July-September 2016

 
During the first quarter of FY '17, the Rare Book Team has continued to keep up with all new acquisitions; worked further on the Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection; continued tackling the TS Promptbooks; closed in on finishing the Edward Gorey material recently acquired by Printing & Graphic Arts; kept plugging away at Ward backlogs; and started worked on the Dan Aaron collection. At the same time, we posted a number of blogs, trained a series of new students, took a series of classes on linked data, mounted an exhibition in the Chaucer case, served many hours in the Reading Room, and worked diligently on Harvard Library initiatives.

The Manuscript Section accessioned a number of important collections, including manuscripts from Arthur Conan Doyle, John Ashbery, and Abbie Hoffman. Finding aids were published for six Harvard Theatre Collections including the Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Dana papers and the Tina Howe papers. Significant progress was made on the Frederic Woodbridge Wilson collection, which included finalizing processing for the Gilbert and Sullivan portion of that collection. The section finished a six-month project to enhance access to the Jared Sparks manuscripts by publishing 105 individual finding aids as well as a MARC record for each manuscript. Major resources were expended in preparation for migration from OASIS to ArchivesSpace, including supervision of a temporary assistant on EAD normalization and clean-up of our container data. 

The Acquisitions and End-Processing team began the new fiscal year with a rush of new materials and collections. In acquisitions, we continued to expertly process and pay for new library acquisitions.  A number of large manuscript collections, and a host of single-item manuscripts were made shelf-ready, and significant backlog processing cleared space for long-term storage.  In books end-processing, both current items and incoming rehousing projects were processed. Nine Harvard students and one Cambridge Rindge and Latin School student were hired to work in the section and in other areas of Technical Services. All staff continued to contribute time to Public Services functions in both the stacks and Reading Room.

The summer digitization focused on the medieval manuscripts for the Beyond Words exhibition, finishing the Theodore Roosevelt cartoons for the Hidden Collections project, and a number of manuscripts and collections for the Colonial North America project. Progress was also made on the Theatre Collections of Angus McBean photographs and the American Minstrel collection, and the Monks House loose photographs were finished. 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 of 2017. There remains clean up for a small percentage of objects that, for various reasons, did not migrate successfully.