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Week 3 At Berger Archive: Archiving Vernacular Photos

July 27, 2024 by kjmooney

As week two turned over into week three, I was still archiving the vernacular photos in the Gibbs collection. Throughout the process, I began putting them into acid free/archival folders, and from there I would learn how to put them into acid free boxes to be stored safely. While I was sorting through these, they would often be in a photo album, or frame, so step one was to remove the photos from their frames or albums. This was important because it’s difficult to archive a whole frame or photo album if it’s intact. From there, I began writing descriptions onto the tops of the folders describing the images. I began to run into a challenge of running out of archival folders. Because of this, I had to pivot and think critically about how I wanted to archive and group together the photos instead of making an individual folder for each of the photos. From there, I grouped some of the photos together based on the event, where the photo was taken, and who or what were in the photo. For example, there was a folder full of wedding photos from the 1920s, and that was my favorite collection I made. When archiving photos I learned that it’s important when grouping the photos together to make sure they all share a common theme, kind of like if I was sorting them into albums. 

In the first photo, you can see the folders I was putting the photos into with sticky notes attached. The sticky notes helped me remember what photos were from which box and who they belonged to/if anyone in the photos were related, and if they were, the sticky notes helped me keep those photos together. After sorting them into their rightful folders, I then proceeded to put them into archival boxes, and make labels for them. Unfortunately, I do not have photos of the boxes with labels, but in the second photo, you can see the boxes I put them in! Getting to finish up this project was extremely fulfilling and satisfying. Because of this project I was able to recognize that archival work is something I want to pursue in the future and something that I genuinely enjoy!

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