October is American Archives Month, a time when we celebrate the work that archivists all over the country do to ensure that the records of their institutions are created, collected, and protected in a manner that allows their clientele to find what they need.  Here at the National Archives that means ensuring that citizens can hold our government accountable, can learn from our history, and can explore family histories, to name just a few ways the records are used.

What do I love about the National Archives?  The discoveries made every day in the records of our country, such as:

• Last week a veteran arrived in College Park by motorcycle from Nevada.  He has been searching for 43 years for information about his platoon leader killed in Viet Nam. The staff found the information he needed “in 30 seconds!”
• An archivist in St. Louis learned of a family bible in our pension claim records for his Revolutionary War ancestor
• Letters with checks for the pennies collected by school children, teachers, and Elks Lodges around the country in a campaign to save the Navy’s oldest ship, the U.S.S. Constitution during the late 1920s.
• The fact that my grandfather, Paolo Ferriero, was 15 years old when he arrived in Boston from Naples in 1903.  And that he was met by his father, Antonio, who had arrived

… [ Read all ]

I feel like I should have a big drum roll here as I’m so excited to announce that the National Union of Women Teachers collection is now available online!  The catalogue is free-text searchable meaning that if the search term you are looking for appears anywhere in the catalogue entry then your search will pull it up and highlight it for you.

To get to the information itself? Well it’s so easy, you can just search for any terms you want in the basic search box and it will bring up all the records held at the IOE which contain that term.  Alternatively you can follow these steps to narrow your search down to items within the NUWT Collection.  Here is a visual ’how to’ for narrowing your search –

search ‘how to’

I thought a bit more explanation on the organisation of the collection and the way in which I catalogued it would be useful to include here. If you remember from the beginning of this blog, the aim was to catalogue 370 boxes of ‘subject files’.  Well we thought all those boxes were subject files but in actual fact they contained subject files and a whole lot more! I found minute books, photographs, membership figures, account books and equal pay campaign material – all in addition to the huge range of subject files. To reflect the different types of material the collection is divided up into 7 sections –

1. NUWT Committee records
2. NUWT Administrative records
3. NUWT Financial records
4. NUWT Subject files
5. NUWT Branch and County Association records
6. NUWT Photographs
7. NUWT Publications

The subject folders are catalogued at folder level, which means that there is a detailed summary of the contents of the folder, often with lists of any publications or reports in the folder.  If there are photographs or campaign posters this will be highlighted in the description as well.  Any minute books or account books are catalogued to volume level, giving the covering dates of the volume and the committee or branch they relate to.  Some of the volumes, particularly the branch minute books, are often catalogued in more detail in order to give an idea of the work that NUWT branches were involved in.  The Committee, administrative, and financial sections include folders of correspondence as well as official records such as minute books and account books, and the subjects discussed in the correspondence will be summarised in the ‘scope and content’ field.  The photograph section contains all the photographs that were stored separately and these are mostly catalogued individually.  The publications section contains the compete run of the journal of the NUWT ‘The Woman Teacher’, along with a large selection of publications written by members of the NUWT.  The publications include campaign material n why women teachers should join the NUWT, as well as educational publications on a variety of subjects including science teaching for girls, nursery education, post-war education, physical education in schools.

Tagged: cataloguing, Institute of Education, IOE, National Union of Women Teachers, NUWT

“The Actor and Clichés In the Theater,” is the subject Sir Alec Guinness chooses for this impromptu 1964 performance before the Overseas Press Club. 

Appearing on Broadway in Dylan (a play about Dylan Thomas for which he would receive a Tony award), Guinness recounts some of the more tiresome questions an actor must face. “Are you Alec Guinness? You’re shorter than I thought you were.” Or, “You’re taller than I thought you were.” (These two posed to him within minutes of each other.) “Does it worry you to be bald?” “Which is your favorite part?” To which he now answers that he can’t say because “all the other characters I’ve played will be jealous.”

He then offers a toast to the speedy recovery of “a blazing genius and very dear friend, Peter Sellers” who had just suffered a series of heart attacks. During the brief question segment he describes his very inartistic way of preparing for a performance (he slaps some putty on his face and listens to theater gossip), discusses the differences between the West End and Broadway (not many), and tells a story about hearing a eel-monger in London, while batting one her eels back down into its bucket, yell, “Down, wanton, down!” which is word-for-word from King Lear, the fool saying, “Cry to it,nuncle, as the cockney did to the eels.” Then, in response to a request, he closes the proceedings by reciting  Thomas’s “In My Craft or Sullen Art.” Guinness comes across as impeccably suave, witty and unpretentious, yet a professional to his fingertips, extending a theatrical tradition that goes back to Shakespeare himself. 

