that the department had asked for, Brad showed me how to scan them and use Photoshop to remove dust specks from the images. On Wednesday, I scanned and retouched the rest of the negatives myself. I loved the production of Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute) put on by Indiana University last November, so it was a treat for me to get to see images of previous productions. It looks like they've put on a lot of really fantastic shows!

The first week of my internship went really well, and I'm looking forward to my next! I think this internship will be fun and will provide me with some really great experience in an area of archival work that I know little about.