A fond farewell...

Victorian, political satirical print:
'Some Screws Loose
in the Reform Cabinet'

Well, here I am writing my final blog post. I can’t quite believe I’ve carried it through to the end! I’ve been a bit delayed in getting this written because of various dramas, but I so wanted to complete the saga! I really hoped that, by the time I posted for the last time, I’d be all set to go on to new and exciting things, and am glad to say this dream has come true.

My time in the digitisation studio went very quickly. As well as the Japanese prints, I managed to photograph six of the random prints that I found in a box in the gallery store. Here are two of the images, which I think I can show you as they are set to go online at some point anyway. You can see that I had to put a colour chart next to them, which I used to do a white balance at the start (this instructs the computer program as to what to recognise as true ‘white’ – the image is adjusted accordingly). I actually did a seventh picture of a different print, but annoyingly it couldn’t be used, as I’d somehow managed to get the colour chart so close to the edge of the print that it still showed when you cropped the image!

I wrote another blog post for Special Collections, about the work I did in the digitisation studio. You can read it below:

http://blog.library.leeds.ac.uk/blog/special-collections/post/281

18th century satirical print

Since this was written, both sets of Japanese prints (not just the Hiroshige) have been put online! This is really exciting, and something that can be shown in the future as representing the work I’ve done in the Brotherton. If you look here http://library.leeds.ac.uk/special-collections-explore/382889 , you can see the prints’ entry in Special Collections’ online search facility, including my description. If you then click on ‘In this collection’, you can view the collection’s hierarchy – click on the titles of the individual sets to see how the individual prints are catalogued.

You can also see the prints here, in the University’s digital library! http://digital.library.leeds.ac.uk/ Scroll down the page to see the brand new section, ‘Special Collections – Art’. I was allowed to choose an image for the icon, using a detail from one of the prints. Click on this and all the individual prints are listed. In the future, provided someone carries on the work I started, more and more art from Special Collections will be added to this section. Library users and the public can then be made more aware of all the wonderful art that exists as part of collections, that before may have been hard to find. I feel so honoured to have been able to instigate this really fantastic and important project.

19^th March was my very last day at work. On the 18th, I had a lunch out with my line manager, the conservator and a couple more people – we had some delicious pizzas at The Libertine restaurant, opposite the university, and they treated me to mine, which was really kind of them! It was probably just as well that we didn’t do this on my last day, as I spent it rushed off my feet. I had to finish my final report and also some text about the project as a whole that could be used by another member of staff for a future presentation. However, I was also asked to go and label all the artworks in the L-shaped room with their title and catalogue number – this took an hour! Especially as there was a big stock move that week and someone had parked all the upstairs trolleys down the aisles of the L-shaped room to get them out of the way.

Added to this (and, of course, much nicer!), people came up to me all day and wished me well in Aberystwyth. One person had studied there himself and gave me some tips! I also had a surprise sendoff by all the staff I’d got to know through both the internship and my volunteering before that. They called me through to reception and the ‘big boss’ presented me with £20 in book tokens, a huge card that they’d all signed, biscuits and chocolates! I wasn’t expecting that at all and was a bit shocked, but really very moved and ended up doing an impromptu speech (which I’m not sure they were quite expecting!). I told them they were all wonderful and that it was due to their support that I had got my place at Aber – and that it was so great to have found something I really wanted to do as a career. I’d got them some biscuits too, as well as cards for the gallery team and the digital team, and an individual one for the lovely gallery Collections Assistant who had helped me so much. Not to mention special cards that I’d handmade in quilling, for my manager and the conservator.

I still feel sad to have gone, when I think of all the lovely people there, and that I’ll never again go to my little ‘home’ in the gallery store, or to the big Uni library staff meetings with their interesting presentations. However, I’m ready to move on to the next step and become a qualified archivist, as well as enjoying everything Aber has to offer – when I don’t have my head in a textbook on Latin grammar, that is! Thanks to everyone who’s read this blog and given me nice compliments. I will stay in touch with you all and let you know about my progress on the next stage of the journey. Who knows… maybe there’ll be a job at the Brotherton someday…

Love, Cate xx

From the digi suite...

Hello - well, I'll start with my big news, that I got into Aberystwyth to study MA Archive Administration! The online form was quite straightforward and they contacted me within a few days with a conditional offer. I have to get at least a 2:2 - which I'm set to do anyway as getting mid 2:1 marks on the whole. I'm so pleased that I'll be going and that I was able to get such brilliant experience at the Brotherton library, which surely helped my application. Now begins the search for funding...

