Special Collections Division the University of Texas at Arlington Libraries Vol. XV I* No. 2 * Fall 2002

NEH Awards Special Collection Second Grant
By Maggie Dwyer and Sally Gross

The University of Texas at Arlington Libraries has received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for a second year in a row to use toward preserving the W. D. Smith, Inc., Commercial Photography Collection housed in Special Collections. The Preservation Assistance grant, in the amount of $4,998, will be used to re-house the Fort Worth photography firm’s negatives from the 1950s.

According to the NEH website

Millions of books, serials, manuscripts, documents, still and moving images, sound recordings, and objects of material culture are at risk because of their fragility and the manner in which they are stored. Work in the humanities is hampered by inadequate intellectual access to many significant collections and by the lack of reference works and research tools that organize and interpret complex bodies of information. . . Preservation and Access grants support projects that preserve and make available the full range of humanities collections that are important for research, education, and lifelong learning.

American Airlines ticket agents at Amon Carter Field, Fort Worth, 1956. W. D. Smith Photograph.

UTA Archivist Shirley Rodnitzky, who headed the project during the past year, explained recently that "We started preparing a database last summer to be ready to apply for grants to preserve this collection. The database was constructed to allow the archivists to figure out how to approach the project to rehouse the negatives." She said that the NEH grant awarded last year funded the purchase of archival sleeves and acid-free envelopes so that the 1940s negatives from the W. D. Smith, Inc., Collection could be removed from their original manila envelopes, sleeved individually, and placed into individual archival envelopes. Rodnitzky pointed out that if several negatives are stored together in a single envelope they can scratch each other or all deteriorate even if there is only one that is unstable. The database was used to print the information from the master envelope—the envelope that originally held several negatives—onto the front of each new envelope. This gives researchers information about how the photos were originally grouped.

This second grant will be used to duplicate these procedures for the negatives from the 1950s. Ann Hodges will serve as the project manager for this next year, following the retirement of Shirley Rodnitzky.

The W. D. Smith, Inc., Commercial Photography Collection consists of more than 100,000 negatives spanning the firm’s work from 1941 to 1989. In addition to their own photos, the firm owned approximately 1000 negatives that were copies of early photos by other photographers dating back to the 1890’s. For more information on last year’s grant, visit http://libraries.uta.edu/SpecColl/crose01/grants.htm for an article by Ann Hodges in the Fall 2001 Compass Rose and for more information on the W. D. Smith, Inc., Photography Collection, see http://libraries.uta.edu/SpecColl/crose98/smith.htm for an article by Gerald Saxon in the Fall 1998 Compass Rose.

For further information about the second grant, contact Ann Hodges at ann.hodges@uta.edu or at 817-272-7510. For more information on NEH grants, visit http://www.neh.fed.us/. For information on other photography collections at the University of Texas at Arlington Libraries, see the Historical Photographs section of A Guide To Archives And Manuscript Collections in the Special Collections Division at The University of Texas at Arlington Libraries at http://libraries.uta.edu/SpecColl/findaids/guideHisPhoto.htm .

American Airlines plane and crew ready to depart Amon Carter Field, Fort Worth, 1956. W. D. Smith Photograph.

Downtown Fort Worth, corner of Seventh and Main Streets, 1950. W. D. Smith Photograph.

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