Week 15

As this is the second to last week of this capstone experience, I worked mainly on finishing record-keeping, including drawer lists and database records for the collection.  I also checked with my field supervisor about the collection storage and status of the transfers so that there would be no confusion after I leave.  I hope next week to have all my notes and documents organized and in place so that the next person to use this collection will have all the information available.

Week 14

This week I turned in the first draft of the finding aid for review by the Manuscripts and Art Department.  Hopefully only minor rather than systemic changes will be necessary in the revision phase.  The final two weeks will be dealing with the odds and ends left over from the various objectives and leaving the institution with an organized record of the collection and all materials stored in final locations.

Week 13

As this project is wrapping up, I am focused more on tying up loose ends and asking for critiques and advice from interested parties.  Since the art collection has never had an artist whose artworks where so closely tied to a written form of expression, there is no clear-cut template to follow.  Still, I am trying to make every attempt to follow the standards of institutional finding aids and documentation as that will make my work clearer to the people I am working with as well as the end user.
I have a working draft of the finding aid and after an close proofing, it will given to my supervisor for comments and a consultation appointment with the Manuscripts department concerning appendices dealing with Manuscripts materials. 
Hopefully next week, I will be able to make final drafts and wrap up some of the aspect of the project.

Week 12

As nearly every art item has been accessioned and housed and half of the collection has already been moved to its permanent (for now) home, the documentation process has taken the center stage over artworks themselves. 
Combined with the encroaching deadline (see: the end of the semester), I have begun to encounter more and more hard decisions that need to made.  Of course in most instances, particularly in the organization, appearance, and content of the finding aid, many of these decisions are able to be changed, though likely at a considerable time/effort cost.  Luckily, the bulk of the finding aid is a similar table structure to my inventories, so this section mainly needs cleaning up and standardizing that was missed during that phase.  The appendices, though, are the aspect that I'm currently stressing, as this is where the non-art aspects of the collection get integrated. 

Because EP is a poet as well as a printer and often combined the two forms of artistic expressions in singular or related artworks, I knew from the beginning that I wanted the finding aid to address and make accessible the folders of notes and finished poems she has sent.  Currently, Appendix I includes the box number, an alphabetized list of all the poems, her numbering system for the poems, and whether notes and drafts are included.  Appendix II has a list of prints with their accession numbers and corresponding poems with their numbers. Appendix I has the real potential to change beyond design and appearance, as really the table could be ordered by box/folder location (the order they were shipped in) or by the numbering system the author gave them, rather than alphabetically.  While all of those elements are evident in the table, because this is a static document rather than an electronic one (regardless of whether it will one day be placed on the institition's website, it does actually matter to a degree which elements is sorted.  That is something I will have to consider and consult with colleagues, especially as art collection finding aids rarely contain information about not art objects.

Week 11

While still accessioning and housing art objects, I have begun to place segments into the finding aid template.  There are still many decisions to be made, but it looks like most of my plans and previous data organizing will be usable in the final document.  I hope to have the finding aid draft finished by the end of April, so that it can go through revisions by relevant parties, leaving me with enough time to make corrections before the end of the semester. 
I will also need some of that time at the end of the semester to organize my notes and documents into a collection binder and accession folder, so that they can be consulted in the future by the department.  While I probably should have started that process at the beginning of this project, now that my filing structures are only understandable by me, it makes most sense to wait until the end and organize it all at one time.  Hopefully it won't be too difficult to make sense of!

Week 10

Most of this week was spent organizing the prints into related groups and then those groups chronologically so that they can be accessioned and described in the finding aid.  I also completed nearly all of the housing and am on track to complete housing and accessioning within the time frame I indicated last week.

Week 8/9

By now I should hopefully be over halfway done with this project.

Here’s my checklist currently:

Inventory
completed: (separate documents organized by shipment # and by type of item: EP Works, Other Artists Works, Manuscript Transfers, Book Transfers)

Housing
completed: drawings
to be completed: prints (40%)
estimated time to complete: 6 hours
   
Accessioning
completed: drawings
to be completed: EP prints; other artist’s works; artists books
estimated time to complete: 12-14 hours

Finding Aid
completed: biographical sketch
to be completed: scope note, contents; appendices (25%)
estimated time to complete: 10-12 hours

Week 7

I have been moving right along with accessioning with very few issues (not including potentially missing/not sent items).

But before I could get too deeply into that process, I needed to step back and get my inventory files clear and readily understandable to the HRC Art Collection staff and the donor of the collection. Because the collection was sent in 3 different shipments over the course of the last few years there have been multiple people with their hands in it, and the records display this often confusing jumble.  The artists/collector seems to also have different people assisting her with arranging and shipping the materials, so her inventory lists differ in both presentation and details included.  Unravelling this documentation to understand what is in the collection and when it was sent has been a long process for me, and this next week I hope to have inventories finished.

Week 6

A few weeks ago, I had been given a new finding aid template, but on closer inspection it did not seem like it was really going to work for a predominately art collection finding aid.  There was two columns to describe the collection: container number and description.  In the Art Collection more columns are definitely appreciated when you need to include accession numbers, dates, medium, titles etc.  After talking with the art cataloguer about how this is going to work, she started talking with the archivist and learned that the art collection can just ignore the updated finding aid template and stick with what they have been already doing!  I’m very happy with this development as it solves the issue of what order to put those descriptive elements, and having column again will make it easier to transfer the information I already have typed out in spreadsheets for every item.  This will definitely decrease my workload in that respect.

