Today’s update comes from Annie Peterson, a Master’s degree student in Library and Information Science, specializing in preservation, at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. We’re running a summer internship program at UCLA to give students like Annie an opportunity to get their hands dirty (figuratively and literally) and gain experience in how preservation works in practice. Annie did some very good work with us this summer, and we’re really happy to share her observations here, now, and will plan to post some of our research products in the weeks ahead.
The first week in August will be the last week of my eight-week internship working with Jake Nadal in the preservation department at the UCLA Library. During my time here I’ve gained an invaluable wealth of knowledge and have worked on some really exciting projects.
One of the projects I worked on is “Collecting Los Angeles.” The goal of the project is to build a strong, cohesive collection at UCLA that is all about Los Angeles history and culture. The preservation portion of it is a condition survey that will help the library assess the overall condition of its archival collections. I worked on tweaking the survey tool and creating a ratings system for determining how valuable to Los Angeles research a particular collection could be.
This project involved the wonderful task of looking at some of UCLA’s special collections material to test the survey instrument. I was constantly amazed at the quantity of incredibly interesting material that is held here, and was glad to have the opportunity to look at some of it first-hand. One highlight was sifting through the papers of Clifford Clinton, the founder of Clifton’s Cafeteria, a Los Angeles establishment that still exists, and was founded on the idea of serving inexpensive food for everyone (and still guarantees customers “dine free unless delighted”). I enjoyed reading part of the Clinton’s trip log from their long vacation traveling the world in the 1950s; it’s amazing how different traveling was just 60 years ago.
Another highlight was looking at material in the biomedical special collections about Isaac Horne, who tried to create a zoological garden in Los Angeles in the 1920s to cater to the film industry. The collection includes a gigantic scrapbook full of fascinating photographs and correspondence that were meant to attract investors. Horne supplied William Hearst with exotic animals for his castle, and one letter to Horne from Hearst lists some concerns Hearst has about his birds, and concludes with the line, “Send along four dozen gray squirrels as soon as they are obtainable.”
The survey tool will be used in a larger survey project in the fall, when surveyors will assess content and attempt to quantify Los Angeles research value based on a scale I drafted. For example, we would collect data about the “Los Angelocity” of the people, organizations, and materials in a particular container by ranking them as:
| Rating | None (0) | Minimal (1) | High (2) | Exceptional (3) |
| Person | spent no time in Los Angeles | spent a brief amount of time in LA (less than 5 years) | “spent a significant, formative portion of their life in Los Angeles (more than 5 years) | spent his or her entire life only in Los Angeles |
| Organization | not located in LA or does no work in the LA area | not located in LA, but does some work in the LA area OR located in LA but works primarily elsewhere | located in LA and works mostly in the LA area | located in LA and works almost exclusively in the LA area |
| Topic | no relation to Los Angeles | some relation or importance to LA | significant relation or importance to LA | unique to the LA area |
While working on this project, I learned about the value of collaboration between scholars and librarians. Susan Anderson, a great source of Los Angeles knowledge, is heading the project, and preservation and other library staff are working to bring together scholars with incredible subject knowledge and the librarians who can help organize and present that knowledge, in order to create some new research tools and ways of building collections. I’m looking forward to seeing where the project goes from here, and I think both the process and the end product will be valuable for the library community.
The other project I worked on this summer was revising the way the UCLA library makes decisions about retention and withdrawal. The project started basically with shelves and bins of damaged or brittle books in Jake’s office. First, we gathered holdings data from WorldCat about the damaged books that had been identified as in need of reformatting. Most of these are brittle or severely damaged materials that turn up in circulation. Then, we ran formulas in Excel to automatically generate withdraw, retain, or review decisions for each item. The formulas were based on past decisions by collection managers as well as research by Candace Yano, an economist at UC Berkely, about survival probabilities for print materials. Then I played around with the formulas, removing information to see which pieces of holdings data affects decisions the most. I found that the decisions change significantly based on whether UCLA wants to preserve items on the global level (ensuring a copy will survive somewhere) or on the local level (ensuring a copy will survive somewhere in California or the UC system). UCLA preservation is concerned with preserving material within the UC system, so the formulas used will take into account UC holdings data, as well as the existence of digital copies in the HathiTrust.
The next stage in this project is to present collection managers with lists of items and decisions, which they will review, revise, and return to preservation. The goal is to create a formula that will match as closely as possible the decisions that collection managers make, and use that formula to automate decision making. Collection managers will always be able to review and change the decisions, but this process will save the Library’s scarce staff time.
Working on this project taught me about the big picture of current preservation methods. I learned that preservation in the age of shared storage facilities and online resources has the potential to be more collaborative than preservation models of the past that relied on a few of the largest institutions to collect and protect everything. The way of making decisions we employed is more about understanding and managing risk than about building an impenetrable protective wall around objects to try to save them from all outside forces. Working on this project, I learned about different approaches to preservation, and gained a newfound interest in the importance of data in library decision making.
I also spent some time this summer just following Jake around, which was always interesting. On my first day here we installed data loggers all over the Southern Regional Library Facility (SRLF) to track temperature and humidity on each floor. I saw the inner workings of the air handler for Special Collections (there are even data loggers inside it). I went to meetings and learned how many different parts of the library preservation is involved with (acquisitions, collection management, digital libraries, and more). Throughout the course of this internship I’ve had the opportunity to work with many great people, especially in Special Collections, that have made my time here so enjoyable.
In just a few weeks I will start my second year in the GSLIS program at the University of Illinois, and I feel extremely well-prepared for my all classes and my assistantship in the conservation lab. While I’m not quite ready to leave UCLA, I’m excited to return and share all my new knowledge and enthusiasm for preservation.