Image above: Textile factory employees eye-level view, circa 1960. Courtesy of the Chattanooga Public Library and University of Tennessee at Chattanooga Special Collections.
By Jane Dodge and Erin Ryan
An archivist’s and student assistant’s experience working on a grant project to create digital collections that offer a view into the city’s manufacturing past
Archivist’s perspective (Erin):
The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga Special Collections received a $3,630 grant in October 2022, funded by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) and distributed by the Tennessee Historical Records Advisory Board (THRAB), that allowed us to create and publish on our website two digital collections that highlight labor and industry-related materials in our archival repository. These two collections, the Wheland Foundry and United States Pipe and Foundry photographs and the Dixie Mercerizing Company photographs, contain images ranging from 1875 to 1976, with the bulk falling around the 1950s. The collections, which consist primarily of photographs, also contain a few undated company-produced booklets: a 1930 newsletter for employees living in the Dixie Mercerizing Company’s mill village, Lupton City; and a 1928 reference letter for a woman seeking clerical work.
When Carolyn Runyon, Director of Special Collections, and I applied for the grant in September 2022, we had several reasons for choosing this particular material as our focus: it met a research need (reference inquiries from people interested in area labor and industry resources are not uncommon for us to receive); the material was not already available in our Digital Collections; we felt we could finish the project by May 31, 2023, the time allotted to complete the grant cycle; and the material was important to the history of Chattanooga. Wheland Foundry, which moved from Athens, Georgia, to Chattanooga in 1873 (1), and Dixie Mercerizing Company, which opened here in 1920 (2), are examples of the many textile mills, foundries, and other manufacturing centers that developed in this city in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries following the Civil War (3). And the factories, while fueling economic growth, also later made Chattanooga one of the most polluted cities in the nation–a designation it has worked in recent decades to overcome (4).
I will also note that the items in both digital collections reviewed in this blog post came to us from the collections of the Chattanooga History Center, a regional museum that folded in 2017 and whose materials, a trove of documentation about the area, are now co-curated by UTC Special Collections and the Chattanooga Public Library. We want to continue to make those materials widely available, another reason for choosing these items.
We applied the grant funds to the salary for a part-time student assistant, hired for the Spring 2023 semester, to work on the project. In November 2022, Carolyn and I hired Jane Dodge, a UTC English major, who would spend the next semester scanning the materials and writing Dublin Core metadata in accordance with our local descriptive standards based on DACS and RDA. She used standardized vocabularies such as Getty Art and Architecture Thesaurus (AAT) and Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) in this work.
During the process, she examined the legacy descriptions we received from the Chattanooga History Center on a case-by-case basis along with the items. These were helpful and often could be used as a basis for our own text, but they sometimes contained information that went beyond what we would include in a standardized description field or details we could not verify independently. We built out the rest of the full metadata record–title, creator, and so on.
The collections included a number of different local creators (area photographers, for example) and corporate entities that did not have entries we could find in any existing standardized vocabulary, so in these cases–as with Wheland Foundry or Chattanooga photographer A. E. Ruhl–we created standardized terms for them, either by searching for the company’s current iteration (if it still existed) on their corporate website or by looking up the name in past Chattanooga City Directories for decades between 1936 and 2003 to see how the names appeared most often in directory listings. Jane helped us with this process, as well.
Jane also wrote and assembled images for posts that we published monthly on our UTC Library social media accounts to publicize the project, including posts for Black History Month and Women’s History Month 2023 that drew on photographs in our project materials.
I asked Jane to share her perspective about what it was like for her to work on this description project with us.
Student assistant perspective (Jane)
In January 2023, I started working on a project to digitize and describe over 200 items from Chattanooga, Tennessee’s manufacturing past. Chattanooga was once known as the “Dynamo of Dixie,” home to a booming industrial economy supported by the Tennessee River connecting the waterways and the railroad track connecting Appalachia with much of America.
I did not know much about the archival process before this position, so I had a lot to learn. I had worked on metadata before, but it was at a small elementary school library and did not involve as much detail as this project.
