October-December 2016

The Rare Book Team continued to keep up with all new acquisitions and worked further on the Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection; the TS promptbooks (both printed and manuscript); Dan Aaron; Edward Gorey; and the Ward backlogs. In addition, work has begun on an old Widener transfer - a large uncataloged collection of Thirty Years War pamphlets. The 2015 Stoddard gift is now done (just in time for the 2016 one!). The Typ 725 section of the Typ shelf-reading project is also done. With student help, we are clearing some of the overcrowded Theatre P-2 stacks by processing more promptbooks for HD. Other students are working on the post-Pforzheimer Tawa/Lowerre volumes.

The Manuscript Section accessioned a number of important collections, including the papers of Peter Whitmer, additions to the Maurice Blanchot papers, and typescripts from TS Eliot, Arthur Miller, and Tennessee Williams. Finding aids were published for five collections including the Gilbert and Sullivan Collection of Printed Ephemera, which constituted a large portion of the Frederic Woodbridge Wilson Collection, the Franz Liszt letters, and the Santo Domingo Collection of Underground Comics. Significant progress was made on the Frederic Woodbridge Wilson collection; completion on that project is scheduled for beginning of February 2017. The Manuscript Section participated in a two-day training on ArchivesSpace. This quarter saw the completion of the multi-year project of migrating our EAD out of OASIS and into ArchivesSpace!

The second quarter of the fiscal year saw the Acquisitions and End-Processing section continue processing materials for payment, cataloging, and end-processing. In both manuscript and book end-processing, large numbers of materials in all formats were prepared and shipped to offsite storage at the Harvard Depository. Team members worked on space planning at Houghton, Alma evaluation for Harvard Library, as well as working with tools such as MacroExpress, Excel, and Access to increase efficiency in processing complex collections and large amounts of print material.

The digitization continued with a number of manuscripts and collections for the Colonial North America project as the end of the Arcadia grant (Novemebr 30) approached.  Progress continued to be made on the Theatre Collections of Angus McBean photographs and the American Minstrel collection, plus the Dickinson and Melville Libraries.

The migration from DRS1 to DRS2 happened over the summer, all text, images and PDS objects were migrated.  Audio digital files continue to live in DRS1, with a planned migration to DRS2 for the Summer 2017.  There remains clean up for a small percentage of objects that, for various reasons, did not migrate successfully.