Sometimes a filmmaker can find themselves in the fortunate position of making a film which perfectly echoes and reflects the mood of its time. Lindsay Anderson’s second feature film, If…., released in 1968 certainly achieved this feat.  Starring Malcolm McDowell in his first major film role it is a lyrical tale of teenage rebellion set in an English public school.  Filmed at Cheltenham College, where Anderson was a pupil in the 1930s, the harsh brutalities and rigid structure of public school mirror the wider inequalities of British society.  The iconic image of McDowell, machine-gun blazing, at the end of the film resonated with an audience bombarded with images of protest during the student riots of 1968. The film was swept along on a revolutionary tide to the Cannes Film Festival in 1969 where it won the Palm d’Or.

Anderson and Malcolm McDowell on the set of If….

 Anderson’s papers include an extensive production archive for the film including:

• the original script for the film entitled Crusaders, written by David Sherwin and John Howlett, based on their own experiences of public school
• letters of praise for the film from friends, colleagues and fans including Akira Kurosawa, Alan Bennett, Rex Harrison and Harold Pinter
• an extensive photographic record of the making of the film
• a large collection of press cuttings from the British and American press reporting on the film’s release and reception, and the European press reporting on the film’s success at Cannes

 The Lindsay Anderson Archive also includes a large amount of personal memorabilia including a selection of material from his schooldays, a period of his life which he drew on when he came to make If…. in 1968. Cheltenham College was a school with a strong military tradition which specialised in preparing the sons of officers for the army training colleges at Sandhurst and Woolwich. Coming from a military family the choice of Cheltenham for Anderson was not surprising. The school prospectus noted that “all boys in the Senior School are instructed in military drill and the use of the rifle… with a view to the special preparation of Boys for the Army” – an aspect of his education that was reflected in the schoolboys military manoeuvres in the film. The discipline enforced in the school is reflected in Anderson’s copy of the College Rule book which consisted of 12 pages of rules and regulations governing behaviour and conduct with a fold out map showing the areas of Cheltenham that were out-of-bounds to students. 

Memorabilia from Lindsay Anderson's schooldays

Anderson kept a number of souvenirs of his schooldays including postcards of the College, school prospectuses, his school crest and cap, exam certificates, programmes for theatre productions in which he appeared, school notebooks and a run of The Cheltonian, the school journal, covering his time at Cheltenham.

When it came to making If…. these souvenirs of his schooldays could have provided some useful reminders for Anderson – the rules and regulations, the military tradition, the Speech Day reports in The Cheltonian (including the speeches of the Headmaster and distinguished guests). As well as drawing on his own personal collection of memorabilia Anderson also carried out some up-to-date research purchasing a copy of Eton: how it works by J. D. R. McConnell in 1967. In a commentary on the film written by Anderson in 1994 he noted how useful this book had been when it came to shooting the scene where Travis, Johnny and Wallace are called to the headmaster’s office after shooting the chaplain during a military exercise. He noted that “it is interesting that a lot of the headmaster’s dialogue in that scene was taken from a book written by an ex-housemaster at Eton, so some of the more idiotic things spoken by the headmaster are real.”

Anderson shooting a scene from If…. at Cheltenham College

There’s been a lot of debate about the validity of impact factors over the years (and there have been many attempts to measure impact but none wholly accurate).  Just this week on Twitter, the discussion took off again after the publication of an article by Jennifer Howard entitled “Scholars seek betters ways to track online impact” in The Chronicle of Higher Education (January 29^th 2012 ) which highlights the work on “alternative metrics” done by Jason Priem (a graduate student in library sciences at the University of North Carolina) who helped write a manifesto on “altmetrics” (see:  http://altmetrics.org/manifesto/).

The advent of the social web and open access initiatives have resulted in a myriad of possibilities of sharing and communicating research output almost instantaneously and have changed the ways in which researchers are disseminating their work.  It seems that there is a loosening up of the neck tie in some quarters as no longer is there an absolute reliance on peer-review, citation counting measures (which, as the altmetrics manifesto states, are in themselves a narrow and inaccurate measure because the context, especially as the socio-political impact in which a work is cited, is often ignored and the impact of an article is often not felt for several years after publication) and journal impact factors (which have always been questionable anyway).  Certainly, the altmetrics movements states that we can no longer rely only on the traditional bibliometrics to measure impact and re-thinking impact measurement for research is clearly a step in the right direction.  However, as the ‘conversation’ on Twitter and the various blogs on this suggest, there is much work still to do in assessing research impact.

