Rebecca Carpenter – Public History at UMass Boston

by Rebecca Carpenter

In the fall of 2016, I completed an internship with the Northeast Document Conservation Center (NEDCC) with Frances Harrell and others in Preservation Services.

The NEDCC, founded in 1973, was the first independent Conservation lab in the US dedicated to preservation and conservation of paper and film based materials. Funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities it has grown to encompass Imaging and Audio services as well. With the advent of new technologies, preservation and conservation will become ever more important in the archival world and the NEDCC is leading the way.

19th century college scrapbook — This 19th-century scrapbook contains mixed media and provides complex preservation challenges.

I took a behind the scenes tour of the NEDCC facilities during Professor Morgan’s “Archival Methods and Practices” course. That experience, and my lifelong interest in preservation, led to the opportunity to work with the NEDCC.

Digitization as Digital Preservation?

Since the 1990s libraries, archives, and similar institutions have digitized select special collections materials at an increasing pace. This push occurred partly because technology enabled it. Digitization and the internet brought hidden collections out of the shadows and made them accessible to a much larger audience. This brought with it a host of challenges.

David Joyall, Senior Photographer at NEDCC, using digital photography for preservation.

At what resolution 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, and more, became commonplace when talking about digitization. Quickly, archivists began to ask, who could and should create and provide answers and establish best practices? The Library of Congress, Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative, and the Smithsonian Institute are some of the bigger institutions and groups that have taken on the task of creating and distributing best practices and guides. These standards 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 centered on assisting in the creation and distribution of a survey about the present-day digitization and digital preservation practices of small- and mid-size institutions. NEDCC hoped 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. Researching each state, I collected information about statewide museum and archive associations to get the information out to as many people as possible. Then, I targeted smaller and specialized institutions, especially those whose focus pertained to minority groups. After targeting individual institutions and statewide institutions, I moved to looking at listservs and social media pages that could be helpful in distributing the survey. In the end, I created 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 writing clear survey questions 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. In a way, being new to preservation, digitization and digital preservation helped me to create questions hat were easy to understand, even for those with limited knowledge of the specifics of digital preservation.

I designed the preservation survey using Survey Monkey.

I designed the survey in SurveyMonkey. 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 has an analysis tool; however, we collected so much odd and individualized data, the results of SurveyMonkey’s analysis were 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. 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.

capture1 — Staffing data from Digitization and Digital Preservation Survey. October 2016.

The work with the survey culminated in the presentation at the Preservation and Archiving Special Interest Group (PASIG) conference in New York. I presented with NEDCC’s Frances Harrell. I was very nervous about speaking to such a large group of people but, in the end, our presentation went well by all accounts.

01a9d4ce859a657a1042a8111b2dcd08ec10425cf9 — Frances Harrell of the NEDCC and me after completion of our presentation at PASIG. October 2016.

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.

Kiyoshi Imai, Associate Book Conservator, working in NEDCC conservation lab.

One of my favorite tasks that did not directly relate to the survey was reference work. I read and answered questions that came to the Preservation Services email address . This enabled me to do research on preservation and conservation practices. Because of this task, I also spent some time in the conservation lab seeing what they were working on and the techniques they used regularly. This part of my internship I enjoyed more than anything else.

Take-away

The NEDCC Preservation Services team showed me how important preservation is to all collections and how vulnerable almost all collections are. This internship was informative, educational, and challenging at times. But I thoroughly enjoyed it. I know more fully that preservation and conservation are where my true passion lies.

Political cartoon, 1954. Image courtesy of the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia. Reproduction not permitted without prior permission, in writing, from the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library.

On Valentine’s Day, 1974, the Boston School Committee received a crushing rejection. Its appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court to repeal the Massachusetts Racial Imbalance Act was denied on two grounds: the deadline to file had expired and the Committee’s appeal had “no substantial basis.”(1)

Established in 1965, the act empowered the state Board of Education to investigate and reduce racial inequality in public schools. Perhaps the strictest racial balance legislation among the states, the act defined racial imbalance as any school in which the number of nonwhites exceeded 50% of the total population. For nearly a decade, the Boston School Committee and the state Board of Education argued bitterly over the definition of racial imbalance and the means of implementing a more integrated public school system.

In 1972, the Massachusetts Board of Education accused the Boston School Committee of repeatedly refusing to institute any measures to integrate its schools, many of which were heavily segregated according to the act’s definition. After the state suspended funding to Boston Public Schools, the School Committee launched a series of legal battles to repeal the Racial Imbalance Act and recover state funding for city schools.

The NAACP also initiated legal action in the federal court system. It charged that, by not complying with the Racial Imbalance Act, the Boston School Committee violated the Fourteenth Amendment and the 1964 Civil Rights Act. In the digital exhibit, “Busing Boston Bound: Phase I of Desegregation in Boston, Massachusetts,” Rebecca Carpenter, a graduate student in the Archives program, explores the impact of the Morgan v. Hennigan decision.

Cover of booklet, "Make Congress Stop Bussing," [sic], by Lawrence P. MacDonald, April 1976. Reproduced courtesy of the John Joseph Moakley Archive & Institute at Suffolk University, Boston, Mass. Rights status is not evaluated. Written permission from the copyright holders is required for reproduction. — Cover of booklet, “Make Congress Stop Bussing” [sic] by Lawrence P. MacDonald, April 1976. Reproduced courtesy of the Moakley Archive & Institute at Suffolk University, Boston, Mass. Rights status is not evaluated. Written permission from the copyright holders is required for reproduction.

Using documents, maps, reports, and photographs from special collections and archives including Boston City Archives, the Northeastern University Archives & Special Collections, the National Archives, Boston, the Moakley Archive and Institute at Suffolk University, and other repositories, Carpenter evaluates Phase I of desegregation. Beginning in September, 1974, the plan, which required that students in the most racially imbalanced schools be bused into schools where the number whites exceeded 50%, provoked heated and hostile reactions in some neighborhoods. The exhibit explores the motivations behind Garrity’s decision and assesses the initial plans for busing.

How did students react to Garrity’s decision to bus them away from their neighborhood schools? How did the decision, and the fear and violence it provoked in some schools, affect teachers? Learn more about the the impact busing had on public education in the next posts. For more background and details on the Racial Imbalance Act, see Connor Anderson’s digital exhibit, highlighted in the last post.

Notes

[1] Muriel Cohen, “Court Denies Balance Appeal Request.” Boston Globe (1960-1985) Feb 15 1974: 3. ProQuest. 13 Feb. 2017

Tag: Rebecca Carpenter

Preserving the Past: An Active Internship at the NEDCC

Preservation Services Work

Mapping Divisions & Historic Decisions: The Road to Desegregating Boston Public Schools

Notes