Protecting the Past

A1570 map of America from the first modern atlas of the world. Love letters that Sam Houston wrote to Anna Raguet in the 1830s. Photos taken for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram during President John F. Kennedy’s final visit to the Metroplex. These are just a few of the fascinating materials the UT Arlington Library’s Special Collections has amassed over the years—and some of the ones they’re fighting daily to preserve.

Preservation efforts run the gamut from high-tech (image scanning and digitization) to low (custom-made sleeves that protect historic maps). Professor Imre Demhardt hopes the former becomes the norm industry-wide for maintaining the historic materials he works with. As the Virginia and Jenkins Garrett Endowed Chair in the History of Cartography, his research puts him in frequent contact with the thousands of maps and atlases housed in the library’s Special Collections.

Before the addition of the cold-storage vault, film negatives were at risk.

Earlier this year, during his tenure as the ST Lee Visiting Fellow at the School of Advanced Study at the University of London, Dr. Demhardt explored the extensive cartographic holdings of famous London institutions like the British Library and the National Maritime Museum. A common theme of his experiences? Frustration.

“We are in the 21st century, but if you do research on map items, you’ll find that it’s still much like it was in the 19th century: many listings and few scans,” he says. Often, just tracking down a physical copy of a map described in a paper or online catalog is a complicated and time-intensive task.

Demhardt believes scanning and digitizing maps and cartographic items is key to preserving them and making them widely accessible. “We have the content at UT Arlington,” he says, “we simply must find a way to release it to the interested public.”

In Special Collections, 5,000 maps from the cartographic holdings already have been scanned and are accessible for researchers on the Portal to Texas History. Some of these are part of the library’s A Continent Divided project, which makes available for the first time online one of the largest collections of primary source materials on the Mexican-American War. One of the main goals of the archive is to present a binational perspective of the war, giving scholars, teachers, and the public at large a more integrated North American narrative about the historic event.

still, all these digitizing efforts mean little if the original materials aren’t properly cared for. Ensuring that historic documents—some centuries old—survive well into the future is one of Ben Huseman’s many jobs. As cartographic archivist for Special Collections, he monitors delicate maps and other materials, seeing that they’re appropriately stored and available to students and the public.

Anyone can request to view the materials, even handle them, but Huseman and his staff are always there to observe that proper care is taken.

“We have very few restrictions, but we do have rules,” he says. “We want to make the collections accessible for everyone.”

But preserving 500-year-old maps can be tricky. Measures taken include storing the documents flat, encased between two sheets of polyester film that are custom-made at the library. (Some of the larger maps are stored rolled, either wrapped around acid-free board tubes or in special boxes.)

Surprisingly, it’s often the newer materials that cause the most preservation issues.

“The ironic thing is that many of the maps with the biggest problems come from the 20th century,” Huseman says. Due to the cheaper, more acidic paper that became popular in the early 1900s, maps from that age can brown and crumble quickly. “Proper housing and storage are critical.”

Even more critical is the preservation of the library’s photographic materials—the millions of negatives, prints, slides, and daguerreotypes documenting the history of North Texas, including archives from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and from local commercial photographers such as W.D. Smith.

“We have some items—like our acetate negatives from the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s—that are suffering right now,” says Brenda McClurkin, head of Special Collections.

Brenda McClurkin and Kate Holliday with the David Dillon Papers.

In typical office conditions, film negatives begin to deteriorate after 50 years. Thanks to the University’s new cold-storage vault, however, the collection is getting an extension of about 500 years. Recently completed at the Central Library, the $800,000, world-class vault comprises two rooms that will eventually house roughly 5 million negatives, film reels, and other materials.

“Digitizing these 5 million negatives would be a staggering and expensive endeavor. Cold-storage vault consultants estimated the cost in 2010 to be approximately $100 million,” McClurkin notes. “Stabilizing the negatives in a cold-storage environment will permit them to survive until their digitization can be planned more strategically.”

That digitization is ongoing, with scanning already complete on an estimated 12,000 images. The staff is making arrangements to begin digitizing W.D. Smith’s negatives from the 1940s and ’50s as well, to keep Special Collections’ materials at the public’s ready fingertips.

as we move forward into the 21st century, Special Collections will have to adapt its preservation approaches and treatments for the new, more modern types of materials that are becoming increasingly common in its archives.

A good example of this is the David Dillion Papers, donated to UT Arlington after the death of the revered architectural critic and Dallas Morning News journalist. During his long tenure at the newspaper, Dillon wrote more than 1,000 articles and several books. Consequently, his collection features a huge range of materials, including reporter’s notebooks, edited manuscripts, photographs, and correspondence with editors and readers.

“It’s a wonderful collection,” says Associate Professor Kate Holliday, director of the David Dillon Center for Texas Architecture. “It shows how Dillon wrote about architecture in Dallas and in Texas, which is helpful for anyone interested in the history of journalism, the way journalism has evolved from the 20th into the 21st century.”

The library’s future plans will have to account for the digital preservation of these and another ephemeral forms of media, such as audio recordings. Dillon’s archive features a number of these, as he interviewed Michael Graves, O’Neil Ford, and other noted architects in the 1980s and ’90s.

“Making the recordings accessible to the public is a crucial part of their survival,” Dr. Holliday says.

“We take our role as caretakers very seriously,” adds McClurkin. “Our collections were born out of passion for these topics. They’ve been nurtured, and we feel we have the responsibility to continue nurturing them.”