Processing Personalities: Ephemera Research at the AA/PG Library

Processing Personalities: Ephemera Research at the AA/PG Library

It’s interesting to think of how much of our everyday culture goes unnoticed, lost to time and simple decomposition. The newspaper someone tossed yesterday turns to mush in a landfill pile. The gilt invite you saved from your alma mater’s 15
th
reunion is lost in a pile of documents, kids’ art projects, and bills. The sticky note with your to-do list gets stuck to the bottom of your shoe and wears away as you walk to work one day. We often don’t take the time to think about these little pieces of paper, these tiny fragments of memory and thought that we churn out every single day, though these can very often be the most crucial clues about who we are.
The value in the
Art & Artists’ Files
at the
American Art and Portrait Gallery Library
(AAPG) lies in their attention to these everyday ephemera, the things left behind and that, when pieced together in a variety of different ways by staff members and researchers, tell a myriad of intimate and often novel stories of artists and institutions. Each file includes ephemera on a particular subject (an artist, corporation, or subject): exhibition announcements, clippings, press releases, brochures, pamphlets, photographs, resumes, artist’s statements, exhibition catalogs, and more, a panoply of snippets from the lives and works of American artists (with an expansive definition of “American”). For some of the lesser-known artists in the Files, these small slips of paper are the only available materials we have for research and study.
The beautiful mint green cover of a copy of Photo Era magazine from 1900, found amongst the NMAH Photo History ephemera.
As a
Summer Scholar intern
at AA/PG, I had the opportunity to sort through seventeen boxes of woefully unorganized ephemera, attempting to merge the subject files on photographers and inventors from the
Photographic History Collection
of the National Museum of American History with AA/PG’s Art & Artists’ Files. The types of ephemera in these boxes ranged from patents for photographic technology (from multiple countries), photocopies of master’s theses, photographs and slides, and handwritten letters to whole magazines, exhibition catalogues, self-published books, and anything else on paper you can think of. I knew that attention to detail and scrupulous documentation would be necessary for keeping track of everything for this project, so I set five goals for the process and result:
Clear out the backlog of old ephemera held by the AA/PG
Add relevant and potentially valuable research material to Art & Artists Files
Gain experience processing “archival” or ephemera materials.
Create accessible records for wider range of photographic artists in the collection.
Establish a repeatable personal process for doing this sort of work if it comes across in my career in the future.
Some of the many storage boxes for my processing of the NMAH ephemera (there were originally 17!)
The main challe…