Guinness was born in 1914. He was an illegitimate child and never knew, nor showed much interest in, his father’s identity. From an early age the boy was obsessed by the theater and made rapid progress, appearing as Osric at age 22 in John Gielgud’s 1936 production of Hamlet. Two years later he was appearing in the title role himself. After commanding a landing craft during the invasion of Sicily during World War II, Guinness returned to London where he became a mainstay of the British theater. At the same time, he carved out an equally successful career in films, starring in classics like “Kind Hearts and Coronets” (1949), “The Lavender Hill Mob” (1951), “The Man in the White Suit” (1951), “Bridge on the River Kwai” (1957) for which he won an Academy Award, and “Our Man In Havana” (1959). The extreme variability of these parts is a testament to what the website biography.com calls:

…his ability to disappear into a role, thus belying the dictum that actors without a consistent screen persona are not likely to become stars. Fellow actor Peter Ustinov once called Guinness “the outstanding poet of anonymity,” in reference to Guinness’s ability to create complex characterizations without incorporating his own recognizable personal traits and mannerisms. Guinness’s characters ranged from meek to malevolent, from timid bank clerks to fiery military officers, and all were noted for their depth and credibility, even those that called for him to wear layers of heavy makeup and prosthetics.

But nothing in Guinness’s illustrious career could have prepared for the freakish success of George Lucas’s “Star Wars” (1977). Although his portrayal of Obi-Wan Kenobi made him a rich man, the series so exasperated the actor that he lobbied Lucas to have his character killed off. He argued for this development on dramatic grounds, but Guinness later admitted:

What I didn’t tell him was that I just couldn’t go on speaking those bloody awful, banal lines. I’d had enough of the mumbo jumbo.

A final triumph was his portrayal of George Smiley, the unobtrusive master spy, in the television series “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” (1979) and “Smiley’s People” (1982). In contrast to the James Bond template of the secret agent as sexy action hero, Guinness deliberately underplayed the role. Mike Hale, writing in The New York Times, notes:

It’s conventional wisdom that Guinness’s performance is a landmark in TV history, and you won’t get an argument here, though if you’re watching it for the first time, you may wonder at the start what all the fuss is about. But then you start to notice…how Guinness builds the character. Much of what we know about Smiley accumulates through his reactions to the lies and sad truths that he hears, in slight movements of the eyes and in his capacity for surprise, an analogue for the idealism, or perhaps just devotion to his craft, that drives him.

The same devotion to craft could be applied to Guinness, as well. In 1985 he published the first of three volumes of autobiography, some of them in journal form, in which his engaging personality and strong spiritual nature (he had once considered becoming an Anglican priest, although eventually he converted to Roman Catholicism) are for the first time presented without any intervening “character.” Looking back on this feat, Tom Sutcliffe of The Guardian  wrote:

In his unpretentious and beautifully written book, he exorcised a long-suppressed anxiety about his origins. He was, he made clear, illegitimate — his name a mystery, his father probably called Geddes, the circumstances of his conception, vague. For the rest, Guinness told the tale of his life obliquely, its focus firmly on loved ones and friends rather than on himself. He was there, as it were, in reflection.

Guinness died in 2000 at the age of 86.

Audio courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives WNYC Collection.

Statement of Collection Content

Initially labeled the “Unknown Scrapbook with Two Additional Photographs,” the Horace L. Sheffield Jr. Photograph Album became identifiable after close inspection and a preliminary review of the Horace L. Sheffield Jr. Collection’s Personal Papers and Photographs currently being processed at the CHWMAAH. The name was soon changed from a “scrapbook” to a “photograph album” after inventorying the contents which consisted of 63 pages of 75 photographs, one wedding invitation, and a partial piece of paper with writing that is unidentifiable. Being is a serious state of fragility, it was decided early on that in order to digitize the album, the best way to achieve this end was to take a digital photograph of each page and then each individual photograph because it was too delicate to scan. The album is dated approximately 1917-1958 but the majority of the photographs capture Sheffield’s youth, college years, and as a young father. Most images of him appear to be taken at a special event like a family wedding because he is often finely dressed along side of equally formally dressed, presumably family members and friends. The majority of the people featured in the album are unidentifiable except both his first wife, Mable Elizabeth Windrow, and second wife, Mary Kathryn Otto, and his first two daughters—Corliss and Kathryn, and a few scattered names labeled on the back or near other photographs. In some cases their relationship to Sheffield was clear in other cases it is not. Overall, the photographs capture key events in Sheffield’s life and those of his family that has still much more to reveal.

