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!

In which Cate blogs for Special Collections and talks to a real live Pease person

The main news of the week is that my Special Collections blog post about the Gott archive has gone live:

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

My manager edited it here and there but the general info is there.  She then, unexpectedly, sent an e-mail telling everybody that it had been posted.  I felt quite awkward about this at first, but then had four people either send me a message or come up to me saying they liked it, or, in the case of one of them who is a Geordie, ‘it was good like’.  Another of these people was the archive manager who oversees the work of my manager and myself.  It meant a lot to me that she is happy with what I've been doing.  Everyone in Special Collections is so nice it's like you're living in Niceville.  I can't think about anyone there without going ‘Awwww, they're so nice’.  I think how lucky I am every day I'm there.

 

I also think about the time my sister bought me the Mr Man book ‘Mr Quiet’ as a joke.  Mr Quiet was fed up because everything around him was too loud – he resolved this by moving to Happyland and working in a library!  Little did I know that this text would be eerily prophetic.

Oh – and they want me to write to more blog posts!  One in January and another summing things up at the end of my internship. 

In other news: you may remember that I've been fascinated by a black-and-white photograph of a Victorian portrait of the Pease family of Chapel Allerton. 

I took a two-week free trial of the genealogy site ancestry.co.uk, which helps you build your family tree but also hosts a community of family historians who help each other out. Partly I just wanted to see how it worked, but my main intention was to look at the Pease family tree. Names were repeated over and over again in their family, so there were about five Thomas Peases and it was confusing the hell out of me. After printing out some branches of trees with the info I wanted, I sent a message to the person who'd uploaded the colour picture of the portrait, Sarah, asking her if she knew where the original was.  She turned out to be a contemporary member of the Pease family (I don't know the exact relationship because Ancestry doesn't show names of people who are still living). She was quite happy to answer my query.  

Apparently, the real painting is with a family member so, as I suspected, I won't be able to go and see it, but Sarah gave me some very interesting information: the picture was passed down to Thomas Pease, the young boy in the painting, but he never hung it in his house.  This was all because of Jane Pease, the baby in this picture.  You remember I mentioned her before as having been in and out of institutions, although I did go back and change that post, because it seems it wasn't through mental health issues but from being what Marion Pease calls ‘mentally deficient’ (so obviously a mental disability or learning difficulties). Thomas Pease was afraid that this condition could be inherited, and he was so determined not to worry his wife and children about it that he kept Jane's existence a secret from them. Sarah says that, for years Marian Pease never knew that she had an Aunt Jane. We don't know when she finally found out. As somebody interested in the medical humanities and approaches to disability, I’m really intrigued by this story. I really wish I knew what kind of life Jane Pease had. Her behaviour must have really disturbed her brother – or was it just the attitudes of the time that made him feel the way he did? 

In return for helping me, I sent Sarah a list of the portraits we have at the Brotherton so she could see if there were any she could add to the images in her family tree. There is one she wants, and actually it’s one that I’m hopefully going to digitise after Christmas, so if it ends up going online, she’ll be able to see it. Maybe, once it’s available to the public, I’ll be able to take a photo of it if she can’t use the image on the screen (or come to Leeds to see it herself!). This has all brought home to me how important family archives are – we are dealing in real people’s lives. Although we’re not a local history archive as such, this is an example of how today’s generations can use the Brotherton’s collections to get a true sense of what life was like for their remarkable ancestors.

Archival Film Adventures!