The perennial question of the relationship between ‘counts’ and actual impact is still being asked – popularity is not the same as excellence.  What ‘altmetrics’ attempts, according to its manifesto, is to capture what is being read, bookmarked, shared, discussed and cited online in order to provide a pattern for analysis.  And it is not just for whole articles but also what is  referred to as the “nanopublication” where “the citable unit is an argument or passage rather than [the] entire article.”   Also, data, code and design and the re-use of these elements need to be captured in order to measure the true impact of the original:

These new forms reflect and transmit scholarly impact:  that dog-eared (but uncited) article that used to live on a shelf now lives in Mendely, CiteULike, or Zotero.  The hallway conversation about a recent finding has moved to blogs and social networks – now, we can listen in.  The local genomics dataset has moved to an onine repository – now, we can track it.  This diverse group of activities forms a composite trace of impact far richer than any available before.  We call the elements of this trace altmetrics.

Heather Piwowar, who is also working on alternative metrics, states in her blog post on ResearchMix, research impact now has flavours (and there could be as many as the 31 – the same number of flavours as Baskin & Robbins claims to have for ice cream!) that need to be captured.  This is where ‘altmetrics’ comes in  – Piwowar says, it isn’t about comparing flavours as one is no more  important than another; it is about capturing the flavour(s) so that they form a complete picture.  In other words, as the scholarly information landscape becomes murkier with references abounding on social networking sites, traditional citation counts alone can no longer be the only measure of academic excellence, weightiness or impact.

Altmetrics is in an early stage of development and there is much work to be done in testing and evaluating  the tools that will measure impact in the digital landscape.   The acceptance of these tools will likely require a (significant?) change in institutional mind-set especially among traditional researchers who may not be using the social web to communicate their research.  Either way, the development is important in the context of advances in technology (especially in the area of the semantic web) and may be timely given that we will be undergoing the Research Excellence Framework in 2014 and need to consider impact in all its guises.

The Altmetrics group continues to launch tools to “uncover the invisible in research” – see Total Impact, for example and the Altmetric Explorer.  Until we move towards measuring impact in this new way, we can continue to use the traditional methods, i.e. the various citation indexes, Google Scholar and even Ann-Wil Hartzing’s software Publish or Perish  which analyses the citations on Google Scholar according to established citation measures.  Alternatively, we can use both methods alongside each other to demonstrate ‘total impact’ and uncover the invisible in research.

People of African descent have been part of Vancouver history since before the City was established. It has been a challenge, however, for the Archives to acquire records which document the activities of individuals and the groups in the Black community. In recognition of Black History Month, we thought we would feature a few of the records we do have and, by doing so, encourage the donation of other records.

Sir James Douglas (1803-1877). Item # Port P1593.

Governor Sir James Douglas, born in Guyana to Creole and Scottish parents, was not a resident of Vancouver but he encouraged the settlement of Blacks, who were fleeing from persecution in California, on Vancouver Island. Some 800 left for Victoria between 1858 and 1860 and descendants of these immigrants eventually settled in the Lower Mainland.

One of Vancouver’s best-known and earliest Black residents was Seraphim “Joe” Fortes (1865?-1922). Originally from the Caribbean, Joe arrived as a crewman aboard the Robert Kerr in December 1885. Joe worked in various jobs, including as a bartender, but it is his legacy as a swimming instructor and Vancouver’s first official lifeguard at English Bay for which he is best remembered.

English Bay (Joe Fortes teaching swimming), ca. 1905. Item # CVA 677-421

Joe Fortes standing at the gate of his cottage on Bidwell Street. Item # CVA 677-441

To honour Joe Fortes, a fountain, created by Vancouver sculptor Charles Marega, was erected in 1927 in Alexandra Park, across from English Bay. It includes a portrait of Joe and three children playing in the water and bears the inscription “Little Children Loved Him”.

Joe Fortes memorial drinking fountain. 1944. Item # Mon N15.1

Although there are few records that document it, Vancouver industries such as the lumber mills did hire Black employees. A good example is the man standing on the far right in this photograph of Hastings Mill workers in 1889.

Employees of the Hastings Sawmill, Vancouver, ca. 1889. Charles Bailey, photographer. Item # Mi P4

Prominent Black artists such as Paul Robeson and Marian Anderson performed in Vancouver and the Archives has copies of their programs in our holdings.

Management Hilker attractions : baritone – Paul Robeson 1941. Item # PAM 1941-117

Management Hilker attractions : contralto – Marian Anderson 1941. Item # PAM 1941-118

Vancouver citizen Harry W. Jerome was a world-renowned athlete and world record holder who participated in three consecutive Olympic Games: 1960, 1964 and 1968. Besides his athletic success, Jerome was a tireless promoter of sports among young people in all regions of the country and especially for girls and visible minorities, for which he received the Order of Canada for living an outstanding life. The Archives has little documentation of Harry Jerome’s career, although researchers can find material in sculptor Elek Imredy’s fonds (AM1371) relating to the competition to design the statue in Stanley Park. Jack Harmon won the sculpture competition.

