My name is Steven Kramer and I’m an intern with the Museum at the moment.
I’m receiving my master’s degree from Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada where I’m getting a degree in photographic preservation and collections management.
My time here at the Museum has been very diverse as far as my responsibilities and opportunities.
The bulk of my time has been spent working with photographic material, condition reporting, rehousing,
but I’ve also spent quite a few expeditions doing other things with members of the Museum, giving tours around the Museum
and just getting a broad sense of how a museum works in general, and not just photographic preservation.
The internship has shown me quite a lot about how a museum works entirely.
It has shown me how many different types of people are necessary to run a museum and the type of backgrounds that are needed.
It has just shown that there’s a lot more that goes into a museum than what someone, perhaps from the outside looking in, understands about how museums work, I guess.
The project I’m currently working on is part of a rehousing effort for the Museum’s glass plate collection.
It involves identifying not only the material you are dealing with – glass – but also
identifying the Museum’s stance as far as an institution is concerned.
Understanding the Museum helps limit or create certain types of housing aspects that we can approach and develop,
because not every institution is the same. So the Museum will have a different requirement as to the accessibility of those items.
The main aims we have involving the rehousing effort have to do with, at this moment, accessibility as well as preservation.
We want to make sure these negatives are being preserved in the best way possible but also aren’t just being entombed or encased
or put in the dark. They are going to be used.
This is, after all, a museum, so these items will be accessed, they will be digitised.
So they need to be accessible but they also need to be able to be preserved.
The thing that you have to consider when handling and preserving and rehousing glass plates is just their medium – they are glass.
They will break and they could be potentially hazardous to researchers or whoever gets involved with them.
So creating an environment and creating storage units that are beneficial to the plates, as well as storage devices that protect
and maintain a level of protection to the handler, is important.
The first thing someone should know about rehousing glass plates is how they’re stored physically.
They shouldn’t be stored horizontally. That’s a very weak surface of the plates.
Most glass plates – all glass plates, excuse me – should be stored vertically on their thin side to avoid cracking.
Weight comes into play – if you store a glass plate horizontally they will tend to break a lot easier,
so vertical storage is one of the first things that has to be done.
Separating each individual negative is also very important.
You don’t want two glass plates touching themselves over extended periods of time.
They should be housed and encapsulated separately.
This project definitely has helped me progress in my degree as well as provide me with information
that will help me in my career eventually.
It has opened doors into looking at, not just looking at the material itself and how to preserve it,
but looking also in the context of its institution,
analysing what’s best for not only the objects themselves but how they need to be stored
in the museum or in the institution.
So it gives me a perspective to look not just at one specific area of an object but to look at its context and where it is.
Digitisation is a very important aspect within a vast majority of museums collections.
What digitising does, especially in the realm of photography, is that it limits the amount of handling
that an object can receive.
Instead of a researcher or someone having to physically hold this object, they can now look at a high resolution image.
So you decrease the amount of handling, which in my case in the glass plate negatives is very important.