Iron & Glass

Kite Fly's, Engineering Experiments and Everything in Between: New Additions to the Archives' Photograph Collection

by Staff Pratt Institute Archives on 2020-01-31T11:14:00-05:00 in Archives | 0 Comments

Post contributed by Elizabeth Kobert, Fall 2019 Archives Graduate Assistant.

As the Graduate Assistant at Pratt Institute’s Archives during the Fall 2019, I worked on several projects including processing the papers of former professor Dr. Lisa Ann Carl, conducting research for reference requests, helping to research and curate a Cookery and Food Science exhibition, and rehousing Prattler student newspapers. My main project, which I will describe here, involved adding around 2,700 photos to the Pratt Institute Archives Photograph Collection.

Elizabeth Kobert, Archives Graduate Assistant, 2019.

This project began over the summer with a previous GA, Mary Bakija. She completed an inventory of 8 Bankers Boxes filled with photographic prints, contact sheets, slides, and negative strips. The provenance of these photos is unclear, but they appear to have been taken by photographers hired to capture important events on campus like commencement ceremonies, student and faculty exhibitions, and the opening of new facilities, as well as more day-to-day subjects like students in class and views of the campus. Most photos date from the late 1960s to the early 2000s, with the bulk from the 1970s and 1980s. I focused on just the prints and contact sheets, as photographic materials in the Archives are typically separated by format.

The first step was to come up with folder-level, or group-level, descriptions for the photos. Archives typically don’t describe each of the individual objects in their collections the way that a museum or library would because they are more interested in the context in which the objects were created and the relationships between them. Visual materials like photographs are a common exception to this rule, especially when they are digitized or born-digital, but the thousands of photos in this collection are better understood as evidence that events took place than unique artifacts.

Pratt Annual Kite Fly, 1959. View of students posing with Library and East Building in background.

Most of the photos in this collection were already separated into folders labeled by the photographer with straightforward subjects like “Fashion Design and Merchandising,” “Annual Report, 1977-1978,” or “Faculty.” Often, these descriptions would be useful for future discovery by researchers and did not need to be modified. Other times, I had to come up with ways of describing the content of the images that would better help users find what they were looking for. This might mean describing the photos more specifically than the photographer did; for example, there were hundreds of photos described simply as “Architecture” by the photographer, which I broke down into subseries like “Architecture--Models,” “Architecture--Drawings,” and “Architecture--Competitions.” It could also mean standardizing the description to fit with how the Archives has already described related materials; for example, photos labeled “Kite Day” were renamed “Pratt Annual Kite Fly.”

Left: Pratt Annual Kite Fly, 1964. View of students flying kite, looking South-West.

Right: Pratt Annual Kite Fly, 1964. View of students posing with a kite with Engineering Building in background.

I also recorded the names of individuals featured in the photos, based on captions or descriptions written on the back of the photos, which will be discoverable through a full-text search on ArchivesSpace, our archives management tool.

The next step was to write the subject on the back of each photograph in pencil, along with the identifier and a number. Each photo in the collection is individually numbered to maintain an accurate inventory and to help identify the images if they are digitized or reproduced. Some photographs had a matte surface that was easy to write on, but others had more of a glossy finish that presented a challenge and had to be labeled with special pencils.

A pure graphite pencil was needed to label photos with glossy finishes on the back. However, the finish was sometimes so glossy that pure graphite was illegible so I had to resort to a bright blue colored pencil.

The next step after labeling the photos was rehousing them in protective polyester sleeves. This was sometimes a challenge because the photos are of varying sizes. Some fit perfectly into the 8 x 10 or 5 x 7 sleeves, but others had to be placed in oversized sleeves and trimmed. The contact sheets, in particular, were always slightly too large for the standard sleeve sizes.

Photos in their mylar sleeves.

After being labeled and rehoused, the final step was adding the photos, both physically and in ArchivesSpace, to the Photograph Collection. These are stored in hanging folders within filing cabinets. The additions from this project filled almost two full drawers of the 3-foot wide cabinets.

Since I began this project, some of these newly added photographs have already been used to tell the story of Pratt’s past. Photos from the “Food Science and Management” series were used in the From Cookery and Homemaking to Restaurant Management and Dietetics exhibition curated by the Archives; photos of an architecture project related to the New Jersey Meadowlands Commission in the 1960s were used to answer a reference request for an architecture professor; and photos of students in the School of Engineering, which closed in 1993, have been displayed during tours of the Archive.