Beacon Street Blog

Zachary Bodnar, CLA Archivist

 

The transition from film photography to digital photography has been long and ongoing. Now, with the ubiquity of smart phones, nearly everyone carries a decent quality digital camera at all times. The result of this development is that we can photograph nearly everything in our daily life, from the mundane moments of living to the soaring heights of a boisterous shared event. However, though we can now capture in image and video more and more of our life, the proliferation of digital photography does, perhaps ironically, make the preservation of those memories all the more difficult.

Whereas a church event of the past may have had only a single person with a camera and only one roll of film, today, a similar church event likely has dozens of people with cameras and essentially limitless “film.” As a result, where in the past an event might have produced only a single envelop of photographs, today’s event may produce hundreds of digital photographs. For a church archive, or truthfully for any archive, this sudden influx of digital photographs can seem overwhelming and scary. How can churches go about preserving these digital records, when the volume of digital photographs can pretty much only grow?

For starters, churches can look at cloud services, such as Microsoft OneDrive. Google Photos, or Dropbox. While the long-term viability of any cloud service will be in question (hence why cloud storage isn’t our only suggestion), the short-term benefits are great. Cloud storage is relatively cheap, and files on the cloud are not likely to be lost due to hardware degradation or breakage. If your church can afford it, we do strongly recommend at least backing up digital photographs that enter your archive onto a cloud service.

If the cloud contains your backup copies, then digital photographs saved locally are your primary copies. Digital preservation is fraught and complicated. Hard drives, CDs, and flash drives all have limited lifespans and all are susceptible to environmental damage too. That said, because these are digital files we are talking about, we have to rely on these unreliable storage devices. One of the best practices for local storage, then, is to have multiple devices, each with its own copy of the digital files. For example, you might have two external hard drives, each holding copies of all of your digital files. That way if one device were to break, the other would still be okay. The other best practice to diversify the geographical distribution of those storage devices. At a church, that may be to have one of those external hard drives stored with the rest of the church’s paper records, and the other stored elsewhere in the church building, such as the admin’s office. The idea here is that if something were to happen to one of the rooms, such as a sprinkler breaking, both devices wouldn’t be damaged.

In terms of what device to use for external storage, we almost always recommend external hard drives. They are more stable than CDs and flash drives, and because they are not always turned on, are less likely to fail due to mechanical problems. Still, remember that these are devices with expected lifespans of 10 years, maybe 20 if you are lucky.

Having a place, both locally and on the cloud, to store your digital photographs is one thing, but keeping those photographs organized is also an important part of preservation. The longer photographs remain unorganized, the easier it is to lose any context that would explain the who, what, or why of the photograph’s subject. With the amount of digital photographs that may come in, it is increasingly important that those photographs be organized in some way, and quickly. The simplest form of organization might be to organize photography by chronology. For example you could have a series of top level folders for each year (i.e., 2021, 2022, etc.) and within each folder you have a sub-folder for every month (i.e., November, December, etc.). Another possibility for organization, though more complex, would be to organize photographs by topic. Even here, an annual top level folder may make a lot of sense, but instead of sub-dividing that annual folder into months, sub-divide it into topical folders. Some examples could be “Events” or “Services” or “Weddings” or “Sunday School”. If you have enough information, you can go even further, sub-dividing those topical folders into more specific folders; for example, under “Events” you might have “Thanksgiving Dinner” and “July BBQ.” By organizing your files, you help to ensure that not all context for a photograph’s creation are lost. Just make sure that, whatever organizational method you use, you use it consistently on all of your external devices and your cloud backups.

Now, because digital preservation is its own worst enemy, you can do everything right and still suffer irreparable loss of digital data. This is just an unfortunate reality. The other reality is that paper and physical media continue to be the best preservation media available. Printed photographs are absolutely less likely to be lost to time than their digital counterparts. This is why we also suggest that churches consider creating a policy to print significant photographs from their digital collections. Defining “significant” is always difficult, and will always depend on a church’s specific context, but by defining “significant,” churches can help to ensure that some portion of their digital photographs have physical equivalents that are unlikely to be lost due to the vagaries of digital storage technology.

Photographs taken on a smart phone do tend to be of lower quality than photographs taken on traditional film cameras or digital SLR cameras. This is due to both hardware and software limitations on the part of the phone. However, the differences likely aren't super apparent to the naked eye, so there is no significant downside to printing digital photographs apart from the costs of printing digital photographs and the space used to store those physical photographs. But that is why we suggest only printing “significant” and “important” photographs, however your church, archivist, and/or records committee defines those words.

