Magician with stylish and functional necklace

… so let us know if you recognize him.

[Please note: The featured audio is a transfer from a cassette tape.  Quality varies throughout the recording]

Dr. Robert “Bob” Arthur Moog (May 23, 1934 – August 21, 2005) may be best known as the inventor of the Moog Synthesizer, one of the most widely used and popular instruments of its kind.  In this episode of This is My Music, Moog discusses the origins of his musical education, his inventions, and the recordings he enjoys most, which include the following:

1. Sinfonia, from Cantata No. 29, by Johann Sebastian Bach
2. Excerpt from Violin Concerto No. 2, by Henryk Wieniawski (adapted for the theremin), performed by Clara Rockmore with Nadia Reisenberg on piano
3. Excerpt from Requiem, by Gabriel Fauré, performed by Lucia Popp and Simon Estes
4. Fantasie Impromptu, by Fréderic Chopin, performed by Murray Perahia
5. “Incantation,” from Beauty in the Beast, by Wendy Carlos performed by Wendy Carlos

It is best to change the speakers frequently, we find, and to alternate the “flappers” and the “Over Thirties”, but this, of course, really depends upon the crowd.

This made me laugh as it conjured up images of the hip young flappers, and then the over thirties (which I would depressingly now be counted amongst!) as dowdy and staid.  Unfortunately there were no photos or press clippings in this folder to either prove or disprove this image.  The folder does contain two badges though – can’t say that I think these are particularly striking examples of campaign propaganda though!

©Institute of Education Archives

Click to view slideshow.

What is it about display cases? – they always looks so much bigger when they’re empty than when you start filling them!   A colleague suggested measuring the display case and laying it out on a table first to work out where I would put everything (the brown tape denotes the edges of the case).  This was a great idea as I quickly realised I had too much stuff for the space – better to realise this in the office than deliberating over material in the foyer!

Already I’m thinking ‘oh I wish I’d put … in’ but I thought it was better to focus on a few areas rather than try to cover everything – I’d have needed a much bigger space for that!  If anyone has any comments or suggestions on what I’ve done – either seeing it here on the blog or in person – then please do drop me an e-mail at k.hannan [at] ioa.ac.uk

Have a great trip!

Below is a laundry list of notes presented at the Michigan Archives Conference in April 2012 in Grand Rapids, MI. Internship Program From Cradle to Grave:

The “why” of an Internship Program, Internship Policies & Procedures Inventory of Internship Projects, Building Workstations , Job Description,, Recruiting & Interviewing, Orientation, Processing Manual & Training, Weekly Metrics Report, QC Review & Meetings, Model Professionalism, Final Evaluation Internships as a Networking Opportunity. Make a Case: How does an internship program support your mission statement? What are the expectations of an intern vs. a paid employee? What are the confidential constraints that may impact an internship program? How can the support of interns be absorbed into established workflow patterns with minimal disruption? What would happen without interns? Can your organization offer a portfolio worthy project in alignment with professional archival best practices? How can these internships benefit your organization in developing partnership and networking opportunities with local area institutions? Internship Policies & Procedures: What in-house or client-based documents need to be generated to support an internship program? Company Culture (Being Green, cell phones, dress code, iPods, etc…) Schedules & Breaks Confidentiality Agreement & Intranet/Internet Usage Policy Forms Email & Phone Usage Database Access Restricted Areas Access Emergency Preparedness Plan Mentor Chain of Command How do these compare to the standards in the profession? Limit ambiguity to ensure success Model Professionalism: Provide interns with an evaluation form. Respond to questions, concerns, and feedback in real time. Field Trips, Departmental Meetings, Cursory Projects (mix it up), and Networking Opportunities Allow for Learning Curves, including your own. Approach the intern-Mentor relationship as one of synergy, in other words, one in which you can learn from one another. Surround yourself with teams of experts and expose your intern to these relationships (IT, General Manager, Colleagues, etc….). Not all interns come in with the same skill sets or interpersonal skills, meet them where they are, negotiate the human factor and empower them. Be transparent in your process of mentoring and demonstrate integrity around the evaluation. Final Thoughts: Internships can serve as networking opportunities with the local institutions (from a business standpoint, these partnerships offer a value added service. Building partnerships expands resource bases for professional knowledge. Drawing from local talent bases supports the community of upcoming talent while helping to conduct business as usual with fiscal responsibility. Staying synched up with university programs can keep your skill sets fresh by being connected to current and best practices and changes to technologies.

The exhibition will be on display through the rest of May.

While Bowman does her best to get the artist to talk about himself and his own work, it is clear that Dan Flavin has much more to say about the art world and the system in which it functions.

Flavin is outspoken about art critics, museums, and galleries. For Flavin, “art is what people think it is,” and the mediating art critic only serves to further separate people from the art itself.

In this interview, he promotes the idea that museums should have a more direct connection with their living artists, and he is forthright in his critique of institutions, like the Museum of Modern Art, for not doing so. Flavin offers his critique not only of established institutions, but of artists as well. He accuses the Art Worker’s Coalition (AWC), for example, of being too disparate and political. The AWC was an organization of artists, museum staff, and critics whose primary aim was to create more open, inclusive museums in New York City.

Flavin also discusses his reluctant relationship with the gallery system. He admits to being much more critical of galleries in the past, but now sees them as a necessary evil.

“There are some restrictions. I recognize it [in] commercially committing yourself, but I’m not choking on it,” he quipped.

Suffice it to say, Flavin has strong opinions about various players in the art world and is not afraid to voice them.

As Ruth Bowman concludes: “I’m glad you came here to irritate and excite us and even give us some satisfaction.”

1910 Commencement (photograph by Justin B. Smith, class of 1909)

Check out more images from past graduation events here.

Good luck, Class of 2012, from everyone here in Archives and Special Collections!

Early in the city’s history, breweries were established in several locations, usually taking advantage of the numerous creeks running throughout. Some breweries, such as Stanley Park, Red Cross and Royal breweries, were located near Burrard Inlet. [1]

The Columbia Brewery at Cedar Cove, at the north side of Powell Street at Wall Street and Victoria Drive., ca. 1892. Photographer William Stark. Reference code AM54-S4-: Bu P127

Others, such as Doering and Marstrand Brewery, Lion Brewing Company, and Lansdowne Brewery, were along Brewery Creek in Mount Pleasant.[2]

Employees of Doering and Marstrand Brewery in Mount Pleasant enjoying their product in the brewery yard, ca. 1890. The caption "Wohlsein" is a toast to good health. Reference code AM54-S4-: Dist P18

In 1902, the Cedar Cottage Brewery opened on the site of what is now King Edward Village.

Cedar Cottage Brewery, Southeast corner Kingsway and Knight Streets. Note the woodpile beside the building. The water tower in the fir tree was filled by hand-pumping water from the creek. Reference code AM54-S4-: Dist P69

After about a year, the Cedar Cottage brewing operations moved to the Stanley Park Brewery at the foot of Georgia Street and the proprietor used the old brewery as his residence. [3]

Cedar Cottage Brewery building as a private residence, ca. 1920. Photographer William Stark. Reference Code AM54-S4-: Dist P68

The Stanley Park Brewery also sold beer by the glass and was conveniently located near the thirsty teams that played sports at Brockton Point.[3]

One very popular brand of local beer was called Cascade. Major Matthews recorded that the name was found by the Red Cross Brewery through a contest with a $50 prize.[4] The Doering and Marstrand Brewery changed its name to Vancouver Breweries Limited when Marstrand left in 1909.  Soon after, the Red Cross Brewery and several other smaller breweries merged into Vancouver Breweries. Cascade beer became the Vancouver Breweries’ flagship product.

Illuminated sign advertising Cascade Beer, located on top of the Regent Hotel on East Hastings Street, ~1910-19. Detail from Reference code AM54-S4-: LGN 999

The present-day Cascade Room is near the site of the old Vancouver Brewery and is named for this beer. The building, which started as the Doering and Marstrand Brewery, still exists as a live/work studio.

Vancouver Brewery interior, ~1926. Photographer Stuart Thomson. Detail from Reference code AM1535-: CVA 99-3071

Vancouver Brewery Trucks, 1923. Reference code AM1535-: CVA 99-1404

Even though the brewery had conventional trucks, they also had a horse-drawn cart.

Vancouver Breweries horse-drawn delivery wagon, December 1942. Photographer Jack Lindsay. Reference code AM1184-S3-: CVA 1184-1531

As a result of the amalgamation, Vancouver Breweries operated the former Canadian Brewing and Malting brewery, which had been built at 11th and Yew Street in 1912. At the time, the neighbourhood was wooded and marshy and its creek was above ground. Vancouver Breweries was  sold to Carling Breweries in the late 1950s. The building was later sold to Molson’s, and today the site has been redeveloped as Arbutus Walk.

Sample bottles of Vancouver Breweries Limited products, including a cream stout, ~1932. Note that UBC Bohemian was a product of the Union Brewing Company. Photographer Stuart Thomson. Detail from Reference code AM1535-: CVA 99-2683.2

Capilano Brewing Company was owned by Sick’s, which had many breweries in the U.S. and Canada. The first Capilano brewery opened in 1934 at 1400 Powell near Woodland, in an old vinegar plant. When the business outgrew that brewery, a new one was built on 1550 Burrard Street. Sick’s operated that brewery by itself from 1953 until 1958 when the brewery was purchased by Molson’s.

Beginning with Gassy Jack’s Globe Saloon in the 1870s, beer was enjoyed in many establishments across the city, and at festivals.

Hotel Europe Beer Parlour, 43 Powell Street, 1931. Photographer Stuart Thomson. Reference code AM1535-: CVA 99-3894

Abbottsford Hotel Beer Parlour, 921 West Pender Street, April 11, 1933. Photographer Stuart Thomson. Reference code AM1535-: CVA 99-4328

Kinsman Carnival beer parlour, June 30, 1944. Photographer Don Coltman. Reference code AM1545-S3-: CVA 586-2866

Some enjoyed Jack O’ Hearts beer, distributed by the Gold Seal wine and liquor Merchants.

Jack O' Hearts, one of the brands carried by Western Canada Liquor. Ca. 1912. Stuart Thomson, photographer

If you like beer, we hope you enjoy Vancouver Craft Beer Week.

[1] Hagelund, William A, House of Suds, Hancock House, 2003.
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[2] Luxton, Donald, Mount Pleasant Historical Themes, May 2008. http://vancouver.ca/commsvcs/planning/cpp/mountpleasant/heritage/pdf/historicalthemes.pdf
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[3] Fonds AM54 Major Matthews collection, File Stanley Park Brewery.
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[4] Fonds AM54 Major Matthews collection, File Red Cross Brewery.
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The “Prince of Indexers“

That expression seems so familiar.

Click to view slideshow.