When members of the Black community on Vancouver Island began to migrate to Vancouver after 1900, many settled in the Strathcona neighbourhood around an area known unofficially as Hogan’s Alley. Hogan’s Alley ran between Union & Prior streets from the alley east of Main Street, called Park Lane, to Jackson Street. Just 8 feet wide, this alley was the heart of the Black community with its homes, businesses and the African Methodist Episcopal Fountain Church.

Some of the first restaurants in Vancouver to feature fried chicken were located in the area, including Vie Moore’s Chicken and Steak House which was located just off Main Street at 209 Union Street.

In the mid 1930′s, Hogan’s Alley became a target for Mayor McGeer’s anti-vice campaign. Demolition of some buildings located there occurred near the end of the decade, but most survived up to the 1960′s.

In 1965 the City voted to replace the Georgia Viaduct and later purchased and demolished the remaining buildings. The Archives has digitized some of the City records, including photographs, which document this activity.

Area surrounding Hogan's Alley, 1939 Detail from City of Vancouver sectional map, series #508: section 9. City Engineering Services fonds – Engineering Department – Surveys Branch

View of Hogan's Alley 1958. A.L. Yates, photographer. April 1958. City of Vancouver Archives, Item # Bu P508.53

We welcome the chance to acquire and preserve records from Vancouver’s Black community, such as the minutes and correspondence of community organizations, photographs of individuals and families, papers relating to businesses or moving images of activities or events. Please help us before the records are lost.

The New York State Archives released a set of power point slides for an upcoming presentation titled “Preserving Electronic Records in Colleges and Universities. ” The slide presentation covers such topics as assessing e‐records in an academic environment, preservation examples, standards, and suggested strategies.

http://www.nyshrab.org/training/erecords/erecords_slides.pdf

The NISO ERM Data Standards and Best Practices Review Steering Committee just released a paper titled, “Making Good on the Promise of ERM: A Standards and Best Practices Discussion Paper.” The paper discusses recent surveys of  Electronic Resources Management topics and systems, identifying standards and best practices, and then offers recommendations.

http://www.niso.org/apps/group_public/download.php/7946/Making_Good_on_the_Promise_of_ERM.pdf

In addition to the fascinating items we have on exhibition here at our 150 Empire St. location, you can now see PPL Special Collections material at three other locations across the city:

At the RISD Fleet Library (through March 30, 2012), check out Dard Hunter & the Roycroft Print Shop, curated by Robert Garzillo. The exhibition is staged in the downstairs library and upstairs outside of Special Collections. Look for Roycrofters material from our Updike Collection.

Tomorrow at the Providence Athenaeum, the “Wilde at Heart” celebration begins (a limited number of tickets are available), and it will include an exhibition of Wilde materials. Among them you’ll find volumes like the first edition of The Ballad of Reading Gaol from PPL Special Collections.

And through May, the John Carter Brown’s exhibition hall will be filled with items illustrating Lawrence Wroth’s classic The Colonial Printer (which is to say many great examples of early American printing). The first edition of The Colonial Printer was itself printed by Daniel Berkeley Updike’s Merrymount Press, and punches, matrices and type designed for Updike will be on display in the exhibition.

That’s a busy schedule of excellent exhibitions. You should probably get started right away.

Henry Slocum proves that no matter how you acted in life, they’ll depict you on horseback waving a sword when they get around to making your statue.

I had an opportunity to provide the keynote address at a recent meeting of the Association of Library and Information School Education (ALISE). The Association has been active since 1915 in providing a forum for archive and library educators to share ideas, to discuss issues, and to seek solutions to common problems.

As I have been traveling to meet National Archives staff I have made an effort to meet with students and faculty at the graduate programs around the country to educate them about who we are and where we are headed. My goal is to excite them about opportunities to work in the Federal Government, especially my agency. So the ALISE program was a great opportunity to meet with a group of students, faculty, and deans—all in one room—and to encourage them to think about their teaching and research programs and how they meet the needs of the next generation of information professionals.

What I have been telling students is that we are looking for:

• People with a broader background than was the case when I was a graduate student. In addition to history, archives and library science, other subject matter areas are important. Above all, we want people who can connect archival work with real life experiences.

