 It's a collection of publishers findings, so I have two colleagues here today that are going to talk to you about that. So why don't you guys just introduce yourselves and talk a little bit about what you do here at Alden? Sure. I am Maryam Interchpore, responsible for Special Collections Librarian, responsible for rare books and for the Documentary Photo Archive. I've been here for about three and a half years, and I primarily do a lot of instruction related to the collections that I'm responsible for across departments all over campus. And I'm also responsible for managing all aspects of the rare book collection primarily. I'm Cameron Becroft. I'm Digital Projects Librarian for Digital Initiatives. So I take the stuff that you get me, Stacy, and that you give me, Maryam. And I create digital images of it. I describe them, and then I make them available online. Cool. Okay, so, but talking about this specific project, Maryam, could you tell us a little bit about what publishers findings are and why they're significant? Yes. So publishers findings are book findings that were designed sometimes by but more often for a publisher and then manufactured and used in quantity. So they're significant because they are, they illustrate the moment in the history of bookmaking, book collection, which occurred about 1830 when publishers needed to increase the speed and efficiency at which they were producing books for increasing demand in the marketplace. So publishers findings, primarily of cloth, created a way for publishers to make books fully available as a complete product more quickly to the marketplace. Because originally, or during the 18th century, books were generally bound later in the process by bookbinders or by consumers themselves who wanted very specific findings for their books. But that was more expensive and a more time consuming project. And so in order to make them, again, more affordable and more readily available, came the turn to publishers findings with the turn to mechanization and mass production distribution. Awesome. Okay, so these books, Carmen, what parts of the books are you capturing for the digital project? Well, I will demonstrate with a book. We have the microscope here. And so we would generally photograph the case. So these are the cloth findings that are put on during the manufacturing process. So the front cover, the back cover, the spine. We would also take a photograph of the front fixed fly leaf or end paper, and then the first free fly leaf, especially if they are patterned in some way, or show evidence of that manufacturing process. We'd also take a photograph of any inscriptions that you would see. Sometimes those would be in these, in this front matter here. This is called the frontist piece. It is often opposite the full title page. And it's also was used in advertising. This is what was going to catch someone's eye when they open up the book. As you can see, it's protected by a little piece of tissue paper that has been pasted in by the manufacturer. So you can see how much they value this. And then also the full title, mostly for our reference. And then we do the same thing for the last free fly leaf and the back fixed end paper. So this is Miriam and I came up with this set of images because we didn't want to address the whole page block because the text of this book has already been evaluated by Google Books, Hotty Trust, some of the other huge digitization initiatives that took place beginning in like 2005, which have tons of millions of public domain works already available online. So we didn't want to reproduce that, but we did want to highlight the physicality of the book as an exemplar in the Montcenter collection. And to show these manufacturing processes and the art specifically of how they appealed to this rising middle class and new educated population. Great. And you're planning to connect the pictures that you take of our specific books with the digital scans that already exist of the content as well, right? Yeah. So we have links in the records to similar editions that are already available online. They might not be exactly the same publisher, the same date, the same format, but the text is going to be as similar as we can get. And in some cases, they are exactly that. And if you want to see exactly what this text looks like, you just come to the Montcenter. It's true. Okay, so how did you, Miriam, select the books that are in this collection? Because I know it's just a small subset of what we have. So we started focusing a little bit on the juvenile collection just because those tend to have really wonderfully illustrated publishers' findings. And some of the other things we were looking for were condition. We want bindings that are in pretty good condition so that they show up well online or still beautiful objects. And also just showing a variety of the different types of images and stamping and typefaces and different things that you might see on covers. And it's important also to get sort of a range of time periods because what is on the cover can tell us a lot about what was popular at the time. Some of these have people in clothing, but that's something that you can see. What was the style? What was the fashion? What was appealing to people? These were very much meant to appeal to the general reader. And so, and something else that we wanted to show, like as with the microscope that Carmen already talked about, also the romance of modern astronomy is that publishers' bindings were not just used with literary works. This happens to be poetry, but we have a lot of history of science books in the collection and that's something else that we wanted to represent is sort of how broadly these were used. And some of the different materials you can see right here. So often in the earlier ones you'll see not too many colors or no color at all. You'll just see blind stamping which might not show up here, but there is decoration. It's just not colored in with either the aluminum or palladium or gold or other colors like black or red or any other color that you would see a little bit later. And most often you'll see the front cover being most decorated and then the spine and then the back is often totally blank or has the same pattern as the front cover, but just not filled in. So blind stamped again as we would call it. So we're focused on good condition and just getting a range of styles and times and subject matters also. And I think something else we're going to do moving forward is maybe focus a little bit on Ohio imprints. So bindings that were created by publishers in Ohio and for Ohio readers. Okay, great. I did not know that. So that was my next question was to ask you a little bit about how your plans for growth. So definitely focusing on Ohio and Ohio publishers. To the extent we can. Yeah, I think that will be a good focus. And there's other projects out there similar. So I think that