no. 1: February 2022 – ARLIS/NA Multimedia & Technology Reviews

Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art

February - 2022May - 2022 Karina Wratschko

Nicole Elizabeth Cook, Program Manager for Graduate Academic Partnerships
Philadelphia Museum of Art
Nicole.Cook@philamuseum.org
https://doi.org/10.17613/wch3-wx35

IIIF multi-mode viewer in ”*Rubens’ Invention and Evolution: Material Evidence in The Fall of Phaeton*,” *Journal for Historians of Netherlandish Art* Vol 11:2 (Summer 2019). This view shows, clockwise from top left, visible, x-radiograph, and false-color infrared reflectogram (“IRR”) views of the painting, which users can manipulate with their cursor.

Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art (JHNA), launched in 2009, is the open-access digital journal of the professional organization Historians of Netherlandish Art (HNA). Over the past decade, JHNA has become a reliable, streamlined, and technologically savvy resource for art historical writing related to the Low Countries in the early modern era, roughly corresponding with the geographic boundaries of modern day Holland and Belgium. The journal publishes new academic essays and republishes older articles newly translated into English.

JHNA has always had a forward-thinking focus on art historical essays that attempt to incorporate digital imaging technology in new ways. The journal was helmed by Dr. Alison M. Kettering from its formation until last year when Dr. H. Perry Chapman took on the role of Editor-in-Chief. While some articles cover more cross-disciplinary topics, the specialized content of JHNA essays is primarily oriented toward scholars focused on Dutch, Flemish, German, and Franco-Flemish art history and material culture from the Medieval era through the eighteenth century, with consistent focuses on attribution and artists’ biographical information, stylistic analysis, and examination of the cultural and social contexts of works of art. Some articles are of interest for museum curators, art conservators, and library & archive professionals whose work intersects with early modern Netherlandish materials. The journal is at its best when it takes advantage of its digital format to advance innovative image viewing modes to highlight technical and conservation-focused art historical inquiries.

The online resource is open access and freely available online without paywall barriers, and without the need to create any accounts. The design of the website is visually appealing, and image driven, without being over-designed. Users can navigate easily between present and past issues, and straightforward to find information about the journal’s editorial board and submission guidelines. Because there are no logins involved, there is no opportunity for customized resources, although there are choices that the user can make with how to view and interact with the images illustrations that feature centrally in each essay. The journal’s digital platform allows a robust use of images far beyond what would be available in a printed format, including side-by-side image comparison, ability to zoom in and out of images, and image overlay technology.

Recently JHNA received funding from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation and the Association of Research Institutes in Art History (ARIAH) to support development of enhanced image viewing and navigation tools, including a specialized side-by-side viewer and an “IIIF multi-mode viewer” that allows users to study a work of art up to a microscopic level using a range of technical images and paint samples. The journal targeted its development of these digital image resources for a special issue devoted to ”Rubens’ Invention and Evolution: Material Evidence in The Fall of Phaeton,” with authors E. Melanie Gifford and Jennifer Henel (Volume 11: Issue 2, Summer 2019). Gifford’s pioneering work in using microscopic analysis of painting materials to address art historical questions makes her a natural partner for JHNA and its image-rich focus. The research work of JHNA users will benefit from the journal’s continuing experimentation with using new imaging technologies to enhance art historical enquiry.

Pedro E. Guerrero: A Photographer’s Journey

February - 2022May - 2022 Gabriella Karl-Johnson

Reviewed by:
Marilyn Creswell, MLIS
marilync@tutanota.com
https://doi.org/10.17613/kny1-0b95

Pedro E. Guerrero: A Photographer’s Journey is a one-hour segment of PBS’s American Masters series in partnership with Latino Public Broadcasting’s VOCES series. It is a documentary film about a photographer’s ability to capture architecture and sculpture, so translating an object from one medium to another is central to the story. It fits the tone of other PBS documentaries: both informational and relaxing. In the canon of artist documentaries, it is similar but more professionally focused than the 2021 Rita Moreno episode of American Masters. It may be most similar to the 1993 The South Bank Show episode on Annie Liebovitz: structured by significant projects, showcasing famous works, and supplemented by personal interviews.

