Double Take Photography Exhibition Installation is Underway

Double Take Installation

Double Take Installation

Exhibition curator and history of art graduate student Carrie Robbins working with exhibition designer Steve Tucker and curatorial assistant and history of art graduate student Nathanael Roesch.

Please be sure to visit Double Take: Selected Views from the Photography Collection at Bryn Mawr College, 1860s-Present opening September 27, 2011 in the Class of 1912 Rare Book Room, Canaday Library.  Their will be an opening lecture by Peter Barberie, Brodsky Curator of Photographs at the Alfred Stieglitz Center of the Philadelphia Museum of Art; “The Body in the Library: Collection Photographs on a College Campus”, Carpenter Library, Room 21 at 4:30 p.m.
For more information: 610-586-5335.

Bryn Mawr College Library was recently awarded a Track IV, Collections Management Policy Grant of the Conservation Center for Art and Historic Artifact’s Philadelphia Stewardship Program. This grant will assist Special Collections in updating and further developing its Collections Development, Care & Maintenance, and Handling & Use Policies within the department. Among the benefits of this grant is that it will bring these policies in line with the most current standards and best practices. In turn, this will ensure longevity of the collections and will make them even more accessible for use by the college community.

Peruvian Textiles – Update

This past week Bryn Mawr College hosted a one-week course on Andean archaeological textiles taught by Dr. Anne Tiballi from the California Institute of Peruvian Studies. Students learned numerous weaving techniques and how to identify them in historic textiles by looking at objects from the Peruvian collections at Bryn Mawr College.  The last day of the week was spent at the UPenn Museum looking at examples from their Andean collections hosted by Dr. Clark Erickson, Curator and Julia Lawson, Conservator.

.img_0502img_0515img_0547

Current Research – Peruvian Collections

On December 13, 2010, Dr. Ann Peters, Dr. Clark Erickson (Department of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania), Dr. Anne Tiballi (Department of Anthropology,  Binghamton University) and Jeanette Nicewinter (Intern, American Section, Penn Museum, University of Pennsylvania), came to Bryn Mawr College to look at examples in our Peruvian textile collection, which includes more than 400 pieces. The purpose of the visit was both to assist BMC in cataloging Peruvian textiles and to give these visiting scholars a sense of the scope of the BMC collections. Their expertise in Andean textiles was invaluable as they helped us catalog dozens of textiles

As a result of this meeting, BMC is going to launch a test OMEKA site during the Spring 2011 where outside researchers can access records for many of our Peruvian collections. This project will assist us in identification and cataloging the collections, and we hope our collections will also benefit other institutions searching for comparanda of similar objects.

From left to right: Dr. Ann Peters, Dr. Anne Tibali, Caitlin Fregoe, Marianne Weldon, Emily Croll, and Jeanette Nicewinter.

From left to right: Dr. Ann Peters, Dr. Anne Tibali, Caitlin Fregoe, Marianne Weldon, Emily Croll, and Jeanette Nicewinter.

From left to right; Dr. Clark Erickson, Dr. Ann Peters, Marianne Weldon, and Dr. Anne Tiballi looking at a Peruvian textile in the BMC Collection.

From left to right; Dr. Clark Erickson, Dr. Ann Peters, Marianne Weldon, and Dr. Anne Tiballi looking at a Peruvian textile in the BMC Collection.

Art & Artifact Collections Database: Learn All About It

Answers to these questions and more at our Jan. 20th presentation!

Answers to these questions and more at our Jan. 20th presentation!

Introduction to the Art & Artifact Collections Database
Thursday, January 20th, 4:00 – 6:00 p.m.
Seminar Room, Coombe Special Collections Suite, 2nd floor Canaday Library
All are welcome!
Refreshments and door prizes!

Come learn about Bryn Mawr’s outstanding (but hidden) collections of more 50,000 art, archaeological, and anthropological objects! The Collections staff will host an introductory/tutorial session for the Art & Artifact Collections Database on Thursday, January 20th from 4:00 until 6:00 p.m. in the Seminar Room of the Coombe Special Collections Suite, 2nd floor Canaday Library.
All students, faculty, and staff are invited to attend. Refreshments will be served and door prizes will be awarded to 10 attendees. Feel free to stay for five minutes or two hours to explore the many avenues to Bryn Mawr’s rich collections.

