Photograph Preservation

As part of an internship program with the Simmons College School of Library and Information Science LIS student, Michelle Montalbano has been working this semester with the Hall-Hoag collection. In particular she is organizing and describing the 14 record center boxes of thousands of photographs in the collection. Some of the photographs are identified and labeled, but most are not. Michelle is working to identify as many images as possible and then organize them so similar images are collocated. The end goal is to intellectually link to photographs to the organizations and people that also have printed material in the Hall-Hoag Collection.

Along the way we found photographs that were in the need of preservation. Some of them were folded, bent and frayed with rounded edges that made them hard to fit into boxes. It also made the photographs more susceptible to further damage. We decided with the help of Rachel Lapkin, the university’s preservationist to flatten and press the photographs. We applied pressure to stacks of the photographs using a press that the university owns. We will leave the photographs under pressure for a few weeks. After checking the progress we maybe have to add a bit of moisture to the images and re-press them in they are not flattened at that time.