PROJECT DESCRIPTION

The Charles F. Cummings New Jersey Information Center of the Newark Public Library seeks proposals from qualified professionals to prepare a detailed work plan to process the Newark Evening News Morgue Collection of photographs. It is estimated that the collection encompasses more than 2 million photographs. Newark Public Library is one of only a handful of important newspaper morgue collections in the nation which include the clippings, indices, and photographs, creating an unparalleled resource for understanding New Jersey history of the twentieth century. Newark Public Library seeks a detailed work plan that would guide staff and contractual employees to rehouse and catalog this massive collection in a systematic manner. This work plan would also be an essential part of any future proposals to the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, the New Jersey Historical Commission, and other public and private funding agencies and organizations, seeking support for carrying out this work.

The project consists of two tasks: examining the collection and preparing the work plan with cost and time estimates for processing the various series within the collection. Newark Public Library estimates that this project will take five working days, two days to examine the collection and three days to prepare the work plan with cost and time estimates. The consultant will have the assistance of NPL staff librarians and library assistants to carry out the on-site examination.

ORGANIZATION DESCRIPTION

Since 1888, the Newark Public Library has served as an anchor institution of Newark – dedicated to serving the diverse populations of the city, its surrounding communities, and those throughout the state. Today the Newark Public Library is the most comprehensive public library in New Jersey, serving more than half a million patrons annually, by providing a wide range of programs and services that promote use of its vast cultural, historical and literary collections, with a firm commitment to its responsibility to provide free and equal access to its unique resources and services. For 118 years, the Newark Public Library has been enriching lives and expanding horizons, a vibrant center for community life and learning for people of all ages.

One of the most distinctive of the Library's collections is the Charles F. Cummings New Jersey Information Center (NJIC), the division of the Library dedicated to expand, preserve, and make accessible information about the history and current events of Newark, Essex County, and New Jersey. Founded in 1938, NJIC's holdings have depth and breadth that goes well beyond a typical library's local history collection. Collections include books, newspapers and newspaper indices, census records, legislative materials, on-line resources, government documents, photographs, prints, periodicals and periodical indices, manuscripts, maps and atlases, ephemera, and other materials, and numerous indices and finding aids for researchers. NJIC maintains the state's best historical and current clippings file.

Perhaps the most significant collection, and useful to most researchers, is the Newark Evening News Morgue Collection. Newspapers keep a "morgue," a library with clippings of articles, editorials, and original photographs in subject files, to provide writers and editors with a reference collection of information, opinion, and images for future news reporting, feature writing, and opinion pieces. When the News ceased publication, the complete morgue collection was donated to Newark Public Library, with the help of journalist and historian John Cunningham. The collection included subject files containing more than 2.8 million clippings pertaining to New Jersey and the United States, more than two million photographs, 500,000 clippings about foreign subjects, and 350 handwritten volumes of indices recording the subjects and dates of articles.

For more than 30 years, Newark Public Library has been processing this vast collection of materials and making it available to researchers. At first researchers were able to use the clipping files as deposited at the Library, filed in envelopes by subject. But in 1984, with a small grant from the New Jersey Historical Commission, the Newark Public Library hired a consultant to evaluate the collection and, using that evaluation, prepared a successful funding proposal for support from the National Endowment for the Humanities to begin microfilming the clippings collection. With substantial support from the New Jersey Historical Commission, the New Jersey State Library, and others, Newark Public Library has processed this collection for continued public use.

Beginning in 1988, the delicate, brittle clippings were systematically pasted onto large sheets, alphabetized by subjects, and then microfilmed. In 2005, the last of 700 reels of microfilm were produced, encompassing the entire collection of New Jersey and United States subject clippings from the Newark Evening News. Complete sets of the microfilm are in use by researchers at Newark Public Library and at the New Jersey State.

In 2006, a Microsoft Access database of subjects was completed, with more than 162,000 discrete index topics, based on the subject headings from the original envelopes in which Newark Evening News staff filed the clippings. This database, which includes the reel number for each subject heading, will be made into MARC records in spring 2007 and will be available as part Clavis, the Library's on-line catalog, thus ensuring the broadest possible access.

COLLECTION DESCRIPTION

The Newark Evening News, begun by Wallace M. Scudder in 1883 and published until 1972, was regarded as the "paper of record" for Newark, North Jersey, and the state, with reporters covering the State House, city halls of all major cities, and county, state, and federal court houses. At its height in the late 1940s, circulation exceeded 250,000, and cartoonist Lute Pease won a Pulitzer Prize in 1949 for editorial cartooning. According to a former editor, the Newark Evening News was a special service to the people of the state. The paper was unrivaled in the breadth and depth of its daily portrait of New Jersey life. According to one historian, the Newark Evening News Morgue Collection is "probably … the single most important collection of documentary material that addresses New Jersey's twentieth-century social, political, and economic culture."