If your church does decide to print out digital photographs, or in general if your church still has photographs that need archiving, we always suggest using polypropylene archival photo sleeves. Once placed in such sleeves, you can use three ring binders to store your photographs. In terms of handling photographs, it is always best to handle them while wearing white cotton gloves, though if those are unavailable, it isn't too much of an issue to handle them with your bare hands. If you are handling photographs with your bare hands, it is best to only touch the photographs on their sides and back and to avoid touching the face of the photograph. We also always recommend identifying the photographs in some way. At minimum, write the date of the photograph on the back of the photograph, though if more information about a photograph or its subjects is known, adding that information will also be appreciated by future generations and archivists alike.

Digital preservation is not easy, but increasingly we all must begin to think about it because more and more of our records and memories exist in purely digital worlds. While digital preservation is less art and more a Frankenstein of methodologies and best practices, it can be done. Digital photographs are a great place to begin thinking about digital preservation due to the importance, both emotional and historical, of photographs. The above recommendations are not exhaustive, and they won’t be universal either, but they are a place to start.

If ever you or your church needs more specific advice, please do not hesitate to reach out to us at info@14beacon.org. We at the Congregational Library & Archives are here to support you and your endeavors to preserve your church's memory, mission, and history.

Libraries, museums, galleries, and archives are not just repositories of physical materials anymore. For every book published, a digital copy also exists. For every record printed to paper, another document is stored on a hard drive. For every traditional painting, another exists as a PSD (Photoshop’s proprietary file format). Digital objects, whether born-digital or created as a digital surrogate to a physical object, are now a part of every repository’s collections. This means that, just as we create programming and projects around our physical collections, we must create programming and projects around our digital holdings based on the needs and wants of our user communities.

Digital projects are wholly unique affairs which bring with them unique opportunities. We cannot treat digital projects as we might projects involving physical materials. For starters, by their very nature, digital objects may be changed. We can only interact with physical objects using our senses; in order to see a physical object one must go to that object’s location. Digital objects though may be seen and interacted with even across great distances within digital spaces.

Digital access is an incredibly important opportunity born from the nature of digital holdings. The last twenty months have only reinforced just how important digital access is for repositories; digital access to some portion of our collections is necessary in order to maintain and grow a user base, especially when physical access to collections is impossible. But opportunities do not exist solely in the transmission of digital objects online. Digital objects can be transformed and transmuted in order to create unique experiences that cannot be replicated with physical objects. We can use digital spaces to create online exhibits that are unique in their presentation when compared to a physical exhibit, or even create an art installation. Digital spaces also offer a chance to create collaborations that would otherwise be impossible working only with physical materials.

The New England’s Hidden Histories project at the Congregational Library & Archives is special in large part because collaboration has, and continues to be, a significant part of the project. The CLA has collaborated with numerous cultural institutions and worked with many different church communities and these collaborations have only been made possible because of the digital nature of the project. The end result is a collection that enhances the user experience because NEHH draws on the resources of numerous institutions and organizations.

NEHH has long looked towards existing church communities for collaborative opportunities. Many of the oldest Congregational Churches in New England still worship today and continue to maintain their own records. Our work in NEHH has offered us many opportunities to work with some of these churches and communities, to identify and select records for digitization from within their collections, and make these records, which would otherwise be largely inaccessible to people outside the church community, widely available to a larger public. Working and collaborating with church communities is not only about making records available though. These collaborative opportunities also bring with them opportunities to create ongoing relationships with new communities which can grow and enrich our own existing user communities.

As the NEHH project has grown in scope over the years, we have also worked to grow new partnerships with other museums, libraries, and archives. This project has given us an incredible opportunity to reach out to some of these organizations to gather, digitally, many of these important records, into a single central place. Where physically you’d have related materials across multiple locations, each with their own access policies, digitally you can bring these materials all together and easily accessible. This is a huge boon for researchers. And not just the CLA’s users, but the users of every organization involved in the project. These collaborations too provide opportunities to reach new audiences and build cross community excitement. The nature of the project pushes users to discover the greater holdings of every organization involved. Every organization has a unique user population, and these collaborations provide each organization the opportunity to reach out to these populations and introduce them to new resources and user experiences.

New England’s Hidden Histories is a project that could not exist if it were not a digital project. The opportunities to gather these historic resources from numerous organizations into a single digital repository is an enormous boon to researchers, genealogists, students, and anyone interested in colonial and early-American New England. On the front of access, this is already huge; visiting multiple different organizations can be both time consuming and expensive. But by gathering all of these resources into a single digital space, the user can access these without needing to visit each organization individually. Further, because everything is in a single digital archive, we can encourage comparative research across collections; for example it is not uncommon to find ministerial correspondence from the same minister in otherwise unrelated collections from different organizations or churches. Growing this collection collaboratively also means that there are many more points of access to guide users and communities to our collections. For example, if you had only a single church collection, perhaps you would only have one town name as a point of geographic access. But because our collaborations have allowed us to diversify the geographic scope of New England’s Hidden Histories beyond what our single organization could do alone, we have many more geographic access points across the whole of New England. And if you can bring someone in with one point of access, they can then discover the larger scope of the collection. Collaboration has made the whole far greater than the sum of its individual parts.