I've started my work in the digitisation studio in Special Collections. Here, library material is photographed or scanned to enable it to be more visible and accessible to the public. This material includes unique items from collections, images of which are put online or on touchscreen booths in the library, and material for courses, as well as any requests from customers, who can buy the image files.

The first thing I realised was that - erm, ok - they don't have giant cameras. They have normal-sized cameras suspended on a metre-rule over a 'copy stand', like this chap here. Or they have scanners, if the object will fit in there. The team are really busy at the moment scanning online course readings for the university - I really feel for them, as it seems very boring and takes four weeks to get done. However, they've also been showing me some wonderful illuminated manuscripts that they're working on; they might digitise several or all pages.

I’ve just finished photographing my two sets of nineteenth-century Japanese woodblock prints. I've been told these will most likely stay in Leeds rather than going to London, but I kind of expected that and understand the arguments for keeping them - such as giving northerners and our Japanese Studies students a chance to see them. I’m hoping, though, that an online presence will raise awareness of the university’s ownership of these prints, so that they don't remain hidden in the stacks.

The digitisation team use a range of cameras, scanners and equipment in order to accommodate objects of different types and sizes. I used a Canon EOS 5D Mark II camera to photograph the Japanese prints. The prints were lit from either side by lamps that emit the minimum heat. Connecting the camera to a computer meant I could use software to view the object under the lens and to fine-tune aperture and shutter speed to achieve the optimum focus and level of brightness - this was really cool. My embarrassing mistake, though, came when I thought it would be a good idea to take the initiative to push the lens upwards to get the print in shot, rather than moving the camera upwards on the metre rule. I'd forgotten (or just didn't know) that this doesn't just move the lens backwards, it changes the focus, so changes the brightness. When I came out with a bunch of photos of varying tones, I had to confess. So I guess my inexperience with cameras has been revealed... The supervisor was nice about it though, and once I cropped the photos, they looked more similar than they had done, so I got away with it.

The software let me really zoom in on small details on the print, so I could aim to get even the tiniest fibres in focus. It is important that the object is as well aligned as possible; this involves a lot of tiny nudges and much close attention! Setting up the shot can be painstaking, but once you have achieved it, it does not take long to photograph many objects of the same type. This meant I could finish work on both sets of prints – 22 prints in total – fairly quickly.

After photography, I moved on to post-production. For this I used Photoshop Lightroom, a program that allows you to organise and retouch large numbers of images and also view the images everyone else is working with. Here I cropped my photographs and made sure each set was in the right order. The images were now ready to be 'ingested into our digital repository', whatever that involves - someone else is going to do that part! Provided I've got everything right, you'll be able to view them next week on Special Collections’ online search facility - I'll add a link when they are live.

(Urrg, the spacing on here has gone funny but I can't be bothered to sort it out. Spent enough time squinting at small details on screens!)

The Unbelievable Tale of the Ukiyo-e Prints

Here I’m going to tell you about the first full collection I’ve been given to catalogue, and how there turned out to be much more to it than met the eye.

When I finished in the L-shaped room, my manager recommended a few other collections containing artworks that I could work on. These were part of a survey she did about a year ago. She prioritised specific ones that had been given little attention up until this point. I was especially drawn to one that was simply called ‘Japanese drawings’. It seemed very manageable within the time I have left, and besides, I’ve always loved Japanese art. The prints were tucked away in the stacks, in a black solander box. As soon as I looked at them I realised two things. Firstly, they were not drawings – they were woodblock prints, similarly to those I’d seen recently in the British Museum. Secondly, at present they were hidden from people who would really want to see them.


From Sadahide's Sugawara Tragedy

Helpful notes that accompanied the prints gave me their titles, artists, and rough dates – they were created during the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries. They are ukiyo-e prints; ukiyo-e translates as ‘pictures of the floating world’. The term ‘floating world’ refers to the life of hedonism and indulgence lived by the merchant class for whom prints like these were mass-produced. They depict all kind of subjects including landscapes, beautiful women, flora and fauna and scenes from folk tales. Hokusai’s ‘Great Wave off Kanagawa’ is a famous example. Another popular preoccupation is kabuki, or classical Japanese theatre, which is the subject of the Brotherton’s prints.



