Courtney Tkacz, VMFA’s Archivist, knew from compiling the Fabergé Archive that having historical material available online to readers all around the world would unlock new insights and information. Putting the 700 items related to VMFA’s Fabergé Collection into a cohesive, accessible archive was an accomplishment and, as the museum’s only full-time archivist, it had been a big task.
That experience did little to prepare her for what came next – the Louis Draper archive of over 6,600 items that represent more than 50,000 images, a gift of untold importance spanning the photographer’s entire adult life. The archive, acquired by the museum in 2015, was not only voluminous, its insights into this important period in history as well as art and photography were valuable to scholars of many disciplines.
As part of the VMFA Archives, the Draper Archive Portal would be available to anyone around the world who wanted to access it, no fee involved. So the first task was to find a way to structure the archive so it would be useable to scholars and others who wanted to know more. “It took a long time to figure out how to do it,” Courtney said. “There was no other archive out there of this size that was a model.” The answer was to organize the material around each photo shoot. “Once we did that, it all started to fall into place.”
The material includes items from throughout Draper’s life. College notebooks, letters, receipts, exhibition catalogues, photographs, contact sheets, announcements, all from his professional life as a photographer and educator of 30 years. Thanks to a very generous grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a full-time photographer and a part-time archivist were added to the team. The archivists pored over the material, organizing and cataloging. Once the materials were ready, they were photographed and the resulting images digitized. The process of photographing alone took eighteen months; the project in total was over three years.
“My role as an archivist is not to interpret the material; that is for the curators to do,” Tkacz explained. “My job is to find the important information that can help the curator tell the story. It worked really well for this exhibition.” Already, the archive has been widely used. Education teams have used the material for teacher/student workshops around the state and Courtney has given many tours of the material and the library where it is housed. “Space will be a big challenge. This was our first experience acquiring an archive of such breadth and depth, but it was such a great success, so it’s something I believe we would all like to do again.”