By the time Shirley Zak Hayes joined the WNYC staff in June 1966 as the station’s first full-time woman announcer, she had already distinguished herself as a community activist. In the late 1950s she led the fight against Robert Moses’ plan for a four-lane highway through Washington Square Park. (This activism was duly noted in Jane Jacobs’ book The Life and Death of Great American Cities). Hayes had also worked for the Lindsay campaign, and was a charter member of the National Organization for Women.

A Chicago native, Hayes hosted the overnight classical music program While the City Sleeps and created, produced and hosted the shows Landmark Reports and Planning Board Reports (the above audio is from a 1967 episode of the latter). Hayes had plenty of experience and knowledge for both programs, having been a member of Planning Board 2 since 1952 and organizing the successful campaign to preserve Washington Square Park. Planning Board Reports was launched in conjunction with Manhattan Borough President Percy Sutton’s office on June 4, 1967. The show presented capsule reports and meeting dates for the city’s Planning Boards.

On March 8, 1974 Hayes took on the bulk of WNYC’s special programming for International Women’s Day. This included discussions with experts on women’s health, employment, women in broadcasting, and African-American women. She continued to produce special programs focusing on women’s issues throughout the year and into 1975.

Hayes chaired several committees of the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA) union, and represented fellow broadcasters at annual conventions as chair of the AFTRA Committee for the Creation of a Television and Film Center in New York City.

Hayes produced and announced for WNYC for 10 years and was among the earliest full-time woman radio announcers in New York City. She worked hard to break into the ‘boys club’ of announcing, but her repeated efforts to obtain a management position at the station were ultimately unsuccessful.

WNYC Announcer Shirley Zak Hayes in the 1960s.

(Courtesy of Alfred Tropea/WNYC Archive Collections)

Special thanks to: Christopher Hayes; Kenneth R. Cobb, NYC Department of Records; Ted O’Reilly, The New York Historical Society; and Danielle Cordovez, NYPL Rodgers and Hammerstein Archives of Recorded Sound.

The Special Collections & Archives graduate assistants, Rebecca L. Bramlett and I, are busy preparing for the opening of our exhibit next Wednesday, October 15th. “That I May Remember: the Scrapbooks of Florida State College for Women (1905-1947)” showcases many of the scrapbooks from the Heritage Protocol & University Archives’ collections and explores the scrapbook as a means of communication, focusing on the themes of school spirit, friendship, and creating self. With each scrapbook we opened, Rebecca and I were struck by the way the unique personalities of the women of FSCW jumped off the pages at us. As a whole, the FSCW scrapbooks provide an invaluable insight into what student life was like at one of the largest women’s colleges in the country – a college with rigorous academics, zealous sporting traditions, vibrant community life, and even secret societies. Individually, they present a visual narrative of each student’s college journey, as seen through her own eyes. Which got me thinking… As a means of creating and communicating self, the FSCW scrapbooks operate in much the same way that popular forms of social media do for students today.

Facebook

Wall posts, friends, messages, memes, event invitations, and “likes” – these conventions are not reserved for the twenty-first century. Many of the FSCW scrapbooks, like Laura Quayle Benson’s (pictured right), contain autograph pages signed by the scrapbook creator’s friends. Like a Facebook wall, these pages list a person’s friends along with personal notes from each of them. Some of the notes seem to be the generic words of a passing acquaintance (“With best wishes”), while others are rich with suggestions of inside jokes (“I love Laura ‘heaps’ – I wonder if (?) does?”). The scrapbooks are full of other forms of communication between friends and family – letters, notes, calling cards, package slips, greeting cards, and telegrams. Invitations to join sports teams, honor societies, and sororities are given pride of place as signs of belonging to a group, and collections of event programs read like a personal news feed of where each girl was on a given date. Flipping through the FSCW scrapbooks is a bit like scrolling through each girl’s Facebook wall. It gives one a sense of who she was at a certain point in her life – who she was friends with, what she did, what her interests were – even if the deeper, more personal meanings of the scrapbooks are sometimes obscured from the outside observer.

Tumblr and Pinterest

Creating a scrapbook is an act of curation – carefully selecting texts and images and arranging them in a meaningful way. Although the creators of scrapbooks manipulate physical objects, users of sites like Pinterest and Tumblr use digital media to create collections of text, image, video, and sound meant to express something of themselves. The scrapbook of Annie Gertrude Gilliam (pictured left) contains many excellent examples of well-curated pages. Her clippings from advertisements, theater bills, and magazines are carefully arranged and replete with lively commentary (“A real knock out,” “Exciting and thrilling to the end”). These pages speak of a timeless need to organize our thoughts, express ourselves visually, and voice our opinions, whether in a private scrapbook or a public webpage.

