Meet John. He’s a fairly nice little boy, but he’s also an apple thief. He couldn’t resist pocketing a few of Butcher Wharton’s “rosy-cheeked apples”. (Better than the pallid apples at home?)

Here’s a picture of John, the pilfered apples, and the “worthy, though eccentric” butcher (alongside an unidentifiable, suspended piece of meat and a terrifying hatchet).

John’s mother caught him in his fruity transgression and ordered him to return the apples. In a classic whoops-but-I-don’t-want-to-anger-the-guy-with-a-hatchet move, John returned to the butcher shop with the apples, and:

On reaching the door of the shop he noticed some other customers in, and a way of getting out of the difficulty at once occurred to him, and one which would not bring him into contact with the butcher, and this was to roll the apples into the shop from the door. So, taking one of them, he rolled in gently along the floor, and doing the same with the second, he set off home in high glee.

Alas, John’s high glee was short-lived, as his mother did not agree with the genius of his solution and sent him back to apologize– to the eccentric fellow with the hatchet and the sharp hooks.

Yes, it was very hard for little John to face up to his erroneous ways, but as the butcher was, as previously mentioned, worthy, he accepted John’s apology and gave him three apples to take home for himself and his siblings.

Let’s hope they were just as rosy-cheeked as the originals.

(Image and moralistic tale from an 1878 issue of Chatterbox, a weekly illustrated newspaper with stories for children.)

This past week, Katherine Hoarn and myself had the privilege of presenting a paper at the 2015 Society of Florida Archivists Annual Meeting in Miami.

Included below is an abridged version of the paper “Adventures in Outreach: A Case Study” by Katherine Hoarn and Rebecca Bramlett.

Exhibits as Outreach

For the first part of the case study, I drew upon the experiences Rebecca and I had while planning, creating, and installing the exhibit “That I May Remember: Scrapbooks of the Florida State College for Women.” When we began this project, my brain was awash in memories of visiting some of my favorite museums: the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the MoMA in New York, and the Smithsonian Museums in Washington D.C. I was envisioning clean, slick exhibits in bright, open spaces, with beautiful signage, perfectly cut object labels, state-of-the-art security systems, and objects that had neatly and safely arranged themselves into cases all through their own volition. Then I came back to reality. Exhibits are hard work. They can be a considerable drain on staff hours and resources, but at the end of the day, we believe that exhibits have an important role to play in outreach at our institutions.

Exhibits are an important means of outreach because they give exposure to hidden collections. As someone wrote in our exhibit guest book, “I never knew this was here.” Those are exactly the types of people exhibits are meant to attract: people who don’t know about special collections and wouldn’t otherwise walk into our research center. In addition to bringing attention to certain collections, exhibits provide opportunities for community outreach. Since the “That I May Remember” exhibit focused on FSU history, it was easy to generate community interest, but it’s important to think of other historical societies and cultural organizations that might be interested in coming to see an exhibit.

Although they can be a lot of work, exhibits are also a lot of fun. They can increase access, promote community involvement, and give us librarians and archivists a chance to flex our research muscles. Exhibits shouldn’t be an afterthought, but rather an intentional part of any library and archive’s outreach strategy. Now I’ll turn it over to Rebecca Bramlett to talk about another important outreach method, instruction.

Instruction as Outreach

Whether it’s a page from the Gutenberg Bible; cuneiform tablets from ancient Babylon created in 2500 BCE; letters from the eighteenth century, or a first edition of J.R.R Tolkien’s “The Hobbit”—at Florida State University’s Special Collections and Archives, classroom instruction engages, educates and inspires. Instruction sessions with Special Collections materials can spark new passion and interest, and transform student understanding of a subject by facilitating interaction with the original, primary source materials.

An instruction session in Special Collections & Archives provides students with the opportunity to interact, engage with, and question topically relevant Special Collections materials under the guidance of their instructor and the Special Collections librarian.  It also provides librarians and archivists with the unique opportunity to reach new users, introducing them to Special Collections by granting students the chance to engage with materials outside of a reading room….

