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Hip hip HOORAY! For America!

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They's seen the Sopranos and Sponge Bob around Sirius by now, and Star Trek around Arcturus….

Visit Television for extraterrestrials

Hype:

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http://www.slate.com/id/2221963/

One of the comments that drives me slightly insane is the notion that "plastic is forever". It should be obvious to everyone who's ever owned a cherished plastic toy (usually from the Golden Arches) that plastic does not last "forever", but for people who work with plastic and try to maintain it (or on the flipside, who try to get it to dissolve in a landfill), all plastic is not created equal, and it's certainly not all "forever".

The above Slate story shows the fallacy of the "plastic is forever" notion in relation to art curation. Naum Gabo's plastic works began to deteriorate back in the 1960s, suffering from what is pretty obviously vinegar syndrome. Gabo blamed poor curation, when he should have blamed poor material selection. He'd been working in cellulose acetate, so it's not surprising that the 1920s works were developing vinegar syndrome by the 1960s.

It's a very interesting article.

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Call for papers received via email.

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Venue: Conference at India Habitat Centre, New Delhi • 24–26 February 2010
Tutorial at IGNOU, Convention Centre, New Delhi • 23 February 2010

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In honor of our country’s birthday, NC Miscellany shares these Fourth of July-related postcards.

By the way, IS anyone heading to a “Greasy Pig Race”?

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Karen Varner, Ellicott, MD, won the free copy of Ad Boy. Congratulation Karen! Thanks to everyone who entered the drawing by leaving a comment in the original post. I hope that Ten Speed Press or another publisher of ephemera-related books...

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In the post, “Don’t Smoke Your Eye Out” I related the course of events that led to identifying Joe Clark, HBSS, who up to that point was an unidentified person in a Hugh Morton photograph, standing next to Andy Griffith as he aimed a slingshot while simultaneously holding a cigarette. The above photograph, a group portrait of the 1956 Honorary Tar Heels dinner attendees in New York City, was a key to identifying Clark (second from the right standing next to Hugh Morton). I didn’t know at the time I wrote the post that the original negative was in the collection, so I present it to you in this post. Bob Garland (on the far left holding a camera) likely made the photograph, as his name is on the negative.

This post will introduce you to the Honorary Tar Heels (HTH), a lose-knit social club formed in 1946. But first, a special treat: in a comment for “Don’s Smoke Your Eye Out,” Julia Morton mentioned a photograph of Joe Clark standing on the top of the Mile High Swinging Bridge at Grandfather Mountain. We found the negative; daring stuff!!!

The Honorary Tar Heels began in 1946. During that year, Curtis Publishing (of Saturday Evening Post and Ladies Home Journal fame) sent writer Francis X. Martinez and photographer William S. Springfield to North Carolina to work on a “red-herring” (pre-publication) edition of a magazine to be called Holiday.  Bill Sharpe, head of the Division of Advertising and News of the North Carolina Department of Conservation and Development, guided the pair from one end of North Carolina to the other.  During their three-week sojourn, Springfield took to imitating the locals—eating their food, drinking their liquor, and imitating their dialects.  After they left, Sharpe asked Governor R. Gregg Cherry to sign a “corny little proclamation” making Springfield an “Honorary Tar Heel,” to which Cherry obliged.  Springfield proudly showed his certificate around and before too long other visiting photographers and writers began requesting the appellation.

Sharpe knew Joe Massoletti, a New York City restauranteur with a cottage at Hatteras, and the two shared several mutual friends among the newly anointed HTHs.  Massoletti suggested to Sharpe that they be invited to Hatteras sometime in 1947 for a weekend of fishing.  To make it a festive event, Massoletti supplied a chef and a waiter from New York, and had food flown from New York to Manteo and then boated on the Pamlico Sound to Hatteras.  A group of thirteen HTHs, including Massoletti as host, attended the gathering that included writers and photographers from the New York Times, Life Magazine, and National Geographic.  A group portrait of those who attended, probably made by Holiday staff photographer Al DeLardi, can be found on the cover of The Honorary Tar Heels, 1946-1967: A Pictorial History.  Governor Cherry also attended, although he arrived after the photographs was shot.