This work would pique the interests of photographers, sculptors, architects, and anyone who studies those subjects. In addition to covering Guerrero’s photographs of Frank Lloyd Wright, Alexander Calder, Louise Nevelson, and their works, the documentary includes Guerrero’s coverage of war and the “Mad Men” era of magazine imagery. Thus, some segments might appeal to students of different periods of American media history. Despite the preview’s mention of his upbringing in segregated Arizona, the documentary only briefly engages with his Mexican-American identity as it relates to his decision to enlist. Instead, it focuses more on the subjects of his works. The work was filmed just three years before Guerrero’s passing in 2012, so it functions as a retrospective of his main works.

Only a three-minute or six-minute preview is available through the PBS website for users without an account; the full film is also available via the Kanopy streaming service, to which many public and academic libraries subscribe. Purchase of the documentary is available through a digital download or on DVD through PBS or Amazon ($24.99). It can be rented or purchased as a digital download on the Apple TV store ($4.99-$9.99) or Amazon ($4.99-$7.99), as well as via Prime Video or Apple TV subscription streaming services. Apple and Amazon both allow users to view materials in browsers or through their apps. Despite the partnership with Latino Public Broadcasting, the Kanopy instance of the film did not offer Spanish audio and caption options at the time of this review.

PBS produced a book, digital exhibit, and other educational resources to accompany the documentary, which will be helpful for viewers who wish to study individual photographs at length. Interviewees in the documentary remark on Guerrero’s ability to capture three-dimensional architecture in a two-dimensional form, and the documentary filmmakers highlight that ability. The movie includes many of Guerrero’s photographs, then shows where he took them, demonstrating how artfully he captured the feeling of a place. When covering more biographical elements of the story, the documentary includes interview footage with Guerrero; at other times, it uses historical film footage. These were effective tools to give audiences a better sense of who Guerrero was and what world he lived in.

Alt-Text: Guerrero in his living room, facing the camera. — Pedro E. Guerrero speaks to audiences, reflecting, “I’m still amazed what can happen with just the click of a shutter […] I’m ninety-two, of Mexican descent, still proud, and I’ve had a fantastically glorious life, and it continues to be that way.”

French Paintings and Pastels, 1600-1945

February - 2022May - 2022 Karina Wratschko

Reviewed by:
Julia Reynolds, MLIS Candidate
Simmons University School of Library and Information Science
julia.reynolds@columbia.edu
https://doi.org/10.17613/fx8w-yb21

The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art’s French Paintings and Pastels, 1600-1945 is an online catalog that brings the museum’s collection of 110 French paintings and pastels to visitors and scholars worldwide. Launched in 2021, it is the seventh volume in a series of catalogs that systematically documents the NAMA’s encyclopedic collection and the first to be published digitally. It offers viewers much to learn from a digital distance and has infinite potential for addition and modification.

The catalog is edited by Aimee Marcereau DeGalan, Louis L. and Adelaide C. Ward Senior Curator of European Arts. With twenty-six contributors, the NAMA aims for a vision of collective authorship. Most contributors are affiliated with the NAMA, but others are curators at the J. Paul Getty Museum; faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and vice presidents at Wildenstein & Co.

Mobile friendly, French Paintings and Pastels, 1600-1945 is best viewed in either Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome. It can also be downloaded as a PDF and printed in hard copy to store and preserve for future use. There are no accompanying video or audio clips.

Compared to the multimedia, web-based publications funded by the Getty Foundation as part of its Online Scholarly Catalogue Initiative, French Paintings and Pastels, 1600-1945 more closely resembles a traditional print publication. Entries are arranged chronologically by artistic movement. Within each movement, the paintings and pastels are arranged alphabetically by artist name. Each fully published object includes a high-quality curatorial entry by new or established scholars interpreting the subject and contextualizing the art within the artist’s career, with zoomable high-resolution photographs, comparative figures, and fully searchable text. Technical entries from conservation staff document how each artwork was made and its state of preservation. Detailed provenance, related works, exhibition history, and bibliographic references appear at the bottom of each entry page.

Those entries with new scholarly research and commentary are indicated by a page icon. At the time of writing, such new information is provided for nineteen artworks, most of them Impressionist and post-Impressionist masterpieces by artists including Monet, Morisot, Renoir, and van Gogh. The new technical examination of van Gogh’s Olive Trees (1889) is especially compelling. For object pages without the expanded object entries, there is a note indicating when enhancements are expected..

More than twelve years in production, this digital scholarly effort benefited from external funding at several key moments. The National Endowment for the Humanities made a startup grant in 2009 to support the research and preparation of the original manuscript. The Kress Foundation awarded a Digital Interpretative Grant in 2018 to make possible the hiring of a digital developer and digital assistant. Finally, the Marion and Henry Bloch Family Foundation supported this project as part of a grant to increase awareness, scholarship, and understanding of the Marion and Henry Bloch Collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist Art.