One way we approached instruction sessions was by looking across collections.  For example, In selecting materials for the introduction history of text technologies, an undergraduate level English class that focuses on the materiality, functionality, and intentionality of the written word, one thing we did was to juxtapose materials—historically and culturally.  We didn’t limit ourselves to just rare books, but included ephemera and manuscripts, as appropriate.  For example, we explored similar functions throughout time, with ostraka—Roman letters written on pottery shards in the early 2^nd century and the manuscript letters and the cuneiform tablets detailing economic transactions with nineteenth century ledgers, also detailing economic transactions.

In this particular instance, the combination of rare books, ephemera, and manuscripts helped deepen the understanding the students were trying to reach.  Moreover, different materials engaged different students.

Last week I had an opportunity to visit with Dave Joens and his staff at the Illinois State Archives—the first AOTUS to visit since Wayne Grover was there in 1952.  Dave and I were able to reenact the original photo op at the same catalogue drawer!

Margaret Cross Norton was the first State Archivist of Illinois from 1922 until 1957.  She was a co-founder of the Society of American Archivists, served in SAA leadership roles for many years, and edited American Archivist from 1946 to 1949.  Her “Catalog Rules: Series for Archives Material” trained generations of archivists.

She fought the good fight distinguishing archives from libraries and historical societies:

“One might conclude…that the ideal archivist is a scholar sitting in a remote ivory tower safeguarding records of interest only to the historian.  In reality the archivist is at the very heart of his government and the archival establishment is a vital cog in its governmental machinery.  Archives are legal records the loss of which might cause serious loss to citizens or the government.”

In the mid-1950s, Grover was working on “The Archivist’s Credo” (later Code) and sent drafts out for review.  Our records are rich with the correspondence between Norton and Grover. She challenges language and basic principles, addresses the non-partisan nature of government archives, and makes it clear that archivists are hired to process and serve archives and not to research their own scholarship!

An added general comment to the draft:

“Probably this also does not belong in the code, but I would say that the most important single need for the archivist is for a strong sense of order.  Disorder must worry him.  I don’t think enough emphasis has been placed upon this in the training of archivists.”

This week’s star magician was selected based solely on the merit of his excellent outfit. Look at this dapper fellow!

Magician Frank Mehring won 1st place in the Originality Contest at the 22nd Annual Houdini Club Convention. What did he do that was so original? Whatever happened to this guy? Where can I get an outfit like that? Please let us know if you have the answer to any of these questions.

Photo from Vol. 51, No. 7 of M-U-M: Magic, Unity, Might.

I have been away from Frost Library for the past month on a short (three month) research leave. My research project is to explore the printing history of one of the texts we acquired as part of the Younghee Kim-Wait (Class of 1982)/Pablo Eisenberg Native American Literature Collection: A Sermon Preached at the Execution of Moses Paul, An Indian by Samson Occom.

Samson Occom. A Sermon Preached at the Execution of Moses Paul. New-London: T. Green, 1772.

This copy of “The Fourth Edition” arrived at Amherst as part of the Kim-Wait/Eisenberg Collection. It is generally regarded as the first book published by a Native American author as his own work. At the end of 2014, we received an earlier edition from alumnus Peter Webb (Class of 1974), which I wrote about here. That blog post from January also includes some information about the other editions of Occom’s Sermon held in the Archives & Special Collections at Amherst College. We have two New-London editions, two copies of the 1788 London, England edition, the 1805 Springfield, MA edition, and the 1827 Welsh edition. My interest was piqued, and I began to dig in to the scholarship on Occom to see just how many editions of this text are known to exist.

In 2006, Oxford University Press published The Collected Writings of Samson Occom, Mohegan: Leadership and Literature in Eighteenth-Century Native America, edited by Joanna Brooks. In her biographical sketch of Occom that opens the volume she writes: “A Sermon, Preached at the Execution of Moses Paul, An Indian was first published on October 31, 1772. It subsequently went through nineteen editions, ranking Occom as the sixth leading author in the American colonies during the 1770s” (23). This information only deepened my interest and I continued to dig. Other sources repeated the “nineteen editions” statement, and I recently turned up the source of that number: Samson Occom and the Christian Indians of New England by W. DeLoss Love, a biography originally published in 1899.