Members of the budding affiliation continued to meet two or three times a year—most likely through the efforts of Sharpe as a means to maintain his media connections—at places such as Nags Head, Cataloochee Ranch, Lake Logan, Morehead City, Wrightsville, Linville, New York, Washington, and Philadelphia.

But what of Hugh Morton and Holiday, the publication that served as the unlikely catalyst for the HTH?

Martinez and Stringfield teamed up to produce “Village of Stars,” an article about the Lost Colony drama on Roanoke Island, for the fourth issue of Holiday published in June 1946.  Though not a wide-ranging essay on the state, their three-week trek may have laid the ground work for the magazine’s October 1947 issue that featured North Carolina in a lengthy article written by News and Observer editor Jonathan Daniels.  The article featured photographs by DeLardi, one of which depicted four men playing cards while two men examine a fishing rod and reel next to a fireplace inside Massoletti’s cottage and may well be members of the HTHs.  The heavily illustrated twenty-six page article also included images by several photographers, including eleven by Hugh Morton.

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Many people on Twitter were recently following along with the activities at the latest THATCamp, and are excited about the prospect of participating in something similar in Austin in conjunction with SAA. I asked Lisa Grimm, Assistant Archivist at the Drexel University College of Medicine, to serve as a guest blogger to explain what THATCamp is all about and why more archivists might want to attend:

Last week I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to attend THATCamp 2009 - the second-annual unconference for digital humanities practitioners. (I leave the term for the attendees deliberately vaguely defined, for they included a very useful cross-section of people - other archivists, librarians, historians, literature scholars and programmers). It was an incredibly thorough, thought-provoking yet streamlined experience and it offers some useful models I hope we can begin to emulate at SAA this year in Austin.

(more…)

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I hope that everyone enjoys the long weekend, and the celebration of our nation’s 233rd birthday.

Click here for a good story about the cracking of a code in Thomas Jefferson’s correspondence that went unsolved for more than 200 years. The decrypted message is certainly relevant this weekend!

I don’t plan to post anything new until at least Monday (when we’ll continue to examine the Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library).

Among other things, that short hiatus means my friends in Delaware can take a well-deserved break (on both reading and billing!).   :)

–

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Last month saw the return from the conservators of our collection of reports from the Salvation Army Farm Colony at Hadleigh (also known as Coll Misc 0842).

We rarely get material actively repaired, concentrating instead on preserving it in a stable condition through careful storage and handling, but these reports were a special case. With some of the sheets so brittle and fragile they could not be unfolded without breaking, it was clear that more active intervention was needed.

The reports were written for Hackney Poor Law Union to keep them updated on the progress of the men they sent to the colony, and in particular to let them know whether the training the men received at the Colony helped them to find jobs and stay out of the workhouse. Dating from 1899-1907, they not only provide an insight into attitudes towards the poor at the turn of the century, but also give us poignant glimpses of the individual lives being played out behind the official records.

The reports include the names and ages of the men sent to the Colony by Hackney Union, along with a brief statement about their work and conduct at the Colony, and a note about what they went on to do after they left the Colony. Most names appear in only one of two of the reports, with some inmates recorded as successfully getting jobs or emigrating, and others recorded as leaving of their own accord, but one name recurs in reports year-after-year: Frederick Padfield is first recorded in the 1899 report, and over the next five years worked in both the Colony’s market gardens and its brickfields. Initially reported to be ‘doing well’, officials later described him as ‘quiet, harmless, somewhat eccentric and ordinarily unequal to hold his own with the average worker’. At the beginning of 1905 he was recorded as ‘just pottering along, that’s all’, and in October he was dismissed for refusing to work, ending up later that month in the workhouse.

The conservation treatment was carried out at Graham Bignell’s paper conservation studio. Graham carried out aqueous treatment to deacidify the folios and flatten them out, then repaired each folio with spider tissue, using Japanese tissue infills for the missing areas. Time-consuming and intricate work, but the result is a new lease of life for this fascinating piece of history.

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In observance of Independence Day, all branches of the Central Arkansas Library System, the Arkansas Studies Institute, and the Butler Center will be closed Friday, July 3 - Sunday, July 5. Regular hours will resume Monday, July 6.

