Provenance of the First Books
I began my search by contacting some individuals who proved key in my search for information. I first contacted individuals from the Archives Service Center at the University of Pittsburgh, who recommended that I take a look through Miss Frick's personal file, along with the personal file of Frederick Mortimer Clapp and the Chancellor Bowman Papers. They also recommended that I look through some supplementary historical sketches that were written about the library, as well as do my own searches in Documenting Pitt. They also referenced the second accession book containing the accession log for books starting after the number 3,120, which caused me to question the original reference to 1,000 books. I wanted to find that first accession book, but it seemed to be missing from the library, the ASC, and Special Collections.
After doing some background history reading about the library, looking through Miss Frick and Dr. Clapp's personal files, as well as Walter Hovey's (also a founding member of the department), and the Chancellor Bowman Papers, I discovered that Dr. Clapp had been sent on a trip to Europe to collect the first books. In Miss Frick's personal file I found a reference to a Pittsburgh Press newspaper article titled "Rare Volumes and Photographs in Pitt Fine Arts Department," in which it stated that at the close of Dr. Clapp's first year with the department he had acquired 2,500 volumes for the library (Pittsburgh Press, 1927). This further pushed me forward in questioning of the validity of the reference to 1,000 books. Another newspaper reference, this time from the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, also stated that 2,500 volumes had been added (Pittsburgh Post Gazette, 1930).
Although there was conflicting information in relation to the number of books that the collection was first made of, the fact that I could not locate that first accession book had me curious as to what would happen if I looked up the books mentioned in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette newspaper article in Pitt's library catalog. No results came back for "Kandakof," but an exact match for the "Basilica di San Marco" book appeared in the catalog, both volumes of it published in 1881 in Italy. Because Dr. Clapp was said to have been searching for this book for 3 years, I considered it a part of the founding collection, and was instantly drawn to the idea that I could start a list of the first books just by finding references to them in publications and other archival materials.
This search picked up when I finally followed the endnote for the reference to 1,000 books. The endnote brought me to The University of Pittsburgh Record from October, 1927. It stated that there were "more than a thousand newly-acquired books, dealing with the history of art. These were brought, during the last eight months, by Professor Clapp, in England, France, Germany, Austria, and Italy. They cover all phases of the subject from pre-historic times to the present day, and form, especially in the field of Italian art, French art, the graphic arts in Germany, and Oriental art, a very adequate nucleus for study" (The University of Pittsburgh Record 1927, 44). The record then provided a list of some of the most valuable titles that Dr. Clapp brought back for the library.
I ended up searching for all of the titles in the Record's list, and found over 100 volumes still in the Frick Fine Arts Library. I began compiling their titles, call numbers, volume numbers, and record links into an Excel document, essentially rebuilding the original list of first books.
My next step, which proved to be one of the most important, was to contact The Frick Collection in New York. One of the archivists was very helpful and sent me multiple PDFs containing documents from the Helen Clay Frick Papers - all pertaining to the founding of the Fine Arts Department at Pitt, financial information shared with Miss Frick, and correspondence between the founding members of the department. A wonderful inclusion was the correspondence between Dr. Clapp and Miss Frick while he was abroad finding materials for the founding collection.
The Helen Clay Frick Papers also included budgets and receipts for the first collection. As I have shown on the main page, this list of book acquisitions states that 3,000 books were purchased for the founding collection, for the total price of $26, 631.86:
The expenditure list from 1928 also lists 3,000 books as having been purchased for the same amount:
These expenditure lists were all sent to Miss Frick because of her role as benefactor, and they were part of a larger "resume" of expenditures that were sent to her for the first year (Helen Frick Papers).
All of this information was helpful, but it did not bring us closer to locating an official list of for the founding collection. As I continued my research, I found more books being referenced through correspondence, and I searched the catalog as I found them in order to record those in Excel and hopefully rebuild at least a part of that original list.
Spreadsheet of first books, created as I found them:
Discovery of the First Acquisition Ledger
In December of 2016, with the help of archivist David Grinnell at the Archives Service Center, we were able to locate the acquisition ledger that detailed the purchases of each of Frick's first books.
This was a most welcome discovery, and over the following few months and after many discussions with colleagues on how to proceed, I decided to have the ledger scanned and made machine readable through OCR. With help from staff at our Digital Research Library, this became possible. They provided us with a searchable OCR PDF scan of the ledger, a CSV file containing the contents of the PDF, and a Word document containing the contents of the PDF.
When the content from the PDF was imported into the CSV file, the spreadsheet was a mess. Often author names were divorced from the titles they had written, or gibberish would appear where handwriting had been incorporated in the ledger. Sometimes names or titles were misspelled, or columns were shifted completely based on where they appeared on the ledger. Because the ledger was also inconsistent and not based on any specific standard of organization, this made it harder for us to figure out how to make the spreadsheet consistent. After meeting with our Metadata Librarian and our Digital Humanities Practice Group about how to approach the spreadsheet, we decided to first begin with cleaning the spreadsheet and organizing the columns in a way that mirrored the ledger, even in its inconsistencies.
I continue to work with the student workers on cleaning the spreadsheet and working through new problems that arise throughout the process.
Questions About the Data
In approaching the data that we've acquired digitally from the acquisition ledger, questions arise all the time as to what I would like to know about the data and the books in the ledger, and what questions would be helpful to ask in the context of collection development and preservation in our library. These questions include the following:- How many books in the first collection only exist in our library?
- How many books in the first collection are now rare and if they are, do they need preservation care?
- What subjects made up the majority of our library's first collection? I find this question fascinating in the context of Art History as a discipline and what the teaching and learning expectations were for students and faculty in the discipline during the 1920's and 30's.
- Of the rare books in the first collection, which ones have marks of provenance and can be made available for provenance research by students and scholars?