• Technical savvy is a given to work in a

… [ Read all ]

Two new exhibitions of children’s literature are taking place at Exeter Central Library and the University of Exeter in April 2012. The exhibitions are being organized by Exeter Central Library and the University’s Heritage Collections to showcase highlights from their exciting archival collections of early children’s books. From Margery Meanwell (aka Goody-Two Shoes) to Matt
Merrythought (the boy who was always happy), the displays will give visitors a chance to see how boys and girls were depicted in rhymes, stories and illustrations from the nineteenth- and early-twentieth centuries. The exhibition’s new blog is can be found at http://girlsandboysinstoryland.wordpress.com/

Some fonts just don’t get much love. Papyrus and Comic Sans are well-known for being much loathed. And one font from that more distant past that would have appreciated their situation was Cheltenham. In Just My Type, a recently-published popular history of typography, Simon Garfield describes it as sharing some of the virtues and vices of a popular song: “Like the catchy tune, its appeal waned. It was a fairly charmless face, reliable and pliable, but not beautiful….”

Garfield’s assessment is less than flattering, but hardly more unpleasant than that of Cheltenham’s creator, Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue, in this letter to Daniel Berkeley Updike:

In 2010 the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) published a paper titled, “Digital Forensics and Born-Digital Content in Cultural Heritage Collections.” Written by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, Richard Ovenden, and Gabriela Redwine the paper “examines digital forensics and its relevance for contemporary research…The applicability of digital forensics to archivists, curators, and others working within our cultural heritage is not necessarily intuitive. When the shared interests of digital forensics and responsibilities associated with securing and maintaining our cultural legacy are identified—preservation, extraction, documentation, and interpretation, as this report details—the correspondence between these fields of study becomes logical and compelling.”

http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub149/pub149.pdf

More folders of Annual Conference related material today.  The ‘NUWT Annual Conference 1934, Blackpool’ folder didn’t contain any photographs of members speaking or attending the conference but it did include these caricatures from ‘The News Chronicle’, 04/01/1934.

NUWT Collection ref: UWT/D/375/1 ©Institute of Education Archive

We had a wonderful time at the exhibition opening and were so pleased with all of the familiar faces who turned up! Have a browse through this gallery of photos from the launch, courtesy of Rory Carnegie.

Click to view slideshow.

And remember, the exhibition is on until March 10, so if you haven’t seen it already, there’s still plenty of time!

Article by William Modrow, Rare Books & Manuscripts Librarian

What Bibles did English people read in the time of Shakespeare, Spenser, or Milton? Why did they view the events of the Reformation or the Civil War as biblical episodes? In occasion of the fourth centenary of the first edition of the King James Bible, in 1611, the Strozier Library’s Special Collections Department presents a selection of 27 treasures from the collection of early printed Bibles bequeathed to the library in 1982 by Milton Stover Carothers, Director of FSU’s Presbyterian Center, in memory of his parents Julia Stover and Milton Washington Carothers

Under a title borrowed from Andrew Marvell, King of Books, Book of Kings revisits the role of Bible publishing in early modern England according to the innovative methods of the History of Text Technologies program (HoTT) created in 2007 at FSU. Stemming from a rigorous analysis of Bibles as material objects, it thus emphasizes the international nature of the first English Bibles whose original synthesis involved Parisian typefaces, Auvergne paper, German or French illustrations of Venetian origin, and commentaries drawing on the Flemish Desiderius Erasmus or the French John Calvin. Beyond the history of Biblical artifacts it also highlights the political figure of English kings as biblical sovereigns, from Henry VIII to James I, constantly to the good kings of the Old Testament, David, Solomon or Josiah, or to Jesus-Christ himself.

King of Books, Book of Kings offers a new example of the multi-faceted collaborative effort between the Strozier Library and the History of Text Technologies (HoTT) program as its direct origin is the graduate seminar “The Bible as a Book (13^th-18^th c.)” that François Dupuigrenet Desroussilles, professor in the Religion Department and HoTT faculty, has been teaching every year in Special Collections since 2009.

The last few day’s cataloguing has consisted of files on NUWT annual conferences with each folder containing material on one annual conference.  A lot of this has been very similar – agendas, arrangements for accommodation, financial reports etc and al this is great as it means it’s quite quick to catalogue! however it’s also been nice to stumble across unexpected things such as the scrapbook I talked about a few days ago.

I’ve just come across another interesting find, a photograph from the 1942 conference held in London.  I would have assumed that during the war the NUWT stopped their annual conferences but it’s nice to see that they didn’t.  The conferences kept going although inevitably they were smaller due to travel and work difficulties. 

