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BG: Well, I was hired in 1987. I started work here August 3, 1987. I had just come back from Ecuador when the position was advertised. I had been with the United States Information Agency for two years as a library fellow. I was called a library fellow, but not a research fellow like the Fellows at Dumbarton Oaks. It was actually a contract position. Maybe later I'll go into more detail about that, but I had the wonderful opportunity to work in our bi-national center libraries – three bi-national center libraries in Ecuador. And of course Ecuador is an Andean country, and I had greatly improved my Spanish. The position was a one-year contract, and we were able to renew it for a second year. And after that, I tried to renew it again, and they said, "No, no. You have to give someone else a chance." So I came back to the Washington area, where I had lived before, and Dumbarton Oaks was advertising the position of Librarian for Pre-Columbian Studies. It required fluency in Spanish and a familiarity with Andean – or the cultures of Latin America. I saw the ad and three other people saw it and either called me about it – this was before the internet. Somebody mailed it to me. It was in the Washington Post, you know – we used to clip, and everybody would read the newspaper, and so people thought it was right for me. Then, I got an interview. That was interesting because Elizabeth Boone was on sabbatical that year. She was at the Center for Advanced Studies at Princeton. She was the Director of Pre-Columbian Studies. The acting director was Janet Berlo. So, I came in for an interview with Janet Berlo, and then they had the short list come back and interview with Elizabeth a few weeks later. They brought Elizabeth down. I still remember a lot about those interviews because this place was just so amazing to me. And Elizabeth was great because she was real down to earth in the interview, so it was this contrast of – I remember I walked into the lobby and I didn't know – and this is funny in retrospect – because I didn't know if I was allowed to step on the mosaic on the floor. And you know, it turns out we probably shouldn't have been allowed to step on the mosaic, but I stood at the entrance and asked the guard, "How do I get in?" And he said, "Just walk across."
JW: So you mention that Dumbarton Oaks was an amazing place when you first got here. What were some of the things that contributed to that initial impression?
BG: The collections, because – well, the collections and then the people that I met. The library at that time did not – the Pre-Columbian Studies library was managed by the assistant curator of the collection. So, my first interview, I interviewed with Janet Berlo and I also interviewed with Gordon McEwan, who was the assistant curator of the collection. He is an archeologist. So, he took me through the museum and showed me the Pre-Columbian Collection and explained about the Blisses. I did not know anything about the Blisses. So, what was amazing – the house itself, the gardens. And to tell you the truth, even the experiences – the fieldwork of the people that I met, and they talked to me about their work. And also it was great – I had just come back from Quito and Gordon had done extensive work in the highlands of Peru, so meeting people here who knew so much about the Andes – it was funny too because at one time I felt comfortable with the people who knew all about the Andes and who spoke Spanish, but also it was all very exotic. Of course, the lifestyle of the Blisses was not something I had experienced before, and there was still evidence of the lifestyle of the Blisses. I remember when I met Irene Vaslef. I thought, "Oh, wow!" [To James Carder] I don't know, did you ever meet Irene Vaslef, James?
JNC: I did.
BG: She was a character. She was the Director of the Byzantine Library. She was very welcoming. On the one hand, she was talking about OCLC and Library of Congress classification, but she seemed very exotic to me too – this older woman from Central Europe. So, that was it. It was a mix of feeling somewhat intimidated, and on the other hand very comfortable.
JW: So we're going to shift gears a little bit and talk more about your professional role here at Dumbarton Oaks. Would you tell us what you know about the relationship between Dumbarton Oaks and the Harvard University Libraries and how this relationship has changed since you've been here at Dumbarton Oaks?
BG: It's changed greatly. When I first came, we operated very independently. We didn't even use HOLLIS. We didn't even use the system that was HOLLIS – it was called HOLLIS, but it was a different operating system. It was NOTIS, the NOTIS software. We didn't even use that. When I came here, we didn't even have an integrated library system. The other thing is – I don't know if anyone else has said this in their interviews – but the three library collections operated independently. The library for Pre-Columbian Studies was physically separate and it was managed separately from the other two library collections. I reported – my position reported to the Director of Pre-Columbian Studies. That's why Elizabeth Boone and Janet Berlo were interviewing me. There was not a central library administration. Each library staff – well for the most part – reported to the director of studies. The Byzantine library was a department, it was a part of Byzantine Studies, but Irene Vaslef was a department head, whereas I wasn't, and my counterpart for Landscape Architecture was not. To tell you the truth, each of the three programs – in each of the three programs, the library collection and the library staff was handled a little differently in the organizational structure chart. So I worked – I have to go back and explain that when I was hired, the position for Librarian of Pre-Columbian Studies had just been created. Before me, the assistant curator was managing the library. I should probably talk a little about – this isn't answering your question, but I'll get to that later. I should probably talk a little bit about the library of Pre-Columbian Studies. It started out as Mr. Bliss's personal library at about a little over two thousand books. And he donated it to Dumbarton Oaks. They had it organized by culture in what was then our rare book room, which – I don't even know what is in that room now. But, in the Main House it's a wood paneled room. It was open and it was next to what is now Jonathan Shea's office and across from the men's room. And that was our library. But that was before my time. All of the books fit in that one room, and they were not catalogued and they did not have Library of Congress classification or any other classification. They were organized by subject and within each subject, the subject being culture, and within each culture by author's last name. And that worked fine for a couple years. They actually had Fellows – this was in the early 1980s – and even the Fellows were in that room. And then in 1981, Dumbarton Oaks received the bequest of Thelma Sullivan, who was an Aztec specialist. She was American, but she lived and worked in Mexico. She donated her books, her notes, her drafts of her publications – everything – to Dumbarton Oaks. At that time, the books were too many to fit in that room and to be organized – it was time to catalogue them properly and get them into something. But again, there wasn't a librarian yet. So Elizabeth Boone wrote and got a NEH grant, and they hired a cataloger with that grant, and that was Michael Hamerly, and Michael Hamerly had a PhD in Latin American history. He came and worked – it was a grant for a two-year project. He worked for about eighteen months, and then he got a job on the West Coast. And I met him recently, about a year ago. It was nice to meet him at my Latin American Studies librarians' conference. He did a great job. He catalogued the library, he used contract cataloguers for any – well, I think actually he didn't even use – he found copy records. What librarians do is they look into a shared database, and if there's copy that matches – if someone else has catalogued the book already, they can find that record and bring it in. He found – but we didn't have a system – so he'd find a record, and at that time we had cards. He'd get the card, print it out, attach our holding to that record. And then if he didn't find copy cataloguing, he'd do original cataloguing, which is a ton of work. This man did a really good job organizing the library. But then he left. I think he felt a little frustrated that he was working with scholars, but he didn't have time to do his own scholarship. So after that – that was when the assistant curator had to manage the cataloguing. They were still buying books – I should say, they had started to buy books, because until that time, it was the Bliss's library and Thelma Sullivan's library. But they had started to buy books, and so Gordon McEwan was charged with overseeing copy cataloguing. So, they'd hire people from Telesec temporaries who had been trained as cataloguers, but Gordon wasn't trained as a cataloguer. He was very concerned about this. He told me when I was hired, "I did the best I could, but I didn't have the training, so I don't know." And it showed, because at the beginning there were a lot of records that had been brought in – I keep saying brought in, but we had claimed as our own. They were sitting in this great database called WorldCAT OCLC with our holdings attached, but they weren't for the right manifestation of the work. We had bought – in the old days, we used to by every university microfilm dissertation that fit our profile. Now we don't do that anymore because they're available online. But we used to buy every hard copy. But instead of the copy cataloguing the hard copy being claimed, it was for the microfilm or microfiche, so it took us years to go find all of those and fix those. And also, they'd accept whatever call number was on the record, and sometimes it wasn't what would work best for our users. But anyway, when I started, it was a three-year campaign of Elizabeth Boone to get a position funded for Librarian of Pre-Columbian Studies. She had to say, "Look, we're going to be growing. We're going to keep buying books, our field is growing, there's a lot being published. We need to professionalize this and get a librarian." And so after three years, the position was funded and I was hired. So, meantime, like I said, we were printing cards and – that was happening in Pre-Columbian Studies. Byzantine Studies had a whole library staff. They had Irene Vaslef as Director. They had two cataloguers at least, they had an acquisitions department. Landscape Architecture had a – I don't know when their position got funded. But they had a librarian. I think they called her the librarian of the reference collection. And then they had the curator of rare books. And shortly after I was hired – when I was hired, it was someone named Laura. I forget her last name.
JNC: Byers.