Research

Like all research projects, the findings determined the next course of action. The research path for this particular project unfolded in three phases. Research first began with spending time looking at the photographs and itemizing its contents. Since no donor file existed on the “Unknown Scrapbook with Two Additional Photographs,” identifying someone was critical to not only understanding the content of the collection but how to present it in a digital form. After describing the contents of each photograph and then adding clues like dates and name identifiers where present however when dates were absent, clothing styles, the appearance of cars, and the aged look of the photograph helped to provide an estimated date. For example, dating photographs featuring early Ford models from the 1920s verses models from the 1950s made it easy to place the photographs in their proper decade. Compiling this information led to a list that generated patterns, themes, duplicates, anomalies, and reoccurring faces. Once Horace L. Sheffield was identified then reviewing the Horace L. Sheffield Jr. Collection donor file and perhaps discovery the provenance of the photograph album was an option. However, nothing in the file could definitively point to the photograph album because the inventory lists were quite general. Not doubting its content or origins, after several conversations with staff, it was determined that the album was misplaced and separated from either of the original collections since it had been between 5-15 years since it had been touched for processing.

Phase two in the research process was dominated by learning as much about Sheffield as possible. Trolling the internet to find basic information only led to very cursory sources. For example, outside the Detroit African American History Project by Wayne State University and a few articles on his children Lavonne and Horace III, the sources were largely and surprisingly scarce. Even combing through Wayne State Library, the DPL, and the Reuther yielded even less. The majority of the information that pieced together Sheffield’s life came from the Horace L. Sheffield Jr. Collection of Personal Papers and Photographs that are currently under archival processing at the CHWMAAH residing only feet away from the photograph album. Fortunately the convenience of proximity of this collection cannot be understated and proved to be the greatest reference for a once “unknown” album. The need for more research is evident in the simple fact that it was so difficult to find information about Sheffield, there clearly exists a gap in the scholarship which is all the more reason to offer his collection digitally.

The final phase of this project has yet to be realized because the project leaves many unanswered questions. Namely, who are the rest of the people in young Sheffield’s life and what impact did they have on him and how he came to be one of the most beloved and respected men of his generation in Detroit. To achieve this end, an interview with his children, specifically his son Horace III, has proven to reveal more answers and specifically identify more people in the album. After reading through the donor file, it is the expressed interest of the family to have as much of this collection digitized and made public as possible, therefore developing a relationship with the family to support this process is the natural next step in the birth of this collection as a potential research topic. To date, there exists few scholarly treatments of Sheffield’s life and his contributions to the labor struggles of the UAW, the Civil Rights Movement, nor his prolific commentary on the state of Detroit and America as a journalist and writer.

Photograph: Lisa M. Schell interviewing Rev. Horace Sheffield III at the CHWMAAH, Spring 2010.

Final Thoughts

In the end, by launching this collection into the digital world and placing Sheffield on the local, national and international map may help to promote not only scholarly work of his legacy but generate more visibility for the CHWMAAH and the wealth of collections they have to offer. The long term benefits of greater visibility of this collection will continue to catapult the CHWMAAH Archives as a reliable and valued archive for future academic scholarship.

From Paradise Lost by John Milton

The Nancy Bird Fore-edge painting collection is dedicated to the memory of Nancy Bird, Head of Special Collections from 1960-1974. Many of the paintings on the books housed in Special Collections are of landscapes or other scenes.  Each one holds a different image and is truly a work of art.  We even have one book that has a double painting.  When you fan the pages one way you get one scene and then  fanned the other way there is a different scene.  The fore-edge painting collection is home to 27 titles encompassing 35 volumes.  Fore-edge paintings began in the 1400s, before the invention of the printing press, when books were written on vellum. Since vellum is a heavy material and cannot be folded with the neatness and compactness of printed books today, books were shelved horizontally with the unbound pages facing outward and the title of the book written on the fore-edge.  After the invention of the printing press and with the modernization of printing and publishing books when the spine became the method of printing the title, book owners used the fore-edge to identify to whom the book belonged.  Books then began to be decorated with gold leaf, gold leaf edges and other techniques to enhance their beauty.  For most books with fore-edge paintings, you see the gold leaf edge but not the painted scene until you hold the book in a certain way in order for the painting to appear.