NUWT Collection ref UWT/D/374/3 ©Institute of Education Archive

This photograph shows Dora Appleby (the NUWT President) with Brigitte Pearson (the Vice-President) and the Mayor of Holborn.  Accompanying the photograph is a letter from the General Secretary of the NUWT, Muriel Pierotti, to the Mayor of London thanking him for the time he took to come to the conference and give a Civil Welcome.  She mentions that many members of the NUWT, for whom this is their first war-time visit to London, were shocked by the destruction caused by bombings and she ends by thanking him again for taking the time to help make the conference a success.  It’s also great to see the NUWT banner in the background as we don’t actually have any of these in the collection. What a nice way to finish a day’s work for me!

Henry "Rock of Chickamauga", "Sledge of Nashville", "Slow Trot" Thomas

The Rock of Chickamauga deserved better PR.

For anyone who is interested in Archivematica, the digital preservation system we are helping to develop, we have a summary blog post on the development so far.

It’s at opensourcearchiving.org, the blog of the Open Source Committee of the Association for Moving Image Archives. We’ve been contributing to this blog, and we hope it will become a useful resource for anyone looking at open source software for archival use.

Edith Wharton, the author of Ethan Frome, The Age of Innocence and quite a few other classic works of fiction, would turn 150 today. Wharton was born in New York on the 24th of January, 1862. If you happen to find yourself in the Lenox, MA area tomorrow, you can celebrate at The Mount, the home Wharton designed for herself.

Wharton’s presence is felt here at the Providence Public Library because of her connection to not one, but two of our collections:

Edith Wetmore is better known for her terrific collection of children’s books, but she left the library quite a few amazing books intended for older readers as well. Here’s an image from one, a copy of the first edition of Ethan Frome. It captures the relationship between the two Ediths in what is one of my favorite author inscriptions:

"To Edith the reader. (I hope!) From her old friend Edith, the writer of Ethan Frome."

While Wharton and Wetmore interacted as author and reader, Wharton and Daniel Berkeley Updike had an extensive and long-lasting author-printer relationship. Udpike described her as essential to the success of his Merrymount Press:

“The Press has been fortunate in its friends, but never more so than in the friendship of Mrs. Wharton…. To Mrs., Wharton’s thoughtful act the Press owed not merely the prestige of printing her books, but also the printing of many other books for Scribners…”*

Among Wharton’s books printed by Merrymount Press were The Greater Inclination, The Touchstone, Crucial Instances, The Valley of Decision, Sanctuary and Madame de Treymes.The letter below from Wharton to Updike offers an example of their personal and professional lives entwined:

"Is there any chance of your being in New York … I want to capture you for lunch or dinner."

reverse:

"When are my proofs coming??"

* From page 21 of “Notes on the Press and It’s Work” in Updike: American Printer, and his Merrymount Press (New York: The American Institute of Graphic Arts, 1947). Originally published in Notes on the Merrymount Press and its Work (1934).

I did a teaching session for MA students last night who were participating in the Understanding Education Research module here at the IOE.

The aim of the session was to introduce the use of archives. One of the things i think it’s key to remember about archive collections is that they can lead the user through interesting networks that may inform their research further. I don’t really think this can be represented in text so I came up with this mind map to demonstrate just some networks surrounding the lives of Mary and David Medd, school architects, whose papers we hold here at the IOE. I also included a few tips of a user might go about tracking down networks in archive collections.

I’ve mentioned before how happy I am when I come across photographs in the collection – partly because the majority seem to have been filtered out at some previous stage of cataloguing and collection together in a separate series.  Therefore coming across photographs is coming across material that, likely, no-one has looked at since the material arrived here in the late 1960s.  Of course, the main reason I enjoy it is because it’s photographs and I mean who wouldn’t enjoy getting to look at other people’s photos!

These are extra special as someone has gone to the effort to stick them all together in a scrapbook.  The first photograph of Agnes Dawson is great to have as all I’ve seen of her have been very formal official portraits taken for her London County Council election campaigns.  The three photographs showing a demonstration at Trafalgar Square are almost certainly from a demonstration in 1924 as one of the photo’s appears in A. Muriel Pierotti’s book ‘The Story of the NUWT’.  All the photographs on the pages titled ‘Bath Conference’ are a mystery to me right now!

Click to view slideshow.

At some point I’ll go though these photographs with all the others in the collection and try to cross-reference and identify all the women, and few men, portrayed in them.  However at the moment the priority is to get on with cataloguing as it’s better to have some kind of a description up on the catalogue about all of the subject boxes than have incredibly detailed information about a small amount of the boxes (can you tell I’m on a strict time-frame here?!).