My favourite being these photos of a celebration to mark Agnes Dawson’s year in office as Deputy Chairman of London County Council, and to celebrate her 60th birthday.  Handily enough the letter (also shown in the slide show above) was attached to the photos and gives us all the information on the event depicted and one of the photos shows her being presented with the album referred to in the letter.

If there’s time at the end of the project I’ll scan them all but for now I thought I’d scan a few which are different to the usual photographs in the collection.  Photographs of demonstrations, marches and NUWT meetings are the most common themes, with portrait photographs of individual members also making up a significant number.  This folder is different in that it contains more photographs of social events. 

I’ve yet to find any clues regarding the whereabouts of Agnes Dawson’s papers so I’m particularly happy to find these less formal photographs of her to complement what we already have in the NUWT collection.  Hopefully at some point her papers will turn up somewhere as she was a very important figure, not just in the history of the NUWT, but also in the wider women’s movement. A great example of this is in regards to the marriage bar – it was Agnes Dawson who moved a resolution on London County Council in 1935 which meant that women teachers and women doctors were from then on allowed to keep their jobs after marriage.  I’ve put some information, and another photograph of Agnes Dawson in my current exhibition in the foyer of the library.  Tomorrow I’ll remember to bring my camera in and take some photos of the exhibition to post here.

Obviously, this is some great publicity for archives and heritage collections at the Uni where Carrie and I currently work and study (and as regularly as possible try to champion the collections), and draws attention to the excellent Du Maurier holdings we have here.

The notebook has been on public display along with other items such as Du Maurier’s writing desk within Exeter’s recently revamped Research Commons. The book was donated to Exeter in 2001 by Du Maurier’s children; it contains draft material for her most famous novel Rebecca, and as such was used as evidence in a plagiarism case launcehd against the writer in 1947, proving the authenticity of her authorship of the novel.

Mr. Hardy Lee, His Yacht (1857)

It’s boating season!  What’s more, it’s wedding season.  What better way to, yes, marry the happy pair than to examine a timely gift to the Archives and Special Collections of a rare copy of “Mr. Hardy Lee, His Yacht.”  This slender volume is by Charles Ellery Stedman (1831-1905), who published a limited number of copies in 1857.  Stedman was a doctor by profession, but he knew his way around a boat and a drawing pad.  The book, said to be “the first American book on the sport [of yachting],” contains 24 sketches illustrating how a young man might gain a fortune, a yacht, and a wife, all in one season.

A superficial inspection of the volume provides an amusing little story; a more careful inspection discloses a concise lesson in boating terminology (consider first Mr. “Hardy Lee”: “hard-a-lee,” “a command to steer the boat downwind”); social customs (including a suggestion that a glass of porter and a sardine might be beneficial to seasickness, and much matching of boating terminology to mating ritual); and 19th-century slang and humor (“Has he got any of them botherin’ women along with him, Cuff?”).  A nice way to get at the details is to examine the published version against Stedman’s sketchbook “Windseye,” which is in the collection of the Boston Athenaeum and already digitized: http://cdm.bostonathenaeum.org/cdm/compoundobject/collection/p15482coll8/id/231.

The Interview (Boston Athenaeum): Mr. Hardy Lee gets the bill: “What is such a boat goin to cost yer? Waal, I dno: there’s our work yer know, and the spars, & the riggin, & a tender, & the anchors & chains, and the cabin finish, & the gilder & carver & painter & blacksmith, will fetch up to — “

Mr. Hardy Lee and the expert builder: “BUILDER ‘You dont want her sloop-rigged, more’n you want water in your boots.’”

By comparing the 1856 sketchbook against the 1857 version, one can see those  elements Stedman chose to alter, leave out, or elaborate.  We find, for example, that the order of the drawings in the sketchbook is different from that of the printed volume, and the latter contains two drawings (pages 12 and 24 in pdf below) that are not in the sketchbook.  Some of the sketchbook drawings contain illuminating variations in the text: we learn from the sketchbook that Mr. Lee’s fortune is $80,000 (a good deal for his day)  and that the boat must’ve taken a bite out of that sum.

The sketchbook also reveals that the earlier name of Hardy Lee’s lady’s is Mary Poppleton (in the printed version she is the more obviously named Miss Goldmore), and her brother Bill Poppleton (not named in the final version) accompanies her on the boat.  The lady, incidentally, hails from New York, which seems to explain a lack of knowledge about boating so regrettable that it makes the steward grin and the appalled captain redden, a shade recognizable even in black and white:

“YOUNG LADY FROM NEW YORK: ‘Well, Captain Graves, I cant see now, how that little card makes the rudder turn.’”

The book is a gift from Professor Edward Belt, longtime friend of the Amherst College Library, who knows a thing or two about boats, and tried to explain sailing to this writer.  In an e-mail, Ed provided his informed interpretation of the marriage proposal scene below.

Mr. Hardy Lee proposes to Miss Poppleton/Goldmore: “YES? do you say YES, dearest? then I’m — now, then, what the devil are you after?” “Fore-peak-halliards, please, Sir!”

I had initially assumed the sailor had taken it upon himself to come to Mr. Lee at that moment suggesting that Mr. Lee give the order to trim the fore peak halliard, which is tied off at the base of the mast.  If so, that would have been a breach of discipline…  If the sailor was not acting on his own in this matter (which is doubtful), he must have been acting on the orders of the Captain/Pilot.

The lighthouse in the background and the rocks to the right of it suggest that the schooner was sailing by one of Boston Harbor’s outlying islands.  A slight trimming of the top of the foremast sail might have been called for but only if the vessel was much closer to those rocks than is shown…. No trimming should have been necessary on the Windseye until lighthouses at the entrance were far behind.  However, there may have been a deeper reason. The Pilot may have deliberately wished to interrupt the owner’s proposal, realizing his job would be affected by the outcome. This makes sense because trimming the foremast peak is a very trivial matter and would not affect the vessel’s speed much if at all. Once the order was given, why then did the sailor need to go to that particular spot in the boat?  The halliard is tied off at the base of the mast where Hardy Lee [and Mary] were, and the pilot knew that.

What the pilot also knew is that a man “can’t keep a wife and a yacht too.”  Still, he retains some hope.

“MELANCHOLY TERMINATION OF THIS SEASONS BOATING. WEDDING GUEST. ‘Well, old Skip! this puts your pipe out! he can’t go a wife and a Yacht too, you know!’ ANCIENT MARINER: ‘You be derned, young ‘andspike! can’t they live aboard!’”

Even if you’re not interested in sailing or marrying, “Mr. Hardy Lee, His Yacht” is a book worth examining.  Several images  from the book have already appeared online, but the full volume in the Amherst College Archives and Special Collections is also available as a pdf.

My education favourite is ‘Learning to live’, described by the contemporary catalogue in these terms “Britain has many well-planned new schools with modern equipment. These are described in the picture of a day in Billy Brown’s Nursery School, his sister’s Junior School, and the Senior School where his brother is a prefect. At all stages of education, children learn to be useful citizens.” Interestingly the senior school featured in the film is Northwood in Hillingdon, still in the same building. I imagine the lantern slide projector (part of the modern equipment) has been retired!

While the emphasis of the John MacKay Shaw Collection is on poetry and children, it also contains the collector’s own notes and correspondence, as well as original drawings, proof sheets, catalogs, and other materials assembled during his many years of research. In these materials as well as in the books, history, sociology, music and theatre, art and education are well represented, with emphasis on the Victorian era.

Reuters continue to develop the functionality of the database and since the first trial in October 2011, the enhancements include:

• Reciprocal links to/from book records and book chapters;
• Accurate citation counts from journals, conference proceedings and other books; and
• Full bibliographies from books and book chapters

An online tutorial is a good starting point for searching this new citation index.  Access to the Web of Knowledge is from the ‘Other Databases‘ page or from the Databases, A-Z guide.

The Library would very much like your views on this new resource.  Access comes at a price so please let us know whether you believe this resource will be useful for your research and whether you think it provides value for money. You can do this by filling in an online survey which can be accessed here.

The truth is archivists and researchers often work collaboratively in understanding the research value of records. As archivists we seek out and appraise records based on our mandate and on appraisal criteria which include the content of the records and where and how they were created and used, the order and completeness of the records, their condition, as well as aspects relating to their authenticity, reliability and intrinsic value.

Patrick Gunn consulting the water application record books in the Archives Reading Room, April 12, 2012

Researchers, however, bring their unique questions to the archives and the records they consult and, in working with researchers, archivists can learn a lot about the records we have acquired, organized and preserved and even how records relate to and add value to one another. I recall, for instance, a glaciologist who worked with tourist photos of the Rockies to learn more about the movement of glaciers over time.

Patrick Gunn is a dedicated Archives’ researcher. He’s on the board of the Heritage Vancouver Society and the lead on the Society’s online database of the City’s Building Permits. This database has become an essential tool for researching heritage buildings. Heritage enthusiasts also refer to the City’s Water Works Department records as a source of information towards determining the building’s original owner, date of construction and use.

Vancouver Water application record book, Vol. 1 (1888-1901) Reference Code COV-S367 Vancouver Water Works Company file

Typically, heritage researchers have consulted the Water service record cards and Water service applications as they are a rich source of information, however, there are gaps in these records. Recently, Patrick realized that the Archives’ holdings included the Water application record books. These 3 volumes are a list of the persons applying for water service and the address in order of the application number, which is also chronological. Since they contain only the very basic information relating to a water service application, they appear to have been little used.

Recently, Patrick demonstrated how useful the Water application record books are by searching for information on the apartment building at 1185 Haro Street, on the corner of Haro and Bute Streets in Vancouver’s West End. There is no Water service record card and no Water service application for this address. In addition, although Patrick was able to locate a reference to the building permit in the Vancouver Daily World newspaper, which narrowed down the construction date to around 1906, the City building permits for 1906 no longer exist.

Vancouver Water application record books, Vol. 1 (1888-1901), p.113

Patrick knew that the building was first listed in the 1907 City Directory but only the apartment residents and not the owner were listed. When he consulted Vol. 1 of the Water application record books for 1906–directories are known to collect their data one year in advance–he found the entry for Application No. 9354 on November 15, 1906 to E. Hobson on Bute Street. Edward Hobson was a local contractor and builder.

Researchers typically use a number of sources to locate information on heritage buildings. These include City records in the Archives such as Property Tax records, Water Service records and Building Permit Registers, other archival records such as maps and fire insurance plans, architectural plans and photographs and online resource such as city directories, VanMap and Google maps. A reference guide to researching historic buildings and houses is available online.

Group of men and women assembled for a picnic on the lawn in front of the Vancouver Waterworks Company house in Stanley Park, c.1890. Reference Code AM54-S4-: SGN 175B

The Vancouver Waterworks Company was incorporated on April 6, 1886, the same day the City was incorporated, by G.A. Keefer and a group of Victoria businessmen to supply Vancouver with water from the Capilano River by means of a pipe laid under the First Narrows. The engineering works were finished and the water first flowed in 1889. In 1891 the rate payers of Vancouver voted to acquire the Company, and the City took it over.