A fore-edge painting is made by fanning the pages, clamping the book securely, applying water-color landscapes or other miniatures.  The entire process takes several days or even weeks to complete to allow for drying time.

It is fun to show these to our students and patrons who have never seen one and to see their surprise when the painting comes to life.

From Silex Scintillans by Henry Vaughan

From The History of Sir Charles Grandison by Mr. Samuel Richardson

From The Book of Gems, edited by S.C. Hall

In May 1965, the Overseas Press Club hosted the German novelist Günter Grass, who had arrived in New York to teach a seminar at Columbia University. 

The author of The Tin Drum, in what sounds like his first visit to this country, amusingly recounts watching the previous evening’s Cassius Clay-Sonny Liston fight, which he sees as a “Greek grotesque demonic dance of the American way of life.” After some additional reflections on “this very rich and crazy and unhappy land,” he takes questions from the audience. Subjects range from the reception of his work in East Germany (where forbidden copies of his novel, distributed to a hotel’s cooks and waiters, resulted in there being no service in the dining room that night) to his take on American literature (“America needs a new Whitman!”). He also weighs in on Chancellor Ludwig Erhard’s chances in the upcoming German election. 

Born in Danzig (now known as Gdansk) in 1927, Grass fought during the waning months of World War II. He was wounded in April 1945 and spent the remainder of the hostilities in an American POW camp. Upon his release, he studied sculpture and graphic art. He became associated with Group 47, an organization of writers determined to encourage writing about Germany’s recent past and current situation, in opposition to what it saw as the romanticized escapist strain of writing then prevalent in the country’s literature. With what would become known as The Danzig Trilogy, consisting of The Tin Drum (1959), Cat and Mouse (1961), and Dog Years (1963), Grass emerged as the most widely read and representative novelist of his generation. The books deal with the guilt, horror, and absurdity of Hitler’s reign by fashioning a kind of European magical realism.

Rather than producing a strict literary accounting of events, he transmutes them into an at times hilarious, at times terrifying, picaresque fairy tale, because, as he has explained:

“Fairy tales generally speak the truth, encapsulating the essence of our experiences, dreams, wishes, and our sense of being lost in the world. In this way they are truer than many facts.” 

The impact of this new approach was immediate and far-reaching. Germany had at that time not found a way to face the Hitler years. The books evoked furious reactions, both pro and con. As The Independent put it:

Grass’s breathtaking courage and virtuosity in the face of what he now calls “the gestation of German history” that “had brought forth piles of rubbish and dead bodies” resonated far beyond his borders.

With his fame came responsibilities. Grass quickly became a well-known political figure in Germany, supporting Chancellor Willy Brandt (in office 1969-1974) as well as being active in the peace and environmental movements. In 1986-7 Grass and his wife lived for six months in Calcutta, where he advocated on behalf of the Calcutta Social Project, which attempted to educate the children of that city’s poorest residents. He opposed the reunification of Germany, fearing that the result would be a return to the aggressive, expansionist country of his youth.  

In addition to his subsequent novels, he has had plays produced, published his speeches, as well as journals, poems, and drawings. Capitalizing on his training in the arts, he created many of his own book covers. 

In 1999, Grass was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. The selection committee lauded him as being:

…a fabulist and a scholarly lecturer, recorder of voices and presumptuous monologist, pasticheur and at the same time creator of an ironic idiom that he alone commands. In his mastery of German syntax and his readiness to exploit its labyrinthine subtleties he recalls Thomas Mann. His writing constitutes a dialogue with the great traditions of German culture, conducted with punctilious affection. 

No stranger to controversy, in 2006 Grass shocked his readers by admitting that he, when very young, had enlisted in the notorious Waffen-SS. Coming from a man who had been considered the moral compass of his time, and who was strenuous in his insistence that  Germany face up to its Nazi past, these revelations stirred up a storm of reaction. His previous statements condemning others for what could be seen acts of complicity were now held against him. In an interview, Grass explained:

…he wanted to dispel the notion that Germans were unwilling victims of Hitler. Germans, he said, were enthusiastic supporters of the Nazi regime. “Of course they were seduced as well, but many were involved with enthusiasm.”