Since I’m planning to apply as soon as possible to do a postgraduate diploma, I thought I’d do some activities that will help me research areas of archiving I’m unfamiliar with and generally expand my awareness. Some time ago, I sent an e-mail to the Yorkshire Film Archive, in York St John University, asking if I could visit, and was delighted when the manager, Graham, offered to take me round himself. As a film fan, I really wanted to learn more about film and sound archiving, and the fantastic morning I spent at the YFA last Friday did not disappoint.

http://www.yorkshirefilmarchive.com/

The archive is situated in the corner of a library on the university campus. After a welcome, I was first taken round their three main storerooms. The archive will accept film or video from anyone at all who wants to donate, provided that it’s about Yorkshire or featuring Yorkshire people and generally useful to them – so the first room is full of people’s donations that are waiting to be accessioned. Graham showed me some of the reels of tape, which had come to them in various containers such as toffee tins and tupperwares. You could tell most of them had been dug out of people’s attics! They are all held in this room until someone is able to check them and assess what’s on them and their usefulness. If considered appropriate, the film strip is then transferred to a standardised reel, labelled with an accession number and brief description then moved to the next storeroom.

These rooms were really quite cold – definitely a lower temperature than our stacks at the Brotherton. This is because old film is in great danger of deteriorating. Graham showed me an example of some acetate film that was in quite a bad state – the most obvious sign being that it smelt of vinegar! I had meant to ask him if they had ever got anything in that was on the nitrate film stock that can explode like in Cinema Paradiso. I never did though.

Then I was taken to the room in which is stored the film that has been transferred to digital tape for use by the archive. This is incredibly expensive to do and so is only carried out on demand, for specific projects: research, television, exhibitions and so on. In fact, the whole archive is very expensive to maintain, considering all the specialist equipment, labour time, and the need to keep those cold temperatures consistent, but they get funding from various sources. Sadly, we also have to consider that technology moves on, and the equipment used to play this tape will one day be obsolete, meaning, presumably, another transfer to a different format and more expense.

Graham told me quite a funny example of a recent user of the archive: the band Metallica. They had wanted to show some film footage of fox hunting during their Glastonbury set; it was meant to be a joke because of the big controversy over their singer’s support of hunting. I think I’d feel uncomfortable helping them out with something like that, but I guess you can’t pick and choose these things!

Next we went and talked to Steve, who works with the film itself. He views people’s donations when they come in and assesses whether they are unusual or interesting enough to be kept, making sure that they’re relevant. He also writes catalogue records for the film. When I’d read some of these online, I’d been surprised that each one featured a quite detailed descriptions of what went on in the film. I felt this must be time-consuming, but I was told it was important so that researchers or in fact the archive themselves can find specific parts of the film that are of interest, or can cross-reference when doing a search. Steve was viewing a new film when I came in, on a huge reel-to-reel machine, a lot more hi-tech than the cine-film projector in my dad’s loft! Like many, I expect, the film seemed to feature a family holiday. He said they get as much information as they can from the owner regarding what exactly is happening in the film, but still it’s very often difficult for them to ascertain what’s going on!

Finally, I went into the room where film is cleaned and repaired – again using special equipment including quite a large cleaning machine, as well as solvents and so on. The best part, though, came when I was shown some of the actual films the archive themselves were producing from pieces of footage. I had no idea they did this themselves but apparently an editor comes in every week. I saw a short extract from ‘Filmed but Not Forgotten’, their current, Heritage Lottery-funded project for the WWI centenary. They have taken all the films they have from around this time – obviously not a huge number – and remastered them so they are available for the public to view. They’re also running a campaign to try and identify some of the filmmakers and the people who are in the films.  http://www.yorkshirefilmarchive.com/videos/filmed-and-not-forgotten  . Interestingly, the Brotherton will be helping them out with this by digitising a programme for Ripon Sports Day from 1916.

The other two films I saw were ‘Trike to Bike’, a lovely 5-minute film they made for the Tour de France, which you can see here: http://www.yorkshirefilmarchive.com/content/le-tour-comes-yorkshire  and, excitingly, an unfinished version of the trailer they’re making for Hull, City of Culture  – more info about this is here http://www.yorkshirefilmarchive.com/content/film-search-hull . Everyone who might have a film about Hull is being encouraged to search their attics, as they really want to expand this particular film collection in time for 2017.