Digital projects bring with them opportunities that you would never have working solely with physical materials. And when these opportunities align with the needs and wants of your known and potential communities of users, the effects can be transformative for these communities. Digital projects can change, sometimes subtly and sometimes wholly, how people interact with and use the resources available at a library, archive, museum, or gallery. In the case of our New England’s Hidden Histories project we have had opportunities to collaborate with church communities and partner with cultural institutions. These collaborations have resulted in a large and multi-faceted digital collection that brings together the unique resources of each contributor and will help to tell, and even shape, the story of life in early New England for years to come.

A guest blog by Francis J. Bremer

Sometime in the Fall of 1621, four hundred years ago, after over a year of suffering and the deaths of many of their number, the English puritans of the newly settled Plymouth Colony, whom we often refer to as the Pilgrims, gathered to celebrate a successful harvest.  Long described as the “First Thanksgiving,” over the past decades countless articles have challenged traditional descriptions of the event.  Was it or was it not the first?  Was it or was it not a religious observation? 

There exist two accounts of the event.  One was a brief notation by Governor William Bradford in his history Of Plimoth Plantation. The other was a slightly longer account in a letter by the colonist Edward Winslow.  It is Winslow who provides the information that during the celebration, which lasted for days, about ninety members of the Wampanoag people, led by their Massasoit Ousamequin, joined the colonists and contributed five deer to the feast.

The issue of whether this was the “first” thanksgiving is easily disposed of.  Thanksgiving celebrations were commonplace.  At this time virtually all Europeans recognized no boundary between the material and the spiritual.  Everyone saw a supernatural dimension to the events of everyday life and acknowledged this by offering thanks to God for personal blessings such as the birth of as child, the recovery of a loved one from illness, or a successful harvest.  Governments and churches appointed special days of thanksgivings.  Most of the Pilgrims were old enough to have been among the Englishmen who celebrated the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588.  Believing that God was responsible for good fortune, there were many gatherings to offer thanks in the early Spanish and English New World colonies, one at least as early as 1541. In fact, the passengers on the Mayflower had offered thanks in 1620 upon safely reaching the shores of Cape Cod.  The fact that such events were common should erase any doubts that the Plymouth 1621 event had a religious base.  And a description of a later Plymouth colony thanksgiving (in Scituate) demonstrates the combination of prayer followed by a meal.

As for the Native presence at the Pilgrim thanksgiving of 1621, we don’t know if the Wampanoags were invited to the feast or whether, as some have argued, they heard the firing of guns by the English and came to investigate.  The devastation wrought by epidemic diseases introduced in the previous decades by European explorers offered little for the Wampanoag to be thankful for, and even less had they been able to foresee the ultimate consequences of colonization. But whatever explains their presence, they would have recognized what was happening, because they too believed that divine powers shaped their fortunes.   They had their own rituals that included feasting and exchanges of goods at the time of the corn harvest.

It was the presence of the Natives that distinguishes this occasion from the former European thanksgivings in the New World.  With their faith rooted in the Bible, the Pilgrims were well aware of the instruction in Deuteronomy 16: 13-14 that in celebrating bountiful harvests the Jewish people should include the strangers within their gates.  And so, on those days in the Fall of 1621, something briefly occurred from which we can learn.  The newcomers and the original inhabitants of the land demonstrated that it was possible for people who were different in many respects to live in peace. 

Francis J. Bremer is Professor Emeritus of History at Millersville University of Pennsylvania and the author of numerous books on the puritans, including the recent One Small Candle: The Plymouth Puritans and the Beginnings of English New England (Oxford, 2020).

by William McCarthy, Reference & Processing Archivist

Today, we wanted to highlight a new book being released soon titled “Titus Coan: Apostle to the Sandwich Islands” by Phil Corr. This book is the first full biography on Coan and his work.

The book is slated for release in November of this year and we wanted to highlight it on behalf of the author. Phil first learned about Titus Coan while working on his dissertation related to the first thirty years of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. His research on Coan ramped up in 2009 and this book is the final result of that work.

The following is from the description of the book: “Phil Corr provides a tour de force by writing for both the biography reader and the scholar. In this hybrid work he vividly portrays the life of Titus Coan, “the pen painter,” while also filling gaps in the scholarship. These gaps include: the volume itself (no full-length published book has previously been written on Titus Coan) and the following chapters - “Patagonia,” “Peace” and “Other Religions.” Using the unpublished thesis by Margaret Ehlke and many other primary and secondary sources, he significantly deepens the understanding of Coan in many areas. This book is presented to the future reader for the purposes of edification and increasing scholarship of this man who lived an incredible life during incredible times.”

Reach out to us at ref@14beacon.org if you want to get connected with the author. Have a great day!