Volume 1 of the Water application record books, where Patrick found his information, was started by the Vancouver Waterworks Company and finished by the City of Vancouver, although there is no note of the transfer of ownership in the ledger.

Typical entries in the Vancouver Water application record books, Vol. 1 (1888-1901)

To quote Patrick: “The clerks who originally kept the ledgers were very precise in their entries, the handwriting is clear and legible, and the entries are all complete.” He thinks that the ledgers are another potential project for transcribing and is planning to add the data to the Vancouver Heritage Society’s ever-expanding Building Permit database.

I like the idea of taking to the trees!

Cartoon from ‘The Schoolmistress’, 14/05/1931, ref UWT/D/439/5 ©Institute of Education Archive

So, where were we? The Department of Education in Tropical Areas (or ETA), became the Department of Education in Developing Countries (EDC) in 1973.

It is during the late ETA, and EDC period that connections with universities in other countries, particularly in Africa, can be tracked through the papers. And it is here I feel the collection comes into its own, not just as an example of the work of the Institute, but also in prividing snapshots of life in countries in the process of gaining independence, or in the aftermath of it. Two particular examples stand out for me, though I am sure there are countless more;

file IE/COL/23/63 (1979-1981) contains a letter from a member of staff at the University of Zimbabwe discussing the state of schools post segregation. She discusses more and more children turning up at schools, both at ones that were previously reserved for white, and for black children

file IE/COL/19/8 (1964-1966) contains papers regarding a planned conference that never took place. The papers refer to a conference that was intended to take place in Nigeria in 1966. However, the country was in the throes of the Nigerian Civil War, also called the Nigerian-Biafran War, so it could not go ahead. Often an archivist would discard papers regarding a conference that never actually happened, when the transaction so to speak, was not completed. I couldn’t have done this. While it’s not quite whitewashing history, it would be isolating the department from external occurences, and therefore ignoring the context it developed and grew within.

When working with archives, it’s often quite exciting to find find material that relates a collection to things occuring in the wider world. Archivists do love to bang on about context, but it can make quite an isolated, collection, and indeed experience, feel part of something bigger. It can also help you learn a lot about historical events that you probably didn’t learn about in history lessons at school. Do leave a comment if you have any interesting examples of similar!

Friday 1st June 2012, Stirling Management Centre, University of Stirling

A one-day conference presented by Archives and Records Association (Scotland) with the support of the Scottish Council on Archives. Focussing on the management and preservation of born digital archives, this event will bring together experts in the field who will offer practical advice for those facing the challenge of dealing with born digital material.

The AGM of ARA(S) will also be held during the day and the event will be followed by an evening reception in the beautiful surroundings of the Management Centre’s Conservatory. Cost (payable on the day):  £30 for ARA members, £40 for non-members (this includes all presentations, catering and evening reception). We would ask all those intending to attend to please register in advance of the event. To register, email Jane Petrie, Secretary ARAS:  petriej3@stirling.gov.uk.

Conference programme:

10.00 – 10.30: Coffee and registration

10.30 – 12.15: Morning Session:

• “Don’t Panic! An introduction to born digital records” – Sharon McMeekin (Digital Preservation Coalition)
• “An Update from the National Records of Scotland” – Susan Corrigall & John Simmons (National Records of Scotland)
• “An Update from RCAHMS: trustworthiness, preservation and dissemination, and available repository software solutions” – Emily Nimmo (RCAHMS)

12.15 – 1.00: Lunch

1.00 – 2.15: ARA(S) AGM (including presentation from Marie Owens, ARA)

2.15 – 5.15: Afternoon sessions:

• 2.15 – 3.00: “Preserving Moving Pictures and Sound: An overview of the latest DPC Technology Watch Report” – Richard Wright (Audiovisual preservation specialist and former technology manager of the BBC Archives)
• 3.00 – 3.30: “The use of file validation tools in the University of St Andrews digital archive for research data” – Swithun Crowe (St Andrews)
• 3.30 – 4.00: Tea / coffee
• 4.00 – 4.30: Parallel session (a): Practical demonstration of DROID file format identification tool – Swithun Crowe (St Andrews)
• 4.00 – 4.30: Parallel session (b): “Twitter for Archivists and Archives” – Kiara King (Ballast Trust)
• 4.30 – 5.15: Panel discussion and Q&A

5.30: Evening BBQ

It has been a few months since I began work with the Claude and ZerNona Black Papers here at Coates Library.  The majority of the first two months work was primarily a combination of surveying, physically acquiring, and preliminary accessioning and processing, all at once.  The following photos will give a glimpse into that journey.

Sifting through dusty, deep piles of  materials (wearing nitrile gloves) across three rooms of a house, a remote office and an outdoor shed, has yielded approximately 100 cubic feet of an archival collection.  The three pictures seen above give a candid view into what an archivist might find as the original point of entry — somewhere in there I had to find the collection. The endeavor took 120 hours of February and March afternoons. Happily, I found a very willing volunteer in Elias Guetaneh, who had been an intern extraordinaire for me at the City of San Antonio Municipal Archives and Records. Elias joined me for the March portion of this treasure hunt.  His cheerfulness, excellent eye, and enthusiasm (and height!) made the evaluation, heavy lifting, photographing, access to materials near the ceiling,  and copious note-taking much less daunting.
Spying original order was a challenge, but it was possible to find meaningful arrangement — each physical location revealed rough time frames and materials relevant to them. The attic, for instance, had some of the earliest records (from the turn of the century), and most of the Baptist Convention materials (Reverend Black was active with the American Baptist Convention for many years), and most of ZerNona Black’s community organization records and educational materials.

When packing materials up, I retained meaningful groupings whenever possible and made notes on the box itself and on a spreadsheet, giving each box a unique identifier with an indication of the room it came from.  In my experience, you never know how useful that information can be until after the fact, at the time of processing and creating the finding aid. Because the storage of the collection over many years has been in a hot attic, a turn-of-the-century home with highly fluctuating environmental conditions, and an outdoor shed, the materials are being treated anaerobically (no chemicals, but deprivation of oxygen in a vacuum chamber) for pests and cleaned by hepa vacuum. I eagerly await the arrival of a clean collection any day now.

After having gone through this process, I have laid eyes on most of the items in the collection. In addition, with all the documentation so far, I have started background research, put together a preservation supply order for the entire collection, begun solid work on the finding aid in Archon, and am exploring digitization needs and costs for formats that we cannot do in-house.
So, for now, “Onward, ho!”

When that happens, you should see several improvements including:

• A more intuitive user interface that allows you to save favorites and to download and print items more easily.
• Improved search functionality across multiple collections.
• Better performance from a new, more powerful server.
• Improved item description displays on multipage items.
• A “newest items” feed for each collection so that you can subscribe via Google Reader or other options and see new items as they are added to the collections.

The ride may be a little bumpy for the next few weeks. Your patience and understanding are most appreciated. The launch of our new server will also coincide with the unveiling of several new and expanded collections.

Watch this space for updates.

As the guides were integrated into the course content (in both the  presentations and on the ‘worksheet’ for suggested hands-on exercises), students were asked to provide feedback on the portal and the relevant guides (Getting Started, Research Skills, Databases A-Z, EndNote, Mendeley, Zotero, Interlibrary Loans, Using Other Libraries  and Bibliographic Measures and Citation Searching) via an online survey form.   This is so that we can continue to improve  the site in preparation for the formal launch in September/October 2012.  The present site is a prototype that was created specially for the IOE’s Learning & Teaching Conference 2012 to demonstrate the potential for improving the student experience.

In addition to the guides, the students were also asked to interrogate LibAnswers, the new online enquiry service, and to submit a query on this new online enquiry platform which we are hoping to trial during the Olympics.  As the guides became integral to the learning, some students provided additional feedback on the course evaluation forms.  The feedback has been positive and helpful as some students suggested ways in which we could improve the portal.  This feedback is summarised below:

LibGuides

The majority of the students said that the portal would improve their student experience, though a small number were undecided.  The accessibility of information on the homepage received mixed responses:  some students perceived it as being clearly laid out in that it was easy to see which guides were available, though these may have to be grouped if the number of guides on the site increased whereas a few students found the page to be “a bit busy”.   In addition, one respondent wanted to see the guides to be downloable as pdfs.  The guides that were found to be particularly useful for this group were:  Research Skills because “it provides a step by step guide on how to conduct the literature review.  I wish I’d known about this before I started doing it!”  One student rated the guide 5 out of 5 and commented “I think it’s really helpful to have these explanations easily available for use after the Info and Lit course, so that I can check on things I have forgotten or simply not used recently, whilst studying independently”; another found the Databases A-Z guide “clear and with useful information” ; and others found the three bibliographic managment software guides (EndNote, Mendeley and Zotero) the most useful.  This is not surprising given that these guides were given prominence during the course.

When asked what additional guides the students would like to see on the site, the following responses were received:  a guide on what to do if a resource was not available in the library; a guide comparing the differnt bibliographic software packages, i.e. EndNote, Zotero and Mendeley; and  guides to other libraries in related disciplines (not necessarily education focussed).

LibAnswers

The students said that they found it useful to browse the answers to FAQs on LibAnswers and an international student who submitted a query to LibAnswers was delighted with the response s/he received – see:  Support for International Students which highlights the Interlibrary Loans, International Education & the Postal Loans and Photocopies Service guides).   Another (or is it the same student?) student commented on his/her course evaluation form, “It is heartening to learn of the support for part-time international doctoral students!”  Generally, students said that LibAnswer would be “an easy way to contact the library or find answers” especially for those studying at a distance.  One user said s/he would prefer to find their own way using online resources, or to ask in person at the library.    The majority of the students were pleased to know that they would be able to submit queries to the site via SMS text and all students were unaware of the fact the portal was available as a mobile site on their smart phones/tablets.

A couple of the students also provided feedback in their course evaluations forms, saying that the guides are “really user-friendly” and would prove invaluable in reinforcing the learning that took place during the week.

I’d like to end this post by thanking the students who took part in the survey and for their useful comments.  Please do look at the portal at http://libguides.ioe.ac.uk  and give us your feedback too.

ADDENDUM

A comment on a feedback form that has just been received:

” The whole library service is wonderful and always relevant and practical and the staff have both technical expertise and good inter-personal skills, not to mention the ability to look ahead and implement new developments in the most helpful ways. Thanks”.

