A tribute to Librarian, Esther Ralph (1918-2011), by Margaret Schaus, Lead Research and Instruction Librarian at Haverford College:

Esther Ralph, long-time librarian at Haverford College, passed away October 21. Esther worked at Magill Library from 1941 through 1984. She began as an assistant cataloger while still enrolled in Drexel University’s Library School. She later worked in the Bindery, managed circulation, became head of cataloging, and Associate Librarian. She oversaw the building and the collection move during the massive addition made in 1964-1967 and introduced computerized cataloging to the library. Her notes in books bear witness to her care and appreciation of research materials both for scholarship and for the college’s history.

In her 40-year career at Haverford, Esther witnessed many changes to the Library’s building, collections, and services. When she arrived, she and other staff returned books to the stacks using a dumb waiter operated by rope and pulley. She saw U. S. Army units exercise on the College fields during World War II; she heard Eleanor Roosevelt speak to students and faculty in the College chapel. In 1941 the Library held around 150, 000 volumes. When Esther retired the Library had doubled its floor space and tripled its collection size.

In 2008 in honor of her service, her family dedicated a bench and garden area on the north side of Magill Library outside Special Collections. It is a fitting memorial near the library, offering students a place to read or talk between classes.

Learn more about Esther’s career and experiences at Haverford from her oral interview: hdl.handle.net/10066/1636

–Margaret Schaus

What about parody?  Check out this new-ish online student publication, The Bi-Co (On A Budget), which includes a clever send-up of the Descartes letter discovery from 2010.  Professors, administrators, and school traditions are lampooned on the pages of this Tumblr microblogging site.  Even the Cricket Library isn’t spared!

Students working in Special Collections this summer have published online 1,100 letters from the Cope Evans Family Papers, beating their goal by over 100 letters.  In addition to scanning, the students researched genealogical information about the people mentioned in the letters, and cataloged the letters before posting them to Triptych, the Tri-College Digital Library.  The team consisted of (from left-to-right) Luke Mueller, MLS graduate student at Drexel University; Hannah Lonky, HC ’10 history major; Sara Bornstein, HC ’09 history major; and Mara Miller, HC ’10 classics major.     

The qualities of digital media are well-known: their agility, portability and scalability, among others.  Their one down-side seems to be the result of their usefulness: we can’t keep up the ratio of preservation to advances in technology.  A couple of years ago, we attended a week-long workshop on digital preservation at Cornell University, and one of the slogans of this really excellent workshop was “there is no silver bullet” in terms of preservation of digital assets.  We came away from that workshop with strong ideas on how to get started and created a campus-wide survey on the types of digitalia being employed and methods used to preserve them.

On November 14 & 15, 2007, David Conners and Diana Peterson attended a workshop held at the new PALINET headquarters in Philadelphia entitled “Stewardship of Digital Assets,” which the organizers subtitled “sustaining digital collections.” About 40 people attended the PALINET workshop from a variety of institutions: museums, public libraries, community colleges, universities, government, and businesses.  Haverford was one of the smaller institutions represented; most attendees came from government institutions like NARA, the Pennsylvania and Delaware State libraries, even the Supreme Court of Canada.  The trainers included Liz Bishoff, former Executive Director of the Colorado Digitization Program; Tom Clareson, Program Director for New Initiatives at PALINET; Robin Dale, former Program Manager for Preservation at RLG; and Katherine Skinner, Co-Director of the MetaArchive Cooperative.

While the expression “there is no silver bullet” was still uttered, it was not a slogan.  In the final analysis, we wrote up a strategies statement based on our assessment of risk of loss in which we listed: increased institutional buy- in for digital preservation; an expansion of the previously formulated survey; an improvement of our backup procedures for digital objects; transfer of digital objects on superseded formats and CD and DVD to spinning disks; and consideration of the future of digital objects that are produced in proprietary formats.  We listed the personnel and stakeholders we considered vital in this undertaking and broke down our preservation plan to the level of implementation.  Finally, we projected financial needs and potential resources.