The NAMA seeks to ensure that French Paintings and Pastels, 1600-1945 will be maintained and updated for the long term. Any revisions or corrections made to the publication after the first edition date are listed on the “About” page and in the project repository at https://gitlab.com/namafpc/catalog-french-paintings, where a more detailed version history is available (login required).

As with any online catalog, the danger lies in its limitless possibility for expansion. High-resolution images and historical background information are important, but arguments must eventually result from this abundance of raw material. When adding new scholarly research and commentary, the challenge for the NAMA will be to ensure that its contributors continue to offer a clear point of view.

Monument Lab Podcast

February - 2022May - 2022 Karina Wratschko

Kathy Edwards, Librarian
Emery A. Gunnin Architecture Library, Clemson University
kathye@clemson.edu
https://doi.org/10.17613/e0ws-qb59

The Monument Lab podcast is a podcast about public art and art history that reimagines monuments as tools for social and cultural change. The Lab has produced twenty-seven podcast episodes since its launch in 2018, ranging in duration from thirty-five minutes to nearly an hour and a half. Each podcast is available directly from the website or is downloadable to mobile devices via the Apple, Google, Spotify, and Stitcher podcast platforms.

Produced by a collective of artists and activists, the mission behind the podcast is to “disrupt the status quo of how monuments are made, preserved, and interpreted,” in order to lay the foundations for a more just, artful, and “joyful” future society. It covers all aspects of the evolving monument landscape and public history activism in the United States (and sometimes beyond our borders). The conviction driving these allied artists, historians, curators, educators, and students is that monuments represent systems of power as much as public memory. Monuments’ meanings are dynamic rather than frozen in time, rendering them open to interventions through collaborative public engagement. The Lab’s territory is the landscape of public memory in the United States, but their vision that “Monuments must change” is not limited by official borders.

Podcasts serve up content with mobile convenience and the immediacy of voices inside one’s head.The subject is as timely as it is fraught–socially, culturally, and politically.

Episode 15: Erasing the Border and the Wall in Our Heads with Social Sculptor Ana Teresa Fernández

The podcast presenters are a diverse and inclusive roster of artists, activists, educators, historians, art curators, and civic organizers, among whom BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ voices predominate. But it’s the breadth and scope of Monument Lab’s discursive interrogation of what and how we commemorate human experience that is most exhilarating:

Paul Ramírez Jonas, untangling the symbolism of the equestrian monument through a participatory project on New York City’s High Line,
The ceremonious removal of a Christopher Columbus statue from Los Angeles’ Grand Park in 2018
Artist Partirica Okoumou’s protest climb of the Statue of Liberty in 2018, to draw attention to inhumane Trump Administration immigration policies.
Syrian-led technologists archiving images and video of the war in their country, as testimony for future war crimes prosecutions.
A teach-in at the university of Mississippi honoring Ida B. Wells.
A public display of the Confederate Army’s flag of surrender at Appomattox.
The MADAD collective’s critical mapping of the monuments of St. Louis
A dive into the psychogeography of Emancipation Park in Houston,
The evolutionary arc of the Museum of Capitalism, from an installation in Oakland, CA, to a traveling exhibit.
A photographer’s harrowing documentation of California wildfires.

On the website, listeners can adjust the speed of the audio stream, and a full transcript for each podcast is the accessibility icing on the audio ‘cake.’ To add images to the mix, each podcast introduction links to websites of featured artists, activist groups, and their projects.

Monument Lab podcasts are consistently well-produced, intellectually engaging, provocative, and potentially change-making. These resources are highly recommended for any culturally curious audience.

Manuscripts of the Muslim World

February - 2022February - 2022 Karina Wratschko

Reviewed by:
Christine Anderson, Administrative Coordinator
Coastal Carolina University
cdavant@coastal.edu

ARLIS/NA Multimedia & Technology Reviews
February Issue 2022
2474-6673

Manuscripts of the Muslim World is a University of Pennsylvania-led project hosted on their domain OPenn. The collaboration with other heritage institutions has sourced digital editions of over 1,200 Islamic works for free digital access. This curated list combines pieces from multiple repositories, allowing users to easily search by the topic of Muslim works instead of by the original collections to which they belong.