The letters discuss one of the most famous fights in literary history (are there many?) — a 1929 boxing match in Paris between Hemingway and Callaghan, during which Hemingway was bloodied, then knocked to the mat.

http://ehto.thestar.com/marks/the-curious-case-of-the-stolen-hemingway-letters

In the spring of 1950, 28 artists signed an open letter protesting the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition “American Painting Today, 1950.” The letter was published in The New York Times and The Herald Tribune. In it, the artists accuse Met officials of being “notoriously hostile to advanced art” and refuse to participate in the exhibition.(1)

Life magazine photographer Nina Leen gathered roughly half of the artists for a photograph dubbed “The Irascibles.” The image includes the likes of Theodoros Stamos, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, Richard Pousette-Dart, William Baziotes, Jimmy Ernst, Jackson Pollock, James Brooks, Clyford Still, Robert Motherwell, Bradley Walker Tomlin, Willem De Kooning, Adolph Gottlieb, Ad Reinhardt, and at the very top, standing on a table, Hedda Sterne.

Despite her prominence in the photograph, Sterne was never an abstract expressionist. Neither was she particularly interested in mixing art and politics. She did, however, sign the letter of protest to the Metropolitan Museum in 1950 (“I always sign everything”(2)), and shared the same gallery as a number of the artists: The Betty Parsons Gallery. In fact, she was very much a welcome member of their intimate circle, but when it came to artistic aesthetics and philosophy, she tended towards another direction entirely, then and throughout her career.

In this interview with Ruth Bowman, Hedda Sterne discusses her exhibition of portraiture at the Betty Parsons Gallery entitled “Everyone.” When asked about the portraits, Sterne replies, “They are just heads. Remembered portraits of contemporary friends and friends of my past.” She goes on to describe some of her aims (directness, spontaneity, truthfulness, and simplicity), her method (painting as spontaneous as handwriting), and her inspiration: riding the trains on the New York City subway. For Sterne, art is a “very important, personal, intimate experience,” a technique of understanding, an exploration of perception. In the end, she says, “the work of an artist gets its total meaning when he [draws] his last brushstroke, and the last brushstroke has meaning from the first, and the first acquires meaning from the last.”

(1) Open Letter to Roland L. Redmund, President of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1950 May 20  Archives of American Art
(2) Oral History Interview with Hedda Sterne, 1981 Dec. 17 Archives of American Art

Amherst College Bicycle Club 1882

Amherst College’s romance with the bicycle started off in the winter of 1868-69 with the velocipede, a bone-rattling, derriere-damaging, wood and iron contraption. Velocipedes were the hottest of trends in the nation that year. Charles E. Pratt describes the velocipede in his 1879 The American Bicycler: “the best machine as made here was a heavy wooden-and-iron affair, with rigid wheels nearly of a size, with flat iron or steel tires… and with the rider poised about midway between them in an unnatural position, thrusting out his feet before him for propulsion, and only able to keep his equilibrium by constant and laborious effort.” Indeed the velocipede was so difficult to ride that it was considered primarily an indoor activity, best accomplished on a smooth, level surface. Nonetheless, the thrill of  speed and self-locomotion worked its seduction on Amherst students; George Cutting describes the “velocipede mania, which extended so widely in the winter of 1868-69″ in this 1871 book Student Life at Amherst College, “many of the students spent most of their leisure time in learning to manage this new agent of locomotion, and, for a while, nothing was talked or thought of but the velocipede. The excitement, however, died away almost as quickly as it had arisen, and hardly a trace of it remains.” (Article on Velocipedes, above, from the Amherst Student of February 20, 1869)

Cycling made it’s comeback more slowly, easing into college life in the last 1870s and early 1880s. By this time the high wheel bicycle had come into fashion – it was much easier to ride and made outdoor riding and even touring possible. The first advertisements for bicycles are found in the Amherst Student in the May 22, 1880 issue. Early mentions of the Bicycle Club appear in May and June of 1881. The bicycle club appears to have been an amateur racing and touring society, whose members traveled together to area races and events. The club seems to have disbanded once bicycle racing became incorporated into track events.

One of the most enthusiastic early bicyclists was Charles S. Mills, class of 1882. His scrapbook (Scrapbooks Collection) contains programs from races in Springfield, Belchertown and Boston and his ribbons and medals along with the photograph above, presumably showing his room with the bicycle in prominent position.

click to see images full size

Bicycle racing was incorporated into college athletics sometime in the mid-1880s. Track team photographs begin to incorporate high-wheel bicycles in 1887 (Amherst College Athletics Collection).

One of the most charming photographs of the high-wheel era was donated to Archives and Special Collections in 1942 by Tryon Dunham (on the left in the photograph above). He writes that the photograph is of “Frank Delabarra and myself [Class of] 1890 with our high wheeled bicycles which we rode all around Amherst”.

The high wheel bicycle was replaced by the “safety” bike around 1895. The safely bike (so called because it was indeed much safer and easier to ride) is the first bicycle that closely resembles modern bikes. These bicycles can be seen in track team photographs into the early 1900s.

Bicycle racing fell out of favor as a track event in the early 1900s and hasn’t been considered a sport at Amherst since. But bicycles have certainly remained an important part of student life.

The Kosinski interview above is from September 29, 1975, where Kosinski discusses his novel Cockpit. This exchange and the others that follow are typical of Miller’s approach to interviewing. Drawing out his subjects by thoroughly knowing their work, underscoring universal themes, and always being curious about each author’s distinct approach to character and narrative was signature Miller.

A poet, playwright, critic and translator, he created and taught the Great Books course at New York University where he held forth for more than 40 years with very popular classes. As a young man during World War II, he was a public affairs officer for General George Patton honing his skills as a writer of both prose and verse. Miller wrote hundreds of stories about men in combat and life in the infantry. He was the recipient of a writing prize for his short story, Two Soldiers Stopped for Water, published in the anthology, Fighting Words.

After the war he taught at engineering schools in Brooklyn and Colorado and was appointed a full professor at New York University largely because of his pioneering research on the work of Jules Verne. Professor Miller authored, co-authored or contributed to some 67 volumes including book-length studies of Vonnegut, Heller, Sinclair, Beckett, Doctorow and Bradbury. Long considered the dean of American Jules Verne scholars, his annotated translations of four of Jules Verne’s novels are noted landmark works.

Erica Jong talks about her third book and first novel, Fear of Flying on December 23, 1973.

Piri Thomas is the author of Seven Long Tunes. He spoke with Walter James Miller on August 24, 1975.

Dorothy Gallagher is the author of Hannah’s Daughter. She spoke with Walter James Miller on October 18, 1976.

Some of Professor Miller’s favorite links:

Walter Talks Books  North American Jules Verne Society  Poets and Writers  Pen American Center  Home Planet News

Authors Guild  New York Quarterly  NYU Liberal Studies

Broadcast on WNYC Today in:

1928: Prince Ludovico Spada Potenziani, the Fascist Governor of Rome is received at City Hall by Mayor Jimmy Walker and official greeter Grover A. Whalen. The Municipal Band performs.

1931: King Prajadhipok and Queen Rambaibarni of Siam are officially received at City Hall. Mayor Walker tells the King and Queen they are the first visiting royalty to New York since King Albert of Belgium. The King of Siam says, “If some visitors from other worlds, such as Mars, were to come and visit our Earth, I think that the human race would be proud to show them New York, and tell them, ‘This is what the human race has been able to do.’ “

1945: BBC Radio Newsreel reports on the unconditional surrender of the German army in northwest Germany, Holland and Denmark.

1959: WNYC reports on the winners of the 43rd annual Pulitzer Awards. The awards that year included: Archibald MacLeish. Robert Lewis Taylor, Arthur Walworth, Leonard White, Stanley Kunitz, John La Montaine, Joseph Martin, Philip Santora, The Utica Observer-Dispatch, Utica Daily Press, Bill Mauldin, and Jerome Paul Whitkin.

1962: Robert Moses addresses the San Francisco Bay Area Council on city planning.

J. Carter Brown came from a prominent New England intellectual family who encouraged his interest in art at an early age. His ancestors established Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and his father, John Nicholas Brown II, was Assistant Secretary of the Navy under President Harry S. Truman. Brown studied History and Literature as an undergraduate at Harvard, later receiving both an M.B.A. from Harvard and a Master’s from New York University’s Institute of Fine Art.  

In 1961, The National Gallery hired Brown as the assistant to the then Director, John Walker. In 1969, at the age of 34, he replaced Walker and went on to become the longest serving Director in the Gallery’s history.

The year of this interview, 1971, was an exciting time for the National Gallery. The museum had just broken ground on the East Building, an addition that would eventually double the Gallery’s floor space and increase its scope. The architect responsible for the expansion was I.M. Pei. Pei was already well known for the construction of the Des Moines Art Center and the Johnson Museum at Cornell University (his iconic pyramid structure at the Louvre was to come later, in 1988). 

The new East Building was meant to compliment the Gallery’s adjacent West Building, a grand neoclassical structure built in 1941 and paid for by Industrialist Andrew Mellon. In addition to the building, Mellon had also donated his art collection; to this day, he remains the single largest donor of art to the federal government. Many of the great works in Mellon’s collection had been bought during the depression from the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, Russia.  It was a time when the Hermitage Museum was desperate for money and one could, according to Brown, easily acquire paintings “right off the walls.”

With the opening of the new building, Brown invited scholars to come and work with the prints and drawings in the Gallery’s vast collection. He established a residency program for the advancement of scholarly research at the newly minted Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts. In Brown’s words, the Center would establish for the “first time since Alexandria” a library with books for advanced studies in art.

Bowen and Brown end with the discussion with a teaser for an upcoming exhibition, Rodin Drawings, True and False.  The show was to include 132 drawings by Rodin and 28 forgeries of the artist’s work. Visitors would be able to examine each work and judge the authenticity for themselves. 

Authenticity was a hot topic in the art world at the time. The forger Elmyr de Hory had recently garnered fame from Clifford Irving’s 1969 book Fake!, and Orson Welles’ 1974 film F For Fake – a movie based partly on Irving’s book – followed soon thereafter.

John Percival, with card up sleeve

John Percival spent nearly eighty years practicing his magic in Providence and building an excellent collection of books on the topic in the process. Now, thanks to volunteer Elise Petrarca, that collection of over 1,200 books plus ephemera and manuscripts is cataloged in its entirety online. You can find the books in the Library’s online catalog* (you’ll find most — and soon all — of them by doing a call number search for “John H. Percival”) and the description of the ephemera collection on our website. (Elise managed all of that work over the course of the last semester.)

And if you’d like to find out more about Percival and get a quick tour of the collection with a selection of images, you can find that online at http://www.provlib.org/exhibitions/percival. If you’d like to see this terrific collection in person, don’t hesitate to visit.

* Alright, there are a few books scarce enough that they’ll take a little longer to catalog. And  a small collection of Percival’s letters still needs a finding aid. But they’ll be along soon.