Digital Collections Specialist Cheryl Klimaszewski will introduce and explain features of the database designed to facilitate discovery of collections. including advanced search techniques and selected highlights of the collections.  Curator and Academic Liaison Emily Croll and Collections Manager Marianne Weldon will also be on hand to answer questions about how collections can be used in courses or in other ways around the campus.

Everyone is welcome at this event – so please join us whether you are interested in the collections for research or teaching purposes or would like to learn more about the College’s rich collections and the database. We look forward to seeing you.


Art and Artifact Collections Database makes its debut

The Special Collections departments at Bryn Mawr and Haverford Colleges are excited to announce the launch of the new Art and Artifact Collections Database, now available to the Tri-College community at http://triarte.brynmawr.edu.

Please note that this resource is currently only available to the Tri-College community either on-campus or via off-campus access through your library’s website.

 

Art and Artifact Collections Homepage

Art and Artifact Collections Database Homepage

 

The database includes over 20,000 archaeology, anthropology, and fine art objects from Bryn Mawr’s collections and several hundred from Haverford’s collections. This multifaceted web site makes possible for the first time access to the colleges’ rich teaching collections for use in classes, for individual research, or for simple enjoyment. Students, faculty, and staff at the Tri-Colleges can now search the collections by artist, subject, culture, geographic region, time period, object type, and many other entry points. Or, users can browse highlighted parts of the collection to learn about the diverse holdings of art and artifacts from around the world.

Special Collections staff and students at both institutions have been working for the past eighteen months on data migration and cleanup, object cataloging, and imaging. To date, over half of the objects in the database have images and the majority have at minimum a basic level of cataloging. The original impetus to harmonize and expand the old, piecemeal databases came from the Graduate Group in Archaeology, Classics, and History of Art, which provided the funding for the initial stages. “Since training in material culture and curatorial practice is a key part of the Graduate Group’s work, it made sense to direct funds towards making the Art and Artifacts Collections more generally known and available,” says Catherine Conybeare, the Director of the Graduate Group. “This project has been managed with extraordinary speed and efficiency, and the whole Special Collections team deserves our hearty thanks.”

 

Screenshot of a selection of Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology Featured Collections from Bryn Mawr College

Screenshot of a selection of Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology Featured Collections from Bryn Mawr College

 

Cheryl Klimaszewski came on board as Collections Information Manager at Bryn Mawr in February of 2009 to oversee the transition of the old database records to a new collections management system and to develop the web interface. “It is so rewarding to see the results of everyone’s hard work come to fruition,” she says of the online version of the database. “So many students have been working on this—from cataloging to imaging—they should all be very proud. Plus, it’s a really terrific learning experience, since the skills students learn by cataloging and imaging our collections are transferrable to any museum, library, or archive anywhere.”

The biggest benefit of the database will be the increased awareness of these resources on all the Tri-College campuses. “The Art and Artifacts Database is a huge step forward for Bryn Mawr and Haverford. A great deal of work has gone on behind the scenes to make this possible. Now students and faculty can know more fully the tremendous resources that are available for them to study. We hope this will lead to greater use of our material objects on both campuses,” says John Anderies, Head of Special Collections at Haverford College. Eric Pumroy, Director of Library Collections and Seymour Adelman Head of Special Collections at Bryn Mawr, agrees: “Our extraordinary collections of art and artifacts have been hidden for far too long. This database finally makes it possible for students and faculty to explore the collections in a systematic way, and should lead to exciting new opportunities for teaching and research.”

 

The Advanced Search screen

The Advanced Search screen

 

For more information about the
Art and Artifact Collections database contact:

Cheryl Klimaszewski, Digital Collections Specialist
cklimaszew@brynmawr.edu
610-526-5093

To see the collections in person, contact:

Brian Wallace, Curator/Academic Liaison for Art and Artifacts
bwallace@brynmawr.edu
610-526-5335

or

Marianne Weldon, Collections Manager
mweldon@brynmawr.edu
610-526-5022

Our first Collections Information Management intern lives to tell the tale!

Classics graduate student Diane Amoroso-O’Connor has been working for the past academic year as our Collections Information Management Intern. This position allowed her to experience all facets of working with collections information – from individual object cataloging to global data management in the new EmbARK database.