This week I also wrote the biographical sketch for the artist/collector.  I tried to look for some articles written about her and in the journals she published in, but quickly realized that they all had used information that EP herself had written.  So instead I looked to the books she published herself and her website to find the information I needed and piece it together chronologically and thematically.

I hope to hear back from EP by next week about some inconsistencies in the records, so that I can begin accessioning.

Week 5

This week I finished spreadsheets covering every item in the collection and made it 3/4ths the way through double checking the details of each item.  Next week I hope to move to organizing the Drawings, Proofs, Prints and Artist's books by medium, chronologically in time, and by their connection to one another so that I can assign accession numbers that are useful and convey a sense of the scope and of the inherent relationships in the collection. 
I will also need to spend time deciphering the organization structure the artist employed.  She numbered the collection in the process of packing and creating records for the works.  Her numbers for the items will be preserved in the final records, but on consultation with the Associate Curator, we decided not to follow her numbering system in the accession numbers.  I also hope to have a list of questions that I still have not answered about the items and her records to write to the artist in the next week. 

Week 4

To follow up on last week's visit with an archivist at the institution, I have requested some books to get acquainted with archival methodology and practices.  I also had another conversation with him about ways of presenting information about publications and poems in the collection, while still maintaining the focus on the artworks.  I will be looking for institutional finding aid examples to see if there is a collection that is a hybrid of art and manuscript or book items, and if so maybe gleaming some organization ideas from it.  If not, I will likely be using indices at the end at the finding aid to tie the poems and books to the art items.
Most of this week was spent trying to find the best ways to display these various connections between poems, books, and art in the collection.  Often a single print in the collection can be related to a proof, another print, a poem, and a publication.  Making those connections easy to understand and read may be the most important and time consuming element of creating this finding aid.  While EP did provide a lot of documentation for the collection items, sometimes particularly when it involves the text of her poems, tracing the connections can involve some extra thought and time with the items.  Despite this I hope to soon move from beginning inventory lists to accessioning the art items into the collection.

Week 3

This week, I talked with an archivist in the book cataloging department about collection processing needs.  He will be sending me some information regarding general and institutional specific archival processes.  I was particularly interested in discussing ways to keep connections between book and manuscript items that will be transferred to other departments in the institution and prints and artworks which will stay in the art collection.  He will also be sending me a new template for findings aids that has just recently been changed, so this collection will be the first to use this new, slightly tweaked, finding aid format.  After seeing this new template, I hope to get a better idea of ways that those connections can be readable to users of the finding aid.
To prepare for this task, I have been making notes regarding the books and manuscript materials and how they relate to one another, as well as to the art items.  That information will be applicable to the finding aid as well as the inventory.
Next week I will continue with the inventory process.

Week 2

I spent most of this week matching artworks to the files and inventory lists sent with the collection.  In many cases additional information needed to be recorded from the artworks and on occasion collection materials did not have corresponding files.
At the end of this capstone, this information will need to be recorded in 5 ways:

1. Collection Inventory File
2. Accession File
3. Finding Aid
4. Artwork Storage Inventories
5. Database Records

 As I have not been able to make final decisions yet about the structure of all of these documents, I decided to start with a template for the artwork storage inventories which generally contains the least amount of information.  This storage inventory template also contains all the information that needs to be gathered directly from the artworks.  This means that after completing the storage inventories, I can then organize, accession, and store the artworks.  The other documents can then be created by working with paper and electronic records, lessening the need to move and consult with the artworks themselves after accessioning.    

Next week, I hope to finish storage inventory lists for 1/2 to 2/3 of the total collection artworks.

Week 1

For the first week of my Capstone, I focused on orienting myself to the collection and the organizational structure employed by the artist/donor referred to in this blog as EP.  EP included some CDs of files that featured records for many items, though the organizational structure differs in what I have identified as 4 different collections.

In the file scheme, EP splits the collection into 4 subcollections:

1. EP Poetry
2. EP Prints
3. EP Artworks (includes some uneditioned prints and proofs)
4. Artworks by other artists

Information about each of these sub-collections is noted differently in the corresponding files and in some cases documentation for certain artworks was not included.  I hope that certain things will begin to make more sense, as I move through more of the collection.  I have already found that duplicates of files on individual prints indicate that 2 separate editioned prints of that work are in the collection.  

After I get a handle of the organization scheme, the next hurdle will be figuring out how much of this organization will need to be tweaked to fit the institutional organization and documentation schema already in place.  Since EP's descriptive files for each sub-collection differ in format and type of entries, I will be necessary to decide on a consistent presentation and configure each item file to match for the inventory and finding aid.  Next week, I hope to begin making those decisions.  

Project and Blog Logistics

This entry serves to introduce the main aspects of the project that will help readers understand future blog posts.
I will post by Friday each week, and posts will contain updates on the status of project goals and any issues or realizations encountered during this process. 

Background about the Capstone project:

• Collection donated by an artist/poet; will be referred to as EP in this blog
• 
Collection includes her own work, predominately prints, as well as some works by other artists

• From my initial assessments, art items in collection = over 170 items


Goals to accomplish by the end of the Capstone:

• Organize and house collection materials
• Accession items
• Create inventory list
• Create database records
• Create finding aid draft

Next post will be tomorrow, covering my first week assessing the collection.