Following are some of the points presented in the workshop that merit notice in this report and some further detail to the strategies statement outlined above

1) A short definition of digital preservation as prepared by ALCTS suggests that it is the combination of policies, strategies and actions that ensure access to digital content over time.  Integral to these propositions are such factors as assigning responsibility for digital preservation to staff, technical specifications, reliable master files, sufficient descriptive, administrative and structural metadata to ensure future access and a quality control procedure. In addition are such factors as disaster preparedness, programs to refresh, migrate and emulate digital data, and, of course, sources of funding. One way to get started may be to hire a consultant.

2) We had always thought of back-up of our various digital formats (think: websites, email, data sets, GIS, images, audio, video, among others) as synonymous with preservation, but, while this continues to be of significance, it lacks the necessary aspect of long-term preservation or structural integrity. Best practices also dictate the employment of standards, oversight to curry to new media and a system of LOCKSS (lots of copies keep stuff safe).

3) While we might aspire to being a Trustworthy Repository (www.crl.edu/content.asp?l1=13&l2=58&l3=162&l4=91) that ingests all digital material produced by the college and provides it safe, updated and authenticated harbor until its egress at any point, the cost in terms of personnel and money may be greater than what Haverford can afford. There is a good deal of literature on life cycle preservation for digital media, and a number of institutions that are gearing up to step into this role.

4) Katherine Skinner gave one of the more interesting presentations when she talked about the founding and organization of the MetaArchive Cooperative (MetaArchive.org).  The MetaArchive is a cooperative made up currently of Emory, Georgia Tech, Virginia Tech, Florida State, and Auburn.  They use a LOCKSS (www.lockss.org/lockss/Home) -based system of servers to deposit their digital objects.  If any particular copy of a digital object is compromised on an individual node, the other copies can overwrite it.  Two aspects of the MetaArchive were interesting to us.  First, the cost to deposit our digital data in the MetaArchive is only $200/year.  Second, the MetaArchive Cooperative is interested in exporting its model to other groups, which has already been implemented for a state-wide digital preservation program in Alabama.  Is this something PACSCL or PALCI would be interested in?

Next steps: we hope to build on the survey that was circulated across Haverford’s campus, stressing the need not only to back-up critical digital data, but also to engage in best practices for long-term preservation, including providing counseling on practices (safety, security, longevity, breadth, authenticity, reporting) and prioritization analysis.  This is all possible as long as there is institutional interest and commitment.

Diana Franzusoff Peterson and David Conners

Former Special Collections Executive Secretary & Research Assistant, J’aime Wells’ article “‘Until Called For’: Safekeeping Materials in Special Collections” appears in the current issue of Haverford’s College Information Resources Newsletter.

David Conners, our new Digital Collections Librarian, has recently had an article published in Library Journal.  Co-written with Laena McCarthy, Image Cataloger and Assistant Professor, Pratt Institute Libraries, the article "Can The Jobs Be Found," reconsiders the common presumption that entry-level jobs for recent library school graduates are hard to find.

We’re happy to announce that J’aime Wells has joined the staff of Special Collections as Executive Secretary & Research Assistant.  J’aime recently completed her Ph.D. in Philosophy from Rutgers University and brings with her experience working in the acquisitions department of Rutgers University Press.  Please welcome J’aime!

We bid a fond farewell to Joelle Bertolet who has retired this month from Special Collections as Executive Secretary & Research Assistant.  Joelle is looking forward to visiting her children and grandchildren and is preparing to enter the Peace Corps in 2007.

In July, Karl-Rainer Blumenthal begins a one-year appointment as our Digital Archives Fellow.  Karl is a 2006 graduate of Haverford College and worked in the Library and Special Collections while a student.

Special Collections staff Diana Franzusoff Peterson and John Anderies are attending WebWise 2006, a conference put on by the Institute for Museum and Library Studies, OCLC, and The Getty Trust in Los Angeles.  The conference centers on innovative approaches to resource discovery and opening our collections to users via the online environment.

Diana Franzusoff Peterson, College Archivist & Manuscripts Librarian, and John Anderies, Coordinator for Special & Digital Collections, will be attending the conference “Future Foundations: Mapping the Past – Building the Philadelphia GeoHistory Network” sponsored by the Philadelphia Area Consortium of Special Collections Libraries at the Chemical Heritage Foundation, December 2-3, 2005.