AIMS has just released its new white paper titled “AIMS Born-Digital Collections: An Inter-Institutional Model for Stewardship.” The AIMS Project is a partnership between the University of Virginia Libraries, Stanford University Libraries and Academic Resources, the University of Hull Library, and Yale University Library with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The project evolved around a common need among the project partners — and most libraries and archives— to identify a methodology or continuous framework for stewarding born-digital archival materials.

http://www2.lib.virginia.edu/aims/whitepaper/AIMS_final_text.pdf

The library’s two ongoing projects looking at digital preservation are just two  of nine that are feeding into a larger JISC funded project – Sustainable PReservation Using Community Engagement (SPRUCE). Launched at the beginning of the year and running for two years the project aims to build an enthusiastic community of digital preservation practitioners who will meet online and face to face to address the specific issues that we are all facing with the ultimate objective of building a business case for digital preservation activity.

Over the last two days all those running and working on projects that have been funded by this strand of JISC money got together to share our experiences of our projects so far and to discuss the future work of the SPRUCE project. Although I’d read about the other projects taking place (there is more information on all the projects here) I’d been so focused on all our own objectives that I hadn’t really been following them. But just listening to short 5 minute presentations on each showed me how so many of the projects feed into each other and/or are relevant to other areas of our work. For instance just over the road at the University of London and ULCC Kit Good (UoL Records Manager and FOI Officer) and Ed Pinsent (ULCC Digital Archivist) are testing a number of toolkits that are available to create preservation copies of core business records that require permanent preservation.   This is definitely relevant for our Digital Directorate project and you can follow Ed and Kit’s progress here.

Ed’s colleague Patricia Sleeman is looking at another important area for HE organisations with the Institute of Historical Research – the preservation of digital research data. Specifically they are assessing the training needs of staff at the IHR and designing training programmes based on their findings. Again they have their own project blog and although it’s quite quiet at the moment, their project runs for nine months so will progress over the next few months.

The meeting was a great opportunity to meet people from all areas of digital preservation work, to learn from them, and to discuss those issues that we are all facing. One thing that came up in discussion was that although a lot of work has already been done on digital preservation and there is now a wealth of information out there, ensuring the findings of this work are disseminated to the wider community and sustaining this work is still a challenge. I thought the wiki developed by the AQuA project on quality assurance for digital collections is a great example of the potential for building the infrastructure that the community needs. The fact that SPRUCE will be building on the results of this project is therefore promising. In the meantime I’ve already subscribed to the blogs of the other projects under this strand of funding to get a better idea of how their work is progressing.

We would just like to draw your atention to this amazing list of websites and resources from archiveinfo.com

http://www.archivesinfo.com/assistance.php

http://paper.lib.uiowa.edu/

(Thanks to @wvmierlo for bringing this to our attention)

The project aims to to better understand paper composition and conservation by analysing paper specimens from 14th-19th centuries.

From the project website:

“Historical papers vary considerably in their present-day condition for reasons that are not fully understood. This website shares the results of research on 1,578 paper specimens made between the fourteenth and the nineteenth centuries. The papers tested were selected from collections at the Newberry Library and The University of Iowa, and were analyzed using nondestructive instrumentation. The Institute of Museum and Library Services, the Kress Foundation, and The University of Iowa provided funding support.

The results of this 2007-10 project show that the oldest papers are often in the best condition, in part, we believe, because they contain high levels of gelatin and calcium. “People often wonder why in the digital age we should be concerned about paper stability,” says principal investigator Timothy Barrett. “Artifacts on paper often contain valuable information related to human history that is not accessible in a digital image. Not only do these artifacts need to be preserved for future generations, but paper copies that can be read without electronic hardware will continue to be essential backups to the digital record long into the future.” The results of this research will be of special interest to paper historians, paper and book conservators, and producers of archival papers.”

Press release: http://news-releases.uiowa.edu/2012/january/011712paper.html

Numerous projects outside the Archives staff’s regular course of business have been accomplished thanks to our many wonderful volunteers. Christine Tutt began volunteering at the Archives the summer before she began the Library and Information Technology program at Langara College.

One of the many projects Christine has been working on. Glass snipe from 1923. Item # CVA 371-2809. Continue reading to learn more about snipes!

With great enthusiasm and dedication, Christine has generously spent more than 230 hours working on various projects at the Archives. Even now that she is a full-time student, Christine has continued to come into the Archives each week. As a Library Technician, Christine would love the opportunity to use her knowledge and skills at an archives or a municipal records department. Libraries and archives are a new direction for Christine. She holds a Fashion Design and Technology Diploma from Kwantlen University College and has previously worked in fashion, as a fitness instructor, and with books in various capacities.

Being the younger sibling of a photographer, Christine arrived at the Archives with hours of experience carefully looking at and handing prints and negatives. This skill was put to use at once at the Archives. Her first project was a very popular one at various events around the city in the summer of 2011, including Summer Live, the City’s 125the celebration in Stanley Park: the copy prints. Volunteers compared the copies to the originals ensuring that they were indeed exact copies and contained no additional information and were not misfiled. Thanks to the dedication of Christine and other volunteers, the Archives was able to give away several banker-boxes-worth of copies of photographs from the Major Matthews photograph collection. As an additional benefit, the Archives gained some much-needed space in its storage area.