Instagram

Photographs are a common feature of almost all of the FSCW scrapbooks, and many of these photos include captions written by the scrapbook’s creator, such as those by Jewell Genevieve Cooper (pictured right). Photos in scrapbooks are, in a sense, “tagged” by the scrapbook creator. Jewell Genevieve Cooper’s “tags” tell us what the photos are of (an Odd-Even baseball game, one of FSCW’s wildly popular inter-school rivalries) and who is in them. These social layers added to photographs in scrapbooks are similar to the tags and descriptions users add to photos in social media sites like Instagram. Even though a picture says a thousand words, we can’t seem to resist adding our own words anyway.

The FSCW scrapbooks give a unique window into student life as told by the students themselves. While the scrapbooks present plenty of cataloging and preservation challenges for archivists, they are at least physical objects that can be stored and displayed as such. Students today are also telling their own stories, but they are doing so through social media sites like Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, and Instagram. How these stories will be preserved and shared with future generations remains to be seen and is a question beyond the scope of this blog post. In the meantime, “That I May Remember: the Scrapbooks of Florida State College for Women (1905-1947)” will be on display in the Strozier Library Exhibit Space from October 15th through December 1st.

Katherine Hoarn is a graduate assistant in Special Collections & Archives. She is working on her Master of Library and Information Science degree at Florida State University.

I recently decided to take a look at one of the Benedict Arnold letters in our Updike Autograph Collection, and came across a curious situation. Here’s an image of the letter:

and the verso:

The letter is dated May 19th, 1775, just a month after the battles of Lexington and Concord, and it describes Benedict Arnold’s successful raid on Fort St. Jean in Quebec, where Arnold had captured a ship and the small group of soldiers at the fort. Here’s Arnold’s account from the letter:

Manned out two small batteaux with 35 men and at 6 the next morning arrived there and surprised a sergeant and his party of 12 men and took the King’s sloop of about 70 tons and 2 brass six-pounders and 7 men without any loss on either side. The captain was hourly expected from Montreal with a large detachment of men, some guns and carriages for the sloop, as was a captain and 40 men from Chambly at 12 miles distance from St. Johns, so that providence seems to have smiled on us in arriving so fortunate an hour. For had we been 6 hours later in all probability we should have miscarried in our design.

The letter is also notable for a passage in which Arnold describes an encounter with Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys:

 I must here observe that in my return some distance this side [of] St. John I met Col. Allen with 90 or 100 of his men in a starving condition. I supplied him with provisions. He informed me of his intentions of proceeding on to St. Johns and keeping possession there. It appeared to me a wild, expensive, impracticable scheme…

What makes the letter particularly interesting, though, is that it doesn’t seem to be the only version that Arnold wrote. An alternate version (addressed to the Massachusetts Committee of Safety) is available in a compilation of Revolutionary War documents published in the 1830s-40s (text | page image). The letters are both dated May 19th, 1775, and are basically the same in content, but there are routinely differences in language, and occasionally major differences in content. Our draft of the letter, for instance, doesn’t include the following passage, which appears in the other version:

I wrote you, gentlemen, in my former letters, that I should be extremely glad to be superseded in my command here, as I find it next to impossible to repair the old fort at Ticonderoga, and am not qualified to direct in building a new one. I am really of opinion it will be necessary to employ one thousand or fifteen hundred men here this summer, in which I have the pleasure of being joined in sentiment by Mr. Romans, who is esteemed an able engineer….

… I beg leave to observe I have had intimations given me, that some persons had determined to apply to you and the Provincial Congress, to injure me in your esteem, by misrepresenting matters of fact. I know of no other motive they can have, only my refusing them commissions, for the very simple reason that I did not think them qualified. However, gentlemen, I have the satisfaction of imagining I am employed by gentlemen of so much candour, that my conduct will not be condemned until I have the opportunity of being heard.

It’s illuminating to note that these lines — which move beyond the immediate reporting of forts taken and cannons captured — were ones that Arnold seemed to hesitate to send.

So why two copies, and why would they be different?* Unfortunately, our letter isn’t addressed, so we can only guess that it was intended for the same recipients (the MA Committee of Safety). But one bit of evidence appears in the last lines. Our copy concludes with this note:

For particulars [I] must refer you to Capt. Oswald, who has been very active and serviceable and is a prudent, good officer.