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Thanks to blog reader Holly Robertson, who posted the following comment in response to yesterday’s post about the need for support for programs at UTA:

This post contains some inaccuracies, and perhaps the best place to start is with some background information:

http://www.dailytexanonline.com/news-briefly-school-of-information-halts-library-archival-program-1.1646479

Last spring, the Kilgarlin Center for the Preservation of the Cultural Record lost federal funding from NEH this year (funding has supported the two conservation instructors since 1991). The Conservation Studies program is directly affected (and thus no students were accepted for the Fall 2009 semester), but the preservation administration and archives programs are still in place for Fall 2009.

At present, the Conservation Studies program is undergoing a review funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. They’re working with a range of sources to stabilize faculty lines. Additionally, they are moving into new labs integrated into the iSchool’s new facilities — for more information on the iSchool’s new home at 1616 Guadalupe, see:

http://www.ischool.utexas.edu/1616/

The program review grant from Mellon has allowed the Center to document the import of the program to the nation, to investigate research collaborations, and to plan for an enhanced curriculum. I think that they would indeed appreciate professional and positive letters of support that point to the singular nature and importance of the Kilgarlin Center’s Conservation Studies program.

The School of Information has promised to post additional information as it is available:
http://www.ischool.utexas.edu/about/news/

FYI: UTA is the University of Texas at Arlington, which is not where the Kilgarlin Center for the Preservation of the Cultural Record nor the parent School of Information is located. The proudly Austin campus is informally referred to as the UT Austin and formally as the University of Texas at Austin.

I followed up with Holly and confirmed that support for the Conservation Program is still needed. If you are interested, the best people to contact are Andrew Dillon (the Dean of the School for Information) and Steven Leslie (the Provost)–their contact information is in the previous post. As always, if anyone has further clarifications or information, please let us know. Thanks!

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This week, Dr. Jim O'Dea, M.D., retired Portland pediatrician and OHSU alumnus, brought us more materials for the archives of the North Pacific Pediatric Society (originally donated by Dr. Oliver Massengale in January).

The collection includes financial ledger books from the 1970s to the late 1980s (when the society went digital for its accounting), member directories, meeting programs, updated by-laws from 2005, and a wealth of correspondence including... printouts of email! (It just warms my heart to see folks acting on archivists' advice to keep the really important documents in paper.)

Unexpectedly, the collection also contains a copy of an unpublished autobiography of Dr. S. Gorham Babson, M.D., known as "Gory" to friends and colleagues. Titled The Full and Wonderful Life of Gorham Babson, the memoir is short but sweet. The table of contents includes:

"Prologue--My fascination with travel"
wherein we learn that Babson's father's fourth brother was named after Sir William Morton Stanley;

"European junket with the family--1924"
wherein we hear that Babson's father was so annoyed by the pigeons in Italy that he wanted to write to Mussolini to propose "a great pigeon shoot";

"Back to Oregon through the Panama Canal--1927"
wherein we find young Gory on a stopver in still-rustic Acapulco, watching cock fights;

"Again to Panama Canal, across South America and up to New York--1938"
wherein we get a glimpse of the locum tenens in North Portland that Babson took right out of medical school: it paid $200 a month, and came with a small office library but no R.N. to turn to for advice ("fortunately patients were not of litigious mind");

"How I married Ruth Lambert--1939"
wherein we hear that their first date was watching Sonja Henie skate at MSG, and that Guy Lombardo's orchestra provided the dancing music for their wedding day;

"How I started my practice--1940"
wherein Babson gets his start, even though "opportunities to practice the art for a living were not frequent" in Portland;

"Shirley Thompson: Supervisor of Doernbecher Hospital--1950"
wherein we hear of the efforts of "this innovative nurse" to establish the first nursery for premature babies at Doernbecher;

"How I became a professor of perinatology at OHSU--1961"
wherein we hear that the reason Babson gave up one of the leading private practices in Oregon was that his clinic was about to be demolished to make way for an expansion of the I-5;

"In search of Petra, our first trip around the world--1963"
wherein we hear of the ancient practice of the "open" airline ticket that allowed travelers to make up their itinerary as they went;

"Director of the OHSU Neonatal Center--1965"
wherein we hear about nurse Katie Simpson's technique for teaching staff to intubate neonates by practicing on cats;

"Epilogue"
wherein Babson thanks his daughter Jane for awakening in him an interest in creative writing, "restricted by years of inscribing medical manuscripts";

"World trips of the intrepid traveler"
which presents a chronological list of the highlights of a footloose life, one of the more intriguing of these being "An Eunoto, a jungle campsite where Maasi boys are admitted to manhood" (1979).