Of her work on the new Art and Artifact Collections database, Diane writes:

As the Collections Information Management Intern, I split my time between small-scale research projects, in which I research items from our collection that need a little more information, and large-scale data projects, in which I might edit a few thousand records at a time. Fortunately, the same general principles of data organization apply to both; the smaller projects provide practice for the larger data concerns, and the larger projects provide the global view of the collections that informs good object entries.

My first task in Collections was to accession a group of nine coins, and then to edit or add to all of our other coin entries, aiming for consistency and clarity. In order to identify the coins, I used the standard sources as references in the Collections (The Roman Imperial Coinage, etc.) but also tested out a variety of online sources, both academic and commercial. This gave me a look at the ways sites organized information and created something word-searchable out of graphic or image-based data. After entering the new data, I worked on the old data, editing for uniformity across the collection and (hopefully!) reducing ambiguities in titles or descriptions, such as whether a “Roman Coin” was issued in the Roman period, issued by the Roman government, or issued in Rome.

From left to right: Classical Didrachm of Elea (C.17), Classical Tetradrachm of Athens (C.96), and Hellenistic Slater of Itanus (C.112)

From left to right: Classical Didrachm of Elea (C.17), Classical Tetradrachm of Athens (C.96), and Hellenistic Slater of Itanus (C.112)

These sorts of changes were needed throughout the database, so I’ve gone through fictile ivories, geological photographs, anthropological artifacts, and all sorts of objects to make sure that data like dates or geographic origins of items are presented consistently across the database. Taking the objects in groups of thousands actually helps here; I can easily insure that I’m using the same terms or formatting throughout a type of item, then several types of items, building up to the database level.

Among the clean-up tasks, I’ve been able to intersperse research on our Egyptian Collections. Some of my favorite items in the College Collections are our pieces of Egyptian Predynastic pottery, donated by the American Exploration Society. In addition to checking the database entries against the two sets of cards for the objects, and updating some of the terminology used in the database, I had the opportunity to photograph these items (using a camera far better than any I could be trusted to own). Filling in lost data on our ushabtis has been my other pet project. I used Schneider’s typology to date our ushabtis, what I liked to call the “Hair and Handbag System,” as wigs and bags molded, carved, or painted on the figurines provided some of the most useful diagnostic data. This also allowed me to use Schneider’s terminology to make our descriptions uniform and easily referenced in Schneider’s work for anyone researching these objects in the future.

(If you don’t see an image below, it means that you will need to download the Quicktime plugin for your web browser).


Above: Egyptian Faience Ushabti (Funerary Sculpture) [F.164]

Of late, my large projects have moved from the editing and reformatting of data to the classification of objects. We’re working with a few different hierarchical systems that should allow users to browse the Collections. I’ve been classifying the types of objects by using The Revised Nomenclature for Museum Cataloging: A Revised and Expanded Version of Robert G. Chenhall’s System for Classifying Man-Made Objects, as well adding keywords to use a hierarchical system based on materials, time periods, subjects, and other features, grounded in The Getty’s Art and Architecture Thesaurus. While neither system captures every object or subject perfectly, either one provides a powerful search tool for anyone doing research on the collection, even before making any modifications or additions to the systems. (As a related note, if anyone has ever wanted to research numismatic depictions of helmets, it would be a very fruitful keyword search at the moment.)

Throughout this year, I’ve been amazed to see what the Collections database has become, and the research that other students have already put into action. Most of all, I’ve been fortunate to help make Collections a better tool for research and teaching, as well as work with, and learn from, Cheryl, Marianne, and Emily.

Better know the collections: Terracottas

Andrea Guzzetti is a seventh-year graduate student in the Department of Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology. He is working with the Art and Artifact Collections as part of an NEH Curatorial Internship, which gives graduate students in the Graduate Group in Archaeology, Classics, and History of Art the opportunity to spend a semester (or summer) working with collections at Bryn Mawr and a second semester carrying out a project at a partner institution in the Philadelphia area.

Here is what Andrea has been working on this semester:

In particular, my work in the Collections revolves around a group of ca. 300 terracotta figurines, mostly Greek and Roman. The majority of them were given to the College by Bryn Mawr alumnae or faculty members. Since they have been acquired at different times and under different circumstances, the information available on them varies widely in quantity and quality. A few pieces have been published in journals or exhibition catalogues, such as a trio of Etruscan heads (T.7-9) and a weight with an owl in relief (T.182), while several others have been discussed in senior theses or class papers. More often, however, all that is known about these artifacts is limited to the contents of the old catalog cards, which can range from a detailed description and list of comparanda to a generic title (“terracotta head”) and measurements.

