Currently viewing the tag: "Authority Names"
Today we continued processing all of S. Byron Stone’s many many MANY slides!! Since an Internet search of him returned very little our best guess is that Stone was a world traveler who donated his travel photographs to the museum. He was extremely well travelled and explored some fascinating locations including Isreal, Japan, Thailand, South America and many more. thoughout the 1960′s. We came across a Body Building Competition in Japan that was a welcome change from the never ending slides of street markets and landscapes.
Stone’s images captured a specific time and place in the world when noticeable changes still existed between different countries. One of the souvenirs included in the slide collections were souvenir slides, created at the time to be bought by tourists for their slide shows at home. We’ve noticed these slides in a few of the travel collections of different people and have noted that every time they are present, the quality of the slide has deteriorated in color faster than the slides included in the collection. We somehow doubt that any country is creating souvenir slides today.
There were some problems with sloppy labeling present in Stone’s collection and also in the mysterious Clyde Fisher collection. More on the mystery later. In the case of the Fisher collection, many of the labels were marked directly on the mount in ink, which could off-gas. In the case of the Stone collection, we came across a rather sloppy and extreme case of labeling gone wrong when we found a slide covered in what looked like red crayon.
And on to our mystery of the day: how does a man take extensive photos of his travels over 20 years after his death? That is the question that the wonder of authority records will solve, when we clear up the reason why a Clyde Fisher who died in 1949 was labelled the creator of slides taken in the late 60s and early 70s. Hooray for authority records!
As always, thanks for visiting the slide collection with us and we will see you all next week!
Beginning our day with the second round of “Risk Assessment,” we swiftly moved our way back through all of the collections we had processed so far. In general, the slides are all in very good condition and rarely show any signs of preservation concerns. The most significant “risk” from these collections is dissociation by lacking any type of identification (other than the label on the outside of the box), thereby rendering them not-so-useful for research purposes.
With half of the day ahead of us, we moved onto a little spreadsheet data clean up and authority work. Here’s a little elaboration on one authority file we updated…Box 208 is labeled “G. Ekholm Collection, Mayan Photographs, 35 mm color slides, 44 images.” This “G. Ekholm” is actually the late Dr. Gordon F. Ekholm, curator emeritus here at the museum. Earning his master’s and doctoral degrees in anthropology from Harvard, Dr. Ekholm was an expert in the field of pre-Columbian archaeology of Mesoamerica. Many of his studies focused on parallels between southern and eastern Asian cultures and the Mayan civilization. An author search retrieved 17 records from the AMNH research library OPAC, including several books, numerous co-authored publications, and a few films. He served as an AMNH staff member for several decades.
But back to the collection…there are 44 slides, many of which are glass mounted, and all of which contain detailed captions, but no dates. The most eye-catching part of the collection concerns a “Volador Pole.” This group of photographs was taken during an expedition to Mexico, which focuses on a ceremonial ritual called the “Danza de los Volodares,” or “Dance of the Flyers.” Think of it as a merry-go-round for very brave adults. It consists of 5 dancers who climb a 30-meter pole, four of whom launch themselves from the top, tied by their feet with ropes, and swing around in circles, while the fifth remains at the top to play a flute and pray. According to myth, the ritual exists to ask the gods for a reprieve from severe drought. In 2009, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) recognized this ceremony with the Intangible Cultural Heritage distinction. For those interested further, a video clip can be accessed here.
Our day began with verifying authority data in the creator field of our photographic slides inventory spreadsheet. On that account, we substantiated and/or edited about 100 records, which got us pretty much up to speed on all the collections we’ve described thus far. Some names were not found in the library’s OPAC or Library of Congress, so we’ll have to deal with those later.
The issue that arose in today’s processing concerned the authority file of one photographer, ambiguously labeled on 9 boxes as “Fisher.” Someone had previously credited an influential photographer on the spreadsheet, by the name of Clyde Fisher, who has turned up in many other print and slide collections. The tricky part is, the slides were dated circa the 1960s and 1970s, while the authority record of Clyde Fisher indicates a death date of 1949…so something doesn’t add up. None of the slides were numbered, none were labeled, and they numbered literally in the thousands. Regarding whom to credit, we’re still unsure. But one thing is certain; he was genius at capturing human emotions.
We’re not sure what these people are smiling about, but we’re happy to be working our way through all of these remarkable slide collections…
As a shelf shifting project is currently underway, our efforts today were geared more toward detailing the accuracy of the data for collections we had previously cataloged. In particular, we went through the dates, titles, and names to make sure that they were compliant with DACS (Describing Archives: A Content Standard). One detail we learned is that abbreviations should be avoided, e.g., spell out circa and approximately, rather than ca. or approx.
Another area of focus was verifying authority records for creators. While some were easily found in the AMNH OPAC or the Library of Congress authorities, many could not be verified or even found at all. For example, no additional data could be found for Oscar Byron, a photographer responsible for a number of collections of travel photography from around the world. Verification or not, he took this sweet photo (no pun intended) of a mountain of sugar in Barbados, which was the most remarkable discovery today.
Describing Expeditionary field work at the AMNH
These posts describe recent discoveries and observations by the project team.
In 2012, the Research Library of the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) was awarded a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, through a program administered by the Council on Library and Information Resources’ (CLIR) Cataloging Hidden Collections. The AMNH Archive Project will produce in-depth descriptions, called finding aids, for major archival collections relating to Museum expeditions. The project will also result in brief histories of these expeditions and biographies of those who participated in them.
