Preservation Services staff have been working from home on projects ranging from transcription to those using specialized handskills.

Directly and indirectly supporting Harvard’s massive effort to support online research, teaching, and learning spurred by the pandemic, the staff of Harvard Library Preservation Services has been working from home on many different projects over the past few months, some contributing to Library-wide and broader projects, like transcription, and others that are unique to specialties within Preservation Services. Here is a selection of projects that help improve access to collections, take advantage of specialized handskills that can be deployed at home, and provide direct classroom and teaching support.

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Collections Access, Discovery, and Storage Projects

Lisa Clark, Conservation Technician for Special Collections at Baker Library, has been transcribing a volume from the Baker Library manuscript collection that contains the business correspondence of William Blair Townsend, Harvard class of 1741, who was an importer of English and West Indies goods. Particularly enlightening are his comments on the challenges of doing business throughout the French and Indian War and the years leading up to the American Revolution, such as damaged goods, overpriced goods, trade embargos, and the lack of ships for sale. “Some people’s handwriting is easier to read than others’, but focusing on one volume allows me to get used to their words and abbreviations the writer used, the way they form letters,” Lisa says. “It’s like learning a new language, and the more I read it, the more fluent I become! I sort of feel like I’m forming a personal relationship with the writer.” Other HLPS staff who have contributed to the CNA transcription project include Irina Gorstein, Anne Corrsin, Alan Puglia, Anne McLain, and many others.
 

Elizabeth Walters worked on a series of transcripts of a Harvard Film Archive discussion event featuring a famous Japanese director and a well-known actress who has starred in many of his films. In addition to polishing up the AI-generated transcripts of these events, Elizabeth has translated the original Japanese commentary, much of which had been omitted or abbreviated by the event interpreter. Other HLPS staff who have contributed to the HFA transcription project include Deb Cuoco, Catherine Badot-Costello, Amanda Maloney, and Robert Vaszari.

Kaylie Ackerman, Head of Media Preservation Services, worked with HUIT to establish remote systems access to support a new set of workflows that enable staff to edit and process audio and video assets from home.

Even though the campus has been deserted for four months, the Harvard Library’s Digital Repository Service (DRS) has been running without interruption and providing a high level of preservation assurance for more than 10.2 million digital objects and 107 million files totaling 482 TB, making many collections accessible remotely. In order to ensure reliable and cost-effective performance, all DRS hardware is replaced every five years. Preservation Services staff Stephen Abrams, Head of Digital Preservation, and Tricia Patterson, Digital Preservation Analyst, have been working with Sharon Bayer, Library Technology Services Manager of Systems Deployment and Integration, and other LTS colleagues to plan for the refresh of the affected hardware in the next year or so. Consulting with HUIT and FAS Research Computing, project goals include greater flexibility in the DRS replication policy, new storage options such as cloud storage, and a resulting decrease in DRS pricing, addressing both pandemic-related budgetary constraints and curatorial desire to increase collecting of large-scale audiovisual materials. The refresh project team hopes to make a final procurement decision before the end of the calendar year. This effort is just one component of a larger set of ongoing activities by Preservation Services to maintain and enhance the DRS to ensure that it continues to provide effective, efficient, and innovative stewardship of the Library’s rich digital collections.
 

Other Harvard-wide access and discovery projects include:

• Participating in a pilot to generate closed captions and audio transcripts for Woodberry Poetry Room and Harvard Film Archive materials from the DRS (Amanda Hope, AnnMarie Ostrowski, Drew O’Doherty)
   
• Tagging photos from the MCZ Library in the Biodiversity Heritage Library’s Flickr account (Ann Antonellis)
   
• RD HD holdings cleanup in Alma; Widener, Law (Allyson Donahoe, Amanda Hope, Terri Messina, Humberto Oliveira, Drew O'Doherty, Dunstant Duncan)
   

Hands-On Work

In pre-pandemic times, many HLPS staff spent much of their days working with their hands and eyes to assess, repair, prepare, and for film and audiovisual media, digitize collections.  These handskills have been repurposed in the work-from-home setting to address long-standing needs as well as new ones, focusing on Harvard Library’s priority to support online research, teaching, and learning.

