Working Alongside the Northeast Document Conservation Center as an Intern

History 627 Archival Methods and Practices class tour of the Northeast Document Conservation Center

In the fall of 2016, I completed an internship with the Northeast Document Conservation Center (NEDCC) with Jessica Bitely and the Preservation Services Staff. The NEDCC, founded in 1973, was the first independent Conservation lab dedicated to preservation and conservation in paper and film based materials. Funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities it has grown to encompass Imaging and Audio services as well. In History 627 Archival Methods and Practices we took a behind the scenes tour of the facilities at the NEDCC; that, and my lifelong interest in preservation led to the opportunity to work with the NEDCC. With the advent of new technologies, preservation and conservation will become ever more important in the archival world and the NEDCC is hoping to lead the way.

A scrapbook being shown off to students by conservation staff

Digital Preservation and Digitization

Growing since the 1990s libraries, archives, and similar institutions have been making a push to digitize their materials. This was taking place “…partly because technology allowed it…” and bringing what was being called ‘obsolete’ institutions in the popularity of the internet. This brought hidden collections out of the shadows and made them accessible to a much larger audience, but this also brought along with it a host of challenges.

What DPI should items be scanned or photographed? What storage should we be using to store digitized materials? What platform is easily accessible to the public? How often should we do fixity checks? Is an internal or external IT department better? How much storage space will we need? What happens to the materials after digitization?

All these questions became commonplace when talking about digitization and the biggest question became who could and should answer them. The Library of Congress, Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative, and the Smithsonian Institute are just a few of the bigger institutions and groups that have taken on this task and put out best practices and guides for others. These best practices are helpful, but often filled with jargon and might not be useful in small- to mid-size institutions who have limited staffing and budget resources. It is with this thought in mind my internship took shape.

The Survey

The main objective of my internship was assisting in the creation and distribution of a survey. This survey centered on the digitization and digital preservation practices of small- and mid-size institutions. The hope was to use the information gleaned from the survey to devise educational classes and webinars on digital preservation and digitization techniques.

I worked with the preservation services team throughout the entirety of this process. In the first few weeks of my assignment with the NEDCC, much of the time was pulling together a list of possible institutions to target for the survey. From each state, I found information for a statewide museum associations and archive associations. This is a great way to get the information out to as many people as possible. After each state, I targeted specialized institutions, especially those pertaining to minorities and smaller groups. After targeting individual institutions and statewide institutions, I moved to looking at listservs and social media pages that could be helpful in getting the survey out. In the end, I had a list of over 200 individual email addresses compiled for distribution, along with other 50 listservs and groups.

One of the most important steps was coming up with the questions for the survey and making sure that the answers would give us the information we wanted. I have only made one survey before this project and it was a customer service survey. Much of my help in this process came from being new to preservation, digitization and digital preservation. I was able to help the questions to stay as easy to understand as possible Jessica noted that many small institutions that they work with regularly lacked the education in these areas. In an effort to make sure this survey was accessible to all I looked over the questions for basic comprehension.

I designed the survey on SurveyMonkey. I had some experience with SurveyMonkey previously, but the NEDCC puts out several dozen surveys annually so they pay for a higher version than that offered freely. This allows for more flexibility in the formats of questions and different design elements. This was the most creative part of my internship and I had a good time with it.

The weeks following the opening of the survey became about data analysis. SurveyMonkey, the platform we used to produce the survey, has an analysis section for answers. However, with so much odd data the results of the analysis was not great. Therefore, my job became attempting to do basic data analysis. Having never done data analysis before, I spent time watching YouTube videos and doing research about how to do data analysis.

Staffing data from Digitization and Digital Preservation Survey. October 2016.

I found out from this survey how incredibly difficult data analysis is. I was not surprised to find out that the NEDCC previously hired data analysis employees.

The work with the survey culminated in the presentation at PASIG. By all accounts, the presentation went well.

Frances Harrell of the NEDCC and myself after completion of our presentation at PASIG. October 2016.