So far I know that she was a lifelong friend of Vera Brittain, that she was involved in the Six Point Group and the League of Nations Union, and now I know she was also a friend and supporter of the NUWT.

©Institute of Education Archives

Dear Miss Froud,
I send you this Speakers Bell with gratitude and affection for all the fine work of the NUWT.
The Tortoise, symbolic of the NUT, speaks for itself.
Yours ever, Winifred Holtby

In her reply Ethel Froud refers to it as a Chairman’s Bell so I assume it would be used to announce each speaker at a meeting. I’m not sure what the Tortoise is in reference to, maybe there was an inscription or drawing on the bell or maybe the design of the bell itself – the correspondence itself shows that maybe the meaning was quite illusive. Ethel Froud writes ‘whilst agreeing that the tortoise is indeed symbolic of the NUT, we will bear in mind the fable of the hare and the tortoise and will hope that this aspect was far from your mind when you chose the design’.  Very intriguing!  I wonder what happened to the bell?

Exhibition poster

In conjunction with the exhibition the Scottish Political Archive is hosting a series of lectures at the Stirling Smith Art Gallery and Museum on Thursday lunchtimes at 12pm. The full lecture programme is as follows:

3rd May: ‘Scottish literary magazines and devolution’, Linda Gunn

Linda will examine the editorial processes of Cencrastus and The (New) Edinburgh Review.

10th May: ‘Let the People Decide’, Dennis Canavan 

Dennis will give some personal recollections of the Referendum campaigns, the intervening period of 1979-1997 and ask what lessons can be learned from the past to help shape Scotland’s future.

17th May: ‘From 1979 to 2014: Referendum Campaigning and the Future of Scotland’, Peter Lynch

24th May: ‘Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham (1852-1936), Stan Bell, John McIntyre and Willie Thom

A celebration on the 160^th birthday of Cunninghame Graham, who first proposed the establishment of a Scottish Parliament in 1888.

31st May: ‘Political Fictions’, James Robertson

James discusses the fictionalising of 20^th-century Scottish political history in his novel And the Land Lay Still, and asks why there has been relatively little ‘political’ fiction in Scottish literature.

7th June: ‘The Radical Scotland Project: the making of a magazine’, Kevin Dunion

 Tickets for the lectures are £3 and are available at the Stirling Smith (Tel : 01786 471917). The exhibition runs from 27^th April – 10 June 2012.

I discovered another quirky idea on the last day of my Erasmus Libraries week when the centre of the city seemed to be taken over by students in groups dressed in all manner of outfits — brides’ dresses, soldiers, flowerpots. They were blowing horns, carrying baskets and politely asking for money donations.  This colourful student in the photo explained that they were students sitting exams and they were asking for ‘party money’.  I  couldn’t think of a happier way to get rid of my loose change on my last day. Cheers to the students of Brno.

Audio courtesy NYC Municipal Archives.

I mentioned spires in a previous blog from Brno in an attempt to show that libraries can inspire from the inside. What I didn’t expect to find were actual, physical spires (although they appear to be upside down)  as seen in the student area outside a Masaryk University library above.

And sometimes libraries just provide resources and  room for thought  as in the Moravian Library open to all below.

Panorama of Vancouver’s Port showing the B.C. Sugar Refinery in 1927. Item # 2011-092.806, Reference Code pending

We are pleased to announce the donation of the B.C. Sugar fonds! The records of B.C. Sugar are a valuable contribution to our holdings and one of our most significant acquisitions. Founded in 1890 and still operating today, the company is only four years younger than the City of Vancouver itself. Over 300 boxes of records (including roughly 5500 photographs and 500 architectural plans and drawings, as well as moving images and artworks) document the beginnings of the business, follow it through two world wars, and provide insight into social and economic changes both locally and globally. For a brief history of sugar companies in Canada check out the Canadian Sugar Institute.

The Archives would like to thank Lantic Inc. for donating the records and for generously providing some financial support for processing them. As the records are processed in stages over the next couple of years, we will let you know when they are made available for research, and will share highlights from the fonds as exciting discoveries are made. We are starting with the core business records.

The City of Vancouver was incorporated in 1886; just last year the Archives was a key participant in celebrating the City’s Vancouver 125 anniversary events. Take a moment to think about our city in its early days and the industries that shaped it . . . natural resources such as fishing, forestry and mining come immediately to mind. B.C. Sugar was the city’s first major industrial venture not tied to these industries. Sugar has been refined atVancouver’s port since 1891, for 121 years! Today, the refinery can produce up to 240,000 tonnes of sugar per year from imported raw cane sugar.

B.T.R. (Benjamin Tingley Rogers) at 24, 1890. Item # 2011-092.807, Reference Code pending

In March of 1890, the man who founded B.C. Sugar, Benjamin Tingley Rogers, was a young and confident entrepreneur. He started the company at the age of 24 with an idea and some financial backing from Canadian Pacific Railway president William Van Horne, and other businessmen based out of Montreal. Vancouver was an ideal location for B.T. Rogers’ intentions; it was at the Western end of the newly completed CPR, and right across the ocean from the Philippines, a major source of raw sugar.

Last page of contract between the City of Vancouver and B.C. Sugar. Note the clause to exclude Chinese labour at the refinery, an unfortunate part of our history. Reference Code pending

The City of Vancouver was eager to support and encourage business in the late nineteenth century. B.T. Rogers received concessions from the city: free water for 10 years and no taxes for 15 years. The $40,000 bonus he requested was given in the form of $30,000 worth of free land which the city granted to him.

BC Sugar employees annual picnic 1945. item # 2011-092.082

Picnic at Brockton Point, ca. 1898. Item # 2011-092.368.1, Reference Code pending

The history of B.C. Sugar is rich and diverse. The sugar industry is both a very local and a demonstrably global enterprise and the records reflect both local and international influences. The records document everything from company picnics and passion-filled strike action to the global price and availability of sugar.

Picture Butte factory, 1942. Item # 2011-092.020, Reference Code pending

The company owned, under different company names, cane sugar refineries in Fiji and the Dominican Republic as well as beet sugar refineries in Alberta and Manitoba. The records of B.C. Sugar include records for all of these subsidiary companies documenting everything from negotiations with Canadian beet farmers to correspondence addressing the difficulties of doing business in a country run by a dictator to decisions surrounding the maintenance and purchase of equipment.

B.C. Sugar A.F. Club soccer team, with trophy, 1927. Item #2011.092, Reference Code pending.

I have spoken to several people who grew up in Vancouver and fondly remember visits to the B.C.Sugar Museum which included a tour and a giant pile of sugar. In 1976 the B.C.Sugar Museum opened to share the history of the company and inform school children and other visitors about the history of the sugar industry. The events of 9/11, however, had many repercussions and tighter security at the Port Metro Vancouver meant that bus loads of school children and tourists could no longer freely visit the B.C. Sugar Museum and it was closed. In 2011, Lantic made the decision to donate the archival records on display and stored in their vault to the City of Vancouver Archives.

B.C. Sugar shop crew 1915. Item # 2011-092.809, Reference Code pending

Photograph of the "Orinoco" train wreck, August 5, 1893. B.K. Emerson Papers.

In August of 1893, there was a terrible accident on the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern railroad. The Springfield Republican reported that the Chicago-bound express, the “Orinoco,” jumped the track and ran into the engine of a local freight train. Three sleeper cars were wrecked and nearly 30 people were killed or injured. Among the dead, The Republican reported, was Professor Benjamin Kendall Emerson, a prominent geologist and beloved teacher at Amherst College. The paper published a moving and thorough obituary of Professor Emerson attached to the report of the wreck, lamenting that the “ending of a career so full of usefulness, of high enthusiasm and solid achievement is all sadness and unavailing regret.”

Headline from the Springfield Republican, August 7, 1893.

It was “characteristically vigorous” of Benjamin K. Emerson, wrote Horatio Smith in 1932, “that he should outlive his own obituary by forty years.”* Though injured in the accident, Emerson did not die and was back in Amherst within the month.

Benjamin K. Emerson (class of 1865) had been appointed an instructor of geology and zoology at Amherst in 1879, following his graduate studies in Germany. He quietly introduced methods of instruction in his classrooms which would lead John W. Burgess to call him the “founder of modern science and modern scientific study at Amherst College.”**

Benjamin K. Emerson, ca. 1912. Alumni Biographical Files.

Emerson emphasized laboratory work and dissection, hands-on techniques that were a departure from more commonly practiced lecture-based science instruction. Even more scandalously, he taught Darwinian evolution, and saw the study of science as separate from the study of religion, an attitude that ran counter to prevailing Amherst College philosophy, and certainly to the teachings of his geology department predecessor, Edward Hitchcock.  It was a testament to Emerson’s non-confrontational nature that his beliefs and methods were not challenged by the administration. Even Amherst College President Julius H. Seelye, author of “A Criticism of the Development Hypothesis, as Held by Charles Darwin” stayed quiet on the subject until a proposed series of lectures pushed him to state that Evolution was a subject best left to the Department of Psychology and Philosophy.

Following the railroad accident in 1893, Emerson went on to become President of the Geological Society of America (1899-1900), revise the state geologic map of Massachusetts (1917), and to oversee the restoration and continued building of the Amherst College collection of minerals—originally collected by Charles Upham Shepard—after it was largely destroyed by a fire in 1882. The collection was one of the strongest in the U.S. by the time of Emerson’s retirement in 1917, and much of it can now be seen on display at the Beneski Museum of Natural History at Amherst.

Emerson’s notebook "11" containing notes on geological features of the Connecticut River Valley, 1880. B.K. Emerson Papers.

Affectionately called “Emmie,” Emerson became one of the most loved faculty members at Amherst during his nearly 50 years here. “He never turned into a stiff pedagogue, never became an unbending elder statesman, never surrendered to any kind of ritualization,” wrote Horatio Smith. Emerson was known not only for his teaching and scientific contributions, but for his slightly eccentric personality and absent-mindedness. Many repeated the story of Emerson once taking his watch from his pocket and noting that he had just enough time to go back to his room for his watch.

Benjamin Kendall Emerson died peacefully in Amherst on April 7, 1932.

Photograph of Benjamin K. Emerson, used for December greeting card, 1929. Alumni Biographical Files.

The Benjamin Kendall Emerson Papers held by The Amherst College Archives and Special Collections contain correspondence, geological notebooks kept during his geological surveys, pamphlets and scientific papers relating to Emerson’s “Helix Chemica” (a 3-D representation of the chemical elements) and his Geology of Massachusetts and Rhode Island, and materials from his time as a student and professor at Amherst, including his 1865 valedictory oration. The collection also contains documents and photographs related to the wreck of the “Orinoco.” Further materials related to Benjamin Kendall Emerson’s personal and professional work can be found in the Alumni Biographical Files and the Pratt Museum of Natural History Records.

