Job Description for RSA in Rhodes Special Collections
We now have 20 named special collections each ranging in size from a few hundred objects to a couple of thousand objects. And, the range of materials in any one of these collections can vary widely: paper and parchment items which can be over 900 years old, metal which can be 2,000 years old, and an array of textiles, the earliest coming from the 16th century. Photographs from the 19th century are special unit. Paintings range from oil-on-canvas to watercolor, and our print collections include steel engravings, dry point, pen-and-ink, and Japanese woodblock prints. The rare book room has over 1,500 works from the 15th century on, many signed by the author. The A/V special collection has items over 90 years old: 78 rpm’s; aluminum sound recordings of Richard Halliburton, reel-to-reel tapes; 16 mm film, and over a 1,000 VHS/DVD recordings of college events.
The student looking after these collections shares a big job with me, and they must have fairly extensive training in the conservation of these various types of artifacts. Online tutorials and the occasional professional that we sometimes engage to advise us keep both my Student Associate and me up to date on the best practices. Over the years several students who have worked in this job have gone on to get advanced degrees in this work and are now enjoying a career in museums or universities.
The job includes preparing manifests of groups of new items coming into the Special Collections or updating existing lists with appropriate new metadata. They also create the finding aids used to retrieve items from any one collection.
They will be doing the major part of preparing these items for digitizing (either by scanning or setting up a camera with a light box.) The steps required for any of this are reviewed with me first. And, they will be expected to work up to the level of their training and stop, creating a set of questions which we will answer together. They will then upload these to Dlynx with metadata if appropriate. Some items are digitized for security reasons but not put online.
The Student Associate for Special Collections will help pull and organize items for a class visit. They work with me and the faculty member to decide which items will work best for the visit. Later, my student often makes appointments for follow-up visits so the student can spend more time with an object that was shown in a class. This is invaluable as I cannot always be in the Archives when the customer needs to see an object.
The Student Associate will work with me when any exhibit is made from the collections.
The longer a student stays in this job the more valuable their assistance can be. They become a real colleague in the work we do here. My time spent training is not productive if I have to redo that each year. The number of classes using the Special Collections has grown each year.
Bill Short, Supervisor