Through the Pratt Insitute, School of Information fellowship program, I have been working at the American Museum of Natural History in the Library Department for the 2016/2017 school year. My assigned Conservation and Digital Curation project involved preparing early museum correspondence books for digitization, entering structural metadata into an Excel sheet, and digitizing each page. The early museum correspondence was housed in Letterpress Books, from the Institutional Archives (Early Administration). Each book had a custom enclosure built to ensure proper housing. I primarily worked with Barbara Rhodes in the conservation department.
The Library department at the American Museum of Natural History is nestled in a far corner of the fourth floor, somewhere behind the Tyrannosaurus Rex. Library staff offices and the library conservation department are located on the fifth floor. I worked on both floors throughout my fellowship; treatment of the Letterpress Books took place with Barbara on the in the conservation lab on the fifth floor, and scanning took place in a back corner of the fourth floor.
