Week 11, Part 2: Needing an Extra Hand

Today I worked on three boxes that included several large pieces, including several blueprints and a proposal for a Byrd Memorial Museum. Due to the size of the blueprints and proposal, I needed some extra hands to help me photograph them. Additionally, the large papers had been poorly preserved, as they were rolled and/or folded into boxes. I had two people holding the ends and I photographed the large pieces against a wall in the hallway. It was an interesting method and it was great that others were willing to lend a hand.

I came across several more paintings and illustrations, one of which was “Hope” by George Frederic Watts. When I come across a piece of art, I have been researching it heavily due to my own ignorance in the field. The finding aid simply named this painting “Woman with Harp.” I decided to do a basic search for “Blindfolded woman lyre” and came up with several hundred results talking about Watts’ “Hope.” It was absolutely clear that this was a print of Watts’ painting. It was also apparent that this is a fairly famous piece of artwork and I was happy that I identified it.

During the day, I brought up the question of original order and provenance in a collection such as this. I was wondering how important original order and/or provenance is when your collection has no sense of categorization or structure. Many of these items are related and they are housed in completely different boxes at different ends of the stacks. Laura thought that it is very difficult to abide by an original order or provenance organization with artifacts and that documents and folders are generally easier to keep in order.

With this in mind, Laura gave me free reign to organize the files in the Media Manager in whatever way makes sense. I put related items together (such as David Paige items) and tried to stack it so that the more interesting and relevant items were towards the front, while the redundant and/or less interesting items were towards the back. I realize that this order does not really matter unless the user is idly browsing from piece to piece, since most will arrive at the collection through search engines results for a particular item or through a related web page, such as another Media Manager record or the Byrd Polar main page. However, it was nice to rearrange the collection to also reflect on how I interpreted the collection.


In: 8:30 am
Lunch: 12:30 - 1 pm
Out: 5 pm
On-site hours completed today: 8
On-site hours completed total: 94.25
On-site hours left: 5.75