In 2009, to celebrate its 50th anniversary, a new English translation of The Tin Drum was released. Breon Mitchell, working with Grass, was able to retain much more of the author’s syncopated style, to reproduce his extended (at times page-long) sentences, and even approximate his made-up words. Additionally, several prurient scenes not translated in the earlier version were restored.

Audio courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives WNYC Collection.

It’s been very quiet on the NUWT blog recently as the cataloguing project funded by the National Cataloguing Grants Programme officially came to an end at the end of July.  It’s been a pretty mammoth task to get through all the cataloguing – about 370 boxes in total!  The most recent stage – and the reason the blog has been so quiet – has been the renumbering and re-ordering of the entire collection. 

My desk – surrounded by some of the boxes to be sorted and renumbered

In the 14 months of the project 232 boxes of subject files have been catalogued to a detailed file level description (this means that the content of the folders has been summarised and important documents, reports and discussions highlighted in the description). In addition I found a huge number of branch records mixed in with the boxes of subject files. So we’ve gone from having 20 minute books covering 15 or so branches of the NUWT to having 62 boxes of minute books, account books and correspondence files which now cover 147 branches.  This gives us a much fuller understanding of the work of the NUWT throughout the country and the relationships between branches and central council.  Towards the end of my cataloguing I also made a few exciting finds in terms of the history and workings of the union when I found the earliest Central Council minute book – from 1907 – 1914 – as well as a membership book giving membership figures for the union from 1926 – 1939.

I’m currently working on checking through the online catalogue and it should be up online on Monday – which is so exciting after all this work!  I’ll do a more comprehensive round-up of the cataloguing another day but for now I just wanted to update readers on what’s been happening with the project.

Tagged: cataloguing, National Union of Women Teachers, NUWT

As the archives of Amherst College, one of our missions is to document student life. We have vast collections that document athletics, musical groups, dramatic activities, student publications, and other organized activities from the nearly 200 years of Amherst College history. One collection that provides a unique glimpse into the lives of individual students is The Scrapbooks Collection – 140 scrapbooks maintained by individual students between 1853 and 1967. These books contain a wide array of ephemera and include everything from report cards to ticket stubs to dance cards to newspaper clippings and photos.

William Belcher Whitney (AC 1887) compiled what I believe to be the greatest scrapbook in our collection.

This is a fairly typical spread from a student scrapbook with a mix of ephemera and manuscript material that gives a real sense of what life at college was like in the 1880s. I’m curious whether the time limits on the Bath Rooms were strictly enforced. I’m also surprised to see such a well-regulated Billiard Room.

Whitney’s scrapbook is not the only one to include objects along with paper ephemera, though his may be the most beautifully laid out.

This opening includes a handkerchief, a pair of glasses, pressed leaves, a clothespin and a fraternity pin along with the expected paper ephemera. Whitney’s book is also one of the more thoroughly annotated ones — nearly every item has some note next to it with names and dates. If one took the time, you could practically reconstruct Whitney’s entire college career through his scrapbooks.

I chose to blog about Whitney’s scrapbook today because I recently stumbled across a particularly interesting item while showing this book to a class. Back in August, I blogged about a recently acquired copy of the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary Annual Catalog in which one of Emily Dickinson’s friends had made notes about Dickinson and her teachers and classmates. At the time I wondered if it was a common practice for students to annotate copies of their college catalogs and the frequency of literary allusions in such a practice. Here is another piece of evidence that suggests this was, indeed, a regular practice:

We’ll get to the question of why a Mount Holyoke Catalog is in the scrapbook of an Amherst man in a moment, but imagine my delight when I peeled back the front cover of this 1885-86 catalog to discover this:

The line written across the middle of the page — “a habitation giddy and unsure” — is a line from William Shakespeare’s “Henry IV, Part 2″ Act One, Scene Three. The complete sentence, spoken by the Archbishop of York is “A habitation giddy and unsure hath he that buildeth on the vulgar heart.”

Another turn of the page revealed more of the same:

After a few minutes of deciphering these manuscript notes and plugging them into Google, it was clear that every one of them is either a direct quotation from literature (mostly Shakespeare), or a clever play on a literary quotation. I ended my research at this point, but there is plenty here for someone to work with if they want to delve further into the practices of college students in the 19th century. One could track down the sources of all of the quotations then compare that to the known reading students were assigned to learn something of their reading habits. Are they only quotations from works assigned in class, or do students range more broadly in their literary knowledge?