These materials, and the rest of the NPPS Records, are now available for research. But you'll have to wait until after July 4 to have at them; Historical Collections & Archives is closed Friday July 3 in observance of the federal holiday. Happy Independence Day!

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Late last year, Kevin Kelly, the founding editor for Wired magazine, wrote a blog post on "Movage." Kelly argues for the continuous moving of digital assets (or what we might call refreshing and migrating) rather than storage. He says:

This movic rythym [sic] of refreshing content should be as smooth as a respiratory cycle -- in, out, in, out. Copy, move, copy, move.

While this concept is not new, what the blog post did was to make me think about the term "storage". When I store something, I tuck it away and likely won't touch it again until I decide to finally use it or throw it out. However, we don't want to tuck our digital assets away and ignore them. They need to be touched, maintained, and moved. The word "store" and its permutations don't convey that. Movage may not be the correct work, but it is interesting.

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Technorati tag: Digital Preservation

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July 9 marks the one year anniversary of the creation of this humble little blog. On that date I planted my flag in the fertile soil of the blogosphere, and not long afterward I began my trek across the social networking frontier. I opened a LinkedIn account and eventually found my way onto Twitter. There are many other social networking sites out there, but for me LinkedIn and Twitter accomplished my goal of connecting with interesting people in my profession from whom I can learn a great deal.

Lately, I've noticed that some of my professional brethren have been wondering aloud what exactly is the value of social networking, and in particular Twitter. For me, social networking has been an educational odyssey. The Posterity Project started as a blog platform from which I could share links to interesting web sites about archives, history, civics, and related topics. The blog led me to other interesting Web 2.0 platforms and suddenly I found myself Stumbling and Tweeting all across the Internet. I participate in these new communication technologies because I want to learn, and because I realize that if I do not utilize these tools I risk becoming professionally irrelevant in an increasingly engaged world.

I think part of the appeal of social networking is that there is such a variety from which to choose. I also think that it is this variety that frightens off a number of people. Archivists, in particular, seem to worry too much about how permanent these new technologies will actually become, paralyzing some of them into inaction. But in this weekend when we honor our nation's Declaration of Independence, I hope you'll consider declaring independence from inaction and do not be so quick to judge new technologies before you've given them the old college try. I can tell you from personal experience, you'll be better informed, you'll connect with interesting and intelligent people, and you'll have a lot of fun in the process.


RELATED LINKS:

• "Social networking," "Web 2.0 & Archives" and "Archives & 'new' technology" - ArchivesNext

• Society of American Archivists on Facebook and Twitter

• TennArc - A place for Tennessee archivists, associates and friends on the Ning social networking site.

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If you live in Austin or are going there for SAA, you might want to know about this resource put together by Rebecca Goldman:

Inspired by Terry’s post, I made a site to help archives-folk find free lodgings for professional events. If you have crash space to offer, you can add it using the form at http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?formkey=cjJuSXNYWXlyc1QxWEdEZVhhdlNhMmc6MA. If you’re looking for crash space, see the results of the form at http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=r2nIsXYyrsT1XGDeXavSa2g&output=html.

You can contact Rebecca (Rebecca.m.goldman [at] drexel.edu) if you have any suggestions for improving the site, or can think of a better way to host it.

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In my Wide World of Serials Receipts, I always find myself looking forward to the latest issue of the North Carolina Postal Historian. Not only for the excellent color reproductions of tobacco-advertising first covers (the subject of the current issue–see image below) and the occasional Confederate letterhead, but for the colorful choice of postage stamps that always adorn the mailing envelope (see above). They’re much more engaging than your typical first-class, red-ink postage metering, don’t you think?

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The Auction Rebel, Gary Hendrickson, passed away recently. Gary was a good friend of this blog. His obituary ran in the Grand Forks Herald: Gary Douglas Hendrickson was born on August 30, 1946 in Crookston, MN, the son of Lyle...