we're creating this, you know, again to represent our collections physically and the types of things that we have and so that it can be used also, you know, as a teaching. Teaching tool is a research tool, but also just as sort of the enjoyment of looking at these as beautiful physical objects that are representative of a specific moment in history and time in the history of technology and bookmaking and mechanization and manufacturing. Great. Okay, so switching gears to talk about the digital project. Carmen, can you give us some of the details of digitization, higher capturing images, what kind of descriptive information that's going to be included in the collection. So we have a digital camera. It's the camera on a stick model of the coffee stand, where the camera is photographing these items from above it's screwed onto a plate that is on another cross piece that can be adjusted up and down. Based on the size of the object and what the kind of image that you want to get. And so we have two commercial photography students who work during the regular school year, who have experience with capturing objects specifically. And that's important because, for example, this gold stamping has reflective properties. So they're using two soft boxes to get the best image of the item and work with the item in order to get the most accurate and also the most visually appealing image. So they're gently manipulating the book. And we have a variety of braces and stands and weights from our head of preservation here, Miriam Nelson, in order to hold the book while this is going on. Right. So how long would you say it takes probably for a student to capture a book? I think a student takes about 10 minutes to photograph it, and then they do a lot of processing work. And then there's another student who's capturing the metadata, the description from the catalog records, then that is embedded in the digital files. The files are changed to a different format from the raw files that they're working in when they're doing color correction and other editing in the image itself. And then I take all of that and ingest it, I add it to our database. And then it appears to be end user. Great. So when users are looking at the digital collection online, are there any specific, and I know we've talked about some of the different things that you're capturing, but specific features or specific items that they should be on the lookout for? So we have been trying to specifically highlight the artists that are involved in this process. So a lot of these designs on the front cover would have a small monogram on there. So it's a little symbol that particular commercial artists used in order to, unfortunately it's not one of these, used in order to cue people in that this was their work. So there's some collaborative groups such as decorative designers, which are very famous. There's a lot of women actually who would not otherwise have been surfaced in the advertising for this product versus the interior artists who often got credit by name. And so it's much more likely to see a signature or other identifying information on the front desk piece or other plates inside the text block. So we're really eager to see what threads we can pull out with that and give people a sense of all of the different personalities and decisions that went into bringing this all together. Right. So just to follow up on that a little bit, I think that often, like Carmen was saying, the book or the cover designer might not be actually attributed anywhere inside of the book. So the things that we're looking for like initials or sometimes a little monogram and they're often very small and sort of hidden. So you do have to look for them. Some that are very well known, Margaret Armstrong, for example, she has a very recognizable MA that you can usually find pretty easily. And they are often women but also they were often well known at the time, you know, painters and designers who are also doing book design and they often had relationships with specific publishers and so if you see a design that looks sort of familiar and it's not fine and it's a publisher that you know this artist regularly worked with. You can, you know, you can guess or wonder if perhaps it is that artist because they were working with this particular publisher. Right. Okay, so just the kind of the last thing and we touched on this a little bit when you mentioned using this in the classroom and instruction and research. But just what are what is your ideals for how you would like to see this used. I would love for it to be used as a complement to the actual books in the classroom on when we're on talking about on campus instruction. I think it'll be very useful for the students to be able to see the books and then in class as well as on their own time and spend a little bit more time with the website and look at their own book and compare it with other designs that they wouldn't necessarily have time to see in class. So there'll be much more on offer, basically, when they when they go to the website and there are several instructors, professors who are teaching increasingly with history of the book kind of in mind, either the main thread in their in our course structure or as an underlying thread. So this will give them an additional tool to use with their students and in creating assignments and projects. And there's a lot you can do just with the images, you know, as Carmen was describing, because we're capturing different elements of the book. So if you're interested in those signed bindings and covers you can focus on that if you're interested in the book place and provenance and the history of ownership and usage, you can focus on the inscription signatures and other markings left behind by people who have previously owned and use these books. If you're interested in the content, then you can, you know, either follow the links to the digital versions or come to the month center and look at the books in person. So we hope that there will be multiple possible uses and potentially also that student work on the books will allow us to perhaps add metadata that that will take the research beyond what we have been able to do on our own, just based on resources. So that's another possibility that is very exciting. Well, it sounds like a really wonderful collection and we'll add a link to it in the comments. Do you guys have anything else you want to? Yeah, I just want to say there's currently about 56 items in this collection. So it's a soft open. We're going to have the link for you lucky Facebook live viewers for you to be able to go in there and play around with it. This process will be continuing indefinitely. We have thousands of publisher findings in the month center and we have this process pretty well streamlined so we can continue this as long as we have more books coming down. So this will grow quite a bit. Great. Well, thanks you guys.