What I did this week – 10/30
This week, I only worked on Thursday, because I had some other major projects going on during the week. On Thursday, I began the task of replacing the envelopes for the glass-plate negatives. There are a lot of them – around 300 – so this part will probably take a few weeks. I worked out a sort of routine for the re-labeling, and took some pictures to illustrate it. Here it is:
This is what the old folders look like. You can see that it's getting old and crumbly - there's a small piece of it in the lower left corner that has come off. The writing on this folder can be read reasonably well, because it's in pen, but most of the folders have pencil writing on them, which is fading and difficult to read.
Here is one of the glass-plate negatives. It is in pretty good shape, except for a scratch in the middle. The glass-plate negatives are not in danger of breaking or fading; they are pretty sturdy. It's the writing on the folders, like in the picture above, that we are worried about losing.
This is obviously a picture of a house, but the folder did not have a title, so we have no way of knowing whose house it was, or where it is located.
Right now, I am transferring the information from the old, crumbly folders to these new ones. Each folder gets a number and is labeled SPU ARCHIVES
CHARLES W. PETERSON COLLECTION
with the title of the picture that CWP gave it, like this:
The title for this one is "May Cahion's Shower"
After re-labeling, I put the negative in its new folder and then add the information to a spreadsheet that will become the map with which people will be able to find the negatives they want to see. I put the old folder aside, because I will later make photocopies of the ones with information on the front to put in with the negatives. That way, if there is some sort of error in the labeling, people will be able to see CWP's original labels, and possibly correct the error.