Summer is quickly nearing its end, and with it another chapter of Hall-Hoag work. This summer, with the help of a great team of student workers, the last of the letter boxes were put in continuous alphabetical order. The students, in small teams, worked on some of the largest groups of letters (A, C, and N) and some of the smallest (Q, W, Y, and Z). During this work, the students were able to consolidate the “A” boxes down from 106 to 95, the “C” boxes down from 168 to 153, and the “N” boxes down from 111 to 105. Through this continuous alphabetizing the collection was further condensed by 30 boxes creating more organization within the collection and less unnecessary boxing.

If you have been an avid Hall-Hoag follower, then you are aware what continuous alphabetical order is and how hard the students worked to achieve it. To bring anyone new to the blog and project up to date, continuous alphabetical order requires alphabetizing all of the folders containing organizations of one letter. The C’s, for example, contained over 24,000 folders in 168 boxes. These folders were alphabetized within each individual box, but not across the entirety of the “C” boxes. The students had to first go through all 168 boxes, and organize the folders in small groups creating perfect, continuous alphabetical order from box 1 to box 168. They then had to re-box the newly alphabetized folders, and lastly go through and update the database with the new (and final) box number.

The work may sound monotonous, but it is work vital to systemizing the collection in the best way possible for researchers and the like. Arranging in continuous alphabetical order and updating the database to reflect the location of each folder  makes research much more efficient. When a researcher visits the Hall-Hoag website (coming Winter 2015), they will be able to click on an organization, see all of the folders in that organization, as well as which box they reside in, making re-calling the boxes from offsite storage much easier.

The inside one of the perfectly alphabetized, correctly filled “C” boxes.

“C” boxes numbered, alphabetized, and ready to be shipped back to the Annex.

The work that was completed this summer allows us to move forward with the next and final projects of the Hall-Hoag Collection. With a team of student workers we will focus on researching the roughly 30,000 organizations found in the Hall-Hoag collection. This research will include finding any background information on the organizations, as well as searching for its VIAF (Virtual International Authority File) as well as its Library of Congress linked data authorities or other vocabularies. The information supplied from our student workers will be imported into the FileMaker Pro database, which will eventually be exported and updated on the website.

I think that should be all for now. Looking ahead we have some great organizations to be highlighted in the coming weeks, so stay connected for more Hall-Hoag!

Sorry for not posting last week, it slipped my mind. The weather has been crazy and I have been in and out of the office. However, that has not stopped us from continuing the final phase of processing from The John Hay Library this semester.

Students are working in the stacks of the Hay to alphabetize sections of the Hall Hoag Collection. In the previous phase we organized material based on the letter of the alphabet for the name of that organization. So all of the material from an organization that started with “A” was placed in an A box. Due to the size of the collection we were not able to put each of the letters into perfect alphabetical order at that time. So, that is what we are doing now. Pictured below, two students are emptying and reorganizing all 60 boxes (5,700 folders) of material that starts with “U”. There is a lot of United States, university, and really just a lot of words that start with UNI.

Students Filing

U Material

This week we began processing the A/V material in the Hall Hoag Collection. Cassandra de Alba, a graduate student from Simmons College will be organizing and describing the material. There are 22 boxes and ~400 A/V items in the collection. Formats include 1/4 inch audio reels, VHS video tapes, Beta Cam video tapes, audio cassettes and a small number of film reels. The content is varied containing audio/video produced by extremist and dissenting groups, audio interviews conducted by Gordon Hall with extremists, radio appearances by Gordon Hall, b-roll footage from events like a 1964 picnic held by the National States Rights Party, and some extremism related taped television programs.

Cassandra will be organizing the material alphabetically, creating an inventory of the items and then creating item level records for the material noting, dates, titles, names and formats. We will be working to cross reference the material against the printed material in the Hall Hoag collection to ensure that researchers will known which people and groups have A/V material. At this point there are no plans to digitize this material, but it would probably be worth doing in the near future as many of the formats are fragile and obsolete.

1/4 Audio Reels

Mixed A/V Material

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.

Damaged Photographs 1

Damaged Photographs 2

Photo Press 1

Photo Press 2