BG: Byers. And she retired, and she had been there for a long time. It was Laura working with Betty MacDougall, who was the director of the program. And then it might have been at that point that they split it and created the position when they hired Linda Lott as rare books librarian and curator of rare books, and then the reference position, and it was Annie Thacher. So, the three programs all had the library organization structure in the way that worked best for their program. But it was a lot of work. It was actually impossible to keep up, because I was supposed to be finding – figuring out which books to buy, and in that day it was all paper. So, catalogues would be sent to me, booklists, phone calls would come through, faxes. And I was supposed to be selecting the books, creating new orders – which was mostly typing in, because we didn't have a system to upload – so, creating the orders, sending the orders, receiving the books, paying the invoices, and then cataloguing the books. I had part time help to create the labels and stamp the books, and that was it. And I had help to shelve. What would happen, the cataloguing would wait. I would do the easiest cataloguing, and everything else was piling up. And this was happening in all three programs. So, it was good when the decision was made to get an integrated library system. That was under Angeliki. She selected a committee from the library staff here, and we researched it. That was when we started working closely with Harvard. We had Dale Flecker and his staff. They were our advisors. We decided – and he carefully cautioned us about going with Harvard. The choice was – the first choice was whether we were going to go onto Harvard's HOLLIS system. And this was called a CHUI rather than a GUI. Remember "chewies" and "gooeys"? It was a character based interface, rather than a graphical user interface. It was a DOS-based system by this company called NOTIS. And he said, "We're undergoing a several-year study to figure out what we're moving to. If you come on now, you're going to have to migrate with us." And also, they had over years – they had bought an off-the-shelf system, but then they modified it so much so that it was not recognizable anymore. They had a whole department called OIS – Office of Information Systems – to maintain it. So their system was now called their own. It was Harvard's system. And he said, "This has all these issues." So, he said, "Honestly too, you're going to be everyone's last thought down here. We're not used to thinking about you. Given that, you're welcome to go onto HOLLIS." But we decided not to. We selected SIRSI – is the company – the Unicorn system. And it's an integrated library system. So what we did, we loaded our records from OCLC, that WorldCAT OCLC. We had been attaching our symbol to them all those years, so we were able to load them into a system, and SIRSI called their software Unicorn. And we had Unicorn, and it was at that point we started working together – the three departments here, but we still had very little to do with Harvard. They helped us with the data load, and then after that for years, we were on our own. We had a library information – I forget what we called her – but she managed our software. It was Donna Bible. And Ingrid Gibson, who is now interlibrary loan, but she had done a lot for the upkeep of our Unicorn system. That went along fine – well, not really fine. It went along, but it brought us all three together, but it was an odd time because we were still – I was still reporting to the Director of Pre-Columbian Studies, the landscape people were reporting to their director, and people – the directors were coming and going, so we had to work together, but the organizational structure had us working separately and taking separate lines of command. So Ned Keenan came in and said, "Okay, what do we have to do next, and what will work?" And we created taskforces. So the first thing was created a taskforce for acquisitions. It was called the ATF – the Acquisitions Task Force. We had jokes about that. That was bringing people from the three programs to figure out how to best use SIRSI, because it was supposed to be integrated and we were using it separately. So, we integrated that, then we integrated cataloguing. We still did not have a library as an organizational structure. We did not have a library director. Then we needed to – Ned Keenan said, "Okay, it's time to bring this all together." He created the position for Library Director, and Sheila Klos was hired. She came in, I think, 1997 or 1998, and a year later, the big decision was made – to go back and retrospectively convert all of the records that were done pre-Library of Congress classification for Landscape Architecture and Byzantine Studies because those two programs had used a system they had started before OCLC, before the world was sharing everything. A librarian at Harvard had created the Brinkler System. So, he created classification systems by subject area. And he created a Brinkler for Byzantine Studies and a Brinkler for Landscape Architecture. So, even after both of those programs went onto OCLC, they continued using their very beloved classification system. The scholars loved them. They were used to them; they worked for their fields. But for the cataloguers, and therefore for the entire library staff, it was an incredible amount of work. They'd have to re-class everything. This is a lot of work. I mean, it's a scientific hierarchy. At one point, they had stopped. I think it was the time when we integrated when we created the taskforce, Ned Keenan said, "No. We're going to have split libraries. We're going to have the old Brinkler stuff and everybody is going to go LC. We wanted that. The librarians were happy. The scholars, especially the older scholars, were appalled. The world was coming to an end. We had the library separated, but this was in the old house still. We had books everywhere. We had books in closets, we had books up to the ceiling, and we had books double stacked. They were used to that. They knew where their books were. Then all of a sudden, we had a separate little collection that was LC. And again, everything physically was separate. So, there was the pre-Columbian library, the landscape – we called it the garden library – and the Byzantine library. So, then we had the split collection. Sheila Klos was hired and she was told, "You decide with the staff what we should do." And we decided we should retrospectively convert it. That was a year after she started. And then in – eight years ago, I guess it was 2005 – we moved over physically and that was when the books were integrated. So, it was huge. You asked me about Harvard, but even more importantly in my career here, it's been the relationship of the library with its programs that has undergone complete evolution. So then, we still had SIRSI Unicorn, and then it was getting to be – oh, then Harvard selected their new system. The graphical user interface, and that was a long time ago now. I don't remember what year. They selected it, they got comfortable with it, they were happy with it. So, the same year that we moved over here, we went onto HOLLIS fully. Now, our records were in there. Our titles were showing in HOLLIS as being held at Dumbarton Oaks, but that was the only thing. We were not using it for creating our orders or for paying or for doing cataloguing work. We were doing all of the cataloguing work in our system and then uploading it to HOLLIS. So, this was going to be a huge change. Well we did it the same year we moved in [laughs] – just about did the tech services staff in.
JW: What were some of the biggest issues you faced during the move from the Main House to the new library building?
BG: There were so many issues. It was a lot of work. Sheila took care of most of the planning work, of working with the book movers, but then we had to monitor the work, and I would say one of the biggest issues was communication – because it was just a lot of physical logistics that had to happen. The book movers were still here. The contractors were finishing up the work on the house. There was this list. I forget what they called it. It was kind of like the checklist at the end; all of the little stuff that didn't get done during the big construction. So, all these contractors were still running around doing stuff. We were supposed to – we had to monitor any contractors. They couldn't be alone in the library. So, one of us had to be there babysitting. The doors were still locked – we couldn't go – it was extremely stressful. I think the stress came from – the construction was delayed. We had a smaller window of time to move than we had anticipated. The fall semester was still going to start on time and we had to be ready for primetime in, I think, six weeks. Ned Keenan was out of town, and the director of Landscape Architecture was out of town – maybe even moving. I think they were in between directors. Again, this – now, this wouldn't mean as much because we operate – the organizational structure is our own command. But then, we were still very much intertwined. So, what were the issues? The issues were keeping track of the books, getting the staff settled in, and all of that had to happen in a very short time. There was a lot of clean up. Even, "where are these books?" and "how are we going to manage this?" and "what kind of buttons are we going to put on this?" And then right after that, they had to start the HOLLIS – using HOLLIS. So they had to learn a new system. We had a shadow database in case any didn't load properly. We had this old database of our stuff and they'd have to go back in and look. So, it was double and triple work to do the same function – for tech services. This wasn't so much for me, but for my colleagues. For me, it was getting used to being physically separate from Pre-Columbian Studies. And even though we were in the same building, we were on different floors. And again, it was – the beginning was extraordinarily rocky in settling in. I think definitely the library works better in that new building and it's well-designed, but the stress was such that it took years for people to get over that.
JW: Were you consulted at all with regards to the design of the new building?
BG: Well, we were initially. Sheila worked very closely with the planning committee for the building. So, Sheila did, yes.
JW: And what factors, if any, make the Dumbarton Oaks's collection different from those in other libraries that are research institutions?
BG: Well, I tell our readers and Fellows when first come to the library – all of the scholars – I tell them, for Pre-Columbian Studies, what's special is we collect comprehensively in a very narrow field. So, even though the Library of Congress and the University of Texas at Austin have probably almost all of the same books as we have, our collection offers the advantage of that's all we have – the art history, anthropology of the cultures from pre-conquest up until the early colonial period and from Mesoamerica, central America, and the Andes – where they might have most of our books but in a wider collection of the entire history and anthropology and art history of Latin America. And ours are open stacks, and I also collect gray literature. One of the long-term projects that I've done here, which is, I think, one of my major sources of pride and a good legacy for Dumbarton Oaks, is to collect dissertations from Latin America in archaeology. Years ago, people would say, "Oh, it would be great if you could get these dissertations out of Peru, so when Jeff Quilter was Director, we started – the thing is, they don't have anything like UMI down in Latin America. In Mexico, they have something similar, because a lot of Mexican archaeologists are funded by the government, so they have to turn in a copy, and in Colombia as well; but in Peru they don't have anything like that. So, one of our Fellows said he'd go back home – one of our Peruvian Fellows – and send me stuff. And so he started photocopying down there – he had grad students do all of this photocopying – and these manuscripts or these photocopies would come loose in these giant packages that look like – for some reason, they were wrapped in burlap and sewn. Everybody hated them when they came, they were like, "Oh no, Bridget got some more dissertations." And because the photocopying was often poorly done – some of them went back to the fifties – so they were photocopies of typescripts with bad margins, and they used paper – it's a size that they use in Latin America and Europe called A4. So, they'd come in and sometimes we could use them and just bind them, but sometimes they weren't bindable, so we'd have to re-photocopy them and make better margins, or try to darken them or lighten them or whatever. And so it was an incredible amount of work, but then – we have the only collection, and we started with the north coast of Peru, and then he helped us with dissertations out of the universities in Lima, and then the southern area of Peru, which, in some cases – we have dissertations that even the libraries and universities no longer have there, or, if they have them, people couldn't get to them. It was during a period of the Shining Path, and places were not easily accessible, so we have a really important collection. And one time at my conference, the collection development librarian at Harvard asked me what tools I was using to collect because we were getting all these things that they weren't, and I thought, "Ah!" [laughs]
JW: To your mind, has this collection of dissertations proved useful to the scholarship coming out of Dumbarton Oaks?
