#nyugsas

by Laura Juliano, NYU Graduate Student, Public History and Archives

The Textile Workers Union of America Scrapbooks WAG 249, is a collection in the Tamiment Library at NYU Special Collections. The Textile Workers Union of America (TWUA) was an industrial union of textile workers established through the Congress of Industrial Organizations in 1939 and which merged with the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America to become the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union (ACTWU) in 1976. 

Work in the Lab:

During my time in the NYU’s Barbara Goldsmith Preservation & Conservation Department, Book and Paper Conservation Lab, I was part of a project to complete the second step of the TWUA’s iterative process: creating access by opening up the scrapbooks from their bindings and rehousing the material.

Western Union Telegram, 1917; Textile Workers Union of America Scrapbooks, Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, WAG 249 NYU Special Collections. 

If a binding is too tight, the text is obscured. To fix this, we removed the bindings, the conservators removed the cloth covers and removed the text block from the board, and then each page was separated from the binding paste by peeling them apart one at a time.

 Original bindings of the Scrapbooks; Textile Workers Union of America Scrapbooks, Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, WAG 249 NYU Special Collections. 

Once the pages were separated, they were re-foldered and re-housed in archival quality boxes and folders and sent up to ACM for processing. The collection is now more accessible for researchers and is ready for its next step in processing.

After the Pandemic:

My time in the lab was cut short due to NYC’s quarantine and the global pandemic that has swept through our city. My hands-on learning was replaced with zoom interviews with conservators and archivists from around the country, discussing iterative processing and how to balance access with preservation at larger institutions. This is access I would never have had if my internship had stayed in the lab.

While the personal interviews and access to top industry professionals has been informative and useful, I am worried about the opportunities I am missing out by being unable to work in the lab, what hands-on experience I could have had if I could still be learning directly from some of the best conservators in the country.

While we wait to see how the pandemic plays out, I am finishing my semester remotely while the Special Collections library handles access and user interface remotely. In this age of remote learning and remote access, what are we missing out on and what are we gaining?