Christine with the left-over aluminum frames.

One of the interesting series of photographs that Christine worked on was a section of the City Engineering Services fonds. These oversized (6×6 cm) colour slides from the 1950s were housed between glass in metal frames. To free the negatives from the dirty glass for digitization, each was pried out of its frame, housed in an acid-free envelope and the item number was recorded on the envelope. Christine also typed up the titles and item numbers for each so basic description could be made available.

Some of you might be familiar with Historypin from our previous posts. Historypin allows anyone to submit photographs and ‘pin’ them to a Google map where they can be sorted by date, donor, and viewed in Google Streetview. The Archives has over 300 photographs on its Historypin page. When photographs are sent to Historypin, each must have:

• A street address,
• a date,
• a title,
• and the associated latitude and longitude.

Additionally, there is a place for each photograph to have a story associated with it.

For about half of the scans of street views we submitted to Historypin, finding the latitude and longitude was a simple process. Using the street addresses we had for each photograph, our colleagues at VanMap kindly generated a spreadsheet of latitude and longitude. Unfortunately, half of the addresses were rejected by VanMap. A modern rendering of the city does not precisely reflect the way the city was once organized. Over time addresses change as development takes place and block numbering shifts. Christine to the rescue: using the scanned archival photographs, her knowledge of the city, and Google Earth Streetview, she plotted the coordinates of each of the 150+ addresses that VanMap rejected.

This issue of relating historical addresses to modern cities through time is a common one. The city of Philadelphia has a couple of interesting projects: the Historic Street index, which is fun to play with even for those of us not in Philly, and research toward a Historical Geocoder.

Other photograph projects have benefited from Christine’s time and effort. Assigning item numbers to photographs is a time-consuming process that is essential for controlling the items and is a first step toward ultimately digitizating and making the images available online. Unique item numbers allow the Archives to control the 75,000+ (and growing) digitized images that the Archives already has.

The glass snipe that Christine is holding reads: “Ladies without escorts cordially invited.”

Christine has been able to work with glass negatives on a couple of occasions. Here she is with a snipe [CVA371-2788], which would have been shown in theatres before or after a movie. Christine’s dedication, attention to detail and enthusiasm have seen numerous projects through to completion here at the Archives. Indeed, there are too many to list them all here.

Glass snipe from 1920. Item #: CVA 371-2802.

Glass snipe from 1920. Item #: CVA 371-2816.

In addition to being a wonderful volunteer, Christine is the only person we know who has actually met Kermit the frog. Her mentor, Fran Dowie of Ding-a-ling Bro. Circus, with whom she studied for five years from the age of 10, was friends with Jim Henson, the famous puppeteer, and introduced her to the frog. Talking to Christine about this experience made me curious about the Henson Archives and possible job opportunities. Yes, there is one, and Karen Falk has been the Henson Archivist at the Jim Henson Company Archives since the 1990s. She has found many treasures over the years and has made efforts to share them with fans through a blog and a YouTube channel. The puppet-robot in ‘Flying A Robot’ in this comedic short created for American Oil Flying A sounds a great deal like a certain famous frog:

I’m sticking with the visual theme again for this post and this time the item that caught my eye was a very unusual telegram sent to A. Muriel Pierotti on her appointment as General Secretary of the NUWT in 1940. It was a telegram of congratulations from Miss A. Jones and Emily Phipps (former Financial Secretary and former Editor of ‘the Woman Teacher’ respectively).  Now that isn’t unusual in itself but the highly decorated border of the telegram is. Usually telegrams are pretty dull affairs in terms of appearance – though I do like the typed and cut out words.

As you can see below this one is rather different!

Telegram from NUWT Collection, ref UWT/D/309/4 ©Institute of Education Archive

Now, I have to admit here to having a slightly out-of-control stationery habit - I can’t walk past a paper shop without going in and am known to come back from holidays laden down with paper, stickers, envelopes, postcards etc. So, this telegram intrigued me straight away. It’ll be difficult to make out in the image here but I noticed in the bottom right-hand side of the page there is a signature ‘Claudia Freedman’ so I thought I’d look her up just on the off-chance she was well-known.