BG: Definitely.
JW: How so?
BG: Well, people come here asking for it. And we kind of – an unexpected consequence was we'd get inter-library loan requests for these, and we don't lend much on inter-library loan. Period. And these – we have the only copy, so we have to be careful, we have to be sure we're going to get this back. I like to make our resources available to the scholars, so when we do lend them, we lend them with a lot of restrictions: this has to be used in the rare book room or special collection, under the supervision of a librarian. So, definitely it's noticed that we have them, and people are – one thing they comment on, and this was – we needed special funding to do this because it was expensive to – they all needed original cataloguing, like I said, they needed a lot of checking, they needed re-photocopying, but especially the original cataloguing. We'd send them out a lot, and we asked for more money, and the Byzant – the Director who came from Byzantine studies would say, "Why do you want these? I mean, most of the times the conclusions are, you know, later [laughing] disproven." We said, you know, "It's not the analysis, it's the raw data." And that's what our archaeologists would say. A lot of time these never get published – this data never gets published, so it's the raw data. And we convinced him, and eventually – again, back to our connection with Harvard: back in the day, there were no pre-Columbianists in Cambridge, but now we have Tom Cummins – there are a couple of chairs in pre-Columbian studies, [like] Gary Urton and Bill Fash. And they'd say, "Oh, definitely, you know; these are worthwhile." So, not only have our connections increased as far as library technology, but subject area also.
JNC: How many dissertations have been collected?
BG: Maybe between 200 and 300. And then, unfortunately, we wanted to do it with Mexico and Costa Rica. Individuals said, "Oh we'll go back and help." But then we ran into issues with author permission. And the Costa Rican project – they said, "Well you'd have to get the permission of each and every author." Now what Colombia did – we had to send their institute of archaeology a letter stating who we are and what we do: our collections do not circulate and we can put any restrictions that they needed to on them. So, we got a lot of great literature from Colombia, and not just dissertations, but the reports that they have to do, like the surveys before they excavate and the site reports afterwards. We were able to get all of those.
JW: So at this point in time, the libraries are integrated, you and your colleagues have secured some unique materials – what do you think the next big step is going to be in making the library as useful and user-friendly for scholars as possible?
BG: Digital initiatives. We're in the middle of that big step. And it's huge. It touches everybody, even people who aren't doing anything with HTML or Plone, Omeka, just because – it's very interesting – it creates a need for more refined description and more refined data on everything. An example is, Jan said, "Let's participate" – and we're happy about this – "Let's participate in Harvard's project to digitize rare books." So he asked each program to select a few rare books every year and we have funding to send them up to Imaging Services, and they have the coolest, snazziest equipment to photograph the books, and they do a really good job. So, we were like, "Okay, we'll send our books up." Well guess what? You don't just pack them up and send them. Most of our book – there's a software that can create meta-data, so you put in the equivalent of a catalogue record and it creates the meta-data for every image. But most of our books don't qualify, because, you know, they're just too special. They don't fit either the size or the quality of the image, so we had to create the meta-data, and thank goodness for Wendy Johnson, who's a cataloguer who had just been trained in meta-data because she's working on this big garden archive project. Well, meta-data is the equivalent of cataloguing each page. Of course, most of it is repeated, and you think, "Okay, well you just put in a page number or image number," but no, because then you have to decide: what do you do when pages aren't numbered? what do you do when there's a section that's not numbered, and then there's a section that is, and then another unnumbered section? how do you refer to them? You can't just say, "Unnumbered 1." So we had – and guess what? in this world, it's not all decided, and what we used to do for cataloguing – and I always notice this between us and the museum – that everything we had to do was already decided, like, they started in the 60s; they had international congresses to decide how to do this. We just had to learn the rules. But in the image world, they haven't ever agreed on all of those rules. So now we were getting into that, and Wendy would call Harvard and say, "Well, you know, what do you want us to do for this?" And they said, "Whatever you want." [laughs] "We recommend that you decide and stick to whatever you decide so that you remember." [laughs] So we had to have all these meetings, and it was so detailed – pew! "Well, what do you want? Do you want the fore-edge, and do you want these hinges, and what are we going to call these?" But it was very interesting, but it was a ton of work. So, they went up, and they just came back. And Sheila went and unpacked them, and now our records are in Hollis. If you go to those books, you can click on the link, and you can see the books and page through them. So, it's a big thing. That was just one thing. And then what – people used to do cataloguing of books. Like I said, Wendy – she's now working with the Garden Archive Project – she and Sheila are in constant consultation with Harvard, because it's a catalogue record for a letter, or some text that is linked to an image. It might be – it's a photograph, or it's a PDF of the letter. And then the transcription and all of this – okay, but how does that affect me? Well, it's expected of me – like I say, I used to – I never did book exhibits before. When we moved into the library, I had to learn to do book exhibits, physical book exhibits, so that was a big learning curve. But I got it down, you know, it got to be routine. And then they said, "Well now we want you to put it online." That was another thing to learn, and the first year I did it with Omeka, because we didn't have Plone up and running yet. So, I did it with Omeka, and the next time I had to do it with Plone; and now, like I said, we're getting more finely tuned, where we're creating the digital facsimile of the whole book, not that that's part of that project yet, but it could be. So, it's always one more level getting to the information. The other thing that has changed greatly in my time is that we care about letting the whole world know what we have. When I started here, we were told, "Mm-mm, we don't have the space, we don't have the people, that's not what we're about. We're here for the specialists. You know, we decide who comes and how many, and they have to know what they're doing. We cannot hold any hands. And when they come here, they come here to use our books." Like, they used to say, "We're not even going to borrow inter-library loan for them, or rarely." Because the idea is that the Fellows come here to use our materials. When they're back home, they can get inter-library loans. But you can't do that anymore. The world is all intertwined, and it was knocking on our door anyway. So, it was like, we have to decide how we're going to manage this, how we're going to control our image, how we're going to control our digital access, and how we're going to control their needs. So, now we – Deb gives them training on accessing Harvard's electronic resources. We pay our part of accessing the electronic resources, and then we offer them to the Fellows. But that's all changed in the time that I've been here.
JW: Did that change occur under Mr. Jan Ziolkowski's directorship?
BG: Mainly.
JW: Could you characterize his directorship, especially as it pertains to the library system?
BG: Oh, definitely. Whereas Ned Keenan – what Ned Keenan did was get us organizationally integrated, which was no small feat, and then had the library built and moved – that, again, no small feat. But then Jan has – I would say what he has done is brought us closer to Harvard, and he wants Harvard to know how much we offer them. He wants us to always make ourselves known as a good resource to Harvard. And the digital world – I remember – well, he has shown – they all show a great interest in the library, but partly it's – we've come so far in the last fifteen years. The library was always a good resource, but, to tell you the truth, the attention – it was usually thought of as, "Well, it's taking care of itself, and they're fine." But then they realized that we needed more support and space and all of that. So I think it just gets a lot more attention. So ICFA – the Image Collection and Fieldwork Archives – and the library are separate, but we have to know of each other's work, and it had gotten to the point, you know, where it couldn't be like – kind of like George Bush when he said "a thousand points of light," all of these volunteer organizations that will take care of things. Well, we can't just depend on ourselves reaching out collegially. We needed more structure, so he holds monthly meetings, where he brings us all together, people can report on what they're doing, and he and Yota are there to hear what we need, and, you know, do we want Harvard to come down, like somebody from the copyright office. Because the other problem that comes up for everything that's online is what we can put online versus – okay, for example, with my exhibits, I can put books in physical exhibits, where we don't have copyright concerns, but that same book I cannot put online unless – well, we thought we couldn't, so we would not put any of our facsimiles online. Well, it turns out that we can with certain restrictions, but we learned about that through this librarian lawyer who came down from Harvard – [laughs] – ,who said, "Everyone's a lot more – they self-restrict a lot more than they have to." So, it's his job to train people in what they can do. So, that's a big deal. The reason I mention this now is – at one of these, I think the second meeting we had, Jan had developed a mission statement for Dumbarton Oaks, including the library, and he said he wanted the library to be at the forefront of digital initiatives. And I remember thinking, "Too late!" [laughs] But then all of a sudden – we were – especially ICFA – I mean, that's separate from the library, but we hear about it. They're doing so much with digital initiatives. And I see the point now, that we're the right – we're a good size, we're big enough, and we have really unique resources, so it makes sense that we put all of this effort into making them available digitally. And now we have enough people, and people with the right training and education, to make it happen. So that's one of his big contributions.
