Ambience in Archives: How Surroundings Inform Content at the Frederick Law Olmsted Site

The Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site, Courtesy of U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service, Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site

Who knew an archive could be so beautiful? As a Public History student pursuing an archives certificate, I have spent a decent amount of time in various archive repositories. The cardboard boxes, steel shelves, and chilly temperatures can give off a utilitarian, static feel, despite the richness of the records they contain.

The Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site, where I have been working as an intern since February, also has some of these elements in order to best protect the records from degradation. However, the beauty and history of the location infuses the records stored here with a context that informs their meaning quite a lot. Logistical spacing issues and the advancement of digitization projects have drastically changed the way researchers now interact with these documents. The newer generation of researchers receive images of their requested items via a website, zip drive, or email attachment. Most will never set foot at the site.

Frederick Law Olmsted, Sr. is widely recognized as America’s premier landscape architect. His accomplishments in the fields of park design, town planning, and landscape architecture have national and international significance. In 1883, he purchased a home in Brookline, MA for both his family residence and professional office. He deemed the property “Fairsted,” and over the next 10 years used his expertise to design the building and grounds to match his aesthetic vision, creating a space to celebrate nature and offer an oasis amidst an increasingly urban setting.

Fairsted continued to be a hub of landscape design far past Olmsted’s retirement in 1895. His son, Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., and stepson, John Charles Olmsted, continued the business as “Olmsted Brothers Landscape Architects.” During the first three decades of the twentieth century, the work volume and staff of the firm increased significantly. However, by the 1940’s the volume of work had begun to steadily decline.

Image of ten employees of Olmsted Brothers Landscape Architects in the upper drafting room at Fairsted in 1930, Courtesy of U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service, Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site

In the 1960’s and 1970’s a renewed interest in Frederick Law Olmsted, Sr. emerged from scholars, landscape architects, environmentalists and historic preservationists. The importance of preserving the firm’s history was realized and became a movement. In 1979 the firm’s landscape design activity formally ceased and Fairsted was acquired by the National Park Service (NPS) as a National Historic Site. The NPS became responsible for preserving and cataloging the documents, plans, and artifacts left behind by the firm and interpreting Fairsted’s history for the public.

The Olmsted archives contain more than 1 million original documents related to landscape design projects the firm took on between 1857 and 1979. Contained are approximately 139,000 plans and drawings, and additional items including photographic negatives and prints, planting lists, lithographs, employee records, and office correspondence. The majority of research requests are for the firms’ plans and drawings, which have been used for landscape restorations, academic publications, and historical exhibits.

In the early stages, the archives staff focused on preservation, and specifically the plans, which were often brittle, dirty, and damaged. Next the items were cataloged and made available to researchers, who at that point needed to visit the site to view them physically. In keeping up with archival trends mass digitization of the plans and drawing became inevitable. Initially the plans and drawings were scanned into black and white tiff files.

Plan for Prospect Park in Brooklyn, NY. created by Olmsted, Olmsted & Eliot in 1894          Courtesy of U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service, Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site

Olmsted NHS is currently amidst a four year project to rescan plans and drawings to high resolution color images to meet current industry standards. Without an appropriate NPS platform, the archives staff have then been uploading the items to flikr for public access. Availability of scanned images has virtually diminished onsite researchers. Staff members are currently working out a system to include visitors to the flikr page to meet the annual visitation expectations of the site.

Currently storage of the Olmsted firms’ archival items is split between the Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site and the Springfield Armory National Historic Site. The option of offsite storage has brought up discussions on the necessity of archival storage at the Olmsted site in general. Fairsted is made of wood and highly susceptible to fire or other environmental factors. The plans are stored in a protected vault, but many other items are out in the open.

For now, the items at the Olmsted site will remain there, due primarily to a consensus that their presence adds visceral meaning to the site as a whole. The visitors on public tours are allowed that impalpable feeling familiar to all historians of being among meaningful historical records. This feeling is even stronger at the production site, in this case a beautiful home among gardens and wildlife. The researchers looking at files on their laptops will miss this.

Is it really worth researchers travelling miles and mile for a feeling? Of course not. But after working at the Olmsted site over the past 6 months it is clear to me that seeing, touching, and interpreting the plans while in the historic office brings an impact. If Olmsted researchers are in Boston, I hope they will make a stop at Fairsted.

