The W.K. Kellogg Arabian Horse Library, the largest publicly accessible collection on the Arabian horse in the world, opened the exhibition Horse Drawn: Equine Illustrations and Artistry in Books this past June.

The Special Collections and Archives department at the Cal Poly Pomona University Library consists of two physical locations and four sub-repositories. The W.K.Kellogg Arabian Horse Library (WKKAHL) is located on the first floor of the University Library and represents one sub-repository. Special Collections is located on the fourth floor and holds materials from the other three sub-repositories: University Archives, the Southern California Wine and Wine Industry Collection, and the Pomona Valley Historical Collection.

The WKKAHL is the largest publicly accessible collection on the Arabian horse in the world. It holds over 7,000 books and periodicals on the breed and related topics, archival collections, artwork, and realia. Cal Poly Pomona’s campus was originally the site of cereal mogul W.K. Kellogg’s Arabian horse ranch and winter home. Kellogg donated the ranch and horses to the state of California in 1938 with the stipulation that the breeding program continue. Today, the W.K. Kellogg Arabian Horse Center, which has nearly 100 horses and an active breeding program, is used to support courses in the College of Agriculture. The WKKAHL was established to support the work of the Horse Center.

The WKKAHL has a beautiful, purpose-built exhibition space spread out between the foyer and reception area past the front doors. We stage exhibitions in this area featuring highlights from the collection. Since we are on the first floor of the library, we have a fair number of visitors at the beginning of each quarter and during orientation and registration. The foyer is freely accessible but visitors need to be buzzed in to the library itself.

W. K. Kellogg Arabian Horse Library foyer.

Exhibition case featuring artist C. W. Anderson.

This past June we opened the exhibition Horse Drawn: Equine Illustrations and Artistry in Books. The exhibition covers notable artists from the 18th-20th centuries, though mostly focuses on 20th century children’s and popular art and fiction. We also have displays on themes in equine art such as horses in the American West vs. the East Coast, as companion animals vs. beasts of burden and so on.

The idea for the exhibition was proposed by one of our regular researchers. She studies equine artists and traces the role that W.K. Kellogg’s original Arabians played in modeling for artists working in the Pomona area.

Workforce

Every quarter, we have 1-2 undergraduate history interns through an internship for credit our department developed with the History Department. We usually have the students process a collection, but in the spring we had one curate this exhibition. He was in 6 hours a week over a 10 week quarter. This internship program has been very beneficial to our department. I encourage archivists at academic institutions to explore the possibility of offering a similar program.

Illustration by Lorence F. Bjorklund.

Painting by George Stubbs.

Planning and Research

Before the Spring quarter began, I met with our researcher to discuss artists to include and possible themes to explore. I then pulled together a list of artists and gave it to our student so he could begin researching them. He began pulling books from the WKKAHL collection and the Library’s main collection and took a few weeks to review materials and do biographical research on the artists. I asked him to start looking for themes in the materials during this first pass. Once this was completed, we met to decide which artists and themes to explore in the exhibition. I had some ideas already in mind based on my discussions with our researcher, but I wanted to see what he came up with on his own so that it would be a more engaging learning experience. Of course, he had ideas that hadn’t occurred to me and the exhibition was stronger for it.

Loans

From the beginning, our researcher offered to loan items from her personal collection for the exhibition. The timing of our planning and research coincided nicely with the workshop “Wall to Wall: Building a Loans Program for Special Collections and Archives” that I took at the Society of California Archivists Annual General Meeting in April. The workshop was led by Sharon B. Robinson, registrar for the library division at the Huntington Library and we covered collections management policies, loans policies, best practices, reposits, deposits, standard documentation, and insurance issues. Armed with this new knowledge, I drafted loan policies and procedures as well agreement forms that the researcher and I completed when she dropped off her materials.

Illustration by Sam Savitt.