OPenn is home to over half a dozen similarly curated digital collections. According to their Read Me section, each curated list “contains complete sets of high-resolution archival images of manuscripts from the University of Pennsylvania Libraries and other institutions, along with machine-readable TEI P5 descriptions and technical metadata.” OPenn creators chose this particular design for the collections as it ensures longevity of access and preservation.

The OPenn site also offers a Technical Read Me page with technical and nontechnical manuscript cataloging descriptions. Each item is well described and offers rich metadata, though the metadata of items within collections are not all required to follow the same format. Depending on the research, this lack of congruity could cause some discovery issues. Digital access and preservation aside, this style of cataloging allows items to be organized by topic, theme, or project, which makes it an easy landing page for researchers.

The collection of Manuscripts of the Muslim World features digital versions of more than 500 manuscripts and 827 paintings from the Islamic world. These works come from multiple institutions, with the main contributors being Columbia University, the Free Library of Philadelphia, and the University of Pennsylvania. Bryn Mawr College and Haverford College were both significant contributors and the collection itself is funded by the Council on Library and Information Resources.

As a collection, Manuscripts of the Muslim World represents a wide breadth of Islamic art and history. It covers the cultural heritage of the Muslim people from1000 to 1900 AD. The collection covers subjects such as mathematics, astrology, history, law, literature, art, the Qur’an, and Hadith. The bulk of the collection is in Arabic and Persian. There are some manuscript examples in Coptic, Samaritan, Syriac, Turkish, and Berber.

While Manuscripts of the Muslim World can be freely accessed by anyone, OPenn has geared its lists of resource toward a research audience. OPenn collections are focused on “aggregators, digital humanists, and scholars.” These resources are for researchers looking for high-resolution images of manuscript pages, not casual users. All manuscripts on OPenn are given machine-readable TEI manuscript descriptions and HTML access to the files. Manuscripts must be studied page by page by clicking on the individual images of each page. There is no scrolling through the entire document.

Users not seeking high-quality images may find searching the collection’s home institution websites easier. Many of the institutions with items in the collection offer more user-friendly, page-turning applications on their own websites.

OPenn is a “living” website, meaning that works are regularly being digitized and uploaded to the repository lists. As collections evolve at participating institutions, so do the OPenn collections. OPenn collections are open access under public domain or have been released under Creative Commons licenses as Free Cultural Works. OPenn is to cultural heritage what SocArXiv is for social sciences or CORE is for humanities. It is a collection based on topic and un-reliant on boundaries of individual institution collections. Thanks to institutional collaborations, these open access repositories are allowing researchers to overcome limitations such as funding and location. Now multiple resources from a variety of institutions can be studied freely from one place. As open access repositories continue to multiply and grow, so too will access to creative and scientific research. This open sharing could make for greater leaps in all areas from tech to artistic endeavors.

Wax

February - 2022May - 2022 Karina Wratschko

Reviewed by:
K. Sarah Ostrach, Digital Asset Librarian
Hoover Institution Library & Archives, Stanford University
ostrach@stanford.edu
https://doi.org/10.17613/mw4d-x860

Wax is a flexible workflow for creating online scholarly exhibitions with high quality, IIIF-ready images. It provides an alternative to tools like Omeka or WordPress for information professionals, faculty, or students interested in creating digital exhibitions or other projects showcasing collections of images. ‘Using’ Wax means employing a variety of skills and software, thus the designation as a workflow rather than a standalone product like more familiar turnkey software packages.

Top of landing page for online exhibition “Liturgical Books” with horizontal banner and text.

The Wax project is led by Marii Nyröp, Digital Humanities Technology Specialist at New York University, and maintained by both Nyröp and Alex Gil, Digital Scholarship Librarian at Columbia University. Because Wax is open source, there is a larger community involved in building out Wax capabilities and providing support. The principles behind Wax and similar minimal computing, or minicomp, projects are longevity, low cost, and flexibility. These ideals are often elusive with the paid tiers and software updates from vendors. The creators summarize the tradeoff thus:

Wax was created for individuals and groups who either don’t have or don’t want to use a lot of resources to create their scholarly exhibitions. It’s best suited for folks who are willing to take on some technical responsibility in exchange for a lot of flexibility.

Herein lies the challenge of Wax: its price tag and open source code are more accessible for a wider scholarly community but only for those who have the technological know-how to use it or have digital scholarship departments to assist them. Anyone without the resources for expensive or processing-hungry software and who is likewise unversed in web development, data management, and plain text editing will be unable to take advantage of Wax.