Musings on Original Order

As archives students, we have learned the pillars of archival theory and practice are provenance and original order. Provenance rules that records originating from different creators be kept separate. The essence of original order is that a group of record should remain in the same order they were placed by the record’s creator.

In the past few months my experience in archives has evolved from coursework to actual hands on practice in arrangement in description, both through my archival methods course and my internship at the Frederick Law Olmsted Historic Site this Spring. One revelation I have had pertains to the notion of original order. My understanding based on readings and my own assumptions was that the order of records needed to be maintained at all costs, even when it was clear the creator had not organized the records into a discernible sequence. Yet, the original order in practice is a whole lot more flexible than I had expected.

“World’s Columbian Exposition Illustrated”  Magazine, April 1893

One of the sub-series within the World’s Columbian Exposition collection I have worked on at the Frederick Law Olmsted Historic Site contains about 35 magazines which were published monthly to document the planning, execution, and aftermath of the fair. I noticed that magazines were not in perfectly chronological order but did not do anything rearrange them. It was only later when my finding aid was being reviewed by a senior archivist, Anthony Reed, that I received his suggestion they be rearranged chronologically to make it easier for researchers.

The constraints of original order came up again in the collection of the Massachusetts Federation for Fair Housing and Equal Rights that I processed in the Archival Methods course. I strictly maintained the original order in that collection as well (which luckily had been organized well by the donor) but as my concept of original order expanded, I had to contemplate if that was really the best thing for the records.

The more conversations I have had about the concept of original order have led me to a deeper understanding of it in practice. Anthony explained the value in keeping records in the order they arrive, but that there are times when the order does not possess any real meaning. For example, the magazines I was arranging were collected by the Olmsted firm in the 1890’s, but many others probably handled the items since then, and the random order I found them in was very possibly haphazardly done by someone else.

I appreciate the value in keeping a set of records in the order one found them in. However, I also see much benefit in an archivist having some leeway in this. The goal of an archive is to make records available to the public, and part of this entails giving easy and straightforward access to researchers. By tweaking original order when absolutely necessary. and archivist is better able to serve their public.

Digital Projects at Olmsted

I took a break from my finding aid project to speak with Sara Davis, the archivist at the Frederick Law Olmsted site who handles the digital projects. Sara attended the Simmons graduate program in Library Sciences with a concentration in archives and, like me, started off at the Olmsted site as an intern through the Student Conservation Association.  After her term as an intern, she was hired on as a contractor to start the digital preservation program. I spoke with Sara about her role and got a sense of the issues around digitizing materials at the site and where she sees things going in the future.

The the collections at the Olmsted site include 139,000 plans and drawings that the Olmsted firm, in its various incarnations, created to plan the public and private spaces that they were contracted to design and renovate. Sara’s major responsibility is to scan these items to make them available digitally. Sarah oversees the digitization process and, along with several other archives staff members, is working to scan all of the plans and drawings so that the digital files are easily accessible to the researchers who utilize them.

When the National Park Service accessioned the Olmsted site in 1980, there were several phases of preservation completed on the items at the site. First, the conservation efforts were completed to improve the physical quality of items that had begun to deteriorate. Next, all the of the items were cataloged and put into formal collections with a finding aid. The final phase was for the items to be digitized. Since this process is time consuming and expensive, the staff made a decision based on the types of research requests they got most often that the plans and drawing were the first priority. These items were scanned several years ago in black and white but the overall quality was not optimal. After the completion of this phase, the Olmsted site applied for funding to purchase three large format color scanners to improve the quality of the digital images. They are now using these scanners to re-scan all the plans and drawings for this new phase of the process.

Sara manages a lot of moving parts in order to finalize the digital images. The Olmsted site primarily stores plans in drawers and rolls. Some of the plans are very large and maneuvering them through a scanner is a learned skill. The site has lists of which plans should be in which container, but occasionallySarah will find that a plan is missing and needs to do some investigative work to figure out where it has been misplaced. After she scans the items, she uses Photoshop to crop out extra space but does not tweak the image quality so it remains as close to the original form as possible. She then uploads it to the National Park Service’s database management system and embeds the metadata. When dealing with such a huge number of items it seems like it could be easy to get confused, but Sara is extremely organized and has a great system to track what has been scanned to prevent overlap or extra work.