I was very nervous about speaking to such a large group of people but in the end, it went well. Frances Harrell, who presented with me at PASIG, noted that many of her colleagues approached her later in the week to speak about the presentation.

Preservation Services Work

Along with the survey work, which took up most of the time, I was able to spend time doing other tasks for the preservation services at the NEDCC.

One of my favorite tasks that did not directly correlate to the survey was the work I did with Eva Gizzard. Eva forwarded me questions that came to the Preservation Services email address that asked questions about best practices in interesting situations. This enabled me to do research on preservation and conservation practices. I also through this task spent time in the conservation lab seeing what they were working on and the techniques they used regularly. This was a part of my internship that I enjoyed more than anything else was.

Take-away

My entire internship dealt with a topic that is not specifically covered directly through courses at UMass Boston. This internship was so informative and educational, but at the same time, I thoroughly enjoyed it. I take away from this experience knowing more fully that preservation and conservation are where my true passion lies. Jessica and her colleagues showed me through all this work how important preservation is to all collections and how vulnerable almost all collections are to the elements. We need to work quickly to rectify this situation if there is any hopes of preserving the history we still have. My background in preservation helped prepare me for an internship like this, but I think it is important for all students to experience.

Week 16 – PASIG Conference NYC 2016

This week was a long one! On Tuesday night I left Boston bound for NYC to our hotel near Times Square. I arrived at Penn Station about 10PM and walked down to the hotel to get settled. Frances landed at about 10 and headed over to the hotel as well. It was probably one of the smallest hotel rooms I have ever been in. It was not a bad hotel by any means but I was just surprised, but then again, it is New York.

In the morning Frances and I met up in the lobby and walked over to the Museum of Modern Art, where the conference was being held. The conference started up at 9am. The first couple of panelists lost me entirely talking technically about bits and bytes. After our lunch break we listened to to marketing pitches about products that help handling digital preservation and then our session came up. We were slotted in with four other small institutions to talk about digital preservation in small institutions. Most of those talks centered on the personal experience of those places, but we gave them the preliminary data from our survey.

I think it went well. I can honestly say I am not sure I remember it really. I was very nervous. Even though we had given a mock presentation at the NEDCC the crowd there was a lot smaller than the actual crowd at PASIG. We went through our slides, but did not have time for questions. After our session ended the day ended with 6 more marketing presentations. Not kidding, 6 more. Then the day was over. Thankfully. My train was not until 750 and the conference day was over at 530, so it gave me some time to explore NYC a bit.

This conference was a great experience for me and Frances was amazing. We have a good time.

 

Week 15 – Preservation Assesment

On Thursday I was offered the opportunity to shadow Jessica on a preservation assessment of the Cambridge Historical Society in Cambridge, MA. The society lives in a historic house on  quiet street. We started off our day at 930 meeting with the new director of the Society. Before the NEDCC does a preservation assessment for an institution they are required to fill out a questionnaire, which provides information about their building, HVAC systems, collections, staffing, budgeting, etc. From this questionnaire Jessica develops questions to learn more about the society. This enables her to start a dialog right in the beginning about the institution and learn more about them before making any comments.

We sat down and had a back forth about Jessica’s questions for the entire morning. Jessica noted that the Cambridge Historical Society was further along in preservation than some institutions with similar staff and budget. It is clear they care for their collections, but right now they do not have a thorough inventory or know exactly what they have.

After the morning session of questions we broke for lunch. After we came back we did a walk around, first of the outside of the building. Jessica took pictures and made sure to note anything that seemed distressing or damaged. The Cambridge Historical Society had recently done a good amount of work on the outside of the building and it looked good.

After finishing with the tour of the outside, we moved to a tour of the inside. Jessica took pictures and made notes about the collections. The Society is doing well in that all their collections do seem to be boxed in archival boxes and protected from outside environmental factors. This is an interesting step, it involves removing items at random from the shelves to check on how they are doing. The most interesting part about this is that you can find some pretty interesting things by pulling boxes and folders at random.