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Loyal readers may recall that Brave Astronaut was a crime victim shortly after moving into our great little town. We rebounded from that and have had no incidents since. Until this weekend. In the Brave Astronaut backyard, we discovered that two of the trees planted by our predecessors were plum trees and were bearing fruit this year (evidently it takes plum trees three years to decide to fruit). There is also a sour cherry tree, but I missed those, as they had all become dry, shriveled black dots.

I had been enjoying the fruit with my lunch and LBA had great fun plucking plums off the tree to eat in the yard on a comfortable summer evening. My neighbors were beneficiaries as well, as I shared with them a bag of the bountiful plums. I enjoyed the last of the ones I had picked on Monday with my lunch and Monday evening went out to pick a new bowlful of plums.

Much to my aggravation, every single plum was gone off the trees. Ripe ones, unripe ones, a few that had fallen off the trees to the ground, not one plum remained. There was no evidence of animals having done this (broken limbs, a gnawed plum on the ground, nothing) - it was clearly a human culprit. My neighbors did not see anything, but this clearly took place during the daylight and if only one person, they were in my backyard for at least 15-20 minutes. Yesterday evening, I emailed the Chief of Police to inform him of the situation. I didn't necessarily need to file a police report, I just wanted to let him know what was up.

Then this morning, I looked out on to my back deck and noticed a propane tank, which I had on the deck awaiting a fill up from a propane delivery service was missing. There were three tanks total and now there were only two. This obviously happened between 12:30am and 7:00am. I emailed the Chief again and received a very nice phone call from him.

I guess it's time to install a surveillance camera and perhaps an invisible electric fence. That might work. I'm aggravated by the whole thing, but I'll get over it. Sometimes, however, I feel like Nate Fisher from HBO's Six Feet Under, "I hate the living."

UPDATE: Mission Control has learned that my neighbor was confused about the delivery date for the propane and took back his tank early this morning. So no extra propane for him. Unless he gets on the Propane Taxi bandwagon.

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I’m exhilarated by the planning calls for our ALA session in Chicago called Libraries, Archives and Museums - Converging for Real (Sunday 12 July, 1:30-3:00 pm, McCormick Place West W-190b). Meg Bellinger (Yale), Cathryn Goodwin (Princeton) and John Scally (Edinburgh) are sanguine about real convergence from their unique positions in their diverse situations. Each of their institutions strives to present a holistic view of all collections regardless of where they are housed or how they are managed. Come learn about what has worked and what has not.

Obviously many things have change since the LAM workshops, which inspired the series of panels - at ALA, SAA and AAM - of which this is the second.  John speaks of the Silos of the LAMs [pdf] report as a chance to reflect on priorities at Edinburgh, where “University Collections” have meant LAM collections for over 6 years. Meg is pondering influences of prototypes as part of a larger developing context at Yale. Cathryn is evaluating changes and projects that were unanticipated, but that accomplish the aims of Princeton’s wish list.

We’re not talking about levels of metadata, folks. This conversation is much better than that.

Presenters include:
Meg Bellinger, Director of the Office of Digital Assets and Infrastructure, Yale University
John Scally, Director of University Collections, University of Edinburgh
Cathryn Goodwin, Manager, Collection Information and Access, Princeton University Art Museum

There are links to the entire suite of LAM panels here, and to all the RLG/OCLC Research sessions at ALA here. The Committee on Archives, Libraries and Museums (CALM) has endorsed this series at AAM, ALA and SAA.

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The Stonewall riots erupted in the early morning of 28 July 1969 and continued throughout the next three days. The 40th anniversary of the riots has attracted a lot of media attention, and some of this coverage is of interest to archivists and historians documenting the history of the LGBT community:

• Franklin Robinson of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History assembled a prominently placed exhibit, "Stonewall: Fortieth Anniversary," highlighting the Smithsonian Archives Center's LGBT holdings. This exhibit will remain up until 2 August of this year.

• The Chair and the Maiden Art Gallery held an exhibit featuring the work of Suzanne Poli, who photographed the riots themselves and LGBT marches and parades that were held in the years that followed. Poli is donating her photographs to the New York Public Library.
  

• The BBC interviews Martin Royce, who was at the Stonewall Inn when the New York City Police Department raided it and recalls how the riots started.

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