One of the first hits was a link to this blog post on Barnett and Claudia Freedman.  They were both artists and created beautiful lithographs for books.  Adventures in the Print Trade points out that while Barnett Freedman is deservedly well-known, the work of his wife Claudia has been sadly neglected.  She was born Claudia Guercio and studied at Liverpool School of Art and the Royal College of Art. She began to work under her maiden name but when she married Barnett Freedman in 1930 she took his name and continued to work.  The lithographs reproduced in the blog post, from a book My Toy Cupboard are really lovely and it seems so unfair that, once again, the male artist is remembered whilst the female seems to disappear from the picture and from the timeline of art history. Neil Philip (the author of the blog) points out that her output was relatively small in comparison with her husbands so this could also be a possible reason for her obscurity.

This telegram seems all the more precious now knowing a little bit more about the artist behind the stationery!

Do you live far away from the Institute Library and find that because of this, you are unable to enjoy the full benefits of the rich physical library collection here at the IOE?

Then the Postal Loans and Photocopying Service might be the thing for you!

“For students such as myself, who do not live in the UK, it really is an invaluable service.”

“…as a part-time student living 150+ miles away, as soon as I started to use the postal service, it immediately & significantly changed the benefit I could gain from the library.”

The Postal Loans and Photocopies service is available to staff and students and the service is offered on a pre-paid subscription basis and provides access to Library collections for users who have difficulty accessing them in person. These may be:

• students registered on distance mode courses
• users who live at a distance from the Institute
• users with disabilities
• users with work, family or other commitments that make accessing the library in Full Service hours difficult.

The feedback we have recieved from current users of the service has been overwhelmingly positive. For more information about registering as a Postal Loans and Photocopying Service user, see the dedicated page on our library website here: Postal Loans and Photocopy Service where you will find the appropriate registration forms so that you can start taking advantage of the service as soon as possible.

Some more testimonials:

“This Postal Loan Service is an excellent facility, and the personal attention and correspondence which accompanies it is also greatly appreciated. It’s very special to feel the library staff treat one as an individual and do their best to adapt the service to one’s circumstances.”

“as I am only in London about twice a term this has given me far greater access to resources than would have been possible if I had to wait to try to access everything during visits to the library. I have always found the service very reliable and speedy and it is much appreciated.”

The Civil Warrior of the Week is taking the day off, along with the rest of the internet.

The University of California Curation Center at the California Digital Library is working with other institutions to sponsor the new DMP Tool. According to the project website, the DMP Tool  will help create, “ready-to-use data management plans for specific funding agencies, meet requirements for data management plans, get step-by-step instructions and guidance for data management plan , and learn about resources and services available at your institution to fulfill the data management requirements of their grants.”

Here is the project website: https://dmp.cdlib.org/about/dmp_about

Here is a slide presentation created by Carly Strasser and Perry Willett at the University of California Curation Center titled, “Data Management Plans: Tips Tricks Tools”: http://www.slideshare.net/UC3/data-management-plans-tips-tricks-and-tools

I found a very intriguing poster in a small folder of material about a ‘Festival of Women’ organised at Wembley Arena in June 1957.  The illustration just really appealed to me, the angular lines of it and the design of the furniture. 

Poster for a 'Festival of Women', NUWT Collection, ref UWT/D/355/1 ©Institute of Education Archive

I imagine the illustration is to show what the stands which organisations could hire for the Festival would look like.  It looks to me like quite an expensive promotional poster. It’s on good quality paper and has a blue tint to the print. The diagram shows a map of the main hall for the Festival of Women exhibition and at the bottom in small writing it says ‘Ronald Dickens, M.B.E. F.S.I.A’. I can’t find out much about him except some correspondence in the Royal Society Archive catalogue about a Centenary Exhibition at St Mary’s Hospital. It sounds like he was an artist or an exhibition organiser. If anyone has any more information I’d be happy to hear from you.

It’s just a small file of letters but very interesting as the NUWT give their reasons for not getting involved with the Festival.  An NUWT member writes to the General Secretary, A. Muriel Pierotti, asking her why the NUWT is not going to be represented at this Festival and is not listed as a supporting organisation (the list of supporting organisations are shown in the letter below). 

NUWT Collection ref UWT/D/355/1

The General Secretary writes back with, I like to think more than a hint of sarcasm (towards the Festival not the NUWT member), that :
‘originally it was proposed that the festival would demonstrate the important contribution of women to the national economy, and they seemed to do this by having pavilions dealing with a Court of Fashion, Twentieth Century Homemakings, the Home Beautiful, Food Fiesta, Leisure time and so on… I think the question is why it should be necessary to have a Festival of Women and what purpose it will serve’.
Certainly going from the literature sent to the NUWT it seems to be an awful lot about the women as consumer with the women as worker tagged on as an afterthought. I can see why they chose not to become involved as it has no real relevance to the agenda of the NUWT – to promote equal working and educational rights for women.