Beloved former colleague Daniel Jones (AB 1947) passed away peacefully on October 8, 2022, shortly before his 103rd birthday. Following a long and successful career at NBC Television, Dan joined the Peabody Museum as archivist from 1974–1986.
Over the years, he secured funding from federal and private sources for a number of important preservation initiatives, such as the 1976 National Science Foundation (NSF) Grant for the “Modernization of the Peabody Museum Photographic Archives.” The grant had as one of its significant goals the design and installation of a cold storage vault, which became operational in 1979 and was the first university cold storage vault for the preservation of color and black-and-white photographs. The Peabody preservation vault provided storage for color film material that included the collection of Robert Gardner, the renowned anthropologist and ethnographic filmmaker.
Dan Jones developed an index slide system for the collection where twenty slides would be photographed in a single slide frame, an ingenious solution when computer database and digitization systems were not yet available. Dan’s preservation work at the Peabody Museum is documented in the 1993 book, “The Permanence and Care of Color Photographs: Traditional and Digital Color Prints, Color Negatives, Slides, and Motion Pictures” by Henry Wilhelm and Carol Brower (the book can be downloaded at no cost from www.wilhelm-research.com). The Peabody Museum was involved in one of the earliest computer cataloguing efforts in the 1980s with Lisa Kamisher and Melissa Banta. The NSF grant provided for staffing of the archive room and equipment for a new darkroom and photographic studio, where the noted photographer Hillel Burger photographed many three-dimensional cultural items and photographs in the Peabody collections.
Between 1978 and 1982, Dan initiated grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute of Museum Services, IMS—later renamed Institute for Museum and Library Services—for copying nitrate negatives to safety film, and also wrote successful proposals to the Polaroid Foundation and IMS in 1982. This entailed copying over 80,000 large format black-and-white negatives documenting archaeological excavations, many of which were nitrate films in various states of degradation.
Dan devised a large-scale system of the two-step, master/positive to copy negatives, following a process initially developed by the Chicago Albumen Works. The system involved using Kodak Gravure positive film for duplication (producing first a positive transparency master that was then copied onto a negative), first on 70mm and later on 35mm roll film.
Even though Dan officially retired from his position at the Peabody Museum in 1986, he came in regularly for years afterwards, consulting on various projects, which included advising on plans for the 1995 cool storage facility for black and white photographic materials, as well as enriching our photographic exhibitions by procuring antique projectors and cameras. Dan provided wise counsel, wonderful stories, and modelled the consummate gentleman. He will be greatly missed.
Excerpted from a tribute by Luisa Casella (photograph conservator) with Henry Wilhelm (author and good friend of Dan Jones).