Day 27: Independent Study - Interviews at the Wiener Library

Interviews at the Wiener Library

Former D.A. M. /Curator

We talked about the WL implementing its digital strategy building technological infrastructure to engage in digitization projects. Currently, managing digital imaging workflows building content from within the D.A.M system. Technologies involved: Goobi, Goobi viewer, Fedora repository, Wordpress, Drupal.

Reference Librarian

 Interesting to learn the focus on the user experience. One of the main goals for the librarian is to provide users with clear expectations to make the most of the resources at the library and the use of the reading room. We talked about customer service how well they are doing since they have clear guidelines policies on how to use the reading room, do book requests, copy services, etc. (it was one year ago you can see these clearly stated here: https://www.wienerlibrary.co.uk/?unique_name=Using-the-Library
As she greets the visitors, and she finds out there are two donors talking about donating material she is thankful she said “It is because of you that we are here” . She reminded me about the main vision of the institution, which is to Collect/ To Preserve/ To Share. She handed me the last two annual reviews of the WL which I greatly appreciated as this will be helpful for my research paper.

Head of Special Collections

They have printed books, pamphlets, unpublished memoirs, manuscripts, thesis from Master's and Ph.D. degrees. As far as the cataloguing goes, they have a customized thesaurus keywords, which are the access points. The classification of the words are by the names of the concentration camps, and ghettos for example. E.g. Women inmates [name and place of camp].

The thesis are donated but these are not actively collected. Currently, they have a backlog of audio and visual material, working on getting funding to start the digitization project. The acquisition budget that she has is about 30 K pounds a year for academic books. The collection is also made up of rare war items from the war period, About 80,000 books. They acquired at least 20 posters with political and anti-communist propaganda. She is excited about developing a template for cataloguing posters which are separated from the books.

Sr. Researcher and Curator

 This interview is about the "genesis and development of an exhibit" from a bequathed collection of original photographs which belonged to Gerty Simon, and also material that belonged to Gerty's husband and son, who were interned as enemies and separated when deported.
My conclusion after the interview is: An archive without curatorial activities might as well be dead. What is the point of collecting if material remains inaccessible.  The work that the WL staff has done is  very intense and time consuming but very rewarding. Perusing the annual reviews, I could see the correlations between investing more money in digitization projects and a significant increase in usage and visitors coming to the Wiener Library. Co-curation is key. I have a separate post with details of the curatorial process for the exhibit of the Gerty Simon collection.