The archives staff at Olmsted were finding that the National Park Service’s management database did not meet all of their needs, so they also created a flikr site to post some of the most desirable images. Sara discussed the copyright issues the site needs to be aware of in using this format. At this time, the only images that go up are of the plans and drawing generated by the firm that the Olmsted site now has legal rights too. In the past, there has been discussion of posting other items, such as correspondence, but Sara explained that this gets murky when the author of such correspondence is someone outside of the Olmsted firm. The flier site does provide easy access for researchers looking for specific images , though it does not store all the hundreds of thousands of images that have been scanned thus far. If a user is looking for a different image, they are free to contact the archives staff to receive the image via email.

I was really impressed by Sara’s in depth knowledge of digitization and the benefits/issues surrounding large scale digital projects. She is a good resource for someone who is still learning the ropes.

Finding My Way Through a Finding Aid

My first project at the Frederick Law Olmsted Historic Site was to update the existing finding aid for their World’s Columbian Exposition collection. My internship has also coincided with my enrollment in the Archival Methods course, where each student’s major project is to create a finding aid for a newly accessioned collection in the UMass Boston University Archives and Special Collections. Still, since I am new to the process of creating a finding aid, my experience has involved a bit of learning as I go.

The World’s Columbian Exposition collection already had a bare bones finding and had been arranged into folders and containers. Since I was new to this institution and to creating a finding aid, it was at first not apparent to me how much work still needed to be done. Weary of making large changes to the draft, I focused on providing supplemental information where it was needed, for example in the historical context section and on an assessment of which items were too fragile to be handled by the public in their current state. I got through my edits fairly quickly and submitted to the senior archivists for review.

What came next was surprising to me – in a good way – and a necessary step to my process. I received my draft with extensive markups and comments which indicated there was so much more work that could be done to make sure the finding aid was comprehensive, polished, and usable. Anthony Reed, who handles the database management piece at the Olmsted site and has written many, many finding aids, sat down with me to explain the edits and answer my questions. He communicated that helpful information could be added to the finding aid’s introduction and historical context. There was also a need for more hands-on work in the collection such as refoldering and labeling. I really appreciate the time and guidance of the archivists at the Olmsted site; their comments have helped me move forward to create a finding aid I am proud of.

In archives courses, we often discuss the collaborative nature of this type of work. This was one instance where I really saw it come into play. My working draft of this finding aid provoked additional questions on how the items should be handled, for example, by rehousing them into more appropriate containers, creating a document for conservation recommendations, and a decision to merge another collection of historic World’s Columbian Exposition magazines into the broader collection. My supervisory archivists, Michele Clark and Anthony, discussed what they felt made the most sense for the items within the collection, and came to an agreement on how to best move forward.

I can see in practice the benefit of working with other archivists on site, and the importance of reaching out through associations, social media, and other outlets, especially when this is not possible. In this instance, by incorporating alternate voices into conversations about the finding aid and management of the items within the collection, the eventual finding aid will be better able to assist users in locating the documents they need.

 

 

Is This a Real Job?

The more I experience and learn at the Frederick Law Olmsted Historic Site, the more this question has popped into mind: is this a real job?

I am sure most archivists know this feeling. Having unbridled access to the unseen treasures found within a collection is very exciting. Even collections that have already been processed often remain untouched for long periods of time and still evoke this feeling. Handling documents with so much age and significance has an almost magical, transcendent quality.

The first collection I am working with documents the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

Souvenir map of World’s Columbian Exposition, 1893. Wikimedia Commons.

My work updating the finding aid has involved looking through the items within the collection, which contains meticulously assembled scrapbooks, landscape plans, tree and plant lists, and invitations & memorabilia from the event. Part of my finding aid update includes supplementing the historical context provided. It has been immensely interesting to dive into the history and significance of world’s fairs in the late 19th century, and I have really enjoyed this piece of the work.

One of the aspects of the environment at the Frederick Law Olmsted Historic Site that I have really enjoyed is the encouragement to participate in activities that are not strictly archival processing. Yesterday I was invited to attend the Boston Flower and Garden Show with the Mona McKindley, the gardner at the Olmsted site. In spending time with Mona at this venue I learned about about how the grounds at the site were maintained and designed.

