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Rivers of knowledge9th Specials, Health and Law Libraries ConferenceDifficult to find and keep: providing access to ephemera
E A Holcombe AbstractThe paper covers issues relevant to the provision of access to an ephemera collection in this era of digitisation. The main focus of the paper will be access: ways to provide it, the staged approach we are developing at the Australian War Memorial, and the challenges we are facing. The Memorial's use of EAD, XML, our website and our collection management systems will be covered. The paper will also look at: how to keep ephemera on the agenda; the physical arrangement and storing of ephemera; digitisation as an aid to preservation; and the challenges posed by oversize material. Difficult to find and keep: providing access to ephemeraEphemera is difficult to define satisfactorily. Maurice Rickards, founder of the British Ephemera Society, described it as: 'the minor transient documents of everyday life' [1]. This includes bus tickets, marriage certificates, concert programs, menus, and invitations to galas. It is contradictory material, at once fascinating and dull, fragile and robust, rare and plentiful. It comes in a huge variety of shapes and sizes, on as many different sorts of paper as have ever been invented, produced by all printing methods ever devised, illustrated and coloured and decorated with a dazzling array of materials, and used for an infinite number of reasons. It is able, as Rickards believed, 'to bring the past to life more vividly than many other forms of documentation'[2]. Michael Twyman in his introduction to the Encyclopedia of Ephemera, says that there is a 'need for ephemera to be preserved and studied with something of the rigour applied to other kinds of documents, such as books, music, maps, prints and archival material'[3]. I don't think anyone who looks after this material, or who uses it for any purpose, would disagree. However, there are some issues to deal with first. The control, management and use of ephemera[4] is so plagued with problems that it is frequently avoided. Linda Stanley has described ephemera as a stranger in the house[5], an awkward customer that fits no one pattern easily. Deborah A Smith has said: '"Intellectual control" of collections is a phrase that lends an air of cerebral calm to what is often an exercise only two steps short of madness: the effort to impose order on vast accumulations of things by naming, describing and interpreting them.'[6] Then there are the problems associated with using it as primary source material; it 'usually arrives at the researchers desk devoid of context, with no attribution, provenance, natural history or authority work. There is seldom any item level cataloguing record. Ephemera just is.'[7] The policies of curators and librarians in past years are often at odds with what we are doing now; at the Memorial, it was common for items to be taken out of the collection they came in with, and stored according to their form. When the intellectual connections are maintained and easy to follow, there is no serious difficulty with this, as there still is context and provenance for the items removed. However, should the links be broken (and that is very easy to do) all such information is effectively lost. No one will dispute that we need our ephemera collections to be under control. Getting control over the material means knowing what you have, where it is, what the strengths and weaknesses of it are, what the key or iconic pieces are, what the major themes are, and probably most important of all, why anyone would find it useful. It also means that we are in a better position to collect ephemera from the present day; this is often difficult, as you don't have the benefit of hindsight to help you sort out the interesting from the not so interesting or just plain irrelevant. Most importantly, any information about the collection needs to be where everyone can find it[8]; there is little use in having an expert or experts in a collection if all the information they have amassed is stored in their heads. Where do we begin with ephemera to bring it under enough control so that we can provide access to it, so that people can use it? The answer is a very simple one, on the surface, and I will get to it in a moment. The answer is also circular: in order to control it properly, you need to know how the material will be used and what descriptive terms are likely to be most meaningful to most researchers of your collection material. So, what is this magic answer? To get control over ephemera, you simply do this: Name it It sounds simple and very familiar: this is cataloguing after all. It is simple too, especially if you have either hardly any items to deal with, or a seemingly endless supply of money, staff, and space. We all know what we need to do with this material, it is just that we rarely seem to be able to do it. Organisations like the Library of Congress are building wonderful sites like American Memory, but we also know that we don't all have access to the same level of resources, so whatever we do must be within the limits imposed on us. The size of the problem becomes so great that the sensible thing seems to be to run away from it completely, hope that it will solve itself, that the good fairy will give us lots of money, or that someone else will do it. Another frustrating thing is that sometimes, when you do actually get to do all of those things to a group of items, and while you are patting yourself on the back, someone comes along and asks you to search them in a way you have