This collection consists of the photo archive of the Newark Evening News. This very large collection of approximately 2.1 million photographs is stored in an unoccupied building, formerly used as the Business Library, in the heart of Newark's commercial center. The building is not climate controlled. In 2002, with grant funds from the New Jersey Historical Commission, a Preservation Survey of all photographic collections of NJIC was conducted by conservator Barbara Lemmen, of the Conservation Center for Art and Historic Artifacts in Philadelphia, and archivist Gary Saretzky, of Monmouth County Archives in Manalapan, New Jersey. This document has aided NJIC and Library administrators in establishing priorities for preservation. The collection descriptions below are excerpted from the 2002 Preservation Study.

The most recent photos in the NEN photo collection date from 1972. Because only the most recent are filed chronologically, it is not known when the earliest photographs were made. The earliest photos examined in the 2002 Preservation Study were made in 1928 but it is quite likely that the collection includes earlier images. The photographs are stored for the most part in the original manila envelopes used by the newspaper. Most of the envelopes are stored vertically in five-drawer file cabinets, plus a few four-drawer cabinets. The drawers are very full, making it difficult to remove the envelopes for use. The collection has a number of separate series, as follows:

1. Photos of individuals, filed alphabetically by surname, A-Z, in five-drawer file cabinets, #1-77. Most of these individuals were newsworthy for a relatively brief time, although some well-known people are included.

2. Celebrities, filed alphabetically by surname, A-Z, in file cabinets #78-84 and most of #97. Many of these files are for politicians and well-known actors and actresses, including an entire drawer on John F. Kennedy. More typically, there are several dozen different photos of a single famous individual, such as Ingrid Bergman or Sophia Loren.

3. Photographs filed by year, 1965-1972, 52 drawers (cabinet numbers not recorded). These photographs include documentation of the Vietnam War era, the youth movement, etc.

4. Photographs filed by subject, such as aircraft, animals, Black Panthers, Byrd Expeditions (1928-1940) civil rights, Communists, KKK - New Jersey, merry-go-rounds, triplets, and yippies. These files are found in non-sequential file cabinets #86, 98, 105, R342, PC71, and an unnumbered cabinet that includes an entire drawer on the John F. Kennedy assassination.

5. Sports, filed in non-sequential file cabinets #86, 104, and F-7, for a total of approximately five drawers.

6. Foreign Countries, filed in non-sequential file cabinets #99, 102, 103, and R342, for a total of approximately 10 drawers, of which two are on Vietnam.

7. New Jersey Cities, 8 drawers in file cabinets #99-101.

8. Newark subjects, A-S, 4 drawers in file cabinets #101-102.

9. Space Program (Rockets and Missiles such as Honest John, Jupiter, Nike-Zeus), one drawer in file cabinet #101.

10. States of the United States, Alabama to Wyoming, 7 drawers in file cabinets #104-105.

11. 1964 Presidential Campaign, including Democratic and Republican conventions, three drawers in file cabinet #102.

12. U.S. Coast Guard and U.S. Navy, one drawer in file cabinet #102.

13. Vertical subject file with a mixture of photographs and printed materials, six cabinets, #F1-F6.

Of the above series, much of the New Jersey material is in the 12 drawers of New Jersey Cities and Newark subject files. Given the mission of the NJIC, these files may be given priority for preservation and access measures. Another reason is that it is less likely that these images are available elsewhere, unlike the photos that relate to national news. This is also a more manageable quantity of material for a one- to two-year project. It should be considered, however, that New Jersey-related images are also mixed in with the series for subjects and individuals. For example, it is likely that many images of Newark-area residents are included in the series for individuals.

There are two other reasons why the New Jersey material should be given first consideration. First, the Newark Public Library controls the copyright for photographs created by the Newark Evening News or obtained through "work for hire" and it is likely that a higher proportion of the New Jersey and Newark files will be NEN-owned than the photographs that pertain to national and international news, which were received by the Newark Evening News from picture agencies such as AP, UPI, and Acme. Second, a project that has a focus on New Jersey is more likely to receive support from funders with a New Jersey focus, such as the New Jersey Historical Commission, the New Jersey Council for the Humanities, and several private foundations.

QUALIFICATIONS