Justin Baumgartner – Conservation & Collections Care News

Jan 22 2018

Nancy Kraft Awarded High Preservation Honor

Posted on January 22, 2018January 23, 2018 by Justin Baumgartner

Submitted by Giselle Simon

We are so pleased to announce that our own Nancy Kraft, Head of Preservation, has been awarded the Paul Banks and Carolyn Harris Award for excellence in Library Preservation for 2018. The award was established to honor the memory of Paul Banks and Carolyn Harris, early leaders in library preservation and is given to a professional preservation specialist who has made great contributions to the field of preservation and conservation for library and archival materials. Nancy is recognized for her tireless work with the 2008 Flood Recovery, establishment of local and regional disaster teams and protocols, contributions to national disaster recovery efforts, and many more numerous achievements that have promoted preservation ideals throughout the library and archives world.

One the highest accolades a preservation professional can receive, Nancy will accept her award at the ALA Annual Conference in New Orleans, LA on June 23rd. Congratulations, Nancy!

Oct 26 2016

Keith/Albee Vaudeville Collection in DIY History!

Posted on October 26, 2016April 30, 2019 by Justin Baumgartner

The University of Iowa Libraries presents a wonderful and exciting opportunity for one and for all: The Keith/Albee Vaudeville Theater Collection in glorious DIY History! Now you too can step right up and take part in transcribing these exciting behind-the-scenes reports!

The first 24 books in the Keith/Albee collection, totaling 7,774 images, are now available for transcription in DIY History. These initial volumes consist of typed theater managers’ reports, giving one a unique behind-the-scenes glimpse of vaudeville theater during its time. The managers give their own blunt impression of every act that has graced the Keith/Albee vaudeville stages, ranging wildly from lavish praise to scathing criticism. Included in these books are many people who later became legendary stars, such as W.C. Fields, Harry Houdini, and Buster Keaton.

page_64a — Page including internal review of Harry Houdini from Keith/Albee managers’ report book, March 9-December 14, 1908.

The Keith/Albee collection, one of the most important and comprehensive vaudeville archives in the country, has steadily become available in the Iowa Digital Library. This collection, spanning 150 over sized ledger volumes, documents several decades of vaudeville theater in New England. The Keith/Albee digitization project has been made possible by a generous Preservation and Access grant from the National Endowment for Humanities, with a projected completion date in 2017.

Start transcribing this collection here.

For more information contact: Justin Baumgartner, Keith/Albee Digital Project Librarian, (319) 384-3431, justin-baumgartner@uiowa.edu

Mar 21 2016

Keith/Albee Collection Update!

Posted on March 21, 2016December 1, 2016 by Justin Baumgartner

Some new changes have come to the Keith/Albee Vaudeville Collection project since we have last updated. Read more about the project here and here.

Candida Pagan joined the Preservation/Conservation department in December last year as Keith/Albee Project Conservator. Candida holds an MFA in Book Arts from the University of Iowa Center for the Book and a BFA in Studio Art from the University of Iowa. She is a member of the the Iowa Museums Archives and Libraries Emergency Response Team (IMALERT) and serves on the board of directors of the Iowa Conservation and Preservation Consortium (ICPC). She has worked in book and paper conservation for four years at the University of Iowa Libraries and at the New Orleans Conservation Guild. As a graduate student at the University of Iowa, Candida was involved with initial Keith-Albee collection surveys and with the Fluxus West digitization project. She is experienced in cultural collections disaster response and is enthusiastic about preservation outreach.
In July 2015, Justin Baumgartner, Keith/Albee Digital Project Librarian, visited the Annual Conference of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations in Sydney, Australia. He presented an original poster, “In the Spotlight: Digitization and the Keith/Albee Vaudeville Collection”.
40 Keith/Albee scrapbooks and counting have been digitized and are fully available online as part of the Keith/Albee Vaudeville Collection in the Iowa Digital Library. Browse the collection online here.
The Iowa Digital Library isn’t the only place you can go to find archival vaudeville materials. Here are some links to great digital collections at other institutions:

Nov 24 2014

Preservation & Conservation Welcomes New Equipment!

Posted on November 24, 2014January 22, 2015 by Justin Baumgartner

Earlier this month, Preservation & Conservation welcomed a new addition to our family: this lovely new digital image capture system from Digital Transitions! This equipment will be essential in undertaking one of our most ambitious projects yet, the digitization of the 150 scrapbooks in the Keith/Albee Collection.

While our previous overhead scanner, the Zeutschel, has been in use and doing a wonderful job for several years, there has been a need for some time to update this equipment. Additionally, guidelines for the Keith/Albee NEH grant require that the scrapbooks be digitized at a higher resolution than the Zeutschel is capable of. For more information on this project, check out our previous blog posts here and here.

The setup for this new equipment is unprecedented for this department. The main scanning room had to be cleared out entirely in order to make room for it, and it more closely resembles a portrait studio currently than a typical scanning room. This new digital reprographic system uses a Phase One digital camera back, taking high quality images of each item. At 80 megapixels, it uses one of the highest-quality cameras currently available. The camera itself is attached to an electronically movable column.

Visit the growing Keith/Albee digital archive here.