not thought of before. We had a case recently, when we had just finished cataloguing our sheet music. A reader wanted to know how many covers featured a particular image. And, yes, you guessed it, we had not described the images on the covers in the catalogue records. I want to look at each of the phases I have listed above in some detail, as I think we need to understand each one properly before we start doing any work. Then I will briefly describe to you what we are doing with printed ephemera at the Australian War Memorial. In these discussions, I will be talking about already formed collections, and I will assume that there is a collection policy in place. NamingIf we are to provide access to collections of material, then we need to name them properly and in a recognisable, meaningful way. It must suit our audience, rather than merely fit in with our administrative needs. It is possibly the hardest thing to do. How do you name a thing so that someone who has never seen it and does not know it exists, will find it and recognise it as being useful (or useless) to them? There are at least two different sorts of names: the name of the category of thing that your item belongs to, for example, Postcard, Greeting card. Then there is the name of the thing or collection you have in your hand: a French silk postcard, Christmas card. These examples are quite straightforward. But what do you call a postcard that has been made by cutting a cigar box lid in half? It is still a postcard, in the sense that it is card and has been posted, but it is not a commercially printed item that one thinks of when one thinks of a postcard. What about the item printed on tissue paper that looks like it might have been a placemat, but from the information on it, it was designed to be a newsletter? How do you name these things so it is clear to a researcher just what it is? Your naming conventions need to be as clear as you can make them. DescribingThis is also a challenge. What part of the description do you put your effort into? Do you say what a thing looks like or what colour it is or what is written on it? You can do all of this, or sometimes you can only do some of it, as it depends greatly on the object. If you are describing a collection, what are the highlights? Do you focus on the important items? the common ones? the outstanding features? and/or any themes which may be present? It is not always possible to capture every detail about an item or a collection. The key is to ensure that whatever you choose to focus on will enhance access to the items. For example, in the theatre programs collection, we have listed the names of military units involved and the dates of the performances, as this is most likely to appeal to most of our researchers. For iconic items, we add more detail, for instance the printing method, design of the program, or the presence of autographs, especially if these were by key people. However, the key access points will still be the names of the military units and the dates. Ephemera is at the same time an object to be preserved and made safe, and a source of information. And the information is not simply the words printed on it; it can be the printing method used, the colours, the paper, the font, the decorative motifs chosen. In fact, this is why ephemera is so difficult to find and keep. Ephemera varies wildly in its information content, from the brevity of a bus ticket to the lengthy theatre program complete with advertisements. An item that is attractive because of its decoration may add little to a collection; something as dull as ditchwater may be an excellent type example, and therefore plays a documentary role. Then there are the items which have a high commercial value, like rare stamps or postcards; they may not add anything of value to a collection. Pieces of ephemera transcribed can lose all their appeal and their richness. It is here that digitisation has an important role. Digitised type examples from large collections, or exciting, iconic items made available on the Web allow the reader to quickly assess an object to see if it will give them information or fit some other requirement. Digitising an item is a way of describing it, or, to be more exact, of amplifying a description. It conveys colour, text and layout much more effectively than words, though it is not so good at conveying the size, weight or texture. Digitising solves some problems, but has its own issues of metadata, storage, access to the digital images and preservation of the images. I will not go into these here, but you need to understand them before undertaking a digitising project. [9] Once you have named and described your collection or item, then you are in a better position to interpret it. InterpretingThis is the fun bit. This is where, with an already existing collection, you get to do the research, look through the files, do the reading, get up to your armpits in old documents while you try to answer some questions about the thing or things you are dealing with. Questions like: Why is this piece in the collection? Where did it come from? Where does it fit? Who collected it? Why? How did we acquire it? Do we still want it? This is where you make the links you need to give context. Without context, the thing loses some of its value; with links, it begins to come alive and have a presence. For example, we recently were shown a colour photocopy of a notice written in German, French, Dutch and English about the punishments that what would be meted out if the field telephone was tampered with. We could not tell from the copy what year it was written or what country it