After we finished the tour and looking at the collections Jessica asked if they had any questions and since they did not she gave them information on when her report would be ready and we left for the day. Jessica said that usually preservation assessments are only an entire day.

This preservation assessment was a interesting and learning opportunity for me and I am glad I got to take part in it. It has given me some good ideas and thoughts on what I hope may turn into a capstone project.

Week 15 – Session Monday and Tuesday

So hello everyone. It has been a very busy two days so far. I have committed my week to the NEDCC in order for Frances and I to prepare and practice our presentation for the upcoming PASIG Conference in New York City. I will be working with Frances on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. On Thursday Jessica and I will be at the Cambridge Historical Society for a preservation assessment.

Yesterday and today I spent my entire day working on putting together the powerpoint for our 20 minute presentation. Frances set up a skeleton outline to let me know which questions we wanted for the data. Much of the past two days has been using excel to create pie charts and bar graphs to show the data we have collected. Much of our information is in percentages showcasing the basics of what we have learned. Overall we have 259 full responses, more than we had thought we would get.

Below I have put some of the charts and graphs so you guys can see the information I have been working with.

Tonight I am working on putting together a script to follow for my part in the presentation. Tomorrow Frances and I will go over my script and get the presentation ready for lunch. At lunch time we are going to do a presentation for the staff at the NEDCC so we can work out any kinks. We will fine tune the presentation and be ready for next Wednesday.

Jessica and I will be getting together sometime tomorrow to discuss our upcoming preservation assessment. Jessica has provided me with documents from the CHS (Cambridge Historical Society) to read through before our assessment. We will plan our day on Thursday.

I will also be taking in part in the monthly staff meeting, this will be my last one before I leave. I am sure we will go over the PASIG information and the other upcoming events.

And now I will get to working on my script for the presentation.

Week 14 – October 12th

Today was another tough one for me. I am still working on the data analysis from our survey. We have about 221 completed responses and overall about 600. There is a lot of data to sift through. I spent the morning watching videos about using excel for data analysis, but most of it was centered on quantitative data and I have more qualitative data. However, I did learn a few tricks and started pulling together some information.

Here are some thoughts I have learned from our data so far:

1. The demographics portion – we asked who the institution was serving, we had hoped this would be a good area for data mining, but after looking it over we have decided it will not be. Too many institutions chose every option available believing themselves as a public institution to serve them all.
2. Out of the 221 participants so far only 31 of them are not digitizing materials already.
3. The largest obstacle for those not digitizing is staff, funding, and know how.
4. For those who are digitizing they cite their biggest problems as staffing, time, and money. However, only 23% of those polled are seeking out grant money for digitization projects.
5. I was surprised by a figure of 63% of institutions say they do not engage in a selection process for what is digitized versus which is not.
6. 80% of them do not do fixity checks on digitized materials.

Next week I will be at the NEDCC for the entire week. We have decided that we would like to have as much time together as we can to put together the presentation for the conference. This presentation is for PASIG (http://www.preservationandarchivingsig.org/) Francis and I will travel to NYC for October 26th. Our presentation will be given on the first day of the conference. It is going to be a great opportunity for me to take part in a large conference like this.

On Thursday of that week, Jessica and I will be doing a preservation assessment. This is one of the main focuses on the preservation services at the NEDCC. They take time to visit institutions and do a full assessment, taking into consideration the building, the HVAC systems, environment, and the collections themselves. Jessica put this assessment together for my benefit, because she really wanted to have me see one of these before my time with them was over. My internship with the NEDCC will end after the conference. I do think I will go back once more to Andover and thank them for their time with me and allowing me to see how they work.

Week 13 – October 5th

I did not post last week because I was working from my apartment and spent the entire time sending emails, so nothing really excited happened. I was working on sending out the survey link to the entire spreadsheet list that I have been working on putting together the past couple of weeks. I sent out individual emails to those places I had personal email addresses for and for those that I did not we decided on a mass email having everyone blind-copied.

This week has been a bit of a surprise and a bit frustrating. When I got in this morning it was to find out that over the week or so we have received over 500 responses to our survey. This is way more than we expected to get all together. However, only about 200 of these responses actually finished the entire survey. This was all surprising.

