Wandering Through Time at the American Museum of Natural History
Words By Clare O'Dowd
Edited by Tom Baione & Stacy Schiff
Like many cultural institutions, the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) is working to make its collections available online. The museum’s research library has an ever-increasing number of images on our website. Close to 30,000 images are available to the public in the museum Library's Digital Special Collections, with images from museum expeditions, permanent halls, rare books, art, lantern slides, and other collections.
So if you can’t make it to the AMNH, or you were born after the early sixties and never had a chance to visit the Hall of Oil Geology, or other historic halls no longer part of the museum, you can visit them virtually. If you want to leave the Museum and travel to Mongolia in 1925 with explorer Roy Chapman Andrews, you can travel there through photographs. If you want to retrace the steps of the children from Brian Selznik's Wonderstruck, you can do that, too. You can visit the Wolf diorama, installed in the 1940's (1), in the Hall of North American Mammals, either online or in person. Or you can visit Digital Special Collections to see the mastodons and mammoths as they appear in Wonderstruck in the Hall of the Age of Man—a hall which no longer exists—although many of the fossil skeletons are still on view in the museum's updated fossil halls.
AMNH is an iconic institution, where artists and writers have often found inspiration. It’s also a very popular setting for mysteries. And lost children. And lost adults. Holden Caulfield, ruminating on the loss of his childhood in J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, published in 1951, remarks that “the best thing, though, in that museum was that everything always stayed right where it was. Nobody'd move. You could go there a hundred times...the birds would still be on their way south, the deers would still be drinking out of that water hole, with their pretty antlers and their pretty, skinny legs...Nobody'd be different. The only thing that would be different would be you (2).” In reality, even in Holden Caulfield's time the museum was always changing and evolving, but it has always felt constant; the familiarity of the institution and its public treasures are sources of palpable comfort to its regular visitors.
A regular visitor to AMNH myself since childhood, my professional life at the museum began during a graduate school internship. I worked with a team of other interns cataloging mostly expedition photographs in the museum library. I came back to work on the Historic Halls Digitization Project, an effort to provide the public with the opportunity to explore the history of scientific topics and collections exhibited in the museum's galleries over the past 140-plus years. The initial phase involved selection and scanning of 3,000 images of the museum’s permanent exhibition halls from the Photographic Collection housed in the museum library. After the library's team in the digital lab scanned the first batch of images, I began to catalog them. The second phase of the project was to write over 100 descriptive records for individual exhibition halls, including such details as opening and closing dates, curators' names, expeditions which contributed materials, etc.
The image cataloging was assisted by a team of graduate interns. The scanned photographs came largely from glass and film negatives and prints associated with metadata we utilized to catalog the individual images. Additional research was undertaken if information was missing or if sources were contradictory. The records were created and edited in Omeka, an open source content management and publishing system for digital collections, using modified Dublin Core fields with Library of Congress Subject Headings, Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names, and local AMNH vocabularies.
Toward the end of the cataloging phase, I began research for the hall authority records relying heavily on the museum's Annual Reports, which date from 1869. Another valuable digitized resource for this work were the museum's various exhibition hall guides, which provide helpful details of the permanent halls from 1911 to 2001.
Like anything else, the more you learn, the more you are aware of your limitations. The authority work for the halls—these halls which can seem so straightforward when you are experiencing them through research materials—turned out to be a challenge when we got down to it. For example the museum's halls of gems and minerals, which began as a single hall, eventually became two separate halls. This history raised questions, such as "Do renovations count as new halls?" The answer we decided is: sometimes. These two halls, the Morgan Memorial Hall of Gems, which opened approximately 1890, and the Harry Frank Guggenheim Hall of Minerals, which opened in 1976 alongside a redesigned Morgan Hall of Gems, closed late last year to make way for another update, the Alison and Roberto Mignone Halls of Gems and Minerals.