JW: So we're reaching the end of the interview. Maybe we can shift gears one last time to talk about life in general at Dumbarton Oaks: the social atmosphere…
BG: Well, one of the things I've enjoyed is having the whole community of Fellows. For the most part, it's wonderful to have them here, you know. They come; they're so excited to have this opportunity. I get to work very closely with experts in their field, and then they leave, but most of them come back, whether it's to speak at a conference or come as a reader, or sometimes I just communicate through email with them – so, to just know all of these people. I don't know – I think that, even though academics are a quirky crowd, as a whole they're pretty happy with their lives. I mean, they chose it obviously, out of passion; they never thought they were going to make a lot of money. When I talk to other people who work – either librarians who work with other categories of patrons or patrons from other walks of life, I think I'm pretty happy with my patrons. And my colleagues – I think we have great people here, who really care about their work. And, again, I forget it, and I take it for granted, and then I go somewhere else – when I go to my conference, they're also a good group of librarians; but I hear about the pressures they're under. So, it's good. This isn't social so much as institutional, but a good thing is, we can still – Dumbarton Oaks can still pay attention to individual people and individual books, and other places can't do that anymore. I mean, they have to buy wholesale books that were selected by somebody else, and you have to buy the cataloguing that comes with them, and you can't do anything. And we still have – we're still allowed, we're still funded to catalogue; do original cataloguing and talk to individual researchers. So, that's very nice, and through that we get to know the people, and then we get to keep really qualified staff.
JW: Do any memories, positive or negative, stick out about your time here at Dumbarton Oaks?
BG: Oh lots. [laughs] I'd have to pick…so many… I don't know. I remember – I don't know which ones to tell. But when Elizabeth Boone interviewed me, I remember she said, "We get some people who have a prima donna complex. So, tell me, how would you deal with that?" And I thought, boy that was a really good question. But it's not too much of a problem in Pre-Columbian Studies.
JW: Do you remember your answer to the question?
BG: Yeah, and actually I do remember, and it's kind of what I do. I said, "I pretend I don't notice." You know, I just treat everybody like – I address the issue at hand. And it does work, like if people are trying to push their weight around, or want special services – just pretend like it's gone over my head [laughs].
JW: Is there anything that James and I have neglected to mention that you would like to discuss with us?
BG: I don't think so. I hope I said enough about the Harvard – the evolution of our relationship with Harvard.
JWC: You did mention that Harvard gets a lot from Dumbarton Oaks. What do you think that you gain from Harvard?
BG: Well, in part it's name recognition. If we have to deal with an outsider, and we say, "Oh, we're part of Harvard," they listen. [laughs] And also now a lot of support – not so much me in collection development – but tech services. And I'm so out of the loop now that I don't know the details, but they deal with their Aleph people, so the systems people – Aleph is the software behind Hollis. They get systems support, they have to deal with the accounting office up there because – see, when I did acquisitions, we just managed all of our own accounting here. And then the finance office here reconciled with Harvard, but now the reconciliation has to start within, and our Director of Acquisitions, our Manager of Acquisitions has to reconcile all of the accounts in the Harvard system. So, it's more work, but also a lot of support. See, that's a double-edged thing, you know, because it's a very complicated system; but I think everybody's happy that we're in Hollis. I mean, all of my colleagues, I think – we had gotten too big, and the world is too sophisticated to try to do it on our own anymore.
JW: You mentioned that you've got a very unique group of patrons at Dumbarton Oaks and you have very unique collections – how has working here changed your conception of what a librarian is and does, if at all?
BG: I don't know if it's changed it. I think it's allowed me to be the librarian I had envisioned in the library that I had envisioned. And that's what's not true very many places anymore. I mean, the big university libraries, Ivy League, and the big public flagships, they can't do it anymore. So, I think it's confirmed for me.
JW: Well, unless we have any more questions…
JNC: There are a number of people whom we unfortunately cannot interview, and I was wondering if you had any interactions with Seka Allen, for example, and could say anything about what she did here.
BG: Oh…I did. I overlapped with her for years, but I don't know if I can remember – because I did – my interaction with her was mainly having lunch with her; and I liked her a lot. She was one of the people in one of the Byzantine studies programs that really reached out to the pre-Columbianists; but as far as what she did with the index, I don't remember. I just remember it was very physical, it was cards and papers and cutting and pasting. But she was a well-trained old-school librarian or archivist.
JNC: Thanks.
JW: Thanks you so much for your time.
BG: You're welcome.]]>
EG: Elizabeth Gettinger.
AS: And Anne Steptoe.
JNSL: We have the honor today of interviewing James Carder. We are here at Dumbarton Oaks to speak with the Archivist. Do you guys want to start with a question?
EG: Sure. So, I guess just a sort of start up question – we see that you were a Junior Fellow here in the '70s?
JNC: Yes, I was.
EG: And so we wanted to hear how you first got involved with Dumbarton Oaks and what your initial impressions were.
JNC: I actually first got involved very modestly when I was an undergraduate. I was working on an excavation in Yugoslavia at the Palace of the emperor Diocletian and wanted to read an eighteenth-century description of the palace by Robert Adam, a rare volume of which the Dumbarton Oaks Byzantine library had a copy. And I somewhat naively came to Washington to work in the library as an undergraduate and learned – then as now – that undergraduates don't have easy entree, but I did manage to get a photocopy of that book sent to me, which was otherwise hard to come by. I was on a Ford Foundation Archaeological Traineeship Grant, so there was money for doing that sort of thing. So, that was my first introduction in the later '60s, and then when I went to graduate school I applied for a Junior Fellowship and received it, as you said. It was a two-year – it turned into a two-year fellowship at that time and I finished my dissertation at Dumbarton Oaks.
EG: So, what was the fellowship program like when you first arrived here?
JNC: It was, I think, pretty much the same as it is today in many important aspects. Like today there were more Byzantine Fellows than Pre-Columbian or Garden and Landscape Architecture Fellows. One difference that I remember, and I think it might have been both a difference of chance and possibly a difference of design, was that there were more art historians in the mix of Fellows than there has been in subsequent periods. There were easily five if not six art historians in my group, which made for a very nice situation in terms of getting intellectual stimulation from your peers. Ioli Kalavrezou was a Junior Fellow as was Ruth Kolarik and Jeffrey Andrews and Kathleen Shelton. And Rob Nelson was a Junior Fellow in my second year. And besides that, Otto Demus and Hugo Buchthal and Carlo Bertelli were Fellows, and Ernst Kitzinger came occasionally from Harvard. And, of course, Bill Loerke was Director of Studies, so there were a lot of Byzantine and Early Christian art historians around. The other thing that I remember very much about my fellowship years was that there was a great camaraderie, and the Fellows themselves organized parties and all sorts of events, sometimes costume parties, where, for example, at Seka Allen's home, we put on elaborate silk and brocade clothes and masqueraded as some historical figure, real or imagined!
JNSL: What did you dress up like?
JNC: I think I was an emperor. It wasn't very – my costume wasn't particularly successful, as I remember, but I tried. Many of the staff, including Sue Boyd, who was assistant or associate Byzantine curator at the time, as well as Seka Allen – Jelisaveta Allen – a research librarian – were very conscientious in inviting Fellows to their houses or otherwise organizing events for them. There was a real spirit of being part of a group that was well taken care of.
AS: Did this social camaraderie extend between Byzantine and Pre-Columbian fellows, or was it more of a Byzantine community?
JNC: It did extend among all of the Fellows. I believe – and I really should check the archival record on this – that there couldn't have been more than two Pre-Columbian Fellows and maybe only two Landscape fellows, or possibly only one. The numbers in those junior programs – junior in the sense that they came later in the institutional chronology than the Byzantine Studies program – and really only began having Fellows in the early '70s. I remember Frank Alvarez in Garden and Landscape and Peter Joralemon in Pre-Columbian. But even though there were only three or four non-Byzantine Fellows, I think they were always included in the parties. Then occasionally there were Byzantine-specific activities, such as an exhibition at the Walters or something like that – then it was just the Byzantine group that went.
EG: How did you find the atmosphere here academically; was it an easy place to work on your dissertation? What resources were of the most value?
JNC: It was a dream. I didn't have too much to compare it to, though I'd had a Fulbright the year before I came here in Germany, and I was using primary material libraries in Wolfenbüttel and elsewhere and not necessarily so much using secondary resources. But I had that as a benchmark. But here, even before I came, I received communications asking what microfilms or -fiches I might need that I would be expecting to work on as they wanted to check whether they had them or not. And if they didn't have them, they'd do what they could to get them, which I just found wonderful and remarkable. I don't think I ever needed a secondary resource, a book or whatever, that they didn't have or couldn't get. And at that time there was a liaison person to the Library of Congress, and he had the wherewithal to make a weekly trip to the Library of Congress and bring back materials that Fellows and others had requested. I don't think that program lasted much longer, but it certainly was in effect the two years I was here and that, of course, just doubled the possibilities of doing research. So, I thought the resources at Dumbarton Oaks were terrific, as I believe people continue to think to this day.
AS: Were there any academic mentors that you met and became close with during those two years?
JNC: Yes. As you probably know from the history of Dumbarton Oaks, there actually were, in the early period, faculty members – permanent faculty members – here, and that was just being dissolved, in a way. But Ernst Kitzinger was still here – or at least occasionally – when I was a Junior Fellow. Although he was frankly more in Cambridge than at Dumbarton Oaks, though he did come to Dumbarton Oaks for several months and, so, he did have a presence. And he and I discussed many aspects of my dissertation. Hugo Buchthal, I don't think, had a professorship but he had an appointment of some sort while I was here, and he was invaluable. And then people like Kurt Weitzmann would come around, and he had asked me to write some catalogue entries for the "Age of Spirituality" exhibition that he was planning for the Met, so we knew each other in a way, and his advice was great. But I also think that my peers were terrific. We did the same thing that's done today, we gave progress reports on our dissertation topics or our research topics depending on our level. And it wasn't pro forma; people thought about them and critiqued them, and if there was some tangent that perhaps the speaker hadn't considered, someone in the group might say you should look at this book or you should consider this primary source of some ancient author and see what they have to say. I found it invaluable.
