What is the Graphic Materials Collection?
The oversized drawers where the Graphic Materials Collection is housed in the JPL Archives Processing Room.
Hi! I’m an intern at the JPL Archives, at the end of a five-month, full-time internship here in the stacks.
Now that my time here is wrapping up, I was asked as a last hurrah to write a blog post. Which sounds fantastic, right? But what should I write about, among the various tasks that I did during my time here? After a bit of discussion with the team and some soul-searching, I decided to focus on my work with the Graphic Materials Collection.
Now, you’re probably wondering what is the Graphic Materials Collection?
Well, it’s a mess! Graphic Materials refers to the kind of documents it contains (material that is principally image-based). Collection indicates that the materials in it are pulled from different origins and did not arrive in our archives from one single donor (in which case it would be a Fonds).
The 1297 Collection (the Graphics Collection’s other name) is stored in the oversized drawers. It’s basically supposed to contain every and any poster possessed by the Archives, of which there are a lot. And a lot of them are very cool looking too! But there was a slight problem: our inventory for this collection, which was supposed to be listing every one of these posters with a unique identifying number, and to give their physical location was woefully out of date.
What you will see when you open the drawers in the Graphics Materials Collection.
My task was to do the following: identify the true location of the posters, assign them new unique identifiers if needed, and put them back in the drawers where we keep them.
Piece of cake, right? So I thought, but complications soon piled up. First, the posters were not located where they were supposed to be. Then, some of them were missing altogether. Finally, we discovered a second inventory for the collection, listing completely different items than the other inventory, throwing me into utter confusion.
At this point, I took a long, deep breath, and stopped to devise a new plan of attack before going back into the drawers.
First step: identify the current location of the posters in the drawers.
Second step: take all the posters out of the drawers.
Third step: Assign them new numbers, starting from scratch, and fuse the two inventories this way.
Following this revised plan, I set out to work. Fortunately, I had already worked on numbering and labeling a poster collection before, so I applied what I had learned there: I erased, as delicately as possible the old identification numbers that were written on their versos and replaced them by applying archival tape (special tape used to repair posters) and wrote on that instead.
A 1905 poster for a Jewish theatre performance in present-day Ukraine, in serious need of conservation. This is the oldest poster I found in the Graphic Materials Collection.
After doing all of that, putting them back in the drawers, and writing down (accurately this time) where I had stored them, there was one last step for me. Some of the posters were in rough shape, so I established a rating system to qualify the state of each poster. My task here was done, and I left the conservation of the posters to the Archives team.
An example of a poster in need of conservation from the Graphic Material Collection (1297_53), which reads in Yiddish "You are your Brother's Keeper".
“Does conservation work interest you? Tuesday nights have become our conservation evenings here at the JPL Archives. Each week we pull out posters from a new drawer lovingly organized by Victor and treat them to conservation and encapsulation. All are welcome to stop by Tuesdays between 5 and 7 to learn more about this process from our Archives team.”