One of the first real learning curves was familiarizing myself with the controlled vocabularies and naming conventions. I did not realize the extent of these vocabularies, so I found myself entrenched in hyper-specific terms for each photograph. For example, when thinking about how to label the view of a photograph, I searched the Getty Art and Architecture Thesaurus (AAT) for “portrait” and found several different types of portrait listed there that could describe images in our collection. We debated using AAT terms such as “occupational portrait” and “knee-length portrait” in our image titles, but eventually decided against using these terms–though they were correct and applicable to the item–and simply used “portrait” to avoid limiting discoverability. Ultimately, I learned that there is an element of subjectivity involved in every aspect of describing these materials.
I also focused much of my time honing in on dates that were as precise as possible to enhance the accuracy of our description. There were several ways we went about narrowing down the dates. For some photographs, we have both the original print and the booklet in which the item appeared, along with a dated draft, so we could often narrow down the date to specific years.
Another method we used to narrow down the dates was by consulting Chattanooga City Directories. Throughout the collection, “Roy Tuley Studios” and “Roy Tuley Photo” were stamped on the back of various photographs, sometimes along with an address; by consulting the Chattanooga directories for listings on photographer Roy Tuley, we were able to give an approximate date for the photograph based on when his studio changed names and locations.
Ultimately, I learned so much over the course of completing this project; before this position, I had never considered the minutiae that detail each piece I referenced. Moreover, when thinking of the description of the item, something I merely used to contextualize the piece or to better comprehend the item before me, I did not think of the controlled vocabularies or the consideration put into whether or not to include any given identifier. As an English student, I am aware of the rhetorical situation of archiving and how important it is to document history accurately and I was fascinated by the controlled vocabularies that archivists and librarians have devised to help standardize this process. However, I found–as I am sure many before me have as well–that humans are messy, almost inherently resistant to standardization, and that was something I found really interesting, challenging, and beautiful about working on this project.
[1] The Wheland Company. Wheland Facts for Wheland People, circa 1951, p. 11.
[2] Dixie Mercerizing Company. Dixie Durene: Controlled Manufacture in Action, circa 1950; Scarbrough, Meg, “The Dixie Group: Celebrating 100 Years.” Floor Focus, October 2020. https://digitaleditions.sheridan.com/publication/?i=674781&article_id=3773230&view=articleBrowser; “Our Heritage.” The Dixie Group. Accessed May 25, 2023. https://www.thedixiegroup.com/About/Heritage.
[3] Knapp, Courtney Elizabeth. Constructing the Dynamo of Dixie: Race, Urban Planning, and Cosmopolitanism in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2018, p. 41.
[4] “The President’s Sustainable Development Award Program.” Council on Environmental Quality. Accessed May 30, 2023. https://clintonwhitehouse3.archives.gov/CEQ/awards.html; Kitheka, Bernard M., Elizabeth D. Baldwin, David L. White, and Daniel N. Harding. “A Different ‘We’ in Urban Sustainability: How the City of Chattanooga, TN, Community Defined Their Own Sustainability Path.” International Journal of Tourism Cities 2, no. 3 (2016): 185-205. doi: https://doi.org/10.1108/IJTC-07-2015-0017.
Acknowledgments (Jane): As I touched on in the piece, I had limited-to-no experience before starting this project, so I have to start by thanking Carolyn and Erin for not only their willingness to educate and train me on each step of the digitization and descriptive process, but also for their patience throughout the project. I am so thankful to have learned the innovative and creative ways that Carolyn and Erin are able to provide precision for their patrons. I have learned so much about the archival process; I am truly grateful to have had this opportunity. Beyond those I worked directly with at UTC Special Collections, I must also thank the CHC volunteers and other past archivists for their work on the metadata and processing the material before I picked up this project. I would also like to thank the Tennessee Historical Records Advisory Board for their continued support of the project, particularly through the dissemination of a grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission.
Jane Dodge is entering her final year studying English at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.
Erin Ryan was a Processing Archivist at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga during this grant project.