The edited films I saw were of an excellent quality. I was really inspired, but also moved to think that so much of this footage was recorded by ordinary members of the public, in their back gardens, or perhaps out at a community event. Now their images will be preserved as long as the archive lasts, going on into the future to educate and enchant anyone who views them in the years to come. Without even knowing it, these people have made their mark on history.

I left the archive on a real high – I’d love to work somewhere like this some day. The staff were really nice and I’m so appreciative of Graham for giving up his time to show me round. To anyone out there who have a film to donate, or just want to find out more about what YFA does, I’d very much recommend it.

Gott some news, Pease take note! (Ok, enough with the puns now)

Well, today I’m not quite sure where to begin… I had a pretty exciting time in the art store last Thursday because I found a whole bunch of artworks from the Mrs. Frank Gott collection. Frank Gott was Lord Mayor of Leeds from 1917-18 and Beryl Gott the Lady Mayoress. She was also Leeds’ first woman alderman and one of the city’s first female magistrates. The Gotts, like the Ford family, began as wool merchants – Leeds is largely built on the textile and wool industries so generally big on cloth.

http://secretlibraryleeds.net/2014/09/19/beryl-gott-and-the-gott-bequest/

If this webpage is anything to go by, it seems Mrs Gott bequeathed things all over the place and the Brotherton library is no exception. We have the couple’s papers and very many artworks, mostly drawings and prints. A lot of these depict scenes of Leeds or old plans – here’s one:
 

 

These are either in the store or displayed around the library but (fun times for me) not all of them have records. The notes left by a previous art gallery collections manager indicated that there were a few Gott Bequest things around – she even left some images – but I just couldn’t account for all of them. Then I had the brainwave that, instead of doing any more fruitless searches on the database, why didn’t I just LOOK AROUND?!! I can tell this will be an important lesson in my archiving career. In a few minutes I’d found several prints that I’d been searching for, which means I can start to make records for them. Then (taking the ‘look around’ idea to a new level) I glanced slightly to the right just before entering Special Collections to return the store key and saw two more Gott pictures on the wall! How many hundreds of times had I walked past those?!

Well, I’ll try and contain my excitement and not write any more about that because when I told my manager about it at my 1-to-1 she said she wanted me to write a blog post for Special Collections about all this because I could ‘get some emotion into it’! I can’t remember past blog posts of theirs being especially emotional but I’ve told her I’ll do my best. So I’m going to be blogging for the Special Collections website! Obvs will post a link when it’s live.

I also asked if there were any chance I could take photos for my own blog and she said I potentially could do a couple, but I don’t think I’ll be doing many if at all unfortunately. As well as anything else, there’s something I hadn’t thought of – issues around copyright. You can’t publish something that is inside copyright without permission, and the rule generally is that the writer or artist has to have been dead for 70 years. From what I gather, it seems that this includes reproduction of images. So the portraits might be a possibility but the Edith Culman collages would be out. I’m sure people take photos of people’s art and stick it on the net all the time but apparently you can’t do this officially. Anything we digitise and put on our website also has to be within copyright. It’s been suggested that I might even be able to write some letters requesting permission at some point; watch this space!

More finds followed while in work yesterday… For no reason whatsoever, while in the stacks I went and had a look at the Cottingley Fairies collection, but that’s for another time! I then went and deframed the Pease Family Portrait and got a huge surprise. When I’d removed the frame, underneath was a small stretcher with quite a large pencil drawing of a young girl on it. It was inscribed ‘Cara, 1921’. Why had Marian Pease covered up this lovely drawing with a photograph of a portrait? A possible answer emerged when I took the stretcher down to show the conservator. She looked at it closely and pointed out that it was not an entirely genuine pencil drawing, but a print that someone had added to in pencil. Maybe this was why it hadn’t been deemed worth displaying – it wasn’t a ‘proper’ drawing. Meanwhile, the back of the stretcher had been padded with a Radio Times from 1941 – interesting in itself! I pictured the scene: it’s wartime and Marian Pease doesn’t want to spend money on frames, so she takes this picture of a family member, one she’s not particularly fond of but doesn’t want to throw away, puts the photograph of her father’s family over the top, stuffs it with this week’s Radio Times and puts a simple frame around the whole thing.

