Finding Aids
No collection is too large, small, or complicated for this archivist. Although I am familiar with ArchivesSpace, I particularly enjoy working with collections that require item-level description and have frequently transformed MS Excel spreadsheets into EAD-encoded finding aids using Oxygen. The following are sample of finding aids I’ve worked on.
Josef Gugler African and Middle Eastern Film Collection, 1947-2013
https://archives.iu.edu/catalog/VAD5484
This collection featured over 900 unique posters in addition to audiovisual recordings and 12 boxes of promotional materials. What was particularly challenging about this collection was that the items were written in over a dozen languages including English, French, German, Thai, Polish, Czech, Japanese, Arabic, Hebrew, Bambara, and more. In addition to presenting title and alternate title information, it required name authority research to ensure users could more easily locate films by title and creator. It also raised questions of whether it was best to transliterate non-Roman titles and names, which creates a number of complications, or to at least add the original characters.
Mary Perry Smith Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame Archives Collection, approximately 1974-2006
https://archives.iu.edu/catalog/VAD4347
The Mary Perry Smith BFHFI Archives Collection includes over 100 boxes of administration documents, promotional materials, applications submitted to an annual film competition, photographs, and film and event memorabilia, as well as over 1300 audiovisual recordings. The size of the collection required me to break the description down into series-level finding aids and hardcode linking among the overview and series as the delivery system involves live indexing and couldn’t deliver the information as one continuous XML document.
Phil Moore Collection, approximately 1918-1987, bulk 1953-1987
https://archives.iu.edu/catalog/VAD8293
Phil Moore was a prolific composer, arranger, musician, and talent coach as is evidenced by this collection. In addition to 80 boxes of music manuscripts, lyric sheets, personal papers, and business records, the collection includes over 1200 photographs and negatives and nearly 500 audiovisual recordings. Moore worked with a number of well-known film stars including Marilyn Monroe, Dorothy Dandridge, and Lena Horne and his arrangements often indicate that a piece was arranged for use by a specific artist. In some cases there is also information tying a music manuscript to a published audio recording. Although item-level description is not always warranted, in this case I felt it would create an important entry point into the collection for anyone seeking to research not just Moore’s musical career but those of his clients.
Richard E. Norman and Race Filmmaking Collection, 1912-1997
https://archives.iu.edu/catalog/VAC1152
Although I came in at the end of the NEH-funded grant project for updating this finding aid, my contributions included creating digital surrogates for difficult items including oversized posters, glass negatives, and a lithograph block, and uploading this content to the finding aid.
Black Radio: Telling It Like It Was, circa 1920s-1997, bulk 1991-1995
https://archives.iu.edu/catalog/VAC0316
One of my first and most popular finding aids, Black Radio allowed me to work out the best way of handling item-level description for sound recordings. In this case it seemed more useful to end users to group together the original and derivative recordings than to separate them out by format. I took a similar approach with the Michael Lydon Collection and Portia K. Maultsby Collection, although in these cases I was also able to include the transcripts in the physical description so that both users and staff would immediately know if an interview had been transcribed and–if not–the amount of time required to listen to the interview in real time.
Reclaiming the Right to Rock: Black Experiences in Rock Music Collection, 2008-2010
https://archives.iu.edu/catalog/VAB9846
The bulk of this collection was created during the Archives of African American Music and Culture’s production and documentation of its Reclaiming the Right to Rock conference. The conference and related events took place from October 19-November 20, 2008. In addition to 28 miniDV videocassettes recorded by volunteers and one box of documentation, a professional video team generated nearly 22 hours of born-digital footage. This footage documented panels, lectures, one-on-one interviews with musicians, musical events, and behind-the-scenes moments. Rather than create an individual node for each file, tape, and photograph, a folder-level container was created for each event and interview with the assumption that staff and end-users would have an easier time looking up desired items if they were grouped by intellectual content as opposed to format.
Other Metadata and Cataloging-Related Activities
In addition to creating DACS-based and EAD-encoded finding aids, I’ve worked in a number of positions, groups, and committees responsible for reviewing metadata standards and/or working with controlled vocabularies:
- EAD3 Revision Subgroup, Indiana University
- Metadata Discussion Group, Indiana University
- Media Digitization and Preservation Initiative SIP Working Group
- Image Collections Online Standards and Guidelines Subcommittee
- Indiana University PCC Non-MARC Authorities Issues Group
- Association for Recorded Sound Collections (ARSC) DACS for Archival Sound Recordings Subcommittee
- Coordinator Field Bibliographer, IU/MLA Folklore Bibliography Project, Indiana University
- Assistant Cataloger, Ethnomusicological Video for Instruction & Analysis Digital Archives (EVIA-DA), Indiana University (included generation of SACO records for review by project cataloger)
Of these groups, the ARSC DACS for Archival Sound Recordings Subcommittee and the EVIA-DA Assistant Cataloger position were among the most interesting for me from the perspective of understanding user needs. As part of my work for the ARSC subcommittee, I developed two different surveys–one for catalogers and one for users–that explored the challenges faced when creating or searching metadata specifically linked to sound recordings.
As the EVIA-DA Assistant Cataloger I wore both my ethnomusicologist and library science hats as I worked with users to create and apply appropriate subject headings to ethnographic video footage. Just a few of the issues I encountered and worked through included selecting geographic headings for cities in countries such as Liberia, which have experience considerable geopolitical upheaval; translating and determining whether certain Arabic terms fell under existing subject headings; navigating what many researchers and community members feel to be politically charged issues, such as applying a subject heading that refers to the linguistic practices of a marginalize group as a “dialect” as opposed to a language; and finding a way of harmonizing LC subject headings for musical instruments with local terminology and the Hornbostel-Sachs classification system.
Additionally, my MA thesis research examined the practices used by ethnomusicologists for citing sound recordings and the difficulties these often pose for the identification and location of any third-party recordings used as primary sources in their research.