Jones, Daniel W.
From MediaWiki
- Full name (last name, first name): Daniel W. Jones Jr.
- Other names known by: Dan Jones
- Date and place of birth: November 7, 1919, Saint Louis, MO
- Date and place of death: October 8, 2022, Watertown MA
- Nationalities: American
- Education (degrees): Harvard degree in History (1947)
- Notable teachers/mentors: Maurice Seymour photography studio apprentice (1947-1948) Nickolas Muray, Robert Gardner
- Employment highlights:
- 1947-48 - apprentice ar Marice Seymour Photography Studio
- 1948-51 - assistant photographer at Nikolas Muray Studio in NYC
- 1952-74 - Director of Special Projects NBC
- 1975-85 - Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University Archivist
- Special achievements, honors or awards:
- Designed first cold storage vault in a university photographic archive
- Curriculum vitae:
- Dan was born in Saint Louis, Missouri, and when he was ten years old his family moved to Newport, Rhode Island.
- He enrolled in Harvard University in 1938, but took a leave of absence from his studies in 1940 to join the Navy, serving in both the Pacific and Atlantic during World War II. Dan had a lifetime interest in maritime history and everything pertaining to ships. An oral history interview with Dan can be found on the National Museum of the Pacific War website. He returned to Harvard and graduated with a degree in history in 1947.
- Dan served as an apprentice in the Maurice Seymour photography studio from 1947 to 1948 and as an assistant to Nickolas Muray from 1948 to 1951 in his New York studio, where Dan made tri-color carbro prints from the direct separation negatives produced by Muray’s “single-shot” beam-splitter color cameras. In the 1980’s, Dan became involved in the complex process of making Kodak Dye Transfer prints.
- Dan worked for NBC Television from 1952 until 1974 as Director of Special Projects, where he researched and helped produce 34 nationally televised documentaries, including the acclaimed 1952-53 NBC television series “Victory at Sea.” He also produced documentaries on the life of Abraham Lincoln, the role of the western frontier in the American cultural imagination, and other subjects. Viewing countless hours of archival footage for the series, Dan recognized the need to re-catalog the Navy archive index cards that had many inconsistencies, and then set out to create a new cataloging system for film archives. During his time at NBC, Dan became very interested in integrating still photographs in the television programs he was working on, helping pioneer a visual presentation process widely used today in television documentaries.
- From 1975 until his retirement in 1985, Dan worked as an archivist at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, gathering photographic materials into one central research and storage area.
- Over the years, he successfully 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 black-and-white and color photographs anywhere in the world.
- 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 20 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 Browerr. The NSF grant provided for staffing for the archive and equipment for a new darkroom and photographic studio, where photographer Hillel Burger photographed many of the Museum’s artifact and photograph collections.
- The Peabody Museum was involved in one of the earliest computer cataloging efforts in the 1980s with Lisa Kamisher and Melissa Banta.
- 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 archeological 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.
- Dan officially retired from Harvard in 1985, but continued to have a regular presence at the Peabody Museum until he was into his nineties, and was an advisor on various museum projects. Dan served as an advisor to the museum staff in developing plans for a cool storage vault for black-and-white film materials in 1994 and 1995, offering advice based on his earlier experiences and his continuing research on the subject.
- Publications:
- Conference presentations:
- FAIC Oral History entry: No. An oral history interview with Dan can be found on the National Museum of the Pacific War website
- Location of papers or archives:
- Contact Information: Deceased. No children or spouse.
- Links:
