Fall 2019 - Cataloging, Metadata & Processing Projects Underway in Redwood City (Part 1)
Part One - Regular Staff in Collection Services
The regular staff in the Collection Services arm of the Department of Special Collections & University Archives has finally unpacked from our last relocation in July and settled into our new space in Academy Hall on Stanford’s Redwood City campus. It is a great relief to see our cataloging, processing and digital units once again hard at work and various collections spread out in our workroom. As always, they, and all of those behind the scenes in Redwood City and our colleagues on campus, did a phenomenal job!
Below is a list of staff working on various projects. Part One focuses on regular staff in the department as well as some of our colleagues from the main campus who are working in RWC with us one day a week. Part Two will focus on our soft-funded, term staff and the projects they are processing.
Cataloging & Metadata projects
In addition to their regular work load, Ann Myers & Brian Bethel, our rare books cataloging team, have just completed work on a large collection of titles from the Visual Studies Workshop collection. This group was founded in 1969 as a non-profit with a mission of supporting the creators of images via education, publications, exhibitions, and collections. Its press was founded in 1971. Ann and Brian cataloged 119 titles, many signed and inscribed.
They are beginning to chip away at a new collection - works published by the Nazraeli Press, which was founded originally in Munich, Germany in 1989, and produces books of photography. Since 1996, they have been based in the United States. The books will be cataloged individually in SearchWorks.
In addition to her manuscripts cataloging work, Laura Wilsey, our manuscripts cataloger and metadata librarian, recently completed the work necessary to describe and ingest nearly 300 coins from the Cantor Arts Center collection of ancient coins, circa 5th century BCE - 15th century CE into the Stanford Digital Repository. Throughout the process, she has worked closely with the libraries’ “numismatics team” – Björn Buschbeck, graduate student at Stanford; Kathleen Smith, Curator of Germanic Collections & Medieval Studies; Eitan Lev Kensky, Reinhard Family Curator of Judaica and Hebraica Collections; Glynn Edwards, who’s been serving as the project manager; and Jessica Cebra and Arcadia Falcone, metadata management team in Lathrop Library. The collection consists of approximately 8.600 coins transferred to Stanford University Libraries by the Cantor Arts Center in 2017. The first batch of digitized and described coins can now be seen in SearchWorks:
In addition, Laura completed the creation and application of descriptive metadata for the digitized material in the R. Buckminster Fuller collection, allowing us to publish thumbnails and description for nearly 6,000 items online, including almost 750 recordings and over 5,000 images. Because of copyright issues, large resolution images and recordings are only available in the Special Collections’ Reading Room in Green Library. The digital objects from the Fuller collection can be found in SearchWorks.
Archival processing
Franz Kunst, our lead processing archivist, has just completed the San Mateo County Resource Conservation District records (M2131). The San Mateo County Resource Conservation District (RCD) is a locally governed entity that provides conservation assistance to community members. The RCD works to protect, conserve, and restore natural resources in San Mateo County. A Finding Aid is available through the Online Archive of California.
In addition to supervising most of the term processing positions, Franz is beginning work on the papers of Jose Antonio Burciaga and those of Cecilia Burciaga. Both collections will be closed while they are being processed. José Antonio Burciaga was a Chicano writer, artist and poet. He is well-known for his involvement in the comedy troupe Culture Clash, his book "Weedee Peepo," and his mural "The Last Supper" which is installed at a dormitory at Stanford University. Cecilia P. Burciaga was a leader in civil rights and higher education who inspired generations of Latino students during a long career as a high-ranking administrator at Stanford and at California State University-Monterey Bay. Burciaga arrived at Stanford in the summer of 1974 to become assistant to the president and provost for Chicano affairs under the late Stanford President Richard W. Lyman. Burciaga and her late husband, artist and writer José Antonio "Tony" Burciaga, served for 10 years as resident fellows at Casa Zapata, the Chicano-theme dorm.
Digital collections
Sally DeBauche, our digital archivist, has been working concurrently on a few projects. She recently completed description for over 4,200 images from Amos Gitai’s film Tsili. There are 2,476 location scouting photos and 1,728 production photos. She is beginning to work on the video files for Gitai’s House trilogy, specifically News from House; these will become available when the metadata and processing are complete.
Sally recently completed a small subset of the David Bohrman archive of innovation in media & journalism – specifically recordings of the 1960s and 1970s interview show Tempo on KHJ-TV in Los Angeles with Stan Bohrman, his father, as host. Co-hosts were Maria Cole and Regis Philbin. These interviews are in copyright and must be viewed in Special Collections’ Reading Room in Green Library but description is available online. One of our hourly employees did much of the descriptive metadata work for these videos, Hannah Waleh.
Colleagues from campus
A special thanks to our colleagues with language specialties from the main campus who come out once a week to continue working on projects.
Anna Levia, a Reference and Instruction Librarian at Green Library, has just begun the papers of Bernard Zakheim. This is a large collection with over one hundred linear feet of correspondence, original fine art (drawings, watercolors, sketches, furniture designs, and prints), business records, creative writing, photographs, exhibition catalogs, ephemera, memoir drafts, and periodicals produced by the Jewish American artist Bernard Zakheim. It will remain closed until processing is complete.
Natalia Porfirenko, the Slavic Studies Curatorial Assistant at Green Library is working on completing the Russian letters from the National United Committee to Free Angela Davis records. letters of support to Angela Davis from prisoners in the United States, organizations in Eastern Europe, and school children in East Germany (many are form letters); news clippings of the trial and related matters; and limited personal correspondence. When the collection was received by Stanford University, the majority of the letters had never been opened. Therefore, it is assumed that many opened letters in the collection were most likely opened by patrons. The rest of the collection is done but the Finding Aid won’t be published until this last group of materials is done. Please contact the department for a preliminary guide.
Heidi Lerner, Metadata Librarian for Hebraica and Judaica at Lathrop Library, focuses on archival materials in Hebrew – over the past year, she has focused on several collections of posters including Yiddish and Israeli entertainment posters. This collection consists of 81 Israeli Yiddish entertainment posters, dating from the early 1930s to 1981. Israeli musicians, performers, authors, playwrights, actors and actresses represented in the posters include Dzigan and Schumacher; Max Perlman; Sholom Aleichem, et al. This collection will become available when it is fully processed.