came from, though we guessed it had been a notice in an occupied country. On asking questions of the donor, it turned out that it was pasted to the back of painting that Arthur Streeton did in 1916 in Europe. This immediately gave life and substance to it. The trick is to keep this information with the item, or at least connected to it. However, there is a price to pay here. This sort of work takes a lot of time, time that you most likely do not have. Compromise becomes the order of the day. You can afford to research the really iconic items, or the rare and very valuable, as these will become treasures and you can use them to keep ephemera in general on the agenda. For the rest, if you can provide subject headings which make other links, and if your naming and describing have been good, then a reader will be able to make some links of her own, and go some way to building the context. The next step is to keep the material safe so that it can be used. Housing and preservationThe material must be housed properly if it is to be preserved. The ideal is for all items to have their own enclosure, preferably mylar; but that clearly has little to do with realities that most of us face. Most collections will never get near this. The fall back position is to make sure the treasures are well cared for, and for the other items, do the best you can with the resources you have. Try to store items flat, away from sources of humidity, temperature extremes, dust and light. Simply using acid free paper as a buffer or a wrapper is quite useful, and not too expensive. Material in high use is liable to be worn and torn; material that has to be repeatedly searched through because there is no other way of finding what you are looking for is also at risk. Something stored reasonably well will last quite well without an individual enclosure if not disturbed very often. An unlisted collection stuffed in a shoebox and riffled through often by readers is at much higher risk of deterioration. A good finding aid can be as useful a preservation tool as mylar sleeves as it will reduce handling[10]. A digital image of the object is also a preservation aid, though you need to be careful that the making of the image in the first place will not damage the item; you still need to store the original in a responsible way. A useful ratio to have in the back of your head when prioritising work is: Use: artefactual value: condition[11] If the rate of use and the artefactual value are high, and the condition is poor, then you have a candidate for urgent work. Low use, low artefactual value and good condition on the other hand means you can safely leave that collection alone for a while. There is another value judgement that needs to be made: ephemera costs money to house and preserve, and the pressing demand on resources means you need to be aware of this. There are also items in any collection that are commercially valuable; sometimes they will also be very valuable to your collection (that is, the collection would be the poorer without them), but it need not be the case. The cost of storage and the value of some individual items must be taken into consideration when housing and preserving collections. A constant and vexing issue is how to deal with oversized material. If it won't fit in the same sort of housing as the bulk of the collection, how do you separate it, and store it safely, and still be able to find it again? And how can you tell researchers that there is an oversize item or items? There are many solutions to this. At the Australian War Memorial, we have found that plan cabinets, solander boxes (if you can afford them), or boxes made out of heavy archival board to suit elephant folio (900mm x 600mm) shelving work quite well for the physical storage. The boxes should not be too deep, as it is all too easy to overfill them, and damage the items stored in them. Printed ephemera, as a colleague said recently, 'packs down really well'; an astonishing number of items can be stored in a very small space. We are listing the oversize items in the finding aid, and we put a reduced copy of the large item in with the smaller ones, so that at least a researcher will know if they really want to look at the original. All of the work you have done to this point is useless if you have not considered carefully how the collections will be used. The choice of name, the wording of the description and to some extent the housing of the collection will all be affected by the use to which the collection is put. In other words, there is little use in devising a system of control that requires interpretation by a staff member: the system has to stand by itself and be useable on the Internet and in the reading room by anyone who wishes to use it. AccessIf people can't use your collections, why bother having them or working on them? You need to be able to allow access and to provide it, either to the actual items, or to surrogates. In either case, researchers need to be able to find what they are looking for in a catalogue, a finding aid, or on your web site, or all three. This is where naming and describing and interpreting are so important. If you have not used access points that are useful, no one will find your work. The finding aid or the catalogue record needs to contain as much information as possible about the collection and show clearly the value of the collection to the researcher. For example, why would anyone want to look at a collection of World War One, 1914-1918 Anzac Day sports programs? You need to state things like that many of the programs list the names of the participants and their military