In his book, Love notes the popularity of the Sermon and lists nineteen different editions in a footnote on pages 174-175. He also says “There may have been others which we have not met with or seen noted by bibliographers” (174). It soon became clear to me that I had discovered a gap in Occom scholarship that neatly fit my professional training and interests. Love’s own lack of bibliographical knowledge is revealed by his description of ALL printings of the Sermon as octavo, when the majority are clearly quartos. Although there has been some excellent recent scholarship on Occom from a book history perspective, there was a lack of old-school bibliographical data — basic information on the number of editions and the when, where, and why of their publication.

I began my search with two online resources, one free to all, the other a subscription database available through Frost Library. The English Short Title Catalog is freely available via the British Library and is one of the best sources for bibliographical information on books, pamphlets, broadsides, and other printed material produced prior to 1801 in British Isles, Colonial America, United States of America (1776-1800), Canada, or territories governed by Britain, in all languages. (You can read more about its history and scope here.)  The other handy resource, though not available for free, is The Early American Imprints Series, parts I and II, which is one of many databases Amherst College pays to access via NewsBank/Readex. Though diligent searching of these databases, I assembled a list of twenty-two separate editions of Occom’s Sermon.

But database searching was just the first step in my ongoing quest; I am determined to personally inspect as many copies of each edition as I possibly can. It’s important to understand what the term “edition” means, both its technical definition as well as the larger implications. For the technical definition, we turn to Principles of Bibliographical Description by Fredson Bowers:

An EDITION is the whole number of copies of a book printed at any time or times from substantially the same setting of type-pages. (39)

To stick with our two New-London editions for now, what this means is that T. Green (or someone in his shop) picked out each tiny piece of metal type, set it up on the press, printed however many copies they needed, then put all those pieces of type away so they could be used to print something else. Which means that the first New-London edition and the fourth New-London edition, while reproducing the same text, will have some differences.

As luck would have it, I had to make a trip to Philadelphia a couple weeks ago, so I arranged my travel to leave plenty of time for a visit to the Library Company of Philadelphia, where I had identified seven editions of the Sermon. Based on the basic information in their catalog, they appeared to have two copies of the 1772 New Haven edition, so I asked to see both.

New Haven editions. Images courtesy of the Library Company of Philadelphia.

It was apparent the moment I saw the second copy that there were two separate settings of type here. Page-by-page comparison of the contents of each copy made it clear that these books were produced from entirely separate settings of type. Already my twenty-two editions was bumped up to twenty-three.

But what does that mean? What insight can we gain into Occom’s life and work by nit-picking over the exact number of editions of this work? Achieving a more accurate count is just the first phase of this project, but I am already starting to make some interesting connections and raise new questions. At the most basic level, each edition is an indicator of consumer demand. No colonial printer would take on the time, labor, and materials costs of typesetting, printing, and binding unless they thought someone would purchase their product. Knowing that there were two New Haven editions instead of just one tells us that there was ongoing demand for this work in and around New Haven after the first edition sold out. Knowing that a total of three separate editions were printed just down the road in New-London in 1772-73 suggests an even greater degree of popular demand.

It will take me a long time to complete my physical inspection of the copies available in the collections of the Northeast — I spent a fruitful day at the American Antiquarian Society last week, and next week I will visit New York Public Library and the New-York Historical Society. I have also expanded my search to include other printed material related to the execution of Moses Paul, such as broadsides, newspaper articles, and another pamphlet — none of which were authored by Samson Occom. What has begun to emerge is a sense of the execution of Moses Paul as a media event that involved multiple participants, rather than the story of a single sermon by a single author.

It’s finally warm outside, and we have gardens on the brain. Accordingly, we’ve pulled a few gorgeous old books about flowers and garden design.

Stop by to see them during Tuesday open visual research hours! They’ll be out in the Special Collections Reading Room from 10:30 – 1:00.

Stephen Catlett and David Gwynn from the digital projects unit had the honor of attending the annual Achievers Program banquet held by the Hayes-Taylor YMCA at the Joint School of Nanoscience and Nanoengineering of in Greensboro on Saturday 16 May. We had the privilege of introducing Jamon Oxendine-Blackmon, a student at the Triad Math and Science Academy, who has been participating in the DGH Explorers (Digitizing Greensboro History) digitization project as part of the Achievers Program.