Book Futons

A team of HLPS staff, including Susi Barbarossa, Peter Foster, Amanda Hegarty, Amanda Hope, Laura Larkin, AnnMarie Ostrowski, and Katherine Westermann Gray, have been making a flexible, customizable, and reusable alternative to plexi, foam, or matboard cradles traditionally used to support fragile books as they are being handled. “Book futons” are made with fabric, batting, a needle, and thread (or a sewing machine is even better!). These supports will be tested for future use in reading rooms for patron use (someday), as well as to digitize, catalog, and/or display primary sources in live or digitized classrooms. Thanks to Duke Library for the inspiration and instructions!

 

Endbands in Isolation

Weissman Preservation Center conservators Katherine Beaty and Kelli Piotrowski, along with book conservation intern Oa Sjoblom, have been making models of historic endbands. Endbands, important elements of binding structures, are the small cloth or wound-thread strips found at the ends of book spines and can be both structural and decorative. Oa, Katherine, and Kelli compiled resources on endbands and shared tips with each other. Oa says she learned a lot of new endband styles, a useful skill that she has never had the time to explore before. Working on endbands was a great way to keep up her handskills while working from home. “Endbands in Isolation” was created as a group project using Microsoft Teams, so other members of Collections Care and Weissman Preservation Center were able to participate and share information. The endband models will be added to Preservation Services’ teaching collections.

 

Terri Messina, Conservation Technician at Harvard Law Library, has been customizing curtain weights or snake weights from home. These weights can be used to keep a book open while certain pages are on display; they are heavy enough to keep pages open without putting unnecessary stress on the binding. These types of weights can be used to do repair work on a book, and like the book futons, can also be used by library staff, in reading rooms, and in live or digitized classrooms to make special collections accessible for Harvard’s online research and teaching.

 

 

Remote Teaching and Support

Drew O’Doherty, Commercial Library Binding Assistant, has recently been working on a project with Katherine Beaty, Nora Dempsey, and Laura Larkin to plan virtual tours of the Weissman Preservation Center and Collections Care lab spaces for use by faculty in classes that traditionally take an in-person tour. One task is to evaluate existing video assets to create content for these virtual tours. Using footage that was shot in the labs last November, Drew edited together a two-minute video of the phase box making process as an example of the type of video content we may want to include in the virtual tours.
 

Along with Senior Photo Conservator Elena Bulat and WPC Projects Curator Melissa Banta, Kate Levy, Conservation Technician for Special Collections, revitalized and updated Harvard’s History of Photography Timeline. This resource not only supports learning about the history of photography, but also serves as an engaging gateway to Harvard’s rich photographic collections that can spur further research and support classroom teaching.

HBCU Library Preservation Internship

Staff from across HLPS helped to host our second HBCU intern, Jasmine Malone, by meeting via Zoom to discuss our work and workflows. Elizabeth Walters, Preservation Librarian for Audiovisual Materials, and Kaylie Ackerman, Head of Media Preservation, developed and presented a 2-hour webinar on Audiovisual Preservation for all the interns in the HBCU Library Preservation Summer Internship. Jasmine’s main project developed content for patrons of her home library, Xavier University Library in New Orleans, to advise on how to take care of their family and personal heritage and connect with local organizations to promote access and preservation of these collections. This internship encourages BIPOC undergrads’ interest in the field of library and archives preservation and gives us an opportunity to improve our skills in outreach to undergraduates.

Other activities directly supporting research, teaching, and learning include:

• Creating remote synchronous and asynchronous teaching content for Harvard faculty/students and training Harvard Library staff; working with Virtual Primary Sources-Object Based Learning Working Group
   
• Adapting preservation data for use in Dataverse (Elena Bulat, Kate Rich)
   
• Writing for peer-reviewed publications: 3 have been published; 1-2 are in process (Katherine Beaty, Catherine Badot-Costello, Elena Bulat, Erin Murphy)
   
• Working with Baker Library exhibits team on their next exhibit South Sea Bubble — this was originally an in-library exhibit and has transitioned to a virtual exhibit (Deb Cuoco)

You can keep up with Preservation Services on our new Instagram and Facebook pages!

By Preservation Services staff