Terracotta heads (from left: T. 7, T.8, T.9)

Terracotta heads (from left: T. 7, T.8, T.9)

Terracotta relief weight (T.182)

Terracotta relief weight (T.182)

My primary task, then, has been to check the existing data, which had been transferred to the new Collections database, and to update and expand it. More specifically, the main goal of the project was to provide each object with a minimum of standardized information (title, description, measurements, date) that could be employed for display labels and online searches. Once the work had progressed enough, I began gathering further details about the iconography and the possible function of as many artifacts as possible.

The majority of the terracottas represent human figures, especially seated or standing females, although the subjects can sometimes be identified as deities. The figures are usually alone; in some cases there are couples or women with children (T.83).

Terracotta figurine of a woman and boy (T.83)

Terracotta figurine of a woman and boy (T.83)

The collection also includes several animal figurines (T.125) and reproductions of body parts such as eyes or feet (T.97, T.192); the latter probably constitute offerings presented to healing sanctuaries in thanksgiving for the recovery of the corresponding organ. The artifacts range in date from the Late Geometric period (late eighth-early seventh century BCE) to Roman Imperial times.

Terracotta hen and cat (T.125)

Terracotta hen and cat (T.125)

Terracotta eye (T.97)

Terracotta eye (T.97)


Terracotta foot (T.192)

Terracotta foot (T.192)

A general problem encountered during the project is the lack of context for practically all the terracottas. Since many objects are fragmentary or quite worn, or both, it is difficult to study them on the basis of style alone. Sometimes the region or site where an artifact was found is known, or can be determined from archival information on the donor, but such knowledge is seldom useful, as in the case of surface finds. Ignorance about their origin also raises questions of authenticity. For example, some of the best preserved figurines, which resemble popular Hellenistic types known from such sites as Tanagra in Boeotia or Myrina in Asia Minor, exhibit technical and iconographical features that suggest they are modern creations, produced to satisfy the demand for this kind of object that developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, following the discovery of the first figurines (T.77).

(If you don’t see an image below, it means that you will need to download the Quicktime plugin for your web browser).


Above: Terracotta figurine of a seated woman (T.77)

Nevertheless, the collection itself, including the possible fakes, constitutes a very valuable tool for research and teaching, given the variety of techniques and styles represented in it, and I have really enjoyed working on this material. Although I have some experience with museum cataloging, I had never had the opportunity to work with terracottas before, and I have learned much about this class of artifacts.

Better know the collections: Photography

Carrie Robbins is a PhD Candidate in the History of Art. Her work with the Art and Artifact Collections during the 2009-10 academic year has been focused on the college’s photography collection, which includes works by such notable photographers as Eugène Atget, Lewis Hine, and André Kertész. About her work, Carrie writes:

I have been researching, cataloging, and digitally photographing over a thousand of the collection’s beautiful and impressive “art” photographs. The distinction between art photographs and photographs used for the study of art history, or travel photographs, or family photographs, etc. is one example of the challenges faced in cataloging a collection of roughly 15,000 photographs. Another challenge specific to photography is the problematic identification of its specific medium — gum bichromate, collodion, platinotype, albumen, etc. — which can be hard to determine without microscopic or chemical analysis. Fortunately, the Art and Artifact Collections supported my participation in a Photography Identification and Conservation workshop that has aided my ability to make educated guesses and has helped me to understand how difficult an authoritative identification is to make. With these challenges in mind, I become anxious about the ways in which the distinctions I make and the classifications I impose might limit or mischaracterize future study of these objects. So I try to be mindful of the authority my cataloging will have as part of our collection’s archive. Thankfully, the EmbARK database which we use to catalog each object, artist, donor, etc. offers a lot of flexibility relative to data entry, as well as ease of use, so that objects will be searchable in myriad ways.

Two of Carrie’s favorite works from the photography collections:

Hilary Newman, Brooklyn, New York, October 1989 (2009.22.5)

Hilary Newman, Brooklyn, New York, October 1989, Gelatin silver print (2009.22.5)

Edward Sheriff Curtis, Replastering a Paguage House (2009.26.17)

Edward Sheriff Curtis, Replastering a Paguage House, Photogravure (2009.26.17)