Then there’s the question of why a Mount Holyoke catalog appears in an Amherst student’s scrapbook. While that may not appear to be all that mysterious or surprising, Whitney’s scrapbook does provide ample fodder for someone interested in exploring relationships between college men and women during the mid-1880s. Whitney’s scrapbook is filled with evidence of social outings with Mount Holyoke students.

And then there’s this page:

An entire page of hairpins neatly arranged in the shape of a heart with initials and dates next to each. I leave it to a future scholar of late nineteenth-century social history to unravel exactly what is going on in the life of William Belcher Whitney, but it is definitely worth a closer look. Even within the scrapbook itself, one could check the initials associated with those hairpins against the Mount Holyoke catalog to attempt to determine who these pins might have come from. The student newspapers and publications could be consulted for information about dances or other events on the dates noted, and so on. With a bit of investigation, one could develop a rich portrait of social life at two New England colleges. Possibly three colleges — Smith was founded in 1871, though there appears to be far more Mount Holyoke material in this particular scrapbook.

Anyone interested in conducting this kind of research should make their way to the Archives & Special Collections to dig in. You’ll need to set aside quite a bit of time just to work through Whitney’s scrapbook — this volume is just one of four that he compiled.

My self-funded trip to San Diego to attend the Society of American Archivists Annual Meeting was a fantastic professional experience. I met some great people who are working on inspiring projects.

The view from the San Diego convention center. Photo by Cindy McLellan

Keynote speaker Jon Voss of Historypin set an exciting tone for the conference with his thoughtful and passionate multi-media presentation. Not an archivist himself, Voss does enjoy working with archivists and started working with and thinking about linked open data back in the early 1990s.

Networking began at the preconference event that I attended, CURATECamp, a day of brainstorming with other archivists who are striving to preserve digital materials. One of the concurrent preconference events was a Digital Forensics workshop; having been part of the Digital Records Forensics Project while I was a student at UBC I was torn as to which event to attend. Happily the organizers of both events realized their attendees would have common interests and organized a mixer for the end of the day. I enjoyed talking Digital Forensics and discovering what people and institutions are doing, what problems they are running into, and how they use (or plan to use) forensic software.

The archivist enjoying some art in Balboa Park before the conference began. Nikigator by Niki de Saint Phalle. Photo by Cindy McLellan

My busy week in San Diego included many highlights. I present to you a mix of my favourite conference sessions and cultural attractions:

• Session 406. 80,000 Volunteers Can’t Be Wrong: The Case for Greater Collaboration with Wikipedia:     Staff from the Smithsonian Institution, Archives of American Art and the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) shared their experiences of working with local Wikipedians. NARA’s already impressive social media presence and social media strategy are changing perceptions and making new connections with people and communities of people a natural part of what they do. The GLAM-wiki project (for Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) makes it easier for institutions to connect to interested Wikipedia volunteers. NARA and the Smithsonian Institution both had success with the Wikipedian in Residence program. Read about the experience at the Archives of American Art blog.

  

  A new treat. Tortillas filled, rolled, deep fried and smothered in guacamole, sour cream and salsa. The Rolled tacos at Pokez were the best! Photo by Cindy McLellan

• Baja Mexican food. Cheap. Tasty. And large portions. Pokez was my favourite.
• Session 710. Coloring Outside the Lines: Tattoos as Personal Archives:  Verne Harris, Libby Coyner and Terry Baxter collaborated on a look at tattoos that was academic, archival and personal all at once. Baxter set things up with stories of tattoos and tattooing from many cultures and times; his slide show, which featured the tattoos of numerous librarians and archivists, got the room excited.  Coyner argues that for archivists tattoos as ‘records’ can be a “way for us to contend with age-old questions of how we have come to define modern, Western archives – to problematize notions of representation and self-representation within the archival record, and to examine what something like the tattoo can tell us about gender, regional variation, definitions of “class,” and how categories like “race,” “class,” and “gender” interweave.” While Harris took the idea of tattoo as personal record, with a dual nature, seen as both permanent and ephemeral , stirred in a little Foucault, Derrida, and archival theory and took the audience on a personal and academic journey that inspired a great question and answer session.