* (Amherst Graduates’ Quarterly 84)

**Reminiscences of an American Scholar: the Beginnings of Columbia University (New York: Columbia University Press,  1934), 138.

At the time of this interview (June 29, 1972), the Brooklyn Museum was facing financial difficulties. Cameron mentions how limited funding caused delays in structural repairs, and how one particularly big storm left him scrambling to find buckets and plastic sheeting to repair a leaky roof. The budget shortages predate his tenure: when he took office in 1971 there was no money to stay open in the evenings, and several galleries were closed for extended periods during the day.

And yet, despite these fiduciary woes, the staff remained. In Cameron’s words, there was “a warmth about the place.” Museum curators were generous with their time and as host Ruth Bowman notes, openings were not stuffy “like other museum openings I could mention.”

At the opening of the Norman Rockwell exhibition, for example, there was a mix of hippies and black tie types. The atmosphere was like a “giant block party.”

Much of Bowman’s interview with Cameron focuses on the role of the Brooklyn Museum as a supporter of community culture and arts.  At the time, the museum’s community gallery was unique, ultimately becoming a model for other New York City museums.

Cameron invited organizations like Women in the Arts (WITA) (which was formed in part to address the inequalities existing in a male dominated art world) to curate exhibitions in the museum’s space with complete autonomy. Cameron believed museums “must respond to social change” and allow for public spaces to exist within the walls of their institutions. These spaces were necessary because at that time, Cameron says, there was “no arts equivalent of the Town Hall meeting” or “no Hyde Park corner for the arts.”

Although Cameron wasn’t sure whether the anti-institutional sentiment in the arts world would endure or perhaps be replaced by a “pendulum swing the other way”, he was nevertheless committed to creating a “people’s museum” for the borough of Brooklyn. Along with the existing strengths in the museums’ classical and Islamic collections, from then on the institution would serve as a place for innovative community curation and cultural education.

http://thewondershow.org/2012/04/25/get-your-free-tickets-now/

and get those tickets while they last.

The ever-practical Ms. Child also speaks about whipped cream, and her feelings about food processors, electric beaters and microwave ovens, all while planning a hypthetical dinner for six. The program includes Sarah Walker and Roger Vignole’s comedic song “Place Settings” and Roger Bolcom’s “Lime Jello Marshmallow Cottage Cheese Surprise” (and Ms. Child’s scary encounter with a similar creation).

The “Christian general” eventually became the namesake of Howard University.

I got a bit obsessed with doors during a visit to Finland last year. This year in the Czech Republic, I’m getting a bit fixated with turrets, towers, steeples and spires. Although I really admire these high-rise additions, it has dawned on me that they are not always necessary. Even so, a world without spires would be a bleak one.

I just spent a very busy day looking at very modern libraries at Masaryk University and although there was a distinct absence of spires in the architecture, there were definitely some soaring ceilings and a feeling of upward movement inside the libraries. It was also comforting to see that students and libraries are similar no matter where they are — heads down and thoughts soaring up. Perhaps we need to concentrate on the spires inside buildings with educational inspiration and aspiration.

Here’s a little more info from the exhibition organizers:

After 150 years, some might assume that the history of the Civil War is a closed book. The exhibit Rhode Island in the Civil War: Myth, Memory, and (Mis)Information reopens a chapter of this story to reveal the deeper complexities of Rhode Island’s Civil War experience. Curated by students in Brown University’s Methods in Public Humanities class in collaboration with the Rhode Island Civil War Sesquicentennial Commemoration Commission, the exhibit examines the history and legacy of Rhode Island’s involvement in the Civil War, using items from local archives and libraries. The exhibit will be on view at the City Hall Gallery from April 28 through June 22, with an opening reception on May 3.

A period-uniformed brass band playing music of the Civil War will kick off the opening reception at 5 p.m. on the steps of City Hall, accompanied by a uniformed color guard of teenage Civil War reenactors from the Met School. At 5:30 a brief speaker’s program will include remarks from Keith Stokes, Executive Director of the Rhode Island Economic Development Commission, Chairman of the Rhode Island Sesquicentennial Commission Frank Williams, City Archivist Paul Campbell, and Brown University Professor Anne Valk, whose students researched, planned, and installed the exhibit. The opening is free and open to the public. Refreshments will be provided.

About the Gallery at City Hall:

Offering space to artists and organizations that might not have a permanent gallery, the Gallery at City Hall exhibits an eclectic array of work that highlights the artistic and cultural diversity found in the Providence community. It is open to the public during City Hall business hours: Monday to Friday, 8:30am to 4:30 p.m. and is located on the second floor. City Hall is located at 25 Dorrance Street.

London Metropolitan Archives, 40 Northampton Road, EC1R 0HB
Friday 18 May 2012
10am-3.30pm

FREE EVENT—PLEASE BOOK IN ADVANCE
To book call: 020 7332 3851 or email ask.lma@cityoflondon.gov.uk

Come along to this joint event between London Metropolitan Archives and the Institute of Education Archives and share your memories of school days in London. There will be a chance to see film footage from the Inner London Education Authority, documents and photographs. There will also be time to share your thoughts and memories of your time at school or as a schoolteacher.

Full details:

Remembering London Lives: event details

Event Programme

London Metropolitan Archives, 40 Northampton Road, EC1R 0HB
Friday 18 May 2012
10am-3.30pm

FREE EVENT—PLEASE BOOK IN ADVANCE
To book call: 020 7332 3851 or email ask.lma@cityoflondon.gov.uk

[To see the full programme click on the image above right]

Come along to this joint event between London Metropolitan Archives and the Institute of Education and share your memories of school days in London.
There will be a chance to see film footage from the Inner London Education Authority, documents and photographs. There will also be time to share your thoughts and memories of your time at school or as a schoolteacher.

Brno is known as the ‘city of universities’, and with a population of less than 400,000, it earns it name with 6 private and 6 public universities and over 80,000 students. Masaryk University is one of the most popular universities in the country with over 44,000 students, 15% of which are international.

So what is MUST and why are we here?

MUST stands for Masaryk University Staff Training week and we are made up of university international office staff and librarians primed for a week of visits, discussions and cultural exchanges aiming for better understanding and sharing. What I’ve understood already is that although we come from different cultures and have an assortment of accents, our mutual bond is education. And lucky for me, the shared language is English.

Thanks to Andrea Kirkpatrick, transcriptions of the accounts of three voyages of the ship Margaret are now available online. Place the images beside the transcriptions and it becomes immediately apparent just how much work is involved.

View the transcriptions at http://pplspc.org/digital/items/browse/tag/whaling+transcriptions

McCloy served as Assistant Secretary of War from 1941 to 1945. The diaries are largely day to day records of McCloy’s activities, with some narrative containing his impressions of individuals and events.

Topics of particular interest include: the Japanese-American relocation program (1941 and 1942); McCloy’s tour of North Africa (1943 Feb-Mar) and Italy (1943 Dec); the Cairo Conference (1943 Nov-Dec); planning for post-war Germany (1944-1945); the Normandy invasion (1944 Apr-Jun); McCloy’s tour of the front, the death of President Roosevelt and plans for war crimes trials (all 1945 Apr); various issues relating to the atomic bomb (1945 May-Nov); the Big Three Conference in Berlin (1945 Jul); the Japanese surrender and the end of the war (1945 Aug); and McCloy’s ensuing world tour (1945 Sep-Nov).

Our School Histories collection remains available in the library of course, and there is a wealth of other books and resources on our library and archive catalogues. As well as our own excellent library and archive collections, there are many other sources you may find useful including the London Metropolitan Archives – and in particular this very useful guide that they have produced.

In recent years there has been renewed interest in the case and it has been the subject of a book by respected historian David Hutchison. Titled Many Years a Thief  this book, described by Hutchison as his own interpretation of the events surrounding the crime, also explores the harshness of life in the early years of settlement in Western Australia and the social mores prevalent at the time. John Gavin was a ‘Parkhurst Boy’, the name given to reformatory apprentices who were transported from Parkhurst Prison on the Isle of Wight to Australia and New Zealand in the 1840s and 1850s. Essentially teenaged convicts they were used as a supply of labour in Western Australia, being apprenticed to settlers upon arrival in the struggling colony. The State Records Office holds the original record of John Gavin’s trial (Series 122, Cons 3472, Item 051).

A rather gruesome case and outcome by today’s standards, Gavin was executed 3 days after his trial on 6 April 1844 at the Round House in Fremantle.

The play John Gavin, created and performed by Nick Candy, Dawn Pascoe and Steve Finnegan, is on at the Blue Room in the Perth Cultural Centre from 19 April to 5 May 2012.

Gerard Foley

Senior Archivist
 

After the sinking, the British and Foreign Sailors’ Society sponsored fundraising services in many port cities around the world to support the widows and orphans of seamen who lost their lives. We have a program for the one held in Vancouver.

Public memorial service, page 1. Reference code AM1519-: PAM 1912-25

The service included prayer, reading of scripture, and music by the band of the Sixth Regiment (Duke of Connaught’s Own Rifles).

Public memorial service, page 2. Reference code AM1519-: PAM 1912-25

It included remarks from Mayor Findlay, as well as a resolution of sympathy from H.H. Stevens, M.P., and Alderman Ramsay.

Public memorial service, page 3. Reference code AM1519-: PAM 1912-25

The Vancouver Opera House, in which the service was held, is shown in the following photographs.

Interior of the Vancouver Opera House, from the audience. Reference Code AM54-S4-: Bu P7

Interior of the Vancouver Opera House, from the stage. Reference Code AM54-S4-: Bu P8

For more of the history of the Vancouver Opera House and exterior views, see this post at the Changing Vancouver blog.

For those who do not know about Erasmus, it is the European Union’s educational exchange programme for higher education students and staff. Programmes vary enormously from days to years, yet all encourage student and staff mobility for work and study and for trans-national co-operation projects. The scheme currently involves nine out of every ten European higher education establishments promoting cooperation among 32 countries. For more about what Erasmus can offer, go to http://www.britishcouncil.org/erasmus-about-erasmus.htm or check out the IOE pages at http://www.ioe.ac.uk/study/masters/104.html.

If you are naturally nosy like me, an Erasmus visit can metaphorically open doors to better understanding, new networks and new practices in education. My week this year will be spent with many other delegates from EU countries which should give me a glimpse of not just Czech university education, but of education in a variety of EU countries.

Last year, I spent a concentrated Erasmus week in Helsinki, Finland, where I satisfied my nosiness and a door-fetish – both of which are displayed in a mini-movie summary which can be found at  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SPcWIyT5Qcw.

A book like this copy of Jeremy Belknap’s The History of New Hampshire (published in three volumes between 1784 and 1792) can be found in libraries around the world, for instance.