And who is Cara? It’s Margaret Cara Benson Rablen, who, along with her sister, bequeathed the Ford family portraits collection. She was born in 1914, died in 2011 (you can see her obituaries on Leicester Quaker sites) and is the great-granddaughter of Hannah Pease. Much to impress my manager with for next time, ha ha! 

A collage education

I had a pretty good two days’ work last week. It was all very quiet, because everyone was helping the conservator do a survey of hundreds of old books that are to be moved to the store on the Western campus, to assess what protection they would need. You had to go over them on their shelves in the stacks and identify which books needed tying round with cream tape, or putting in paper wrappers or envelopes.  I had come in earlier in the week to help, so I focused on getting through the objects that was still to survey in the L-shaped room. On Wednesday I scanned Marian Pease's letter onto the Pease family portrait record (I seem to be getting the hang of doing this now). I also worked out how to use the Special Collections camera, despite never having owned a camera since childhood and certainly not a digital one! I photographed a couple of long Victorian labels, including the one on the back of Christopher Rawlinson, so now I don't have to copy down all that Latin.  I transferred the photos to the computer, ready to attach to their records next week.

So I was already feeling quite pleased with myself, then the big boss came in and I hopefully managed to impress her by telling her that I'd found out the provenance of the portraits (meaning what collection they come from) and of the 70s mixed media collages.  Then I went for lunch to the Pickards letting agents café (yes really) opposite the uni, and they played Lykke Li the whole time.  So I was in a pretty good mood that day. 

There are several collages, all made by a woman called Edith Culman, who died in 2004. They are mostly from the late 60s and early 70s and believe me they look it – no skimping on the hessian and brown corduroy. Some are made entirely of fabric, others from materials as diverse as string, straw, wood, painted paper, egg cartons, peach stones and, very weirdly, a lamp that seems to have come from a camera flash. None of them seem to represent anything in particular and are just swirly lines and chaos; in fact it takes some working out which way up they go, which makes measuring awkward.  I remarked to myself while looking at the first one that I had no idea what this curly shape was meant to be – then had to laugh when I saw that the title was ‘Pas un Escargot’, or ‘not a snail’ – that narrows it down anyway!

However, just as I was wondering why on earth we had these things in the first place, I discovered, with some help from staff, that they came from the Holocaust Survivors Friendship Association’s collection, which comprises interviews, correspondence and personal effects of survivors who came to Yorkshire to make a new life.  http://holocaustlearning.org/  I could then see how these collages might help a historian or art student reflect on the lives of such survivors, and how, perhaps, I would only get a rounded picture of what inspired Culman by looking at the rest of the collection in the stacks.  I also noticed that one, extremely disordered collage had a note on the reverse that said ‘Untitled piece: Parkinson's phase’. This object is mounted on MDF, instead of on hessian cloth like Culman's earlier work. I wondered if the artist's Parkinson's disease had made a change of materials and style necessary or if it was a personal choice, or even if this art somehow expressed her symptoms and emotions. I have found a handlist (separate list made by us) for the collection and do intend, when I can, to look at some of Culman’s letters, especially those between her and other survivors across the world, because I think that sounds really interesting.

 

I have tried to find pictures of the collages online, but can find nothing like them!  I'm not sure anything like them exists anyway, well not since the 70s.  I've decided to bite the bullet and ask my manager at our next meeting whether I definitely can't take photos of artworks for my blog.  Probably can't but worth asking.  If I can, I'll add some, if not then I guess I will just have to try and replicate one of the collages myself.  Off to the supermarket for eggs and peaches then…