This is an outstanding group of young people who are doing quite amazing things, and it has been a pleasure working with them–as well as with the staff and volunteers at Hayes-Taylor–over the past few months. The project will continue into the summer for our DGH group.

The program also featured an inspirational keynote address by Dr. Drewry Vincent of Greensboro. The mentors and volunteers for the Achievers Program were recognized, as was Mr. Felton Foushee, the program director.

The following video documents some of the program’s activities over the past year:

One interesting item in the Royal Scottish National Hospital collection is the visitor’s book (ref: RS/2/6). In it are recorded the impressions of visiting deputations and individuals. The deputations were usually from Parochial Boards visiting the children they had referred to the Institution but include groups from similar institutions across Britain.

Many of the visitors came from overseas, particularly in the earlier years, and there are comments from Belgium, United States, France, Germany, Norway, Russia and New Zealand.

For example Dr J A Peeters from the Colony Gheel was commissioned by the Belgian government to examine the organisation of the Scottish system of lunacy administration. In July 1892 he wrote (in French but helpfully translated in the book) ‘I have been deeply touched by the care which is lavished upon the children. I hope that Belgium may some day have the glory of possessing an establishment organized in a similarly admirable manner’. In July 1894 William S Manson from Stanford University, California wrote ‘Scotland may be proud of this school and its work’.

Entry by William Manson, 1894

Also included is a touching note of thanks from a grateful parent in Philadelphia, September 1896:

‘I must record my deep sense of gratitude to Mr and Mrs Skene [the medical superintendent and his wife] in whose charge I left my delicate little girl over a year ago. During her last illness of twenty-one weeks duration she has been nursed day and night and every facility given to one to see her at all times…The Children’s Home is not excelled by any one in England or America’.

It is a fitting tribute to what, for its time, was such a progressive institution that it should be recognised as an example internationally.

The Public Interest Declassification Board (PIDB) will host a public meeting to discuss the recommendations included in its Report to the President on Transforming the Security Classification System, and its recommendation to employ existing technologies and develop and pilot new methods to modernize classification and declassification.

The meeting will include a discussion of the technology study the PIDB is conducting in collaboration with Executive Branch agencies.  There will be a briefing on the results of technology pilot projects completed at the Center for Content Understanding at the Applied Research Laboratories (UT: Austin), co-sponsored by the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Archives.  In his Second Open Government National Action Plan, the President directed the CIA and the National Archives to pilot new tools to provide classification reviewers with search capability for unstructured data and automate initial document analysis, beginning with the Presidential Records from the Reagan Administration’s classified email system.

The Archivist of the United States, David S. Ferriero will offer opening remarks, a senior official from the White House will give comments on Open Government Initiatives and a research scientist from the Center for Content Understanding will provide a briefing on the pilot projects.

WHEN: Thursday, June 25, 2015, 9:30 a.m. to 11:30 a.m.

WHERE:  National Archives and Records Administration
Room 105 – Archivist’s Reception Room
700 Pennsylvania Ave, NW
Washington, DC 20408

This meeting is open to the public. However, due to space limitations and access procedures, we require individuals planning to attend the meeting to register on Eventbrite. Please note that one form of Government-issued photo identification (e.g. driver’s license) is required to gain admittance.

This week’s impeccable science post features one of our favorite texts, an 1839 health tract entitled Thoughts on Bathing.

Thoughts on Bathing is a trove of essential information. For example, bathing of the entire body is important because it cleans your skin and invigorates your circulation. Cold bathing is particularly beneficial, and can even be fun!

A further explanation delves into the specifics of how the skin breathes and helps “renovate” the blood.

Whatever changes take place in the lungs, by the action of the air upon the blood in the small vessels of those organs, to purify and renovate it, take place also all over the surface of the body; that in this respect, therefore, the skin may be regarded as a sort of appendage of the lungs; and that if the skin be varnished over with a mixture of oil and dust, so that it cannot perform its office, an unreasonable burden will be thrown upon the lungs, which will thereby be weakened, and predisposed to disease.