AS: How often did those occur?
JNC: Those research reports? I think on average once a week, as they do now, scattered throughout the academic term – followed incidentally by a sherry hour. There was also sherry served before lunch on Tuesdays, I think it was. I think Jan has now revived this and has it at his house, but that apparently was a tradition that Mildred Bliss had inaugurated before her death in 1969, and I don't know if it had continued unabated until my tenure here in the mid-'70s, but I think it then sort of fell off the board soon thereafter.
JNSL: Did you ever hear any anecdotes from the older, say, the older Fellows or older scholars about Dumbarton Oaks while you were here as a Junior Fellow or any stories about some of the early days that caught your ear or that stand out in your memory?
JNC: I didn't – I don't remember much, if I did, and so consequently I think I didn't. I heard innumerable times the story about climbing over the perimeter walls to swim illegally in the swimming pool. I must have heard that fifty times from fifty different people or people reporting on their best friends who had come over the wall at night to swim, and otherwise I don't remember anything either boring or juicy. I'm not sure how much I was really aware, too, of the institution and its institutional history. I don't know how much I was aware of the Blisses, although I did meet Jack Thacher who was still alive at the time. I had a friend at the Carnegie Museum of Art, David Owsley, a curator, who knew Jack Thacher, apparently fairly well, and he suggested, since he knew I was coming as a Junior Fellow, that I – that Jack Thacher invite me over for tea or something, which he did. He talked about the Blisses, and I remember now that you mention it, thinking that I should somehow know more about the Blisses. It's too bad I don't have a time machine and could go back, as I know a great deal more now. But he talked about Mildred Bliss at this tea.
JNSL: And how did you come into your current position today? What was the story behind that journey?
JNC: When I finished my dissertation and left Dumbarton Oaks, I started as an assistant professor, first at Case Western Reserve University while someone was on sabbatical, and then I came back to Washington where I was at Mount Vernon College and then at George Washington University at the Mount Vernon Campus. And in 1989, I received notification from Sue Boyd that there was a notice of a job position – but it was a part time job position – at Dumbarton Oaks for someone to advise on the objects that are now formally known as the House Collection. Apparently, the president of Harvard University had received some letters questioning whether some objects were in the best care, and the president had written to then director Angeliki Laiou, asking if there was curatorial responsibility for these prints and drawings that were hanging on walls and that sort of thing. And so she realized in a way that there wasn't – there was a Byzantine curator and a Pre-Columbian curator and so forth, but the so-called House Collection was not particularly well situated in anyone's sight lines. So, I interviewed with her and was offered this job, and the first element of it was to do an assessment, a condition assessment of things – especially things of value – and things that were possibly in harm's way. And I did that, and while I was doing that assessment I was also trying to get any information on these objects, because there were no dossier files and, really, no sort of curatorial management for this part of the Collection – the House Collection, as we know it today. So, I was bothering people asking where invoices might be kept or where conservation reports might be kept, and so forth. And that caught Angeliki Laiou's attention. So, she asked me to start putting together a complete dossier for the House Collection. You can see the snowball moving down the hill here!
EG: When was that?
JNC: This started in '89, as an advisor; and I became a staff member in '92. So, I was here during her entire tenure. When Ned Keenan came, early on he talked to me and said that he wanted to revisit the new library project and even revisit it situated under the North Vista – that very controversial location where it had started out in the 1970s. He said, "I need to find all the plans and all of the correspondence and documents from the '70s to see where things were left off." And so he went around looking for them, and of course there was no Archives at the time and things were where you might least likely think they should be. But since I had also taken this route trying to put together things for the House Collection dossiers and had literally looked in the attic and in the basement and in people's file drawers – really just any place – I had something of an unwritten road map of where things were. So, I was actually able to put my hands on these drawings which I knew to be rolled and stored under this building in not the best of circumstances, and I also was able to put my hands on the correspondence files. But there was no logic to it, and they were in cardboard boxes, and I think they were labeled but there wasn't any reason to know that they were there. So he was both horrified – Ned Keenan was – and relieved, and he said, "Would you be willing to take on the reorganization of the archives in much the same way as you took on the dossier building of the House Collection?" And I said, "Yes." So, that's how I came to be House Collection Manager and then later Archivist.
EG: So, what were some of the goals of the archives project and what was the organization of it?
JNC: The mission of the Dumbarton Oaks Archives is to retain and conserve in perpetuity any item that is of importance to the institutional history of Dumbarton Oaks. And that, of course, can be interpreted broadly or narrowly, and a caveat to that is to understand the physical limitations of space, at least in terms of hard copy or hard object storage. So, not every scrap of paper that happens to have survived is fair game for the Archives because it would overwhelm the real estate. So, the first objective was to find out what was still around that really was critical to retain and, if it was in deteriorating condition, what to do to make an analog copy of it somehow to keep its shelf-life going. Then, to find a way to organize it so that it could be easily accessed by people who would want to see this material in the future, and to weed out things – but not capriciously – weed out things that shouldn't be saved. And so I spent the first two years of my life as an archivist just interviewing people in their offices and seeing and telling them that I thought that it was very fair game if they were actively using files or materials that these files should continue to reside with them, as that was a very good use of institutional space and resources. But, if they had things that were just clogging their file cabinets that they themselves felt should be retained for the institutional memory, these should come to the Archives. And so, things began to flow in, and it was greatly interesting to me to make coherency out of all these disparate files and images and objects. And the system I devised now can be added to very easily. For example, when Alice-Mary Talbot retired recently – although she had been a very faithful contributor to the Archives – she did one final sweep of her office files and took things out that she didn't think Margaret Mullett would necessarily need and sent them down to the Archives, and that's how it's grown. And it works pretty well, as I think you can attest because you've been using files from the Archives.
AS: What role do you see the Archives playing at DO?
JNC: It has an absolutely critical role in that we've never written either a periodic history, other than the annual reports or biannual reports, or an official history of the institution. There are a number of history-like discussions – the Pre-Columbian Studies program has a good one and so forth. But, there's a lot of very important institutional activity from the past that hasn't been chronicled in a historical narrative, but it is captured in the correspondence and in the interim reports to the president of Harvard University and so forth, and this material sits waiting for someone to rediscover it. And this material really informs us as to what happened and what people thought they were doing and how they went about their business as they defined it at the time. And it shows that there were mistakes and how people learned from them and how the institution moved on. I think every institution needs an archives and it should use its archives to find out who it was. Here we also use the Archives to check when scholars propose things to us – either fellowship applications or research proposals or what have you. We can go back and see what they've done for the institution before, what we have on file. It's not always complete, but it's very useful. And unfortunately when a scholar dies we often use the preserved archival material for writing an obituary, because sometimes we're the institution that has the best knowledge of the contribution that that particular scholar has made to the field of Byzantine or Pre-Columbian or Garden and Landscape Studies
JNSL: Could you perhaps comment on the uniqueness of Dumbarton Oaks in terms of an institution and what its mission is – both the museum and the professional library, the fellowship program, and its sort of general position here in Washington?
JNC: In a certain sense, Dumbarton Oaks is not unique, in that it's a research institute. There are many research institutes, and they tend to have all of the same phenomena: they have libraries, they occasionally have collections that support the focus of the research, they have a fellowship apparatus, and so forth. But Dumbarton Oaks is, to a degree, unique, and part of its uniqueness is the mandate of its founders, the Blisses. They wanted the institute Dumbarton Oaks to be in Washington, D.C., and although it was to be administered in many ways through Harvard University, they did not want it at Harvard, and during their lifetime they were very clear on that point. They thought things that happened at Harvard were perfectly wonderful and that the student body and the faculty interaction with the student body and all of these good things were what a university of great standing such as Harvard should have. But, for them Dumbarton Oaks was something other, it was, in a way, a retreat, and although they wouldn't have used and didn't use the term "ivory tower," in a way it was just that. Dumbarton Oaks was something other than an urban campus, it was sixteen acres of beautiful gardens, it had an ambiance of sophistication and, to a degree, elegance in the architecture and appointments of that architecture. It allowed people the breathing space and the environment in which to be reflective in their studies. And then, of course, the studies programs themselves are not your average studies programs. You don't have a choice in Byzantine studies between twenty different research studies programs so that you might apply to them all and choose the best one that responds. If you're a Byzantinist and are going to go to a research institute in America, Dumbarton Oaks' Byzantine studies program is probably the first and, to a degree, only choice, and Pre-Columbian and Garden and Landscape Architecture are very similar. In a way, the narrow foci of this institute ensure its quality and ensure its ability to remain vibrant and relevant. If we did twelve other things from ancient to contemporary abstract expressionist studies programs, we would dilute ourselves. You have to be very wealthy to do that. CASVA is very successful because of its high level of funding and amazing resources. But to be a CASVA you have to be very wealthy and you also have to be very astute at what you collect as research materials and what mix of people you bring together in a far-ranging research institute. So the very small focal nature of Dumbarton Oaks makes it unique, I believe.
EG: Could you speak a little bit about the relationship between the Dumbarton Oaks Archives and the Bliss archives at Harvard which I believe were moved to Harvard in the '80s?
