Looking back at the first blog post I wrote nearly three years ago, I have admittedly mixed feelings about how the Hugh Morton processing project has proceeded, and is now wrapping up. Don’t get me wrong — when I compare these “after” pictures of the collection with the “before” shots in that first post, I feel an undeniable satisfaction, that particular archivists’ sense of triumph at having wrestled what was essentially a BIG OLD MESS into something that is organized, nicely rehoused and labeled, physically stabilized, digitized (in part), described, and accessible to the public.

Still, there is a niggling part of me that suspects, deep down, that my victory over the Morton beast is incomplete . . . that despite three years of hard work (not just mine, but also that of numerous and wonderful students and volunteers), the collection still somehow got the best of me. [Note from Stephen: the collection also got the best in Elizabeth.] In the past, I’ve left behind most of my projects/collections with a sense of closure — I had thoroughly beaten those collections into submission, and it was unlikely any processor would ever have to work on them again (or at least for a very long time). Not the case with this one! A person could devote a CAREER to the Morton Collection and still not be “finished.”

In that first post, I wrote:

Since I began working on the collection . . . I have had regular moments of crisis during which I become nearly paralyzed by all the challenges associated with and possible approaches to this project. How do you impose order on chaos, while respecting what few pockets of order do exist? How do you decide what to digitize, and when? How do you balance the needs and interests of the many people who will use this collection with the preservation needs of the material itself?

I’m not sure that we ever found firm answers to these questions, or that we ever really will. But the answer we have to go with is, “we do our best.” And that’s what we did!

• We digitized, described, and made available online more than 7,500 images in the Hugh Morton Digital Collection
• We organized the collection into nine series by subject, and described everything in detail in the collection’s finding aid, and linked it up to the digital collection at the subseries level
• We tracked our progress and highlighted special topics/images in this blog, and built upon it through the Worth 1,000 Words essay project

And what of the future, you ask? First and foremost, A View to Hugh will continue! North Carolina Collection Photographic Archivist Stephen Fletcher will be taking over primary author and editorial duties, but I will likely contribute now and again. We may not post as often as we have for the past three years, but there’s just too much fascinating, beautiful, relevant stuff in this collection — we simply must share!

I’ll be moving on to other collections here in the North Carolina Collection Photographic Archives, but will still be around and completing a few remaining Morton-related clean-up tasks. Morton Collection-related inquiries should be directed to Stephen; information about reproductions is available on the NCCPA Requesting Reproductions page.

Until next time,

–Elizabeth Hull

We’ve been particularly active over the past few weeks adding images to the Hugh Morton Digital Collection, which now contains more than 3,000 items. The influx is due to the fact that 1) our new digitization assistant Sam Leonard has really hit the ground running, and 2) we’ve started scanning 35mm slides in earnest. (Slides go a bit faster due to automated scanning and because we’re often able to cut-and-paste a lot of the descriptive information).

Many of the most recent additions, including the beautifully-composed image above, have been from Morton’s nature photography. (Speaking of which, processing on Series 3, Nature & Scenic, is now finished — so be on the lookout for a major addition to the Morton finding aid in the near future). We’re adding new items every day, but as of this moment the digital collection can be browsed by 419 different names, 253 different locations, and (whoa!) 951 different subjects.

Just wanted to remind you of this remarkably varied and ever-growing resource, and to encourage you, as always, to give us your feedback on the images and on the work we’re doing.

On November 1st, A View to Hugh quietly celebrated its 2nd birthday and during its years of life, this blog has received many visitors. So in this holiday season, we’d like to thank you for being a regular or occasional visitor. Have you ever wondered how many others of you in the blogosphere have been to this site during the first two years?  Well, 323,012, if web statistics can be believed!

“How many visits has A View to Hugh received in two years?” would seemingly be an easy question to answer, but it isn’t. Let’s use an analogy to show why. You may take a trip to see family and stay with them for the holidays. If so, let’s say during your stay that you go to the grocery store, the shopping mall, church, and a friend’s house, and that each time you left each of those places you went back to your family’s house, your primary place of visitation.

When you return home and people ask you what you did for the holiday, you would likely say something like, “I visited my family”—that is, you made one trip to visit your family. But if Webalizer, a Web usage statistics program, was keeping tabs on your comings and goings, you went to your family’s house five times—your first arrival and each time you went back to your primary visitation place.  Every time you entered your family’s front door would be counted as a “hit.” (In other words, if your family’s house was the home page for a View to Hugh, you made five “hits.”) So, our 323,012 total includes not only initial hits on the blog’s home page, but all hits to the home page.

Counting all those hits is useful to people managing Web servers. For those more interested in gauging readership, however, that tally is meaningless — especially since we know that it includes hits made by computers “crawling” Web sites, such as Google indexing for faster search results. To counter that hyperinflated number, Webalizer tallies “visits,” defined as “a sequence of requests from a uniquely identified client that expired after a certain amount of inactivity.” (The are a host of other issues related to Web statistics, but for fear of putting you to sleep, if you want to read more I’ll refer you to Wikipedia and Google where you may search the terms “Web analytics” and “Web statistics” some restless night).

Going back to the example of visiting your family: once you got there and entered any door, all your subsequent departures and returns, running in and out of the front and back doors, etc., would all be counted as one “visit” after you left their home and didn’t return for a predetermined length of time.

If you recorded all of your family visits over the course of your life, you could make a chart to see how they fluctuated over time. That’s what the chart above illustrates for A View to Hugh: the trend for the number of visits during our first two years (blue line) in comparison to our sister blog, North Carolina Miscellany (red line). At the end of two years we’ve surpassed 25,000 visits per month. That number is still inflated compared to the actual number of individual people reading the blog. (Ever read an entry on your computer at work then check it out again at home?  There’s two visits!)  What the chart does show without a doubt is the continual growth of interest in A View to Hugh, the library’s most frequently visited blog. And for that, we again express our deep appreciation to you, our readership.

P.S. If you did venture into deeper reading about Web analytics, the chart above uses the “total entry pages” calculation.

P.P.S. Happy holidays!