On Completing My Internship with the Historical Society of Pennsylvania

When I learned that the Historical Society of Pennsylvania (HSP) houses over 21 million unique materials I really didn’t believe it--I thought maybe their website had been mistaken. The number loses its meaning to me when I try to imagine a building that can hold that many things. But taking a walk through the building’s numerous vaults containing shelf after shelf of boxes upon boxes of manuscripts, books, paintings, photographs, maps, etc. etc. helps one to grasp the reality behind that number. And then you may ask yourself: what do you do with all that stuff?

The first thing to do is, well, keep it there. And keep the room cool and dark and somewhat dry and for the most part, all the stuff should stay pretty much intact. But then what? I think most would agree that keeping all that stuff intact is pretty pointless if all it does is sit there in obscurity. And here we arrive at one of the many challenges of being an archivist: the balance between wanting to share archival materials with the public but also wanting to preserve the materials and prevent them from deteriorating. A really helpful tool in this situation is the process of digitizing materials and storing them electronically in a digital asset management system (DAMS). By digitizing archival materials you reduce the need to pull the original items from their physical locations, thus protecting the fragile items from further damage. You can also send the digitized materials much more easily to researchers all over the world.

But digitizing things is a long, tedious process that requires lots of patience and an array of reliable technology. I know this because I spent roughly 110 hours this past summer at HSP, helping in the digital services department and seeing first-hand the amount of work and care that goes into digital preservation. The required equipment is impressive: large overhead scanners and cameras, reel-to-reel tape decks and microfilm readers, and a pretty regular-looking scanner that takes forever to develop one high-resolution image. Perhaps less impressive but just as important are the computer systems that contain all of the digitized materials: a network of servers and online repositories that hold multiple backup copies of the objects and allow staff to view and share materials as needed.

And then there’s the metadata! Oh, the metadata. I spent many hours writing metadata for various objects to provide context and allow staff to search for both digital and physical iterations of materials. When you have 21 million objects in your care you need an easy way to know what you’re looking for, where to find it, and what it means. That last part is crucial: Imagine finding a folder labeled “Street cleaning” and the only things inside the folder are three 1930s photographs of people in various stages of getting arrested. This actually happened to me and I was very confused until a bit of research indicated that the photos probably had something to do with "Philadelphia's campaign to keep the streets clean." Without descriptive metadata to provide context, the stories behind the photographs could be misunderstood or completely lost, and the photos would not be very useful at that point.

Getting to work with unique materials was really exciting, especially when I was able to discover something new about Philadelphia or history in general. I’ve never been great at remembering historical details--this is a little embarrassing, but I had no idea that waffle irons existed in the 19th century until I digitized a 19th-century catalog from an iron works company. Actually holding and reading old manuscripts really humanized the stories for me, and it’s discoveries like this that make me want to continue working in the field and learning new things. Overall I had a great time at HSP and I hope to have a fulfilling career in digital preservation.