Today I mostly helped out a photographer that was there to take pictures of the Freeman collection. He was hired by Justice Freeman's son to take pictures of the items we pulled for the exhibit, in case he wanted to do a book or some such. But also, there was some agreement that the photos would be shared with the school archive, which is nice, because if they ever want to do a digital archive of any of that stuff they'll have some high quality photos. Though it is occurring to me now that actually, the photographer took photos of stuff that was relevent to Freeman but from another collection entirely, and down the line that could be a copyright issue. But those items are really just the stuff about Freeman participating in the Brown vs Board of Ed reenactment that happened on campus to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the court decision. That's probably mostly of interest to the university more than anybody else so it's probably not something that would come up. But none the less, it's probably helpful to have the CSU stuff photographed for the archive anyway.
Kheir had to step out for multiple staff meetings today so I spent the day with the photographer helping him decide what stuff to photograph, moving things, helping him position stuff, and so on. It felt a little bit like I was a photographer's assistant but also making editorial decisions about what pieces were the ones that were worth taking pictures of. I hope I made good decisions but Kheir seemed to trust me so I think it's OK.
Because I had to help the photographer I learned something very interesting about photography, and that is when you see photos of people or things where it looks like they're surrounded by white it's because there's a roll of white paper (parchment or otherwise) held up top by rollers, and then it scrolls down like toilet paper almost right up to the camera, and the subject of the photograph stands on top of it. I could never figure out how that effect was done and now I know.
Also today Kheir had me go through a box he was given to do an overview of what was in it. I found a couple CSU-related posters, a 1959 yearbook back when CSU was the Chicago Teachers College (before it split up into Northeastern and CSU), and a bunch of the duplicates of the brochures of Provident Hospital that we already had plenty of in the archive. There was also a random unopened CD-ROM collection of Chicago History Makers oral histories going up to 2006.
While the photographer was setting up I continued going through the Bennett mixed media materials hoping to find a recoding of Bennett's Harold's Journey: The Musical About Harold Washington. No dice. However, one box had sheet music and a bunch of cassette tapes/reel-to-reel tapes/DAT tapes, along with a box of cassettes from Roger Leisner (of Radio Free Maine) of leftist speeches by folks like Chomsky, Chuck D, Howard Zinn, etc. It was addressed to Bennett at Ebony so that box (98) definitely belonged to him but box 97 had lots of unlabeled VHS tapes. Were they blank? Yes. Did I have time to go through each one? No. Did I think it was another box that has nothing to do with Bennett? Yes. It is actually also stuff that vaguely had to with Chicagoland area, like a 2002 recording of a newscast about the opening of a Target in Homewood as appearing on the Homewood Cable network, channel 4. But also, I found this gem:
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| Is this from Jackie Chan's slide presentation about what he did over the summer of 2001? Starred with Chris Tucker in Rush Hour 2? Do I catalog this in Dublin Core or ISAD(G)? |
You are doing great work and this is as usual a very engaging entry.
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