I met up with Frances first thing after checking on the survey to talk about the plan for today. Frances asked me to start looking into data analysis tools that we could use to explore the data and find trends and such.

I spent the first half of the day looking into these different programs and finding myself frustrated by them and how to use them. They were not self-explanatory tools. I spoke with  Frances about this and then she asked me to pull reports from on SurveyMonkey to see what the trends may have been.

I got frustrated with this. I have never done data analysis and I found that I had very little help from the Preservation team. I do not know what I am looking for or how to really use the SurveyMonkey to look at data analysis. This was one of those times where I just did not get enough help from someone on this. So even though I worked all day on this I do not feel like I made any headway. I am hoping that come next week Frances may have some time to help me and we can try to figure out how to use one of the sites or something to do the data analysis.

Week 11 – September 21st

Another day and another surprise. Today much of my work was spent on reading through a rough draft for a chapter of a book that the NEDCC is taking part in writing. This chapter was focusing on audio preservation. Jessica was happy to have me in that day and reading it because I have not had much exposure to audio preservation or that many different types of audio. She asked me to work through the draft a few times and make notes to things that were unclear. The staff within the NEDCC deal with these topics and questions regularly, but I was able to offer a more novice look at the chapter.

I circled any terms that were used that I did not know or thought a definition would be useful for. After a first run through on terms I went back and read it again for general comprehension. The first section was jumbled and jumped around a lot. I felt entirely confused, but the next few sections were much better. I made notes all over the draft she had given me and returned it to her for edits.

Later in the day I had another tech-inq. about the recommended DPI for negatives. A librarian emailed detailing that she has hundreds of acetate negatives and would like to scan them for preservation, but after doing several felt that 300 and 400 DPI were too low. I spent my time researching the matter within the NEDCC’s preservation leaflets, the LOC preservation guides and blogs and finally finding what I wanted within the FADGI (Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative). FADGI recommends 4000 DPI, which seems very high. I spoke with Terrance D.Ambrosio, who is the director of image services at the NEDCC for his recommendation. Terrance said that FADGI’s numbers were the ideal, but they are often not available to regular scanners. He recommended to digitize in-house as high a DPI as your scanner allows and then to follow preservation housing procedures to protect the negatives. I wrote an email detailing this information and sent it to Eva before she made edits and sent it on to the librarian.

The last bit of news, our survey has gone live! On Wednesday Frances had taken my drafts for notices and edited them and was getting ready to send out the survey. Our first wave went out to all the listservs the NEDCC is part of and to colleagues who agreed to help distribute the survey.

Next week is the Digital Preservation Conference. This is a huge conference that the NEDCC staff put on every year, so I will not be in the office as everyone will be gone. My assignment for the week however will be to start sending the email asking for participation in our survey to the list of individual institutions I have put together. I will be able to do this from home and maybe spend some time in the sun!

THIS JUST IN: Jessica has secured a preservation pre-assessment with the Cambridge Historical Society. She was hoping to be able to take me to shadow an assessment while I was with the NEDCC and has gotten it! On October 20th, she and I will go to the Cambridge Historical Society for a preservation pre-assessment.

So my schedule now stands as thus, I will be away from the NEDCC next week on the 28th, I will be in on the 5th regularly. The following week we are planning two days in a row the 12th and 13th. The entire next week I am taking from my regular job and I will be with the NEDCC Monday-Thursday (17th-20th). The following week of the 24th, Frances and I will make our way to New York for the PASIG Conference to present on our most basic patterns and data from the respondents we have accumulated (I hope there will be enough!).

 

Week 10 – September 14th

Today was a day of writing. We sent out one more email in a last-ditch effort to get feedback on the survey from our test panel. We have received on two responses back from the 10 people who agreed to help us. We are hoping by the end of the week to have a few more before we begin sending out the survey. I spent much of my day working on drafting an email to send out to various listserv’s and individual organizations. I also worked on a Twitter/Facebook and social media post about it on the NEDCC website. The last bit of writing I worked on for the day was an intro heading for the survey. I sent them all to Frances for her to add and make corrections.