JNC: In 1982, right? In 1982. That was, of course, before my time. I believe from what I've read is that the Blisses themselves had deposited at Dumbarton Oaks a considerable collection of their correspondence and memorabilia. How well organized it was and how topically organized it was I can't say because I know it was completely rethought and re-catalogued at Harvard and wonderfully so. The woman who took that on as a six-year project – I don't believe she was working on it full time necessarily, but I think she was working on it consistently – she did a really remarkable job putting together a first rate finding aid and so forth. Anyway, Dumbarton Oaks had this on its premises, and it had other related things that the Blisses themselves had not accumulated. And the librarians here put this material into folders and boxes because they were, I think and rightfully, concerned about it: one, in terms of making sure that it didn't get lost or misused or thrown out or left to deterioration, and two, they were concerned that they didn't really have the physical room to store it. Until the new library was built, the Main House, as you well know, served as the complete campus with the exception of the Fellows Building, and that really wasn't used for much other than the purpose of feeding and housing Fellows. So, the Main House was really everything: it was library, it was research space, it was meeting space, it was museum space, it was everything, and as Ned Keenan was fond of saying, it was at two hundred percent capacity when he came as director, and that was very true. There were bookshelves in the hallways, and there were often bookshelves in people's closets. And, you know, if you said, "I have 125 linear feet of Blissiana memorabilia, where shall I put it?," there wasn't an easy answer. So in 1982 under Giles Constable, it was decided that everything sort of pre-1940, the date of the Blisses' gift of Dumbarton Oaks to Harvard, would be sent to Harvard which was willing to accept it to establish the Bliss Papers, and that was done. And everything 1940 and after would remain at Dumbarton Oaks. But as I've said, not much was done with this later material until the '90s. It was in boxes and filing cabinets, and I don't think anyone much cared about these archival materials. The problem with the decision was that there is now a segregation: there is a sort of Bliss family, residential pre-1940 group and a Dumbarton Oaks institutional, post-1940 group of documents. So, there is a segregation. But, there is in fact a seamless continuity between these two groups of documents, and anyone who is researching the origin or the early years of Dumbarton Oaks has to use the Bliss Papers at Harvard to get the complete picture. So, it's a little inconvenient. On the other hand, Harvard is a wonderful caretaker and curatorial manager of such things and they're in perfect storage conditions and housings. Although I personally would like to have the Bliss Papers closer to hand, but I don't think they need to be sent back here. I'm not going to compare them to the Elgin Marbles, because I don't think we would have lost this material, but they're at Harvard and well cared for in a way that perhaps historically Dumbarton Oaks wouldn't have had the physical space or the staff to look after them.
AS: After the Archives, you've had the opportunity to work on a number of publications, lots of cataloging projects. Can you talk a little bit about some of the most memorable projects?
JNC: Yes. I started using the Bliss Papers in order to complete the dossier files for the House Collection, learning, as I just explained, that many of the pre-1940 documents were at Harvard. And since many of the objects that the Blisses acquired that are now at Dumbarton Oaks were acquired before 1940 – in fact the vast majority of them were – much of their dealer correspondence and any other kind of ephemeral reference to an object that might be in the House Collection would be at Harvard rather than here. So, I was able periodically – usually yearly – to get a small budget line item to go to Cambridge and sit in the Archives for a week or so and just call up box after box after box of correspondence and either key-enter it into my laptop or get a Xerox of it and enter it into the dossier system. And that really allowed me to get a much better understanding of where the Blisses came by their Renaissance, Baroque, Western Medieval, Asian, and other collections, the documents for which didn't end up in the Byzantine Collection department because they weren't relevant. As you can imagine, for one good document you read five hundred that are very interesting but aren't relevant, so I also knew to a large degree what else was going on in the Bliss Papers, and I soon realized that there was a player out there in the Blisses' life, Royall Tyler, who was just absolutely instrumental in forming the Blisses'– that is the Dumbarton Oaks Collection. I mean, but for Royall Tyler, I think the collection as we know it today would not exist. And as it happens, the Royall Tyler Papers are also at the Harvard Archives. These are a long series of correspondence between 1902 and 1952 mostly from Royall Tyler to Mildred Bliss. And when I was asked to do some catalog entries and essays for an exhibition in Athens, Georgia – when Byzantine objects and American paintings from the House Collection were asked to go on loan there – I alerted Rob Nelson, then at the University of Chicago, now at Yale University – who had been asked to do the Byzantine Collection essay for that catalog – that he should look at both the Royall Tyler Papers and the Bliss Papers at Harvard. And he did, and it opened his eyes as it had mine, and so we then began to think about how useful this correspondence would be if it could be transcribed, annotated, and published in whatever format – hard copy or perhaps electronically, or both. And so, we wrote up a proposal, and the project was put into the works. And so, now when I go to Harvard, I'm also looking at the Bliss-Tyler correspondence. The correspondence starts in 1902 and ends roughly in 1953, the time of the death of Royall Tyler, and I'm through '35 on it. The '30s is the most voluminous part of the correspondence run, and '35-'39 is still a sizable chunk, but in the '40s and early '50s it drops off, so I'm about eighty percent done with the transcription. I've written an introductory essay to what will be the first chapter, and I've annotated the letters from that first chapter. I'm hoping soon to do the second chapter, and Rob is working on the '20s and '30s material – he's working on the '20s material now. And when the '30s' correspondence is transcribed, that will chronicle the meaty, Byzantine-centric part of their buying and corresponding. So, we hope in a year and a half time, if that's not too ambitious, to have this at least in a good draft form. It's going to be huge – that's the unfortunate part of it. It's – if you publish every letter, which I think we should, even the ones that say "Thank you very much, it was a delicious meal," and they occasionally do that, although these are intellectual people who take some time to write what they want the other person to know about life as they see it and art as they know it. I think if we publish it all, it's going to be very lengthy. If it's in hard copy format, it would certainly be two or more volumes, and there's cost implications there. If we publish it electronically, it'll be very usable by people in the future no matter how it ends up, because you can search it – if the spelling is correct, hopefully it will be. And, for example, I was talking with Gudrun – I don't know how anecdotal you want this interview to be, we can scrap this at the end if you like – who was interested in why the Blisses never acquired significant enamels, Byzantine enamels. And I said, "Oh well, you know, they really wanted to and they wrote to Tyler and Tyler to them about getting a significant enamel," and she said, "Oh, that's very interesting. I'd always wondered if they just didn't like enamels or what." And I said, "You know, once this document is done, you'll be able to, even in a Word format, type in the word enamel and just graze through their correspondence finding every time the world enamel is mentioned. It'll just be easy to sate your curiosity as to what the Blisses were doing with enamels, or icons, or manuscripts, or Stravinsky, for that matter. It's just going to be much easier to do research on the Blisses, if anyone is interested to do that. So, those were my two primary uses of the Harvard Archives, for the House Collection dossier files and this Bliss-Tyler project. And, in the interim, every time I've found something of interest to me about the Blisses or about Dumbarton Oaks, I've typed it in a document, a so-called chronology, called "master chronology," that is easily three hundred pages long now in Word format, and is just date, line item, and the source, taken both from primary materials such as the correspondence and secondary materials that tell the life of the Blisses and Dumbarton Oaks.
EG: Is that something you intend on publishing someday?
JNC: I don't at the moment, although I think a history of Dumbarton Oaks is long overdue. Certainly this chronology will remain at Dumbarton Oaks, and it can be migrated to whatever technology is used in the future.
EG: So, in terms of your role as the manager of the House Collection, could you speak a little bit about what your impressions were of the Blisses' mission in collecting the House Collection and about their acquisitions there?
JNC: Yes. If I could answer it slightly differently, I would say that when I came as a Junior Fellow to Dumbarton Oaks and long thereafter when I talked to people at Dumbarton Oaks or colleagues at Dumbarton Oaks I always had the strong impression that the Blisses collected Byzantine and Pre-Columbian art and rare landscape books and sometimes botanical prints and manuscripts, and that they had a focus of collecting that brought about the collections as they were then displayed. And then they had some household furnishings and some paintings and sculptures, but in a sense just as they had clothing and a wine cellar: these were part of the comme-il-faut nature of being a wealthy resident. Since I have taken on a curatorial role as House Collection manager, I realize that the Blisses were considerably broad in their collecting interests. And we tried to make this point in our first special exhibition, "The Collector's Microbe," where we talked about how the Blisses not only collected Byzantine and Pre-Columbian art, but also Asian and American and this, that, and the other. And I see my role as House Collection manager not only as a true curatorial position to protect and catalogue the collection as it has come down, but also as an advocacy position to make sure that the Blisses' vision for Dumbarton Oaks, in terms of art, isn't interpreted in as narrow a way as I understood it initially and I think others have understood it. And this is proven, I think, much beyond a shadow of a doubt, when you look at what they collected in the '37 through 1940 period when they knew that they were gifting the property and its collections to Harvard. That's when they bought a Degas and a Riemenschneider and a Rouault and other great paintings and sculptures knowing that they weren't going to ever really live with them, but believing that this "home of the humanities," the famous phrase that Mildred Bliss uses in the preamble to her will and testament and was used other times in her correspondence, needed to have these great things; that great art inspired great conversation which inspired great research. And the same was true with music. There is absolutely no reason to continue musical offerings at Dumbarton Oaks in a Harvard institutional fellowship arena, because it wasn't a music research institution. But the Blisses were adamant about that and really hoped Harvard would find the wherewithal to continue some kind of musical programming. And the Friends of Music series, which was inaugurated in 1946, was the result of that. All this they saw as being for the Fellows. The music was for the Fellows. The art was for the Fellows. The garden was for the Fellows. Yes, they eventually were opened to the greater and broader public, but that isn't the Blisses' initial interest. The uniqueness that we talked about earlier in the Blisses' vision was that this was for scholarship and fellowship enrichment. So, I see that also as part of my job description to try to make the House Collection a little bit more integral to the institutional wealth.