Perusing sample Wax exhibitions here, a casual viewer may question how exhibitions created with Wax are different from those made with Omeka, and the answer is in the backend. Rather than installing a single software package, users must fork the Wax repository in GitHub, essentially creating a copy of the Wax application that they can modify without changing the original source code. Next, users create a CSV, JSON, or YAML file with the metadata for the exhibition images. The metadata and image files are placed in folders within the copied source code. From here Wax generates a static site using Jekyll themes (another minicomp outgrowth), hosted by GitHub for free.

Utilizing Wax requires familiarity with Git and GitHub, Jekyll themes, Ruby programming language, normalizing data files, and editing HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Learning Wax requires skills broadly applicable across web development and data management, but most Library & Information Studies programs, however, do not include these skills in the standard curriculum, though this may be changing. For those interested in using Wax and undaunted by the technologies involved, the process is extremely well documented. Detailed instructions and explanations live on the Minicomp/Wax Wiki. The entire project, documentation, and new developments live on GitHub (a platform for hosting software development and version control online). Users can share ideas, new developments, and questions via the Wax Gitter (an online, open source chatting tool for developers) and the code4lib Slack channel.

*Wax documentation Wiki with detailed description and formatted code samples.*

Open source technology is a double-edged sword. It is unconstrained by institutional affiliations, budgets, or one-size-fits-all solutions. However, it also requires possessing or having access to someone with advanced web development skills. For an art librarian or visual resources curator with neither of these and further lacking the time to learn on the ground, it will be some time before Wax is the digital exhibition workflow of choice. For colleagues who are comfortable forking in GitHub or who partner with digital scholarship specialists, Wax is a fantastic opportunity to get everything you want and nothing that you don’t.

Malangatana: Mozambique Modern

February - 2022May - 2022 Karina Wratschko

Reviewed by:
Lauren Haberstock, Director of the Genesis Lab Maker Space and Academic Center for Excellence | Librarian for Emerging Technologies and Digital Projects
Pepperdine University
lauren.haberstock@pepperdine.edu
https://doi.org/10.17613/gtff-mb33

Malangatana: Mozambique Modern is the third installment of The Modern Series at the Art Insitute of Chicago. The free digital publication builds and expands on the physical exhibition held at the Art Institute of Chicago which showcased the work of Malangatana Ngwenya focusing on the artist’s work from the late 1950s until 1975. Compelling and well-balanced, the visual design of the publication is effective as it embraces simple fonts and aesthetic choices focalizing Malangatana’s works.

The publication includes a forward by the museum director and an overview of the modern series which contextualize the specific exhibition within the series and provide information about the museum’s relationship with the artist’s works. The publication also includes five essays written by scholars, curators, and conservators who worked closely with the exhibition along with digital reproductions and installation views of the works. The digital format enhances the typical exhibition catalog by allowing for linkages between digital works and publications, particularly of note are the author bios linked to from each of the essays included in the publication. The ‘Essays’ and ‘Works’ sections of the publication include individual DOIs for persistent linking. Users can download the individual sections of the publication, however the publication is not able to be downloaded in its entirety as one document. As a whole, the publication is well-executed and provides a point of entry to Malangatana’s work for scholars and art historians not able to view the exhibition in person or who would like to critically engage further with the works and the artist.

The digital publication is optimized for use on a mobile device while remaining easy to use and navigate from a desktop view. Of particular note in the desktop view is the Table of Contents menu which operates separately from the main content, allowing the user freedom to browse through the publication and readily return or navigate to other sections efficiently. In the mobile view, users must rely on the Table of Contents hamburger menu in order to navigate through the publication, which does require scrolling to the top of the page. In future mobile editions, the designers may want to include an auto scroll feature that tracks along with the user. In the current iteration, the user must reach the bottom of the page before the auto-scroll feature appears.

The table of contents, on the left side of the screen, operates separately from each webpage within the publication, shown on the right

The five essays include linking within the publication which, in tandem with the Table of Contents menu, allows for user agency to determine the flow of the experience. Multiple pathways through the piece are possible, allowing the user to determine the order of their digital visit. Additionally, the essays include paragraph numbering and citation information, encouraging reference and engagement by scholars, researchers, and learners alike.