We are hoping to have the survey begin to go out on Monday!! We had planned originally for it to have gone out last week, but that did not go according to plan. We are going to release the survey in waves. Beginning first with the listservs we have pulled together, then to individuals who have agreed to distribute on our behalf, and then to individual organizations we have found and who like to reach out to.

Toward the end of the day Frances and I got together to discuss October plans. We have secured our spot presenting on Day 1 of Preservation and Archiving Special Interest Group (PASIG) in New York. I will be taking the train out on Tuesday evening to New York and checking into a hotel near where the conference is being held. Frances will meet me there in the morning and together we are going to present our information at PASIG. I am going be leaving later that night to head back to Boston. Frances is staying with her sister-in-law for the remainder of the week and weekend.

I am nervous about presenting this information because I am worried about the amount of data we will get back in that time period. I am also nervous because the last time I did a big presentation like this was in my senior year of my Undergrad at the Undergraduate Research Conference and, realistically, fewer people attended my presentation there than I think will attend our presentation at PASIG. I think it will be a great experience, but a terrifying one as well.

We have also been talking about my schedule for October. I am going to work with NEDCC more frequently leading up to the Conference. Our plan at the moment has me there on the 12th and 13th for some data analysis and then again for three days on the 17th, 18th, and 19th for designing of our presentation and a dry run with the Conservation Lab staff. With these extra’s days it looks like my hours will be fulfilled by the end of the conference.

Jessica and I are planning to have some time next week to talk about the coming weeks as she will be gone for 3 weeks. We are going to plan about what can be accomplished in my time left with the NEDCC and ensuring that I will have enough to do while she is away.

All in all it was a successful day at the NEDCC, the bad part was the drive home from Andover. I was stuck in the tunnel in Boston for an hour because a truck had broken down and backed up traffic.

Week 6 – August 17th

After last week we had cut a few questions from the survey in an attempt to make it more manageable. Today in the morning we sat for another meeting with Jessica, Eva, Frances, and myself to talk about the questions and some changes we planned to make. After finishing up the morning meeting I set about making changes to the survey questions. Once I had finished with that around lunch I let Frances know and she started to go over it and make more cuts to questions. I switched gears then and worked on the powerpoint presentation I am creating for the Canton Historical Society and Canton Public Library. This presentation will deal with the basics of preservation. I am creating this presentation alongside Jessica. In the afternoon I worked on crafting and editing an email that will be sent out with the survey when that times comes. Next week we are planning to send out the survey to a test group. The participants have been selected by Frances, Eva, and Jessica. They are all people that they have been in contact with before. Marta is actually set to be asked to participate! We want to see how they take it and the what the results do. Essentially we want to make sure the questions are giving us the answers we are hoping to gain from it. After this trial run we will make any changes needed and then get this survey out there.

Week 5 – August 10th

Today we had gotten back all of the comments from our panel of experts in the wording, ordering, and design of the survey we have put together. I started the day with putting the remaining comments on a word document with the others so it would be easier to see all the comments for a specific question. I spent a good part of the day working more on our list of potential recipients. I have been adding them all to one google spreadsheet with contact information. During lunch Frances and I met with another person in the office whose specialty is digital preservation to discuss the questions, the comments, and changes to be made. We hoped to eliminate some questions because nearly every expert noted that the survey seemed long. We talked about defining words and restructuring questions to make them easier to answer. I noted that I thought we should keep the technicality of the words and questions to minimum because I am guessing that a good portion of these institutions will not always have professional staff. We are hoping to learn about the ratio of those who volunteer and those who are paid versus what their educational or professional background is. Since we are targeting small institutions we want to make the questions as easy for them as possible. After this meeting I worked the rest of the day on a teching question, dealing with making time capsules, and drafting the email to send out to our list of potentials. I was surprised at how much information was available on making time capsules. I guess I did not think this was as popular as it appears to be.