But you may have noticed that this particular volume carries an inscription on the title page:

So this copy of a then recently-published history of state of Vermont was likely on the shelf of then-President George Washington. That makes this copy already quite different from other copies out there in the world, but what we’d really love to have would be Washington’s marginal notes, commenting on a state in the new country whose independence he played such a large role in winning.

Unfortunately, the pages are bare, as if this was one of those books purchased or received as a gift and then placed on a bookshelf and never opened.

Or so I thought, until recently, when I came across this page:

A single pen stroke, seemingly the most inconsequential bit of marginalia imaginable. You have to look closely to see it’s even there, and the passage it highlights is unremarkable, a description of shrubs and undergrowth:

But if we turn back a page and find the context of the passage:

It suddenly takes on a new resonance:

We can only imagine the President, taking a break from the business of governing a brand new nation, perhaps, or making a conscious effort to study its history and geography. Did he read the book in its entirety or skip right to the passages describing impressive natural features only recently named for him? What was it about this particular description of scrub brush and difficult, steep ascents that captured his attention? Was he remembering a visit of his own?

Whatever the answer, books like this provide a reminder of the eloquence of even the smallest marks and the endless variety of the books in which they’re found. Perhaps best of all, there may well be other such marks awaiting discovery by the next visitor who wants to take a closer look.

Howard Thurston was one of the most well-known magicians of his time. This image is taken from…

… sheet music for the “Thurston March & Two Step” (1911):

It turns out that Trinity University performed this play back in 1985, just a few years after it was written. After seeing the two posters created for the 2012 production I wondered how the Theatre Department advertised for the previous iteration of the production. So, from the archives, the program for Trinity University’s production of Cloud Nine in 1985:

Also, here’s the review of the play from the Trinitonian in 1985:

Stratton, Sean. Everything’s different on “Cloud Nine.” (1985, October 25). Trinitonian, pp.7-8.

 

The small document reproduced here will win no prizes for beauty or elegance, nor even eloquence.  It is stained and faded — barely legible, in fact.  Nevertheless, it represents a historic “first.”  What we’re seeing is arguably the first piece of air mail ever delivered.

It is a letter (more accurately, a 3×5″  card) written by Dr. John Jeffries of Boston to Mr. Arodie Thayer and dropped from a balloon over England on November 30, 1784.  It was dropped with three other similar letters, two of which were reported to have reached their addressees; however, our item is the only one known to have survived to the present day.  It was given to the College by Thatcher Thayer (Class of 1831), a nephew of Arodie Thayer.  This letter is the centerpiece of the Jeffries Air-Mail Letter Collection.

The message on the letter is difficult to decipher, but it appears to read as follows:

From the Balloon above the Clouds

Let this afford some proof, my dear Mr. Thayer, that no separation shall make me unmindful of you, — have confidence, — happier, I hope much happier days await you — pray tell my dear Mrs T. I salute her from the Skies… [section illegible except for the word "pleasure"]… believe me as I ever have been,

     faithfully yours,

          J. Jeffries

Additional writing appears below the signature, but it is so faint that it is impossible to know whether it is a post-script or a later addition.

And what caused the writing on the card to become so barely decipherable?  Analysis at the National Archives in 1951 concluded that the note was written with some sort of berry ink (possibly pokeberry), which was commonly used in the 18th century but which is known to fade relatively rapidly; also, that some unknown person, at a later date, attempted to trace over some of the words using pencil, and not always correctly (discrepancies can be seen between the pencil writing and some of the underlying ink).

John Jeffries (1744-1819) was a Boston physician and Harvard graduate who had a keen interest in not only medicine but also meteorology.  Combined with this was a fascination, widely shared, with the new endeavor sometimes referred to as “levitation,” or hot air ballooning. His balloon ascent of November 30, 1784, undertaken with  the French aeronautic pioneer Jean-Pierre Blanchard, reportedly attained an altitude of over 9,000 feet,  a record at the time.  This was only one year after the Montgolfier brothers in France had successfully engineered a manned ascent in a tethered balloon.

Jeffries’ and Blanchard’s flight in England, as well as a second, much more celebrated, flight from Dover Castle across the English Channel into France, were chronicled in the book A Narrative of the Two Aerial Voyages of Doctor Jeffries with Mons. Blanchard; With Meteorological Observations and Remarks… (London, 1786). Our copy in Archives & Special Collections is an indispensable accompaniment to the Jeffries Air Mail Letter Collection.

Purists might disqualify the Jeffries letter as genuine “air mail,” since it didn’t bear a stamp. We will leave that debate to the philatelists. One thing beyond dispute is that our document, homely as it may be, represents a significant piece of aeronautic history.

More information will be added to the website in due course but it already includes information on the theme, the venue, excursions, the members of the Organising Committee of the conference and relevant links.

The theme of ‘Education, War and Peace’ was chosen

To coincide with the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War in 1914… Delegates will be invited to address the relationship between education and war, and also the role of education in fostering peace.

It already sounds like it’s going to be a fascinating conference and I’m particularly happy to see some images from the NUWT collection being used on the website.

The Library has signed up for access to a unique collection of BBC news material allowing users to explore events over a seven year period (1969-1976) in Northern Ireland’s history.

Watch a short preview of the service here. Hosted by the British Universities Film & Video Council and linked from our new AVOnline LibGuide  (Moving image tab gives more information and login details).

More useful background to BBC news in Northern Ireland on the BBC website.

P.S. If you really wanted this post to be about the other Chronicle why not dip into the archived programmes online.

Some people do more than curse under their breath and continue the hunt for an empty space. Some people take matters into their own hands. Here are two examples of vigilante-style parking citations from our Percival Magic Collection. Feel free to print them out and use them on the next bad parker in your life.

And for those who prefer brevity:

We should understand the sea change that technology has brought to the American public and people around the world. According to a Pew report, 66% of online adults use social media platforms. By effectively engaging with social media tools, we are building and maintaining relevance with the public.

Many staff members at the National Archives have embraced social media–our communications staff is facile, many staff who interact with our user communities have created blogs and are tweeting, and all of our Presidential Libraries have both feet in the social media world.  This is not a passing fad or a frivolous use of technology. … [ Read all ]

Heroic musicians of the Titanic poster

The poster depicts the eight professional musicians who were employed to provide on board musical entertainment for the ships passengers (playing requests for up to 12 hours a day from a song book containing over 350 titles). As the ship sank it was reported that they continued to play, their final tune the hymn ‘Nearer my God to Thee.’ Selling over 80,000 copies in the months following the disaster the poster was one example of the extraordinary public response to the sinking of the Titanic, another musical response being a huge benefit concert at the Royal Albert Hall on 24 May 1912 which featured seven full orchestras.

The pages of the union’s journal in the months following the disaster provide detailed reports about the heroic actions of the musicians and the efforts made by the union and others to provide compensation for their families, compensation which was not forthcoming from the ship’s owners the White Star Line. The musicians were employed by an agency called Black Brothers, who supplied musicians to ocean liners, and were not technically ship’s employees. As well as being denied compensation from the White Star Line the family of the violinist John Law Hume also received a letter from Black Brothers demanding they pay the balance of the money he owed for his uniform. While reporting on the insults suffered by the families of the deceased the journal also records the huge sums of money raised by its members for its special Titanic fund, along with the various tributes made and memorials unveiled across the country to their fellow musicians.

T. S. Eliot. "The Waste Land." 1922.

Our holdings of books and manuscripts by Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, and Richard Wilbur are well known to most poetry aficionados, but the poetry collections at Amherst College extend well beyond these three greats. In the past year I worked with two undergraduate courses that prompted me to dig deeper into other areas of our poetry holdings.

T. S. Eliot. The Waste Land. 1922.

In the spring semester of this year, Nigel Alderman of Mount Holyoke College brought his seminar in modern poetry to the Archives & Special Collections to take a look at some of our books by Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. For students who usually only encounter their readings in modern academic editions, spending some time looking at these poems in their original format can be enlightening. Instead of the dense brick of a Norton anthology, these students got to hold the slim booklets published in the nineteen-teens and twenties.

T. S. Eliot. Prufrock and Other Observations. 1917.

We are fortunate to have a very strong collection of Modernist literature in the Archives. We have two copies of the first edition of The Waste Land — numbers 46 and 811 of the limited run of 1,000 copies. While our holdings of Eliot’s other books are not quite comprehensive, we do have very nice copies of Prufrock and Other Observations (1917), Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (1939), and many others.

Ezra Pound. Cathay. 1915.

Ezra Pound played a critical role in Eliot’s career, and those of many other Modernist poets. We have excellent holdings of the many iterations of Pound’s Cantos, including the very rare A Draft of XVI. Cantos (1925), as well as fine copies of the books that preceded that massive project. Our copy of Cathay (1915) in its original paper wrapper is particularly lovely with its very simple cover design.

James Joyce. Pomes Penyeach. 1927.

Another rarity in the collection is our copy of James Joyce’s only book of poetry, Pomes Penyeach (1927). This very small volume includes just thirteen poems composed over a twenty year period from 1904 to 1924. Our Joyce collection is as complete as one could hope — we have first editions of Dubliners (1914), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Exiles (1918), Ulysses (1922), and Finnegan’s Wake (1939).

The Little Review. Vol. 4, No. 11. 1918.

While these first editions are all wonderful, many of the works of these authors first saw print in a variety of small magazines. In the fall semester of 2011, Jen Acker (founding editor of The Common) taught a course about Little Magazines for which she made use of the holdings in the Archives & Special Collections. Some of her students were so interested in the history of these ephemeral publications that they curated an exhibit in the John William Ward Exhibition Room on the A Level of Frost Library. They selected items from the collections and wrote the text for the labels. The exhibit includes everything from Charles Dickens’s Household Words to recent issues of McSweeney’s. The students also selected several issues of The Little Review where Joyce’s Ulysses was first serialized, and Coterie, which published work by both Eliot and Pound.

The exhibition will be on view through the end of the summer 2012.

In this March 1956 broadcast of the “New York Herald Tribune‘s Books and Authors Luncheon,” host Irita van Doren lavishes Lord with praise, noting his eclectic career as an author and his commitment to telling the story that had mesmerized him since he was a child. She observes the many changes made to shipping in the decades since 1912, and makes particular reference to the class distinctions of the day that resulted in massive loss of life among the less affluent passengers housed on the lower decks of the massive ship.

In his enumeration of the many factors that eventually led to the wreck which left more than 1,400 people dead – starting with a delayed departure from Southampton, followed by the many warnings of icebergs that were ignored and compounded by the stillness of a moonless night – Lord notes the many ways in which fate was against the Titanic.

Lord goes on to describe the great dignity of many of the passengers aboard – rich and poor – who faced their end as the band played. He describes this night as one that proved that a man’s social position has nothing to do with his morality, his intelligence or his bravery.

