Today Kelly and I continued our Phase 2 work in the Anthropology Archives. The beginning of the day was business as usual, and we made our way through a majority of Room 1. The last collection we looked at is the one that really caught our eye, belonging to Nels Christian Nelson. Nelson was a long-time employee at AMNH, serving in a number of curatorial positions at the Museum. He was also President of the American Anthropological Association, President of the Society for American Archaeology, President of the American Ethnological Society, and Vice President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

While we had written about mixed collections before, this one takes the cake! It was a mammoth collection made up of all different formats: papers, correspondence, photographs, negatives, lantern slides, maps, field journals, and film.

There were over 2,500 photographs and most were curling and brittle, even with sleeves. Luckily they are being digitized, so researchers can still access them despite their deteriorating condition. The maps were also in pretty poor shape, many were too brittle to be unrolled. However, the lantern slides and negatives appeared to be in good condition, with surprisingly no cracks and very little fading. Needless to say, it took us some time to go through and properly assess this collection, but is a great example of the different kinds of materials that make up each collection in the Anthropology Archives.

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