Bees Through Time and Space: UMass Amherst, Du Bois Library, SCUA

Bees Through Time and Space

The Apiculture and Culture exhibit curated by Richard Steinmetz at the Department of Special Collections and University Archives at the University of Massachusetts collects seminal (and often intriguing) works on Apiculture from the Special Collections, displaying them through short introductions and scans of selected pages.

1. Selection Decisions
Little is explicitly stated about the exhibit's criterion for selection (the introduction to the exhibit is very short, and does not do much to give background to the exhibit's motives, goals, or guiding principles). All the works are pulled from the holdings of the Department of Special Collections and University Archives, which we're told are especially rich in Agricultural literature. The dates range from the late 17th century to 1917, and seem to have been selected in part to illustrate the major divisions of Apicultural work presented by the exhibit (Early Works, Science, Natural History, Metaphors, Americans, and Business).

2. Metadata
The metadata is somewhat detailed. We are given the author, a full title, publication information, collation, and physical description, as well as the book's call number. The description is followed by a very brief historical context and description of the content of the work itself. Both of these elements, the metadata on the volume itself and the text, seem uncomfortably set between a full, scholarly approach and a passing glance at the book. I don't really understand going through the trouble of curating an exhibit, especially one that is both significant (works on apiculture have a long history of mirroring both commonplace and revolutionary ideas about society and nature) and so small (with only thirty books represented) unless one were to give more than simple two-hundred word summaries of the books' interest.

3. Object Characteristics
The exhibit's only serious error is in the presentation of the scans themselves, which is unfortunate, because a lot of the objects being presented are worthy of attention and effective display. The site is a mixture of the good and bad (nice internal typography and balance, horrible menu and splash-page), but it's greatest crime is the navigation of the images. Each work has its own page, and the page scans are, for some reason, set off to the right and down from the top of the page, effectively lost in a corner of the site. For some reason there is also no page displayed by difficult, when the page is first displayed. The image thumbnails down to the right must be rolled over for the larger image to display. Once presented, the large images of the scans are an appropriate size to look at while also reading the descriptive text of the book, but there is no way to obtain a larger image, and the size is inappropriate for any sort of real scholarly study of the page. The scans are of high quality when presented on the screen at their presented size, and have adequate contrast and resolution for reading, seemingly without having been retouched in any sort of disruptive way.

4. Audience
Because of the cursory introductions, the inadequate description of the exhibit itself, and the poor size of the scans themselves, I would say that this site is meant as a quick highlight of the Apiculture holdings in the university's Special Collections. Short of simply advertising highlights of the collection, and giving a very basic introduction to the shape of modern Apicultural thought, a goal of the exhibit may be to draw the curious to the Collections in Amherst to further study the books exhibited. In being so introductory, I think the exhibit has a strange roll. I can't imagine that the site is advertised much beyond the small, specific communities who are already familiar with this branch of Agricultural literature, and for their purposes it does not seem nearly as informative as it could be.