This morning I have been at Columbia University for a slightly different visit. One of my colleagues from Oxford, Alena Ptak-Danchak (who is our Keeper of Scientific Books) used to work at Columbia and coincidentally is also in New York right now. I had a morning that I hadn't yet managed to fill, so Alena offered to meet me and take me in to visit some of the libraries at Columbia. We began at the Oral History Center, which is a major draw for researchers coming here. They have about the most extensive oral history collections for American history, covering a huge range of projects from the Eisenhower administration to 9/11, and the center is very actively engaged in oral history projects, the fruits of which will eventually be made available in the library and also in some cases online. Charis Shafer gave me an excellent introduction to the work of the center and their collections, as well as a greater insight into some of the unique considerations of working with this kind of material - the importance of the release and consent forms, and how that governs what is available and the way that the changing nature of the Internet can end up making someone's data more publicly available than they initially agreed to. Digitising oral history really is largely done therefore for preservation, as they can't make the transcripts and audio available without the consent of the interviewee. Interestingly for some older material the audio even is no longer available at all, as it was considered unimportant in some cases once the transcripts had been created. Nevertheless they do have some collections online and available remotely where they have the permissions to do so. They also have an online portal which provides more information on the collections, finding aids, and access to those collections which are available online. Charis also walked me through the process by which the oral histories are collected and processed, which was very interesting to learn about. Some of this dovetailed nicely with what I learnt about the oral history collections at the Miller Center at the beginning of my trip. This is something I hadn't realised would be so useful about my trip, the way in which what I learn at one library gets reinforced or complemented by what I learn at another, and I'm getting a lot more of that 'big picture' than I thought I would.

Next we dropped in on the rare books and manuscripts reading room and had a chat with Eric Wakin, who is their Curator of American History and who gave me some more information about their special collections, as well as some of their digitisation projects (which are limited, largely for all the same reasons as all the other libraries I've discussed this with) and what he does to help students and researchers navigate their holdings. He's emailed me a useful looking document that he uses to provide this guidance, which will be a great reminder when I come to investigate this further back at home. He also pointed me on to another couple of people within the Columbia libraries who we then went on to drop in on and who also graciously spent some time talking to me - John Tofanelli who looks after Columbia's digital collections for US history (I can only desperately envy their budget and the e-resources that they have), and the Avery Library which houses the Architecture and Fine Arts collections - not somewhere I would have soon thought of in connection to US history but who have been doing some excellent digitisation work with some of their historic collections. Alena also gave me a tour round both the main library and the campus before she went to attend a lecture and I headed off to my afternoon appointment.

This afternoon I went up to Harlem to visit the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. This is part of the New York Public Library system and is a high profile institution with amazing collections relating to 20th century African American history and culture. Diana Lachatanere (from the manuscript collections) and Mary Yearwood (from the print and photograph collections) talked to me about some of the collections that they have as well as giving me a tour around the building. They have done minimal digitisation, but are working hard to make their finding aids available online. A lot of their materials have been microfilmed in the past and are available that way though, and it was good to learn how extensive these are (but, sigh, more for the desiderata list...). In addition to the usual funding/resources issues, as their collections are mostly 20th century, they are also prevented from digitising a lot of their material due to copyright considerations. Like the Library of Congress, their collections are separated and consulted according to format, and are all held in closed stacks. The Schomburg Center also holds a lot of public events and has extensive exhibition space; curiously when you come in to the building, the library is really not very obvious at all, confined to the basement and upper floors, and it's the galleries that are visually more prominent. They don't just collect books, papers and photos though, but also have large fine arts and sculpture collections so do have this somewhat wider focus than just their library collections.