JNSL: What is the most exciting project that you have been a part of in your time at Dumbarton Oaks, of all these wonderful things, the one closest to your heart that brings back the happiest memories?
JNC: Had you not qualified your statement at the end, I'd have given you a couple. But, the most exciting event – clearly and without a doubt – was the planning for and all of the activities that ensued with the building of the new library and the renovation and rehabilitation of the Main House, including the Music Room. This would be the thing that is dearest to my heart and that makes me the happiest. But the whole renovation will stand out in my memory after I leave here as being my most important contribution. That said, it was arduous and it was painful and it was time consuming and often laborious, and I often thought I never, ever wanted to do that sort of thing again. There are the seemingly never-ending meetings over minutia on plans and the inevitable problems that come up when you're planning for new architecture and the renovation of historically significant architecture. But, it really was terrific; I learned enormously from it. I had great colleagues and superiors – Mike Steen, certainly, who was project manager on a consulting basis, and certainly the director Ned Keenan – and working with great architects, I really loved that. The renovation of the Music Room ceiling is probably my fondest part of the project, especially because the results were, to my mind, so stellar, and I worked with great people on that project as well. But the removal of a world class collection from its housing, the incredible amount of detail work of making sure you knew every object's condition and crate housing and shelf storage housing and this and that and then bringing it all back and making new mounts and new vitrines and designing all of that in the interim before it comes back…. Again, I never want to do it again, and probably won't have to, but those are once-in-a-lifetime curatorial opportunities that would probably be distasteful to many who are not curators, but I think are just the meat of what you do when you're in charge of a great collection.
AS: If we could go back a little bit to your curatorship of the House Collection, to what extent have acquisitions been active after the Bliss days?
JNC: The House Collection is not an actively acquiring collection. That said, we do still acquire, although not in the way or to the degree that the Byzantine or Pre-Columbian or rare book collections from the library might collect. They would want to collect great examples of their particular genres, if they can be acquired legally on the marketplace. That is their mission. Their collections are not necessarily static as they were deposited by the Blisses. The House Collection, on the other hand, is. What remains from the House Collection is a kind of finite collection of Blissiana material, some of which was sold off to increase revenue for collecting in Byzantine and Pre-Columbian. We don't do that any longer, but we do acquire for the House Collection occasionally. We acquire furnishings when things wear out, especially Middle Eastern carpets. We also – although we haven't done much of this in my tenure – we also buy Blissiana material, if it's relevant. We would certainly try to buy any portraits of the Blisses that came onto the market. And they had their portraits made many times – Mildred Bliss, in particular – but they didn't choose to retain them. The one painting of Mildred Bliss that hangs over the fireplace in the Refectory they actually gave away to a friend, who later gave it back to Dumbarton Oaks. If there was some significant object that the Blisses had owned that had left Dumbarton Oaks, we might try to get it back if it was relevant to us. There have been pieces that have come up for auction – furniture in particular – that we know the Blisses owned that we haven't tried for. We just don't need it.
JNSL: Was anything ever stolen? Was there ever any – as far as you know, were there any issues with that?
JNC: There have been a few thefts, particularly of things in the gardens. The Pan figure that sits in an arched bricked area pointing towards the Acadian pool that's called Lovers Lane Pool was stolen twice and returned once and not recovered the second time. The artist who did that sculpture was Francis Sedgwick. A cast of it had been acquired or given to his daughter, and she still had it. So, after much convincing and effort, the daughter agreed to make a new mold from her sculpture from which our Pan was recast. One of the eighteenth-century putti riding dolphins that are in the Fountain Terrace was stolen, also twice, once recovered, and once not. And fortunately they are an exact pair – they're not bilaterally symmetrical, as bookends are, they're literally the same object cast twice, so we made a cast of the existing one. There are two in the garden, and one of them is modern, cast from the other, which is the original. Smaller things have been stolen, but theft has been minimal.
EG: So, could you tell us a little bit about the interaction with the House Collections with the Fellows and the scholars and if that's changed over time?
JNC: I don't know if it's changed over time in the sense of predating my arrival here, because I don't really know what happened vis-à-vis the Fellows and the House Collection. When I first came, we used to do an orientation for the Fellows, which is still done, but that orientation also included a tour through the house and especially the areas where there was significant architecture and interiors or significant House Collection objects that might be of interest to the Fellows. They also had a tour with the Byzantine curators of the Byzantine Collection and they had a tour with the Pre-Columbian curators of the Pre-Columbian Collection. The House Collection tour got dropped after five years or so, I don't quite remember, because the schedule of what the Fellows did upon arrival just became somewhat onerous and the House Collection was expendable. So, we've never done that again except by request. And certainly when we reopened, there were a number of requests that I take people through the house and show them what happened during the renovation, and this involved taking both the docents and the Fellows. Also, occasionally, Fellows are interested in House Collection objects, especially the western medieval ones, and so of course they come to my office and, like any reader, they sit and read the dossier files and look at the historic photographs and so forth, but that's somewhat unusual. And every now and then someone is interested in the Blisses so they come and ask questions.
EG: Is that also true of the Archives? – interest in the Archives?
JNC: I have a lot of interest in the Archives from the studies programs, especially the directors. They change fairly frequently, as you know, sometimes every five years, sometimes every ten years, so they often, depending on their interests and the way they want to define their ongoing or upcoming projects – they want to see what's happened. Sometimes they have that material in their offices, but frankly a lot of the historical material is in the Archives, so they check out what they need. Also, by chance, I have a number of scholarly files that relate to research or projects that were given to Dumbarton Oaks by, especially, Byzantine scholars, although in one case by a Pre-Columbian scholar, and when Fellows are working on similar topics, they come and use these materials. However, I've had about ten Fellows in the twenty years that I've been here do that, so that's not a huge number.
EG: Is there much relationship between the House Collection and the Byzantine and Pre-Columbian Collections in terms of organization and exhibition?
JNC: Yes and no. The three Collections are all part of the same department, which is the Museum department. There's a little bit more of a sophisticated curatorial apparatus for the two primary collections, Byzantine and Pre-Columbian, less so for the House Collection, but we meet sort of on equal grounds otherwise. The exhibition space, so-called, for the House Collection is the Music Room, and it is by plan and tradition a different type of exhibition space than the gallery type of space that the Byzantine and Pre-Columbian Collections use. We have decided to retain a kind of residential, Edwardian, Kunstkammer look for the Music Room – no wall labels, no vitrines. Yes there are spot lights and there are a few museum fittings, but they are meant to be discrete. The only – I'm not quite sure how to answer your question, that's why I said yes and no. So, let me end by saying the new thing that we've done recently since the Collections were reinstalled is to bring collecting at Dumbarton Oaks and the Museum Collections at Dumbarton Oaks into something of a unified focus. And the Bliss Gallery – which was inaugurated with that reinstallation – has a vitrine which, as of tomorrow, will have an inaugural exhibit of animal bronzes, which come from at least two of the Collections. We had wanted them to come from all three of the Collections and they could have, but the Pre-Columbians needed their very few animal bronze sculptures for the permanent installation. We will probably do a hard stone exhibition there at some time, which will be House Collection Asian, House Collection European, Byzantine, and Pre-Columbian, in order to show that the Blisses were interested in artworks made of hard stone from many cultures, and that way refocus attention on their collecting and collecting interests rather than on the cultural nature of the collection. And that certainly was true, as I said a moment ago, with the inaugural special exhibition – hallway exhibition – titled "Collector's Microbe," which put objects from all three Collections into the same vitrines and onto the same walls in order to show that this was a Dumbarton Oaks collection in the singular, our literal and legal title – we are the Dumbarton Oaks Research Institute and Collection "singular," and I think that use of the singular was purposeful – I think that was by choice.
EG: Other than the creation of the Bliss Gallery, the House Collection has always been housed in the Music Room?
JNC: Housed, in a public sense, in the Music Room. Housed, in an institutional sense, throughout the building, so the paintings and furnishings that you see on the first floor – what we call the first floor gallery, the hallway between the museum wing and the Founders Room, for example – the paintings in the Founders Room and so forth, these are all House Collection items, including the Founders Room itself, the boiseries, the wall paneling of the Founders Room – these are all accessioned House Collection items. They are now actually on public display to a degree because we've just started running docent tours on Saturday by sign-up appointment, but that's a very new and historically unique moment in our public persona. But, we've always had House Collection objects used the way the Blisses wanted them to be seen and that is as beautiful things to delight, inspire perhaps, staff and Fellows and scholars. So, there's a public space and a private space, and there's a big storage space where a number of things don't see the light of day at the moment, because there's no room for them.
