Northwestern is a school suffering from some memory loss.
Forty years from now, it may be difficult to figure out what the campus looks like today. It isn’t that photos aren’t being taken; it’s where they are being stored: on cell phones and hard drives rather than as prints and in albums. It makes the life of an NU archivist difficult.
“We have thousands of photographs from early on in the university’s history, all the way to the 1990s,” assistant archivist Kevin Leonard said. “But when digital cameras started to become comMonday, it all sort of dried up.”
University Archives used to receive prints on a regular basis, typically from groups or students who ran out of places to keep them and decided to contribute, Leonard said. Over time, University Archives’ collection of photographs has grown to between 600,000 and 700,000 images. But today, photographs are easier to store but easier to lose, too. And fewer people think to contribute their photos to University Archives, Leonard said.
Moreover, head archivist Patrick Quinn said University Archives wouldn’t necessarily know what to do with digital pictures, even if they were receiving them.
“The problem is that there’s such a rapid change in technology these days,” he said. “There’s hardware turnover. We’re stewards of documents and we’re sensitive to that. Figuring out how to store these things is not a piece of cake.”
It’s part of what Quinn calls the double-edged sword of technology: It makes some things easier, but it creates problems of its own.
That problem is not just limited to photographs, Leonard said. He said University Archives historically has archived every single student or university publication on campus. But there is no mechanism in place to archive newer publications that only publish online, Leonard said. While they are working with the library to come up with a solution, he said there’s nothing immediate.
In contrast, University Archives has not seen any slowing in the amount of paper documents they receive, Quinn said. He said departments still are sending over files to be processed that are 20 or 30 years old, and many at NU still understand the importance of printing out paper correspondence for posterity.
University Archives, like other departments at NU, is grappling with how to use technology to its own benefit, too. Quinn said his department lacks the budget or manpower to undertake widespread digitization of their collections.
“We have the smallest budget of any department in the library,” he said. “The expense is prohibitive.”
Still, Quinn said technology has allowed them to pursue digitizing smaller projects, such as a collection of photographs from Alexander Hesler, a photographer during the late 19th century who spent much of his time in Evanston and at NU. Digitizing the photos, many of which are fragile, will allow the public to view them online, he said.
Other departments at NU are pursuing digitization projects of their own. The art history department has more than 200,000 slides they have been digitizing over the past several years.
Former digitization coordinator Julie Rudder said a recent partnership with NU’s Digital Media Services will speed up the process.
The collaboration will benefit the art history department’s faculty, most of whom now use PowerPoint presentations instead of slide projectors for their classes, she said.
“We only have a couple of professors who are using slide collections these days,” Rudder said. “They aren’t even making parts for the projectors anymore. When they break down, that’s it.”
In perhaps the largest digitization project on campus, the University Library will partner with Google to scan up to 10 million books in NU’s collection, following in the footsteps of others, such as the universities of Wisconsin and Michigan. Once the scanning is complete, the books will be available for search online.
Roberto Sarmiento, head librarian of NU’s Transportation Library, said he thinks the Google partnership is a unique opportunity for the university. NU’s transportation collection is “the best in the country” and opening it up should benefit everyone involved, he said.
“This puts it into play and makes it accessible to researchers all over the world,” he said.
For his part, Quinn said University Archives only can continue to digitize small collections that are of interest to the general public. He said he hopes they eventually will have the resources to focus on widespread digitization of their own collections.
“It won’t be while I’m around,” he said. “It just depends on how enlightened the university administration is at the time. I think the university should be paying attention to these records.”
Reach Dan Fletcher at [email protected].
