Virginia Tech University Libraries recently partnered with the Taubman Museum of Art in Roanoke, Virginia, to photograph the museum’s collection, preserve the digital images, and make them available online. This presentation describes the project management and the reconciling of the different purposes of the museum and library. The museum mainly wants to provide access to its collections, while the library emphasizes digital surrogates of artworks for preservation. Similar negotiations and compromises arose in a larger scale project in the Prints & Photographs Division of the Library of Congress. In 2019 the Balthazar Korab Photographic Archive, a collection of over 530,000 architectural photos, negatives, slides, and mixed media covering a range of subjects, was processed for regular service to the public. In this case study we will highlight reference service of the unprocessed collection, the rehousing decisions made in the processing plan, hiccups during processing, long-term storage, databases and technology, creation of an EAD finding aid, and current use of the collection. If you like Modernist architecture, American art, archival supplies, metadata, or people working together… you’re in the right session!