Workflow and Logistics

Once the student and I settled on artists and themes, he returned to the materials—now including loans—to select images for display. We couldn’t have a lot of books open in the cases because of limited space. Instead, the student scanned selected images and then printed them out on photo paper. He drafted a layout “storyboard” and reviewed it with me before proceeding.

With images selected and printed, it was time to prep them for display. Our Assistant Archivist Elizabeth Gomez has exhibition experience and worked with the student to develop a timeline for the last few weeks of the quarter. She also trained him on preparing materials for display. They settled on a date to de-install the exhibition that was currently in the cases—Becoming Gladys Brown Edwards—and install the new one. The student wrote the caption cards and I edited them as needed.

Drawing by C. W. Anderson.

Painting by A. J. Munnings.

Promotion and Outreach

Elizabeth is in charge of social media for our department. About two months before the new exhibition was scheduled to go up, she posted a reminder to the WKKAHL Facebook page and Twitter account that Becoming Gladys Brown Edwards would be closing soon. One month from opening, she announced the upcoming exhibition via the same channels. In this final month, she and our student intern selected also images to use in a poster for the exhibition. We sent the images to a University Library staff member in charge of all the library’s promotional items and she designed a poster for us in Photoshop that could be printed out on 11x17 inch paper. We could print copies of this “in house” and would later post it at the entrance to the foyer. Once the exhibition opened, Elizabeth used the digital version in her social media announcements. We also had it added to the front page of the University Library’s website and to digital signage throughout the building.

The exhibition opened in June, right as the school year ended. We’ve offered tours to University Library staff over the summer and are planning more tours during the school year. The first tour will be part of the Library’s Welcome Week in October. We are also working with our researcher to arrange for an equine artist or art collector to come give a talk at the WKKAHL.

Illustration by Wesley Dennis.

Challenges and Lessons Learned

In hindsight, we would have developed a timeline at the beginning of the quarter rather than in the final weeks of preparation. This was our student’s one criticism of the internship process. In addition, I would have given him a diagram of the available display cases early in the process. It wasn’t until he showed me his proposed layout a month before opening that I realized that he thought some of a permanent timeline on the wall could be taken down and the space used for the new exhibition. It hadn’t occurred to me that he would think that; as a staff member it’s something I took for granted. In any case, he was able to work around this restriction.

A friend of our researcher who is also an equine art collector had initially expressed interest in loaning materials. We were excited because she had some original pieces by featured artists, but she didn’t reply to my follow up email. Again, we were able to work around this, but don’t rely on promised loans until you have the agreement in hand.

One last thing we didn’t realize until the exhibition had opened was that we hadn’t kept track of which images were taken from which book. We knew the artist but not the book title. Our student was gone for the summer, as was as the flash drive he had scanned the images onto. Now, this is not as bad as not knowing where to put back original materials you have on display—as happened with the de-install of Becoming Gladys Brown Edwards—but less than ideal. Next time, I would have the student create additional caption cards for each reproduction displayed and make a photocopy of the reproduction with the title of the book or box and folder location written on the back of the photocopy. We save caption cards from past exhibitions and I would include these photocopies with those.

Undergrad history intern Josh Rose giving a tour to library staff.

Exhibition case in the reception area.

Exhibition poster.

This exhibition was a successful collaboration with our two main stakeholders: our researchers and the Cal Poly Pomona student. It is important to pay attention to researchers’ interests and reference questions, especially if your specific job doesn’t involve a lot of public service. Regularly check-in with your colleagues who do interact with researchers, such as reading room staff and reference librarians. Ask them what materials get requested a lot and the kinds of questions asked. You will begin to think about your collections from different angles and can make your finding aids more useful. You will also become aware of items you hadn’t thought very important and this will open new avenues for promotion, outreach, and collection development.

Alexis Adkins is the Archivist for Special Collections and Archives at Cal Poly Pomona. She holds an MLIS from San Jose State University and has worked previously at the Getty Research Institute and Stanford University. Her inner 10-year-old gets a kick out of working in a horse library.