Not bathing = colds or lung disease. Makes sense, kind of. But to whom is bathing most important? This is where the truly impeccable science kicks in.

This temporary suspension of the offices of the skin is, however, peculiarly dangerous to those who are of light complexion, slender form, with a long neck, and narrow shoulders projecting almost like wings, indicating a chest whose internal organs as well as external dimensions are comparatively small and feeble, and therefore poorly prepared to do that work which belongs to other parts or organs.

Listen up, thin pale people, you’d better remember your weekly cold bath. Your life could depend on it.

You can see more gems from Thoughts on Bathing in the Spring 2012 issue of Occasional Nuggets, which deals with health and exercise.

Hi Pop! Happy Birthday!! You’ll never guess what I’ve been up to since your 100th birthday. Imitating you, that’s what, or at least trying to. But there’s no way I will ever have your gift of gab, your great love of children, or your extraordinary management skills. You described your books; I’m describing your papers. That much I can do. I made descriptive lists of all those articles, photographs, correspondence, autographed materials and other things you collected that complement the books — over 120 boxes of items. Our archivist Burt and his students, you knew him, I think, they developed a finding aid based on my lists. As FSU’s catalog leads the scholar to the books, the finding aid leads him to these complementary materials.

Your collection has grown from the original 5000+ books you gave to Florida State University when you and the books moved to Tallahassee in 1960.   You added many more while you were here, and the library has continued to add books ever since you left us in 1984. You produced eleven volumes of a bibliography of your collection and a keyword index to the poems. We now have an estimated 22,000 books.

Remember how it started. You wrote by hand inscriptions in two books you gave Mom and me on our first Christmas together: Poems for Peter by Lysbeth Boyd Borie and The Little Mother Goose, collected and illustrated by Jessie Wilcox Smith:

To Mother and Cathmar

 For Christmas nineteen twenty eight
Rhymes for my sweethearts, small and great
Some old, the others up-to-date.

 Pledge to learn well, and I for mine,
For Christmas nineteen twenty-nine,
Will pledge a present much more fine.

 Father

After Christmas 1928, my brother Bruce joined us. Every evening, even before you arrived home after work, he and I were clamoring for your attention.

You would pull us up onto your lap and our nightly poetry reading, reciting and singing, would begin. Robert Louis Stevenson’s Child’s Garden of Verses for a start, but those poems were about other children. We wanted poems about us. You promised to write them, but only if we told you what to write about. We could do that!

You gave each of us, and our cousin Connie too, a black leather binder to hold the copies you typed of the poems you wrote for the three of us between 1930 and 1937. In 1933, you began gathering the poems of each year to be printed in booklets that you sent to your friends as Christmas greetings. I recall how surprised and pleased you were years later when one of the The Friends of Florida State University Libraries told you the poems should be published. When you said you didn’t want anything to do with that process, she took it upon herself to select some of your poems and saw to it that they were published in 1967 as The Things I Want: Poems for Two Children. It was so popular that it went into a second printing, and then Zumpin’ followed with more poems a few years later. We still fill requests for those books every now and then.

By 1938 Bruce and I had lost interest in poetry. How very disappointed you must have been, but you never let on, and we had become too busy with our friends to notice. I did notice though that you were spending lots of time sitting in our big wing chair in the evenings, reading small pamphlets. Little did I know then that they were book dealers’ catalogs, or that the pencil you always held loosely cross-wise between your lips was being used to make checkmarks on the pages. The number of books in our den began to increase, then the number of shelves increased. More books kept appearing to fill the bookcases in our living room. Then I went away to college.

Within the next ten years, you and Mom moved into New York City. Then retirement from AT&T loomed for you. You had been frustrated in your search of libraries and universities around the country where you and your books would be happy.   You and Mom were visiting us one summer when my friend Jackie stopped by — remember? She suggested her alma mater FSU might be a good repository for your books. Then she followed up that suggestion by writing a letter to the head of the library recommending you and your collection. That did it.

And here you are. And I am here too. Every winter I am having the best of times living with Jackie in our Florida home and working in your collection with the special people here who administer it.