units, that some contain nominal roles - in short, that using this material may enable you to put an individual at a place on a certain date. In addition, list the names of the military units and the dates of the programs; this will save readers getting the collection out on the off chance that 'their' unit will be included in the collection. There can be great deal of effort involved providing access, but it is worth every minute of it, even if you only start at a superficial level. If you have a good knowledge of your collection, you can manage it better, you know where the gaps are, what the strengths are. You can find material quickly and efficiently, which saves staff time and researcher frustration. You can cope with donation offers more effectively, and be in a better position to decide if you need to purchase certain items for your collection. If you can collect all the information you have gathered and make it known to your colleagues and your clients by putting it in a finding aid or the catalogue record, then you have freed yourself from having to interpret things over and over again. Your collection will be accessible and useful. What we are doing in the Research Centre at the Australian War MemorialAt the Research Centre, we are aiming to achieve this happy state of affairs. We are going about it in a staged way, as we live in the real world, and need to manage our resources carefully. We are confident that we are beginning with good basic building blocks, and that over time we will construct a sound control system for our printed ephemera collection. Before I discuss our solution, I would like to give you an idea of the sort of material we have in the collection and to talk briefly about the systems we are using. The printed ephemera collection is a small part of the almost 7km of material we hold. It is roughly 105 shelf metres long, and includes:
This last group of material is really anything that does not fit any of the other categories, and is consequently both delightful and frustrating to work with. To access the collections now you have to come to the Research Centre, and use the finding aids in the Reading Room. The finding aids are not as good as they might be, and require interpretation from staff members. There is no other way to access the material, and in this digital age, that is simply not good enough. The Memorial uses three major collection management systems. One is RecordSearch, the National Archives of Australia's database, on which the Official Records are listed and described. The second is called FIRST, and is the catalogue used for books, serials, maps and sheet music; it has about 55 000 USMARC records on it. The third is MultiMimsy, and here we catalogue the museum objects, the private records, and our ephemera collections; it has about 400 000 records on it. The reason we are using MultiMimsy for the ephemera cataloguing, rather than FIRST, is that the museum system allows more scope for recording contextual information. So, how are we going about gaining better control over the material, and improving access? We are using combination of approaches. We are progressively working through the collections, re-housing as we go. We are fortunate to have a paper conservation team at the Memorial. They do any repair and restoration work needed, and provide valuable advice on storage methods and materials. Indeed, we do not make housing decisions without consulting Conservation. They make enclosures for large, odd sized or fragile material, and survey items on request to see what work needs doing to them. As we work on the re-housing, we are, where necessary, creating or improving finding aids. For these finding aids, we use one Encoded Archival Description (EAD) template, written in an Extensible Mark-up Language (XML) editor. In addition, we create a collection level entry for each collection on MultiMimsy, and link the finding aid to it. MultiMimsy also allows us to link item level entries to the collection level entry; this is very useful when we wish to catalogue in depth one item from a collection so that it can be digitised, go in an exhibition or be loaned to another institution. This combination offers us several advantages at once.
The diagram shows how we use MultiMimsy to catalogue ephemera items and collections.
Web site/access pointsIn addition to the cataloguing, we will be creating a presence on our website for the ephemera collections, just as National Library of Australia have done for manuscripts, and the Library of Congress have done in their American Memory site. We do not imagine it will be as big as either of these. It will function, as these do, as another access point for this material, and we aim to alert web users to the types of material held, rather than necessarily list and catalogue every single thing. And this brings me to the most difficult aspect of working with ephemera: how to keep it on the agenda so that you can get the wherewithal to put it on the web, and to do all the work necessary to manage it. Keeping ephemera on the agendaIf you don't do this, it is difficult, if not impossible, to get any work done on ephemera. There are many ways to do it, but whichever way you look at it, this is a marketing exercise. Creating or enhancing a demand for access to ephemera collections is vital if you are to argue for the resources to supply that demand. One of the best ways to improve demand is to advertise your ephemera collection. For instance, you can:
If you don't keep talking about it, they will forget that the material is there. I am sure that you have all shown visitors some of the things in your collection, and heard the oohs and aahs that they generate: this is fascinating material, as it evokes the little moments in life that are so familiar to us all, and it is very attractive. That attractiveness is the great strength of this material; it is why it was collected in the first place. But it is not easy to find if no one knows that it is there. ConclusionWhy do we give shelf space to collections that we have no time to give proper attention to? What is the point of an extensive collection of printed ephemera if no one (except for one or two members of staff), knows that we have it, what is in it, how to use it, can find it in catalogues, or can make little sense of finding aids? We give space to these collections because they are there, and we don't give them proper attention because we don't have time, and there is no little or no demand for them. And why is there no demand? Because on one knows they are there. (It is useful to remember here that the Research Libraries Group have said that one use in five years is significant.) I would argue that we can and should do better. If we use the 'use, artefactual value and condition' ratio to choose key parts of our collections, our treasures, and care for them by naming, describing, interpreting, housing and preserving them, then they will be found by researchers, who will want more. We can - must - help the process by marketing the collections (and the work we are doing) and keep them up there on the agenda. Once there is a demand for these collections of fascinating transient fragments, then we have the opportunity of supplying it. People banging on the door (the real one, as well as the virtual) demanding to see the 1916 Anzac day program is a good incentive, in my book, to provide a way they can get it, and more things like it, as quickly as we can. Once you show people what you have, and why the collections are useful, then there is interest, and a desire to see more. The collections are there. They are fascinating, attractive and informative. We have tools now, like digitisation and sophisticated data bases and search engines, that mean we can tackle the problem of bringing control to ephemera collections, and tackle them at a speed that suits us, as well as our clients. It is desirable. It is possible. To quote a recent television advertisement: it may not happen overnight, but it will happen. Thank you for your attention. BibliographyDann, John C. 'Ephemera collecting - a growing field, hard to define' in AB Bookmans's weekly, v101, n11, March 16, 1998, p717 Greenberg, Jane 'Subject control of ephemera: MARC format options' in Popular culture in libraries, v4, n1, 1996, pp71-91 Last, Jay T. 'Electronic imaging and retrieval systems' in Popular culture in libraries, v4, n2, 1997, pp25-34. Makepeace, Chris E. Ephemera: a book on its collection, conservation and use, Gower, Aldershot, 1985 Opie, Robert 'Preserving the pack age' in History today, v50, n6, June 2000, pp62-63 Ott, Katherine 'Reading paper ephemera: issue in enterpreting nineteenth century graphics', in Popular culture in libraries, v4, n2, 1997, pp11-24. Overall, Richard. 'Ghosts from the past: collecting ephemera' in Biblionews and Australian notes and queries v23, n2, June 1998, pp59-66 Price, Lois Olcott 'The preservation of ephemera' in Popular culture in libraries, v4, n2, 1997, pp35-46 Rickards, Maurice. Collecting printed ephemera, Phaidon, Oxford, 1988. Rickards, Maurice. The encyclopedia of ephemera: a guide to the fragmentary documents of everyday life for the collector, curator and historian. The British Library, London, 2000. Rickards, Maurice and Moody, Michael. The First World War: ephemera, mementoes, documents. Jupiter Books, London, 1975. Smith, Deborah A. 'Intellectual control of ephemera: a museum's perspective', in Popular culture in libraries, v4, n1, 1996, pp63-70 Stanley, Linda. 'The stranger in our house: managing ephemera at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania', in Popular culture in libraries, v4, n1, 1996, pp93-105 Appendix: a small number of examples of Internet sites on digitisation projects
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/ftpfiles.html
http://hds.essex.ac.uk/g2gp/digitising_history/index.asp
http://www.nla.gov.au/libraries/digitisation/
http://www.bl.uk/services/ric/diglib/digilib.html
http://www.acn.net.au/projects/digit.htm End notes1. Rickards, Maurice The Encyclopedia of Ephemera: a guide to the fragmentary documents of everyday life for the collector, curator and historian. The British Library, London, 2000, p. v. 2. ibid., p vi 3. ibid., p vii 4. I will be talking particularly about printed ephemera today, but the points I want to make can apply to all types of ephemera. 5. Stanley, Linda. 'The stranger in our house: managing ephemera at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania', in Popular Culture in Libraries, v4, n1, 1996, pp93-105 6. p. 63. Smith, Deborah A. 'Intellectual control of ephemera: a musuem's perspective', in Popular Culture in Libraries, v.4, n.1, 1996, pp63-70 7. p 12. Ott, Katherine 'Reading paper ephemera: issue in interpreting nineteenth century graphics', in Popular Culture in Libraries, v.4, n2, 1997, pp11-24. 8. The Library of Congress's American Memory site is a wonderful example of this. 9. There are many sites on the internet which discuss digitisation projects in some detail. Examples are included in the appendix. 10. p42, Price, Lois Olcott 'The preservation of ephemera' in Popular culture in Libraries, Vol 4, no2, 1997, pp35-46. 11. ibid., p41
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