Upon Van Doren’s encouragement Lord returns to the microphone to describe the rescue efforts of the RMS Carpathia, a little ship commanded by Capt. Arthur Henry Rostron that answered the Titanic’s SOS calls, rescuing survivors from the icy waters all through the night.

Audio courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives WNYC Collection.

• It allows us to show you the relationships between records and between records and their creators
• Browsing by subject, place or creator is much easier
• You can view and download larger digital objects, so you can study more detail
• Search result URLs are permalinks

How did we get here?

Back in 2008, staff at the Archives began working with lead developer Artefactual Systems Inc to build a prototype of an open-source, standards-based system to preserve and provide access to digital records. We needed a system with the same attention to reliability, authenticity and accessibility that we use to preserve our traditional paper, film and photographic holdings. This prototype became Archivematica, an open-source digital preservation system. We have been working with Artefactual to develop it over the past three years as part of our Digital Archives project.

Artefactual also developed ICA-AtoM, software that manages both digital objects and descriptions. We decided to use ICA-AtoM to manage our holdings because it:

• supports the complexity of archival description
• was developed developed under the stewardship of the International Council on Archives using international standards
• is used by an active community of users world-wide
• is flexible, adding functionality rapidly
• integrates with Archivematica and was designed to work with born-digital records (of which we have many terabytes)
• allows us to make all our descriptions and digital objects available in one place

All 250,000 record descriptions in our old holdings management database had to be migrated into ICA-AtoM, a process that took four months of careful data clean up, field mapping and data validation. We also had to migrate the ~74,000 digitized photographs and moving images that had been managed by the old database. The digitized files were processed by Archivematica to preserve them and to create larger access copies to make available through ICA-AtoM. (Geekout warning: For those interested in digital preservation, here’s a slide presentation with detailed information on this process.)

What’s new

Searching

Our new system offers a number of ways to search for records, including keyword searching, browsing and navigating.

The Search box and the Advanced search on the right allow you to search for phrases and keywords. The links in the Browse section on the left allow you to view lists of descriptions, creators, subjects and places as well as thumbnail versions of digital objects.

The URL of your search (circled below) is a permalink. Unlike in our old system, it will not expire.

Showing relationships

Once you find a record, its long result (“Full Description”) will show its relationship to other records:

If you look in the Fonds section in the left sidebar, you can see this description represents an item in Subseries 3 of Series 6 of the Major Matthews collection, AM54. The links in this section will take you to related descriptions. (Tip: always open links in a new tab in your browser so you don’t lose track of your original search results).

The new system allows us to show the relationships between records and their creators. There’s an Authority Record for each creator and it is linked to the records they created. In our old system, we could only attach a single administrative history or biographical sketch to a body of records. Now we can attach multiple creators to a single body of records and show their responsibility for those records over time. This is really useful when looking at records created by the City of Vancouver.

This is the Authority Record for the City’s Permits and Licenses Department.

The Authority Record gives the creator’s name (in the Identity area), a brief history or biography (in the Description area), and lists related creators (in the Relationships area). The latter allows us to show relationships between creators, such as the different names of organizations responsible for records over time. The left sidebar lists of groups of records the creator made or received, as well as individual records the creator has published.

Some new terms and numbering

Long-time users of the Archives will be familiar with our old way of identifying private-sector records collections or fonds by Add MSS, or “Additional Manuscript” number. Add MSS has been shortened to AM.

The concept of “Reference code” is also new. In the example above, the item’s reference code is AM54-S4-3-: PAN N216. This reference code is made up of codes from higher levels of description (everything before the colon) and an item-level code (everything after the colon). The reference code is what you should now use for citation purposes and for ordering reproductions of items.

Rearrangement of City records

Preparing our data for migration gave us the chance to arrange the City records in a more logical way. Now there are now only five government fonds:

• The City of Vancouver fonds
• Vancouver Board of Parks and Recreation fonds
• The Vancouver Police Department fonds
• The Vancouver Public Library fonds
• The Vancouver School Board fonds

Our old City government records series numbers are still in use, but are now part of the Reference Code. As a result, the Reference Code for an item in one of the City fonds could look like this: COV-S632-: CVA 789-27. This code identifies a photograph in Series 632 of the City of Vancouver fonds. The creator is listed as the Vancouver (B.C.) Engineering Services.

Larger digital objects, with better browsing

The new system offers higher-resolution digital objects. For photographs and other graphic material, click on the image in the Full Description to produce a high-resolution jpg. Click on the image again to produce a jpg with the same resolution as the original digital object. If the item you found is a moving image, click on the Download Movie link below the streaming version in a Full Description to view the video in the mp4 format in the same resolution as the original.

If a higher level of description, such as series or fonds, contains digital objects, thumbnails will appear in the Cover Flow viewer in the left sidebar of a Full Description. In the example below, the images in AM54’s Incoming correspondence photographs subseries appear and can be browsed using the cover flow viewer’s slider. The “See all” link below the viewer loads all the related images, but note that if there are thousands of images in the set, your browser may time out.

Council Minutes index

Although we were able to combine data from many of our existing systems into this new one, the data in our Council Minutes Index could not be imported. You can download it here as an Excel spreadsheet file (19 MB). The .xls file is also available on the kiosk computers in our Reading Room.

What’s Next

We are one of many organizations contributing to the development of the ICA-AtoM software; others include Library and Archives Canada, the World Bank, Archives de France, the Canadian Council of Archives, the United Arab Emirates, and UNESCO. The approach taken by lead developer Artefactual Systems is that of a rapid development cycle. Changes happen quickly, with new releases every year.

The developers are working now on many enhancements, including:

• faster search times
• improvements to the look and feel of searching and results

We hope you find much to like in our new system, and we look forward to your feedback.

Curls & bows.

This seventeenth-century bookseller makes Johann Ernst Adelbulner look practically bald.

https://web.multco.us/sites/default/files/records/documents/desktop_records_management_v9.pdf

Mayflies complements the collection of approximately 2200 books in the Frederick Lane (Class of 1936) Angling Collection, which focuses on fly fishing, outdoorsmanship, and natural history. For more on this collection, read this article by Tyler S. Wick ’92.

Hand tied dry flies enclosed in the slipcase.

Mayflies is also a particularly fine example of modern wood-engraved illustrations. Our copy is accompanied by a set of “progressive proofs,” showing the stages of the printing process.

Progressive proofs

“Wood-engravings” are made with a particular technique of the “woodcut” illustration process. Antony Griffiths, in his book Prints and Printmaking, gives this explanation of the technique:

“Wood-engraving is in essence only a particular form of the woodcut developed in the late eighteenth century … a very hard wood is used, usually boxwood; since box has only a small diameter, large blocks have to be made by bolting smaller ones together. The wood is cut across the grain (‘end-grain’) rather than along it, as in woodcut. As a consequence the tool used is different: instead of being cut with a knife, the wood is engraved with a graver … sections of the block can be lowered with scrapers in order to make them print more lightly, as grey rather than black. The method of printing is the same as for the woodcut. The use of the word ‘engraving’ in the name of this process often creates confusion; it refers only to the method of cutting the block and does not imply that it is printed in the intaglio method.”¹

The eighteenth-century illustrator and publisher Thomas Bewick (1753-1828) is recognized as the most important name in the history of wood-engraving, because the techniques he perfected enabled this form of illustration to reach an artistic and commercial peak.

Among the books in our collection is an 1826 edition in two volumes of Bewick’s History of British Birds. First published in 1797 (Land Birds) and 1804 (Water Birds), this work was immensely popular in Britain in its time. Modern readers of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre might recognize it as the book that Jane is reading in Chapter 1 of that novel. She lingers over the illustrations in some detail, and it can be surprising to realize that these are not the primary pictures–the bird portraits–but the small vignettes or “tail pieces” that Bewick placed every few pages, at the end of each section. Here are a few, with Brontë’s descriptions:

"I cannot tell what sentiment haunted the quite solitary churchyard, with its inscribed headstone, its gate, its two trees, its low horizon, girdled by a broken wall, and its newly-risen crescent, attesting the hour of eventide"

"The fiend pinning down the thief’s pack behind him…"

"…the black horned thing seated aloof on a rock, surveying a distant crowd surrounding a gallows"

Brontë chose to emphasize examples with bleak and gloomy subject matter; but with over 300 vignettes across the two volumes, there is a much wider variety than this. Bewick had a rather dark (and sometimes crude) sense of humor. For more about Bewick and his art, I recommend the entertaining biography Nature’s Engraver: A Life of Thomas Bewick by Jenny Uglow.

Here is a small selection of Bewick’s humor:And one last tail piece to end this post where it began, with fishing:

¹Griffiths, Antony, Prints and Printmaking: An Introduction to the History and Techniques (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 22-23.

Caleb’s Crossing: Indian and English Gods in Early New England

In this presentation by William Simmons, Professor of Anthropology, Brown University, Dr. Simmons will explore the historical and mythic context that underpinned Caleb’s religious crossing, drawing on the religious beliefs of the Wampanoag communities of Martha’s Vineyard and the theological perspectives of Puritan clergy including Roger Williams, Thomas Mayhew and John Eliot.

Dr. Simmons studies social/cultural anthropology, religion, myth, and ritual – focusing on West Africa and Native America. He is also
interested in American cultural pluralism and the transformations of contemporary American research universities.

More information is available at http://www.provlib.org/events/reading-across-rhode-island-2012-indian-and-english-gods-early-new-england

According to The Royal Progress in Vancouver (Item #PAM 1939-115), during their 1939 tour King George and Queen Elizabeth were entertained by a massed choir of 1500 singing outside of City Hall while they were inside.

. . . as their Majesties and the Mayor were in no hurry to leave the Mayor’s parlour, the crowd, under the direction of Archdeacon Sir Francis Heathcote, sang in unison:

‘We want the king.’

‘We want the King.’

The Queen stepped to the window and waved, and immediately there was a roar of approval from those below. The King stubbed out his cigarette and they left the Mayor’s parlour to descend to the Plaza.

Now there is a little story about the stub of the King’s cigarette. Immediately the Royal Party had gone Mrs. Hilda Pinder-Moss, Assistant Secretary, seized the cigarette stub and placed it in an envelope. No doubt she now exhibits her proud possession to all her friends!

Excerpt from Merry America: Their Majesties’ Tour of Canada, United States of America and Newfoundland, 1939, by H. R Pratt Boorman.

The cigarette butt was housed in a glass vial and cushioned within a small cardboard tube, where it remains.

Moi?

John Ogilby: author, translator, publisher and, among other things, one time Master of the Revels in Ireland. According to the Dictionary of Booksellers and Printers, 1641-1667, “Ogilby spared no cost in the production of his books, which were printed by the best men, with the best type, and on the best paper procurable, with illustrations drawn and engraved by the first artists and engravers in the period… To facilitate the sale of his books Ogilby was allowed to establish a lottery in which all the prizes were his own works.”