  

  I took a break from the museums in Balboa Park to do some shopping at the Spanish Village Art Studios. Photo by Cindy McLellan

• Balboa Park is a wonderful green space in the city. In addition to various gardens and the zoo, it includes one of the world’s largest outdoor pipe organs and many galleries and museums.
• Session 305. Trustworthiness Beyond Borders: Developing and Implementing the ISO TDR Standard.  My happy archives geek moment of the conference was enjoying Bruce Ambacher’s talk which gave a complete history of the development of ISO Standard 16363: Requirements for Audit and Certification of Trustworthy Digital Repositories. The current need for Trusted Digital Repository auditors and the training being developed for the auditing process also made for an engaging presentation by David Giaretta.
• San Diego Padres vs. Chicago Cubs. It is a tradition that one of the SAA events is a baseball game. This year the home team prevailed, beating the team from the host city of SAA 2011.

One of my favourite things in Balboa Park was the cactus garden, an alien landscape for someone from a rainforest. Photo by Cindy McLellan

• Session 607. The Challenges and Rewards of Open-Source Digital Video Preservation.  This was the session in which I presented along with City of Vancouver Archives’ partners Dave Rice and John Walko. Beyond Borders was the theme of the conference and the collaboration that lead to our presentation happened across borders. Walko works for Scene Savers, the Kentucky company that changed their video digitization workflow to provide us with the open source preservation files we requested. As a consultant for AudioVisual Preservation Solutions in New York City, Rice recommended an open source preservation format for moving image files. Although our presentation was on the afternoon on the last day of a long conference, we were pleased that our room was packed and there were excellent questions from the audience. There are many memory institutions struggling with the long-term preservation of video, so they welcomed a chance to see our approach.

The long term preservation of digital assets is an issue that many of the people at the City of Vancouver Archives are passionate about and doing a rather good job of. It is always exciting to share what we are accomplishing and participate in knowledge sharing with other professionals.  I was pleased to attend SAA and be a part of the program.

Ormsby Mitchell with a neck beard yearning to be free of his collar:

In this 1974 episode of Musicale, Hubert S. Howe, Jr., selects a few original electronic music compositions synthesized at Queens College. Howe was one of the earliest progenitors of computer music.

Creating a musical composition on a computer in the 1960s was a cumbersome task.  Mainframes were large, slow, costly, and often could not operate in real time.  Programs would run for weeks before spitting out a few minutes of music.  Yet in spite of these hurdles, by the mid-1960s a small group of composers began to enthusiastically explore the potential of computer composition.  Hubert Howe, a professor and composer featured in this episode of Musicale, was among them. 

At Princeton in 1963, Howe, along with James Godfrey and Winham Randall, developed Music IVB, a programming language that was part of a family of “Music” languages dating back to the early Bell Lab experiments of the late 1950s.  Music IVB was written using an assembly language specifically for the IBM mainframe then housed at Princeton. 

In 1969, Howe moved from Princeton to Queens College where he became director of the electronic music studio.  It was here where Howe developed the Music 7 sound synthesis software.  Music 7 was adopted from FORTRAN, a programming language most often associated with scientific and numeric computations for physics, chemistry, and weather prediction.  

The new language updated Howe’s previous efforts and was meant to work in conjunction with the colleges’ newly acquired Sigma SDS-7, a machine that was part of a class of mid-sized computers built by Scientific Data Systems.  In 1969, Queens College was one of only a handful of universities that possessed one of these machines and one of the very few that used it for creating music.  The compositions in this January 4, 1974 episode were born during a class in electronic music at Queens College that Howe had taught between 1973-1974.  

Playlist

1. A New Friend, by Don Muro
2. Descriptive Pieces Illustrating Three Novels, by Arnold Gamson
3. Automated Blues: What Two Can Do, by Steven Tintweiss (vocalist Rosalie Harmon)
4. Third Study in Timbre, by Hubert S. Howe, Jr.

Note: The history of the show Musicale on WNYC is a bit obscure. WNYC has only a handful of these shows on tape, and aside from this episode, the program aired primarily student performances of the works of Brahms, Mozart, Vivaldi, and Rachmaninoff.  Musicale’s host was David Barnes, the then audio technician for the Queens College music department.

This WNYC American Music Festival program from February 19, 1941 captures the Benny Goodman Sextet in a rare and wonderful moment. 

This sextet represents Goodman pretty close to his prime, featuring the brief, golden collaboration with Charlie Christian. What’s even more valuable is that it documents Cootie Williams’s time with the band. Williams had just left Duke Ellington and within the year would start his own group. The rest of the band consists of George Auld (saxophone), Artie Bernstein (bass), Johnny Guarnieri (piano), and Dave Tough (drums). 