Last print in Sugawara.
 

There are two sets, each depicting a series of scenes from popular plays of their period. Hiroshige’s Chushingura tells the story of the 47 Ronin, warriors who avenge the wrongful death of their lord; our set comprises 11 prints. Sagahide’s The Sugawara Tragedy is about the life of Sugawara no Michizane, a court noble accused of plotting to seize the throne; there are 10 prints in this set. In real life the colours look even more lush and beautiful, and fortunately, our sets of prints are in pretty good condition, so that the colours are still vibrant.

I found researching the prints very hard going, as there didn’t seem to be much information on these particular sets. The only good source I found was online information from a book from the 1920s called ‘A Guide to Japanese Prints’ by Basil Stewart, which seemed to be a seminal work. I noticed that this book described both sets of prints as ‘very rare’. Surely, if this was the case, it was important to know for sure?

From Chushingura. 

As luck would have it, someone could provide me with an answer. The conservator put me on to a local person, Ellis, who just so happens to be a leading expert on Japanese prints. He lectured at the university for 25 years and wrote a book for the British Museum http://www.japansociety.org.uk/16570/japanese-prints-ukiyo-e-in-edo-1700-1900/ . I e-mailed him and he came in the next day to have a look at the collection.

He was very interested in the prints and took a lot of photos. He told me that the Sadahide prints were special, as he knew of no other complete set (the Hiroshige set was a bit less remarkable). The Toyoharu was also valuable due to its age, although unfortunately someone had had the bright idea of folding it over to get it in the box, which means there’s a crease down the middle. I’ve now found it a new box and it is in line to be flattened out, possibly through humidifying.

The big news, though, was the provenance of the prints. All I knew was that they used to belong to a collector called Norman Walker who lectured in botany at the university, and were presented to us by a Mrs Redman King. However, Ellis knew about Mrs Redman King’s collection because it had been deposited in the Leeds City Museum, until, in quite a scandalous auction in the 1980s, the bulk of it was sold at way below its market value. Our prints, however, were gifted to us in memory of Norman Walker. The exciting thing, though, is exactly who left the prints to Norman Walker. Turns out it was Basil Stewart! Meaning the information I’d been reading online was actually making reference to the very prints in front of me.

I was absolutely thrilled to hear this news. Ellis suggested that the Brotherton considers depositing the prints with the V&A, and I would be delighted if this decision were taken. The V&A has the largest collection of Japanese prints in the UK, and if our prints could stay there (even as a deposit) it would make them much more accessible, as no one would think of looking for them in our library. I’ve sent the suggestion on to my supervisors and will ask them next week what they think will happen, or whom to pass all this information on to.

I do feel something of a sense of pride, considering I had always suspected that the prints were rare and after chasing it up had found that my instincts were true. However, it is all a bit ironic, because I’m spending a lot of time cataloguing them and taking photographs (more on this next time), and if they leave, I don’t know if this might all be for nothing… Still, if they do stay for at least a good while longer (as is most likely!) it’ll mean the staff can find them, and information about them, easily and they will no longer be hidden on a top shelf on one of the stacks, their true value undetected!

Adventures on the road!

I’ve had quite a long break from my blog to do Christmas, write an essay for my uni course and take two trips away - more on this in a minute! Things are really heating up from now on, as I’ll have two uni modules plus will be spending time working on my application for postgraduate study, keeping up with the latest ARA news, etc. However, I really want to continue this blog until my internship ends in mid-March, so I’ll give it a go!

I’m back in the Brotherton library and it’s all change for me. Thursday 15^th was my last day in the Art Store and I’m really sad about it! I have to move on to other things, plus my work there is pretty much done - I’ve found all the artworks I’m aware of. In fact, I’m pretty amazed because, on my very last day, the fantastic Collections Assistant from the gallery team found the remaining group of four drawings I’d been looking for for months! I had just enough time to make records for them all. Which means, thanks to her, I now have a full house!

