By Taylor Grzesiek, Archives Services Intern
Hello, all! My name is Taylor Grzesiek and I’m an intern in the Archives Services Department. For the past few months, I’ve been processing the Columbus Citizen-Journal audiovisual collection, which contains roughly 24,250 black-and-white photographs, mostly dating from 1940-1970.
The Columbus Citizen-Journal was created through a merger of two newspapers, the Columbus Citizen and the Ohio State Journal. From 1959 until 1985, the Citizen-Journal was Columbus' morning paper. It covered daily life in Columbus and Ohio, and also shared stories about popular media, sports, world news and politics.
My work with the collection consisted of several lengthy steps. The Citizen-Journal's photos occupied 17 full banker boxes and three oversized boxes. They were arranged alphabetically by topic into folders that were so full that it was difficult to pull them out. To find photographs on a particular subject, researchers and staff relied on a 250-page typed index.
First, I went through each box and verified that every entry in the existing typed index was present and had the correct number of photos. I also integrated an additional box of photos into the larger collection and updated those entries.
Then, I spent several days transferring the entries from the old index into a spreadsheet. The typewritten document did not convert well to a PDF, which meant that I ended up typing many of the 4,000+ entries myself.
Now for the Good News
These steps ensured the finding aid (a detailed guide to the collection) could be updated and made searchable online. Now, folks can easily search for photos of topics like the Ohio State Fair, local strikes, the Columbus Zoo and Aquarium and space research (NASA, rockets, satellites and John Glenn are all in there!).
After updating the finding aid, I transferred the photographs into safe archival boxes and folders. To make navigating them more manageable, I re-housed them in smaller boxes. The 17 original cartons were so stuffed that I ended up using a whopping 59 boxes! We now have 24,256 photos newly organized for anyone who would like to see them in our Archives & Library.
Up Next: Who's That Woman?
My work was highly organizational in nature. However, it grew to incorporate an additional project that involved a lot of research into names and effort to represent female subjects more directly. However, that’s a story for another day. Stay tuned for Part 2!