JNSL: Are you aware of any attempts either in the immediate past or the more distant past to take some of the stories associated with Dumbarton Oaks and its history and turn them into any kind of dramatic or sort of novelistic element? Has anyone ever shown an interest in doing that, because when I listen to these stories I think sometimes it sounds like it would make a great movie, or make a great play, or make a great story?
JNC: I've never heard of such a thing. I do think that a history of the institution needs to be written.
JNSL: That's something that several people whom I've interviewed have said.
JNC: And I think through the Oral History interview project and through the archival holdings, both the Bliss Papers at Harvard and the ones that we've now talked quite a bit about, it's all there. One might identify additional people to interview once one started writing a history, as always is the case with biographies or institutional histories. But easily eighty percent of it is already there, it just needs the time and the interest.
EG: So, have you noticed any significant changes over the time that you've been here since your undergraduate 'til the present, in terms of the academic or social or even physical setting here at Dumbarton Oaks?
JNC: Let me start with the physical setting. The physical setting was in need of renovation by the time that Giles Constable became director. He pointed that out in the interview that I did with him, and he wrote about it in his biannual report several times. He points out that well-made buildings are not like the buildings that he or I, as he put it in his interview, might buy because we can't afford to buy better-made buildings. We have to replace the roof every twenty years, whereas roofs on better-made buildings last for fifty years in all respects. But when he came to Dumbarton Oaks, the fifty year time bomb was about to explode. And it was absolutely true – the infrastructure of the physical real estate of Dumbarton Oaks was in dire need of renovation. And he was the one that reinforced the third floor – the attic floor, which is now used for the publications office space – in order to house shelving for the Byzantine library, and in Thomson's tenure, the courtyard gallery was built and all of that space underneath which had been just dirt was excavated to form a connection between the basement of the Garden Library and the Pre-Columbian Collection and underneath the Music Room, which allowed for offices and shelving and storage space and so forth. So, the physical plant improved fairly steadily. Air conditioning was added in the Constable era, and the physical plant continued to improve steadily in the years that I knew the institution. It improved dramatically in the '90s and at the turn of the century with the acquisition of new real estate: the director's house and the apartment building La Quercia, which took a certain amount of pressure off of the existing real estate, including some questionable legal pressures: the old director's house, now the Refectory, probably could not have housed a family of more than two people because using the upper floor as a bedroom space might have been considered illegal from a life-safety aspect. There were reasons to move on and certainly in the first decade of the twenty-first century, the decade we're in, the building of considerable new physical space – the library, the gardeners' court – and the renovation of the existing physical spaces was a remarkable change. That's the easy answer. Socially, I don't know. I was in my twenties when I was a Junior Fellow, and the parties and the swimming pools activities and going into Georgetown for impromptu, on-the-cheap dinners and beers was great fun. Do Fellows still do this today? Probably. I think when you interview some of the younger Fellows or staff, that's an interesting question to ask. I see Fellows being very serious here. They're very nice and when I interact with them on a social level I always enjoy that, but I see them being very serious, and I have a feeling that was always the case. That hasn't changed, but possibly the pressures of the world and the paucity of job openings in academic humanistic professions and just the need to spend your money wisely and move on and get your research and your dissertation done or your next book done and so forth leaves you little time to have a beer and a pizza. I don't know. You had a third prong on that question?
EG: Academically.
JNC: Academically. Oh, the standards here have always been very high, remarkably high I think, in everything – the choice of people that come. I know that sounds slightly self-serving, so forgive me. But the publications, the programs and projects that the institution has sponsored – I mean, Dumbarton Oaks has a stellar record, and I don't say that because I'm "in-house." I think I could write a critical review if I had to, but you know, you look at the history of what this institution has done in the world and here in its self-appointed research areas or interest areas, and it's just remarkable, it's remarkable.
AS: Has the evolution of the faculty to speak of here at Dumbarton Oaks changed the academics?
JNC: The Blisses and the early administrators wanted some kind of faculty presence, a kind of senior mentorship, I believe from what I've read. Let me back up to say that I think the Blisses initially just wanted senior research people here. When more junior people came and were given a kind of task working half day on their dissertations and half day on putting together a census of Byzantine objects in America or, if they were text people, looking at textual references for objects. (If you haven't read David Wright's paper on the early years of the institution, I highly recommend it to you.) I think the Blisses and the administration realized that there needed to be a kind of mentorship program for the more junior people who came – that this was something that would be very valuable. And because of the Harvard association, a kind of academic model was first chosen where there would be professors. But, it didn't make a great deal of sense because they didn't have students and they didn't give classes, per se. I mean, they might offer seminars maybe or give occasional lectures, but they didn't – it just wasn't a good model. And if they became tenured – initially a few of them did – what did they see their role to be? Did they see their role to be tenured faculty who fortunately didn't have to teach so they could spend one hundred percent of their time doing research, or just what? And so it was hard, it was a very hard model to keep going, and I think they were right in doing away with it, and in providing academic leadership and academic mentorship in other ways through having a coterie of like beings of all stages of life physically in one space. As is true now with the symposia and catalogue projects and the coin and seal seminars that are run in the summer, people with similar interests can come from different institutions and talk together, talk to senior members, talk to junior members. Dumbarton Oaks facilitates that, makes the bread and butter of that happen. It would only happen otherwise through email or through something much less interactive.
EG: So, sort of in closing, could you talk a little how you see the role of the Archives and the House Collection in the future?
JNC: The Archives should be exactly what it is today, only better. It should have every significant bit of Dumbarton Oaks institutional, intellectual history that's pertinent to the institution, housed there. It should be user-friendly, it should be – in a conservation sense – secure and well maintained. If we ever enter into an economic period and a digital period where things like that can be more easily accessible through digital technology, then that should happen. It happens obviously to a degree because everything you're doing will eventually become, if it hasn't already, part of the Archives and this comes in digital format, so the transition is underway. The House Collection should also carry on as it is, should maintain its course, ensuring that its role in both the Blisses' lives and in the institutional life of Dumbarton Oaks should not be forgotten. Its status should be maintained and honored because many of the art objects – by no means all, but a good many – are museum, world-class pieces that show a great level of connoisseurship and interest by the founders of this institution. Maintenance of this Collection should be insured, because it isn't inexpensive to maintain an art collection. But Dumbarton Oaks has and, I hope, will continue to do so. And I think that it should. In bad economic times, or when the world has moved on, one has to make choices, and it's possible that things will change, but for the moment I think we should stay the course for both the Archives and the House Collection.
JNSL: Thank you very much.
JNC: Thank you very much.
JNSL: It's been wonderful.]]>


text:
The Department of Modern Languages offers a Bachelor of Arts degree with a major and a minor in Spanish, a minor in Translation Studies, and an Associate in Arts degree in Spanish Translation.
These programs of study are designed to develop effective oral and written communication skills and to provide students with the requisite knowledge of the literary and cultural traditions of the Hispanic World that can prepare students for a variety of careers in education, translation and interpreting, government and business that are open to bi-literate students with a Liberal Arts background in the new global society. Modern Languages, as a liberal study, involves literature, history, psychology, sociology – indeed, culture in its particulars as well as its universals. In this respect, the Modern Languages faculty believes that language studies offers an education that is as much a preparation for life as for employment.
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text:
on December 26, 2012 - 7:12 AM
, updated December 26, 2012 at 12:02 PM
The Kiwanis Club of Buffalo and the Buffalo Kiwanis Club Foundation re-elected Christopher Lukowski its treasurer for the next fiscal year. Lukowski, a CPA, has been a member of Kiwanis for eight years, and this coming term will mark his seventh year serving as treasurer. He has been with Lumsden McCormick since 2002.
Clinton Brown Company Architecture of Buffalo named Hannah Beckman a historic preservation project assistant. Beckman is a recent graduate of the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Va. Clinton Brown Company is a historic preservation architecture firm.
Company Connections
Carson's Country Deli & Bakery, serving meals and desserts for 20 years, is now making its cookies available for sale online at www.CarsonsCookies.com. The restaurant and bakery is at 5668 Old Saunders Settlement Road, Lockport.
Lakelet Advisory Group, a strategic financial and technology advisory firm that focuses on nontraditional engagements, was recently founded by Michael Koeppel, a CPA. Koeppel serves as managing director of the company located at 1902 Ridge Road, Suite 146, West Seneca.
Sevenson Environmental Services of Niagara Falls was awarded a contract by the Delaware Solid Waster Authority to construct the Cherry Island Vertical Expansion Project in Wilmington, Del., a mechanically stabilized earth berm that is one of five finalists for the American Society of Civil Engineers' 2012 award for outstanding civil engineering achievement.
M&T Bank is continuing its long-standing support of Fredonia State College with two substantial gifts, made through the Fredonia College Foundation, to benefit the Fredonia Technology Incubator and the Keeper of the Dream Scholarship and Leadership program. M&T is providing $75,000 over a five-year period to the technology incubator. M&T is contributing $20,000 to the Keeper of the Dream program with a $20,000 contribution. The program provides renewable $4,000 scholarships to five entering freshmen based on high school achievement, community service and a demonstrated commitment to multiculturalism.
Title: Tablet computer stand
No.: D672,783
Inventor: Robinson, Walter Robert (Buffalo)
Date issued: Dec. 18, 2012