Users can explore photographed installation views of the exhibition and digital reproductions of the works grouped according to their placement within the exhibition. The digital reproductions can be expanded for further examination and include an information icon that when clicked displays the image caption. Images in a web view cannot be downloaded and do not allow the user to zoom in or out on the image. However, in the mobile view, users can zoom in or out on images. The image display reflects the curatorial perspective with images appearing in the same order as the show. To encourage user engagement, the creators might consider an additional customizable digital display that allows users to curate the works in order to explore how the pieces inform or differ from one another and to gain further insight into the artist’s work through curiosity-driven comparison.

The most compelling use of media within the publication has to be the inclusion of the virtual walkthrough video on the Installation Views page. The video includes audio fragments from the artist (closed captions available) which imbues the works with life as you both listen and see. The impactfulness of this auditory experience brings to mind the question, could audio have been incorporated elsewhere in the publication? For example, the essays could have been recorded and existed as playable audio pieces while browsing the publication in order to marry the auditory and visual experiences of the exhibition.

Virtual walkthrough video of the exhibition.

Ultimately, this publication brings digital life to the works of Malangatana included in this exhibition and provides important contextual information in order to better understand and situate these works in both their modern and African context. It is easy to navigate and while there are possible additions to the work that might enhance it, its effectiveness is in its simplicity.

Acid Free

February - 2022May - 2022 Gabriella Karl-Johnson

Reviewed by:

Annie Sollinger, Visual Archivist and Librarian for Art History
University of Massachusetts Amherst
annies@library.umass.edu
https://doi.org/10.17613/vnhn-m231

Acid Free is the free biannual publication of the Los Angeles Archivists Collective (LAAC). LAAC was founded in 2014, in the model of the Archivists Round Table of Metropolitan New York (ART) and the Women’s Center for Creative Work (WCCW). The Collective “aims to bring the Los Angeles-area archives community together to discuss, collaborate, connect, and support each other.” Membership includes over 900 archives and library workers, students, and other information professions who share an interest in the archival field. LAAC states that Acid Free, founded in 2016, “is a thematic online magazine that seeks to be a smart, complicated, non-academic forum of a variety of voices and issues in our field, to ground archivists locally and regionally while also keeping an eye toward larger conversations and landscapes.”

Splash image for Acid Free magazine featuring the LAAC logo and wordmark for the theme of Money.

The Acid Free website is, in a word, cool. The art director is Grace Danico, an artist, designer and archivist who is a member of LAAC. The site is bold and colorful, balancing blocks of color with high-resolution splash images. Some of the text is displayed in graphic fonts that might be difficult for some to read, but the aesthetic effect is striking. This reviewer found it legible; however, the text design makes the magazine difficult to read on mobile. Navigation is straightforward: users scroll down the Acid Free page to view the current issue’s articles, displayed as blocks rather than in the style of a table-of-contents. Scrolling down further reveals previous issues, identified by number and theme.

Text clipped from the editors note showing bold text design.

Acid Free will appeal to archivists especially, but the articles aren’t exclusive to the profession; many information workers and others with passing interest in the topics may enjoy reading the magazine. Like the print magazine Cabinet, each issue has a theme, and the themes are socially conscious and invite critical thought: examples include Money, Control, Organize, and Labor. Authors, who respond to semiannual calls for submissions, are unpaid, and there is no peer review. Editors are listed on the masthead: Editor-in-Chief is Lori Dedeyan, and associate editors are Caroline Bautista, Laura Cherry, Courtney Dean, Jennie Freeburg, Melissa Haley, and Alyssa Loera. Acid Free’s electronic format allows for the team to produce a lightweight publication that does not rely on print.

Stories section of Acid Free website showing images and blurbs for three featured articles.

The most recent issue features eight stories on the theme of money. Each issue is introduced by a colorful splash image and an editor’s note. The stories range from a discussion of real bank notes in collections and how they got there, to a critique of neoliberalism in libraries and an investigation of the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) in cultural heritage institutions. Other stories include essays by archivists, researchers, and students; expositions of notable collections from California and beyond; and running series called “PERSON/PLACE/THING” and “In Process.”

The digital format of Acid Free makes it easy to deliver assets like digitized photographs, documents, or audio-visual material, while also enabling authors to include links to their collections, relevant articles, or other sources. Clicking through issues and articles, this reviewer found that some assets would not load, in both Firefox and Chrome. Attempts to access the content via the Wayback Machine yielded mixed results. All told, Acid Free is a labor of love that fills the demand of archives workers for realistic depictions of the joys and pains of archival work.