Tech Reflect: Lucy Lippard Notebooks

Tech Reflect is a platform for Digital & Web Services technicians to look-back on a particular project and share their experiences, thoughts, and lessons learned.

By Austen Villacis, Digital Imaging Technician

Occasionally, requests will come in from Texas State faculty for special projects. One such request came from Dr. Erina Duganne, an Associate Professor of Art History in the College of Art and Design, and included a collection of 5 personal notebooks from art critic Lucy Lippard. The notebooks date from 1983 to 1984, and range in size, the largest being 4″x6″ inches.

After meeting with Dr. Duganne to examine the materials in-person and discuss the goals for the project, the first step was to build a capture station with the following things in mind:

Quality: Dr. Duganne might use some of these images for an exhibit at Tufts University in 2020 and an accompanying exhibition catalog.
Efficiency: The total number of pages in the notebooks in over 1000, so it’s essential that the capture station is efficient.
Careful Handling: These nearly 40-year-old materials are on loan, not for the library to keep.
Versatility: The notebooks themselves vary in size, so I need the capture station to be versatile.

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Tech Reflect: It’s Only Rock N’ Roll Newspapers

Tech Reflect is a platform for Digital & Web Services technicians to look-back on a particular project and share their experiences, thoughts, and lessons learned.

Last November, nearly a full run of 41 issues of It’s Only Rock N’ Roll (IORNR), an alternative San Antonio-focused, alternative punk and New Wave rock music magazine published from 1979 to 1982, were donated to The Wittliff Collections here at Texas State University, adding to the new Texas Music collecting scope of The Wittliff. The newspaper was a labor of love for its managing editor and publisher, music journalist Ron Young, who wrote for the San Antonio Light and San Antonio Express-News. For more information on Young and the newspaper, please see this 2017 article on the San Antonio Express News’s MySanAntonio.com and this 2016 article in the San Antonio Express News includes more information on the newspaper.

My primary tasks were:

  1. Handling with extreme care
  2. Photographing each page
  3. Post-processing and output
  4. Move files into the Wittliff Collections’ shared drive for ingest into institutional repository

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