That pledge you made in 1928? You kept it your whole life and FSU Libraries continues to fulfill it. Thank you, Pop, with love and best wishes on your 118th birthday, from Cathmar.

Cathmar Prange is the daughter of John MacKay Shaw, the donor and curator for the childhood in poetry collection that bears his name in Special Collections & Archives. Every winter, Cathmar volunteers to continue organizing and curating her father’s collection and has been doing so for 18 years.

Today’s post features one historically bad attitude, courtesy of Lily from the eponymous 1870 Lily’s Lesson. Look at her pout!

Not only was Lily feeling grouchy, but she was making sure that everyone could tell she was in a foul mood. In case it’s hard to tell from the above illustration, here’s what she was doing:

One round fat shoulder was pushed up out of her dress; the small hands, which should have been busy about some light work or pleasant play, were pettishly dragging to bits a sheet of white paper which might have been turned to some good use, and littering it about the door, where some one must have the trouble of picking it up; and kick, kick, kick, went the toe of the pretty shiny little boot against the rough door-step.

During the course of this 217-page tale, Lily rapidly progresses from paper-tearing and doorstep-kicking to taking off down the road without her mother, carrying her sister’s kidnapped satchel and a purloined umbrella.

Of course, in the spirit of any good cautionary tale, Lily is then mistaken for a beggar, loses the umbrella, drops the satchel (which is used as a football by even worse children), gets lost while taking a shortcut home through the woods, and falls into a frigid river.

But don’t despair, dear reader: Bruno the Dog pulls Lily from the roiling waters, and after some soul-searching and Ten-Commandments-based-reflection, she makes a full recovery while lying in her own warm bed. It’s quite heart-warming.

The City of Vancouver, Vancouver Heritage Foundation, City of Vancouver Archives and Heritage Vancouver will host #HeritageReboot, a fun, hands-on free public event that combines modern technology with heritage conservation.

When: Saturday, May 23, 2015 from 1pm to 4:30pm

Where: Roundhouse Community Centre, Engine 374 Pavilion, 181 Roundhouse Mews (Corner of Davie and Pacific)

#HeritageReboot schedule:
1 pm – Event launch followed by cake-cutting
1 pm – 4:30 pm – City of Vancouver Heritage Action Plan Open House
1:30 – 4:30 pm – Public welcome to experience and use the technology
2:45 pm – 4:15pm – Tours of Yaletown and Engine 374

The event will officially launch four initiatives that use digital technology to open up Vancouver’s heritage in new ways for everyone:

• The City of Vancouver’s new online platform for public nominations to Vancouver’s Heritage Register
• Vancouver Heritage Foundation’s Heritage Site Finder, an interactive map showing over 2,200 sites listed on the Heritage Register. The tool is searchable, filterable and full of images and information about the sites
• The City of Vancouver Archives’ digital rendering of the important Goad’s 1912 Fire Insurance Plan.  Newly added as a layer on VanMap, construction materials, building footprint, street names and addresses of the time are now easily discoverable.
• Heritage Vancouver’s Historic Building Permits Database, a searchable online database of over 32,000 transcribed pre-1929 Vancouver building permits

Everyone is encouraged to unearth the past with these newly created digital tools and use the information to nominate a site to the Vancouver Heritage Register using the new online platform.

The City of Vancouver will also be having its open house on the next phase of the Heritage Action Plan there throughout the afternoon.

Free tours will also be available in the afternoon, including:

• The Canadian Pacific Railway’s Two Yaletowns 1886-1887 and 1910-1914.  Led by historian and author of the award winning book Vancouver: A Visual HistoryBruce MacDonald.
• City Building: Yaletown and its Neighbours in the Nineties.  Led by former City Councillor and the current Director of The City Program at Simon Fraser University Gordon Price.
• A historic tour of Yaletown in French.  Led by the President of the Société historique francophone de la Colombie-Britannique Maurice Guibord.
• Tours of the Engine 374 Pavilion and the engine to mark the 128^th anniversary of Engine 374 pulling the first transcontinental train into Vancouver.  Led by The West Coast Railway Association.

We’ll have a detailed post about our initiative on May 21 to coincide with its public release. We hope to see you at the event on May 23.