As of next week, I’ll be starting to learn how to digitise artworks… I thought I’d only be doing this for a couple of days, but have now been told that it’ll be for two (short) days per week for 4-5 weeks! I’m freaking out a bit, as I’ll have to work with what are, effectively, giant cameras for most of the time, and while I can handle software, machines are, on the whole, not my friends. When I was a receptionist, the fax machine went wrong literally every single time I tried to use it, so who can tell what will happen when I try and take control of a giant camera. However, I’m still really eager to find out about digitisation, and it will be useful to add this to my experience, so I’ll give it a shot…

I was all geared up to tell you about my new project - cataloguing a whole collection of Japanese prints! - but I feel I must leave that for next time so I can tell you about my latest archiving-related trips away, both of which took place in the past two weeks. 

First, I went down to London to the Digital Preservation Coalition’s student conference.

http://www.dpconline.org/events/details/84-dpc-wiwik2015?xref=98

This was in the British Library’s posh conference centre, which gave me the added bonus of visiting the library, which I’d never done before. The building was a lot more modern than I’d imagined, and all the different levels, eg an upper and a lower ground, made it a bit confusing! Also, security was really tight and I had my bag searched (embarrassing as I had my overnight stuff in there!). Was great to have a quick look around though, and I visited their Gothic exhibition, the highlight for me being the two pages from Mary Shelley’s original manuscript of Frankenstein, one of my favourite books (I nearly cried!).

The conference was all day and packed with presentations from practitioners from major organisations. It was well worth going out for, as only in London would I have heard talks by archivists from the Parliamentary archives, the BBC and the British Library. I found the last two particularly interesting. Deon Cotgrove, operational manager of the BBC’s archive centre, talked about his huge, ongoing task of archiving BBC content from across the years. This really took me back to my visit to the Yorkshire Film Archive, where I learned about the need to migrate content from near-obsolete tape formats and the decisions they had to make about what material was suitable for the costly process of digitisation. Look at a video about the BBC’s archive here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/academy/technology/broadcast-technology/television/article/art20130704121742520

The talk by Helen Hockx-Yu from the British Library was also interesting. She is managing a project to archive web content, in keeping with the ‘Legal Deposit’ act that came into effect only in 2013. She and her team crawl the web selecting and archiving websites significant to researchers, ones that provide important information about British life and culture at any one time in history. Snapshots of these are then made available to view on the UK web archive: take a look! 

http://www.webarchive.org.uk/ukwa/

I hadn’t known about this project, so this talk was quite enlightening.

As to the rest of the day; I’d say I was confused by some of the more technical aspects of digital archiving, and a bit overwhelmed by the sheer number of acronyms! However, the conference was aimed at PG students who would naturally be a bit further on in their knowledge than I am, and I did take notes so will be Googling aplenty to find out what all the terms mean. (I hear the OAIS is hugely important…)

So - my second trip was to the University of Aberystwyth, Wales, to find out about their postgraduate course in Archive Administration. I won’t make this post too much longer but I can say I had a brilliant time, and really was pleasantly surprised. Most people I’d spoken to about the town had described it as ‘isolated’, with one person saying she’d heard ‘you have to drive for two hours to find the nearest Topshop’! In fact it was nothing like this; there was a good mix of high street and independent shops and a few lovely cafes (or ‘caffis’ in Welsh!). From what I’ve found out, the transport links aren’t that bad either, and the railway station is in the centre of town. It was a bit cold for the beach but I explored the town and the rather quirky ‘Ceredigion Museum’ and ate in a nice veggie restaurant. It was just all really beautiful, with all the good things about a seaside town but none of the tacky elements! Plus the mountainous location and the ease of getting to Snowdonia or just out for fabulous walks.

The uni was no less impressive. When I first got there, it seemed tiny and I was like, ‘um… what?’ - until I realised this was the smaller, separate ‘Llanbadarn’ part of campus and not the whole thing! Once I got used to the fact the university was up a steep hill and kind of cut off, I began to really like it; there are things about it that are (I’m afraid to say) definitely better than Leeds. There seems to be a friendlier, small-community feel - plus the cafés are better (v important to me obvs!). Also, the National Library of Wales is round the corner, and, on the main part of campus, there is a massive, amazing arts centre with theatres, galleries, an arty shop, nice café, cinema… Wow is all I can say.

A tutor kindly gave up her time to answer my many questions about the course and show me round, and I was happy with pretty much everything I heard. I’ve now made up my mind to apply for a place. I’ve always loved Wales, the course is right for me and a complete change of scene would really do me good. Since I announced this on Facebook, a few people have commented that family members went there and loved it - and my own cousin did too, which I’m sure will help. I’m starting work on my application asap - cross all digits for me!