Peter J. Kaiser

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©2025 Peter J. Kaiser

Archival Work


Digitizing a Goshuincho (Honorable Seal Book)



I digitized my goshuincho from a recent trip to Japan. Goshuincho are booklets that contain goshuin or seals you can collect from various Shinto and Buddhist shrines across the country. Some shrines even have their own special edition of Goshuincho.


When visiting each sacred site, you perform a prayer, and for a small donation of 300-500 yen, you can collect a goshuin. You either receive a premade page to tape or paste into the book, or a priest can stamp and hand-sign a page in your book. The seals often include the site's name and the date.




I received 22 seals over the course of three weeks, so I’ve omitted some, but here are the names and locations of each shrine:

  1. Goshuincho cover (this one is from Meiji Jingu in Tokyo)
  2. Meiji Jingu [Tokyo]
  3. Ueno Tōshō-gū [Tokyo]
  4. Gotoku-ji [Tokyo]
  5. Hikan Inari-jinja [Tokyo]
  6. Asakusa-jinja [Tokyo]
  7. Fushimi Inari-taisha (Okunoin) [Kyoto]
  8. Sanjūsangendō [Kyoto]
  9. Kiyomizu-dera [Kyoto]
  10. Uji-jinja [Uji]
  11. Byōdō-in [Uji]
  12. Saihoji (Kokedera) [Kyoto]
  13. Mikami Jinja [Kyoto]
  14. Adashino Nenbutsu-ji [Kyoto]
  15. Zenkyo-an [Kyoto]
  16. Todai-ji [Nara]
  17. Kasuga-taisha [Nara]
  18. Chōhō-ji (Rokkaku-dō) [Kyoto]
  19. Namba Yasaka Jinja [Osaka]


Cataloging Image Assets from the Special Collection at Pratt Institute’s Material Lab



As a Graduate Assistant at Pratt Institute School of Design’s Material Lab, which houses over 25,000 unique material samples, I captured various design materials from a small special collection to upload to their digital collection management system (JSTOR Forum). I researched and catalogued these asset records for better discovery and access online.

The primary collection is organized within 9 categories: Textiles, Glass, Ceramics, Stone, Wood, Polymers, Metals, Composites, and Surface Finishes.

Below are some examples of some of the material records as seen in JSTOR Forum:




Digitizing, Researching, and Cataloging Slides from the Noguchi Museum and Image Assets from the NYPL Picture Collection



Image credit: © The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, New York / Artists Rights Society [ARS]

For my final project in my Visual Resources Management class, we were encouraged to reach out to an artist foundation or museum to ask if we could digitize assets in their collection. I was allowed to borrow duplicate photo-positive 35mm slides from the Noguchi Museum to digitize. I also borrowed images from Isamu Noguchi’s folder in the NYPL’s Picture Collection to supplement my collection. 

Utilizing a Nikon slide scanner and a flatbed scanner, I created 30 high-resolution digital surrogate images curated around themes in his sculpture work, such as memorials, playscapes and gardens. I described this lengthy digitization process and my curation choices in a research paper and a pecha-kucha-style slide presentation utilizing only the images.

Below are example VRA Core records utilizing the VRA Metadata Palette plugin in Adobe Bridge: