Ph.D. Program News

Princeton University Special Collections assistant Valerie Addonizio received her M.L.I.S. in archival science and an M.A. in art history from Rutgers. She arrived at Princeton just this year; her first project was processing the papers, artwork, and other documentation by and related to the artist George Segal, donated to the library by Segal’s wife and the George and Helen Segal Foundation.

Princeton's weekly community newspaper Town Topics recently wrote a profile of Addonizio. Click here for the full story by Ellen Gilbert.

From start (literally gathering the materials from the Segal home) to finish (posting the electronic finding aid) the project took me seven months, mid-January to mid-July, 2009. It will take me a week more at some time in the future, as part of the collection is still away for preservation work and I will get to revisit it when it returns.

I worked primarily alone under the supervision of the Manuscripts Division team leader John Delaney and the Curator of Manuscripts, Don Skemer. As a team we would make the larger decisions and discuss the physical and intellectual arrangement of material, but that all happened within the Rare Books and Special Collections department. Two student assistants, most notably Ayse Gursoy (’11), and the department’s Conservator Ted Stanley, also contributed great efforts. But on the whole I worked on the materials myself and did all my own research, fact-finding, arrangement, and description. A few “e-mail interviews” with Rena Segal and some further discussion with Donald Lokuta did inform certain aspects of my arrangement, as they provided context for some materials, mainly the photographs.

I feel I am at a unique point in the divide between the analog and digital ages: I am just old enough to remember a paper world, but young enough to have been fostered on computers. Straddling this physical and intellectual divide is quite challenging, and I am grateful that my work involves me so deeply in it, for it is a new frontier. Personally, I am very worried for our future. As easy as it is to tear or crinkle or burn or fade, a single piece of paper is more likely to “survive” than any piece of electronic information if the means to make it understandable is lost. I could hold up a piece of carbon paper to the light and see the message George Segal left on it 40 years ago, but without a Betamax player (or even a cassette player, something very recent!) on hand I had no way to really know what was on some of his tapes. To be honest, I was grateful that most of Segal’s papers were readable, because so much has yet to be determined for how we will process electronic data for the future. Ours might be a future in a crisis that hasn’t even happened yet.