Then there is contradictory information in primary sources. For example, a Museum Annual Report states that a hall opened in a given year, but an AMNH press release states another year. Oftentimes missing information is easier to handle than conflicting or ambiguous information to the point where it's a relief to say "we don't know!", at least for now and until that information is found at some point in the future. Sometimes information you thought was clear, like a name on negative sleeve, turns out to be wrong. Incorrect information can end up traveling with an item, so additional research is necessary. For this reason, we like to use the term "iterative" to describe much of our own work.
Image from 81st Annual Report July 1949-June 1950. American Museum of Natural History, 1950.
But this work gives way to a new cache of knowledge. Many people remark that the Hall of New York State Environment looks straight out of the fifties, particularly in regard to the font used for the signage and labels. They're absolutely right, but it's important to know that this hall came from the 1950s as this creates an essential context. Its creation was part of an effort by the museum, to foster through its exhibition halls, "a well educated and sensitive citizenry to survive and flourish amid 'ever threatening totalitarian 'isms' (3)" following the Second World War. The exhibition halls both reflect and respond to their times.
Some objects have a habit of moving around the museum such as the Great Canoe, complicating or confirming associated metadata. (1) “Visitors viewing the Great Canoe, 77th Street Foyer, 1962,” Research Library | Digital Special Collections, accessed April 16, 2018 (2) “The Great Canoe and exhibit cases, North Pacific Hall, [1914],” Research Library | Digital Special Collections, accessed April 16, 2018. (3) “School children attending lecture, photographed under ceremonial canoe, Northwest Coast Hall, 1907,” Research Library | Digital Special Collections, accessed April 16, 2018.
Integral to the Historic Halls Project is communicating all this information efficiently and effectively. Once the research is complete on an authority term, we can write the corresponding authority record. In the case with the Historic Halls Project, the draft of the record went through a series of edits with the Visual Resources Librarian, Stacy Schiff, during which phase the records were reviewed for accuracy and clarity and to make sure the most important information was included for researchers.
Once completed, the records were entered into xEAC (pronounced "zeek"), an open source framework for creating EAC-CPF (Encoded Archival Context for Corporate bodies, persons, and families) records, which uses XForms, a W3C standard for editing xml. I started out using xEAC's graphic editing interface, but when that became limiting, I edited the xml directly in eXide, the open source native xml database on the backend of xEAC. When that also proved limiting, I edited the xml offline in oXygen and pasted the code into eXide. For a current project on Temporary Exhibitions, I create the records from a template in oXygen and upload finished records. Though I am neither a programmer nor a coder, I have found coding the xml to be more efficient.
The Research Library's Digital Special Collections has 3,000 images in its Historic Halls Collection and over one hundred records of Permanent Halls Authorities. The Historic Halls Digitization Project was funded by grants from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation and the Leon Levy Foundation. Together, the images and the hall records provide representations and histories of the museum exhibition halls through time, space, and concept, and therefore offer a glimpse into the evolution of the presentation of science and culture to the public. To expand our documentation of the museum's spaces, we have begun work on another project to create authority records for temporary exhibitions, which has been funded by the Achelis and Bodman Foundation. Following the creation of authority records for these exhibits, and we plan to select, digitize, and catalog images as we did with the Historic Halls Project and to make them accessible online via our Digital Special Collections site for public and research use.
Sources
(1) Quinn, Stephen C. Windows on Nature: The Great Habitat Dioramas of the American Museum of Natural History. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2006.
(2) Salinger, J.D. The Catcher in the Rye. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1951.
(3) American Museum of Natural History. 81st Annual Report July 1949-June 1950. New York: American Museum of Natural History, 1950.
Images from the American Museum of Natural History Research Library Digital Special Collections
Clare O’Dowd is a project archivist at the American Museum of Natural History and a librarian at Rockland Community College in New York. She has an MLIS from Pratt Institute and a BA from Sarah Lawrence College.
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