2017 Boston Flower and Garden Show

I also recently accompanied my supervisor, Michele Clark, to the Springfield Armory where some of the larger items from the Olmsted collections are stored. While there we received a tour of the Olmsted records onsite, as well as the armory museum. I have already come to appreciate the relationships between archivists and interpretation staff at different National Park Service historic sites.

I am really excited by everything I have experienced thus far at my internship. I have had to pinch myself a few times, but it is real, and I am enjoying every minute of it!

Olmsted’s Extraordinary World

I spent the first week of my new archives placement becoming more familiar with Frederick Law Olmsted’s legacy. By the second week, I was anxious and ready to begin hands on archival work.

As a public history student who had done some archives coursework, my experience working directly with materials as an archivist has thus far been somewhat limited. I discussed possible projects with my supervisor, Michele Clark, and Professor Morgan, and we concluded that it made the most sense as a first project for me to work on updating and refoldering a collection on the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. The finding aid for this collection was started several years ago but has some gaps in the materials assessment and historical context. Cleaning up the collection and finding aid so that it is available for researchers is an ideal stepping stones to larger future processing endeavors.

The history of the World’s Columbian Exposition, or Chicago World’s Fair, has already been fascinating to explore. The fair was created to commemorate the 400^th anniversary of Christopher Colombus’ discovery of the Americas. Similar fairs had been taking place in Europe on a grand scale, and the World’s Columbian Exposition was meant to showcase the innovation and sophistication of a growing United States. Its placement in Chicago was also symbolic to more prominent U.S. cities that Chicago was a cosmopolitan environment capable of hosting such an event. Olmsted, in his 60’s at the time, was solicited by the fairs organizers to design the landscaped setting. The design which included a “wooded island” and surrounding lagoon, kept in line with Olmsted’s overall philosophy of celebrating and enhancing the natural environment.

The collection is composed of eight boxes of different types of items. There are several volumes of scrapbooks in which members of the Olmsted firm  meticulously cut out and pasted newspaper articles related to the fair. There are miscellaneous records that include reception invitations, plant and tree lists, and inventories. There are also three large volumes of types correspondence from the firm related to the fair’s planning. At this stage I have looked through all the materials and have a good sense of their condition and contents, and have begun edits on the finding aid. I am very excited to complete the remaining tasks so that this interesting collection can be fully utilized.

A Historical Career Jump to Archives

Since I began the UMass Boston History Master’s program I have been searching for an opportunity to take a career leap into the historical field. My job at a hospital had afforded me flexibility to attend class but lacked a needed link to my educational pursuits. Eventually it would be my paid archives internship at the National Park Service’s Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site that merged my interest and passion in history to a career opportunity. I am so excited to take this leap into the field.

I began my placement at the Olmsted site two weeks ago and have already learned a great deal. Prior to discovering the internship opportunity, I had heard of the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted through the parks he designed as part of the Emerald Necklace in Boston. At that time I had little background about his personal history and many career accomplishments, but would soon become immersed in his life history.

The Olmsted site is located in Brookline at a home Olmsted purchased in 1883 to shelter his family and set up an office for his landscape architectural firm. One of the first things I came to appreciate at this placement was the ambiance of the workspace. The home is beautiful and has amazing natural light; in the Spring, Summer, and Fall it is open for visitors to receive tours of the grounds. It is a little hard to see now in the snow and barren trees of February, but I have heard that when the weather warms of, the trees come into bloom, the design work Olmsted did on his own property really shines.

The first few days of the internship were spent getting familiar with Olmsted’s personal life and career accomplishments. I spent some time in the house museum reading through exhibits and joined a visitors’ tour of Olmsted’s home and office. The archivist I am working under, Michele Clark, also provided some secondary sources for me to look through to develop a better historical base on Olmsted before diving into the archival collections.

The next step was to discuss possible projects to take on. The majority of the materials in the Olmsted collections are plans and blueprints his firm created for projects across the country. There are also hidden stories in the correspondence, notes, doodles, and other materials that were generated in personal and business activities. The first project I will be taking on is a collection on the Chicago World’s Columbian Expo to organize the materials and finalize the finding aid. I have just begun looking through the collection items and am already fascinated.

I have greatly enjoyed the start of this internship and look forward to digging deeper in Olmsted’s history and becoming part of the effort to make the research value of his legacy more accessible.