We come upon the band just as they’re finishing a rendition of “Rose Room.” The host, Ralph Burton, prompts Benny to play something “from the old days.” He obliges with “Flying Home,” featuring Charlie Christian’s innovative electric guitar. There’s a little awkward interplay as Burton requests “a blues,” but is tongue-tied when Goodman wants to know in what key.  Williams then launches into one of his great growling solos. Next, Burton requests “a pop tune” and the band plays “The Sheik of Araby.” Then Goodman  announces, “Georgy Auld wants to play a little bit of ‘Body and Soul’ all by himself.” Burton praises Swing as “the folk music of America’s cities.” Finally, the sextet takes us home with a rousing version of “Gone With What Wind?” As the outro music swells, Burton thanks the King of Swing for dropping by and pronounces his group “the real McCoy.” 

Goodman was born in Chicago in 1909. The ninth of 12 children, his musical talents were recognized early. By the 1930s he had his own band. However, their “hot arrangements” (many the work of Fletcher Henderson) did not immediately catch on with audiences expecting more tame, tepid dance music. This all changed at a famous West Coast concert. As the website bennygoodman.com recounts:

After six months of broadcasting coast to coast the band was ready for a cross-country tour. The band was ready but the country was not. The tour was a disaster until its last date in August 1935, at the Palomar Ballroom in Los Angeles. …The kids in Los Angeles had been listening, and thousands of them turned out to hear the band in person at the Palomar. They hadn’t even come to dance; instead they crowded around the bandstand just to listen. It was a new kind of music with a new kind of audience, and their meeting at the Palomar made national headlines. When the band headed east again, after nearly two months at the Palomar, they were famous.

“Swing,” as it was soon known, became all the rage among the younger generation. Its official crowning as the dominant form of popular music was confirmed a few tears later, when, as the Gale Encyclopedia of Biography reports:

…impresario John Hammond rented that bastion of classical music, Carnegie Hall, for a concert that was to win respectability for the music. The night of January 16, 1938, is now legendary; responding to the electric expectancy of the overflow audience, the band outdid itself, improving on recorded favorites like “King Porter Stomp,” “Bugle Call Rag,” “Down South Camp Meeting,” and “Don’t Be That Way.” It capped off the evening with a lengthy, classic version of “Sing, Sing, Sing” which featured some brilliant solo work by trumpeter Harry James, pianist Jess Stacy, and Benny himself.

Goodman combined technical mastery of his instrument with a deep musical knowledge and — an almost equally important skill in the Big Band era — the discipline and organizational skills to assemble and hold together disparate groups of musicians. This last quality led to his acquiring the reputation of being an unfeeling taskmaster, famous for The Ray, a glare he would direct at any band member who muffed a note. However, it must also be noted that he unhesitatingly hired and showcased black musicians, a great rarity for the time. The website allaboutjazz.com lauds him for being:

…colorblind when it came to racial segregation and prejudice. Pianist Teddy Wilson, an African-American, first appeared in the Benny Goodman Trio at the Congress Hotel in 1935. Benny added Lionel Hampton, who would later form his own band, to his Benny Goodman Quartet the next year. While these groups were not the first bands to feature both white and black musicians, Benny’s national popularity helped to make racially mixed groups more accepted in the mainstream. Benny once said, “If a guy’s got it, let him give it. I’m selling music, not prejudice.”

Swing’s heyday lasted until the early 1940s. The American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers‘ fight with the music publishers (a battle jokingly referred to in this program) and repeated musician strikes resulted in popular music shifting in emphasis from composer/performers to singers. As for jazz, Goodman initially embraced bebop, but quickly grew to loathe it.  The sextet Goodman features here was the first of many smaller groups he would lead over the coming decades. He also retrained himself as a classical clarinetist, playing with many orchestras and commissioning classical works. A 1962 State Department-sponsored tour of the Soviet Union is credited with sparking jazz interest in that country. But it will always be as the King of Swing that Goodman will be remembered. As the New Grove Dictionary of Jazz put it:

As a jazz clarinetist, Goodman had no peer. His flawless solo improvisations set standards of excellence for jazz performance. He founded and directed the most important musical organization of the swing era and helped to open a new epoch in American popular music. He was the first white bandleader to adopt and popularize an uncompromising jazz style. He was also among the first to feature black jazz players, an action that might have compromised his own career at a time when racial integration was not a popular concept. His concerts brought a new audience and a new level of recognition to jazz. 

Goodman died in 1986, at the age of 77.

Audio courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives WNYC Collection.

Note: Some poor audio quality due to condition of original recording.