Ask a Curator Day: Meet Lilyan Jones and Mireya Salinas

For Ask a Curator day (Wednesday, September 15, 2021) we are featuring the team who are working on cataloging and digitizing our Alden Scott Boyer collection: Project Cataloger Lilyan Jones and Project Photographer Mireya Salinas.

The Boyer collection is one of the core collections of the George Eastman Museum, donated in the 1950s by Alden Scott Boyer, a Chicago perfume manufacturer. In 2019, the Eastman Museum received a grant award of $350,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Division of Preservation and Access, Humanities Collections and Reference Resources Program, to support its project Preserving and Improving Access to the Boyer Collection. The project includes cataloging and digitizing the entire Boyer collection, eventually giving the public access to images of the objects.

Learn more about Lily and Mireya below, then join us live on Twitter and Instagram as they answer your questions about their work and the collection.

1. What do you do at the museum?

Lily Jones (LJ): I’m Lily Jones and I’m the Boyer Cataloger in the Department of Photography. I catalog objects, which means I gather information like artist, title, date, what photographic process was used, dimensions, and any inscriptions from the objects that I enter into our database, so it is available to others looking at our collections.

Mireya Salinas (MS): I am the Alden Scott Boyer Collection Project Photographer. My job is to digitize objects. To do this, I use a reprographic camera and a copy stand to create accurate, high-resolution images of the photographs, negatives, stereo cards, albums, and books found specifically within the Boyer collection.

2. What is your background?

LJ: I have a BA in Native American Studies and Sociology/Anthropology from Colgate University, and over 10 years of experience in the museum field. Before I came to the George Eastman Museum I was in a collection of mainly Native art at the Indian Arts Research Center at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

MS: I began my photography education at Austin Community College’s Professional Photography program. After graduating from that program, I was accepted into the Rochester Institute of Technology’s MFA Photography and Related Media program. During grad school, I began working at the Cary Graphic Arts Collection digitizing objects from their collection. I began working at the George Eastman Museum soon after graduating from RIT.

3. What is something academically interesting you’ve worked with or on or gotten to use?

LJ: The Pencil of Nature by William Henry Fox Talbot. It’s both a historically significant object and also challenging from a handling standpoint, due to just how light sensitive it is. It was a process to learn and implement the correct lighting and environment we needed in order to catalog and digitize it.

MS: By far, The Pencil of Nature by William Henry Fox Talbot. It’s the one object anyone who has ever taken a History of Photography class learns about. This book is important to the history of photography because it became the first commercially published book to be illustrated with photographs. And not just any photographs, but Talbot’s photographs using the salted paper process he himself invented.

4. What is something fun you’ve worked with or on?

LJ: The Boyer collection has approximately 1300 stereoviews and I love going through them. Stereoviews cover every subject under the sun and I’m always learning new and interesting little tidbits about history, like Professor Lowe and the Union Army Balloon Corps that was created during the Civil War!

MS: Boyer had 21 French Tissue stereo cards which were fun to work with. I had to digitize them two ways: with reflective lighting (light falling on the object) and with transmitted light (light going through the object). This meant I also got to experience them both ways. Within this French Tissue grouping, there was one Diablerie, just one. Naturally, I borrowed a stereo viewer to check it out when I had it on the light box.