Indicating, it seems, that Oswald was delivering our copy of the letter. The other letter ends this way:

I must refer you for particulars to the bearer, Captain Jonathan Brown, who has been very active and serviceable, and is a prudent, good officer…

Scholars of the American Revolution (who are hopefully more knowledgeable of the conventions of military correspondence of the time) are encouraged to comment on whether Arnold was more likely to be sending two copies of a letter like this with different couriers, to ensure that it arrived safely, or sending a similar letter to two different sets of recipients.

In either case, it’s a reminder that even what seems like a clear piece of historical evidence might be only part of the story.

Here’s a transcription (spelling adjusted) of our copy of the letter:

Crown Point 19th May 1775

Gentlemen-

I wrote you the 14th instant by Mr. Romans, which I make no doubt you have received. The afternoon of the same day I left Ticonderoga with Capt. Brown and Arnold and fifty men in a small schooner. Arrived at Skenesborough and proceeded for St. Johns. The weather calm. 17th at 6 PM being within 30 miles of St. Johns. Manned out two small batteaux with 35 men and at 6 the next morning arrived there and surprised a sergeant and his party of 12 men and took the King’s sloop of about 70 tons and 2 brass six-pounders and 7 men without any loss on either side. The captain was hourly expected from Montreal with a large detachment of men, some guns and carriages for the sloop, as was a captain and 40 men from Chambly at 12 miles distance from St. Johns, so that providence seems to have smiled on us in arriving so fortunate an hour. For had we been 6 hours later in all probability we should have miscarried in our design. The wind proving favourable in two hours after our arrival we got on most all the stores, provisions and weighed anchor for this place with the sloop and 5 large batteaux, which we seized, having destroyed 5 others, and arrived here at 10 this morning, not leaving any one craft of any kind behind that the enemy can cross the lake in if they have any such intentions. I must here observe that in my return some distance this side [of] St. John I met Col. Allen with 90 or 100 of his men in a starving condition. I supplied him with provisions. He informed me of his intentions of proceeding on to St. Johns and keeping possession there. It appeared to me a wild, expensive, impracticable scheme and provided it could be carried into execution of no consequence so long as we are masters of the lake, [and] of that I make no doubt we should be as I am determined to arm the sloop and schooner immediately. For particulars [I] must refer you to Capt. Oswald, who has been very active and serviceable and is a prudent, good officer.

Bened: Arnold

Verso:

P.S. to the foregoing letter

By a return sent to Gen. Gage last week I find there are in the 7th and 26th regiments now in Canada 717 men including 170 we have taken prisoner. Enclosed is a list of cannon here at Ticonderoga:

[list follows]

—
* It’s also possible, of course, that one or the other letters wasn’t actually composed by Arnold at all, or at least not on May 15th, 1775. Arnold seems to have signed his name in a number of ways, as evidenced by comparing this signature with this one, both dating from 1775. The latter version uses a two-story form of the “A” in “Arnold,” and seems similar in other ways. I haven’t seen a copy of the other letter, which may be part of the Library of Congress’s Peter Force Library, donated by the author of compilation in which that copy appears.

A trip to Berlin had been planned for a long time and this gave me the opportunity to combine research with pleasure.  At the archives, we are digitising glass lantern slides so that this rich bank of history will be available for future generations.   One way for the public to become involved with the project is to visit and re-photograph the sites from the lantern slide and so I went to Berlin with two photographs from the archive.  We had no information what the buildings in the lantern slide image were, but a quick search on the internet identified one of the pictures as the Bode Museum on the Museum Island.  I could not find any reference to the other picture.

The Bode Museum c.1890 (l) and 2014 (r)

The weather was great and on our first day in Berlin we took a bus tour of the city.  I, of course, was armed with the two pictures and almost right at the start of the tour found the “unknown” building  –  there are now traffic lights right in front of the building – it is the Humboldt University on Unter den Linden.

The Humboldt University c.1890 (l) and 2014 (r)

While comparing the photographs, differences become apparent almost immediately.  At the Bode Museum, the statue has disappeared, the railings along the river have changed, and modern buildings , cranes and pipework that carries the ground water are now prominent.

The changes at the university are less pronounced, although there is now a busy road rather than a quiet square in front of the building, the main change is the inscription on the building – now in modern German rather than Latin!

Not many of the old buildings survived the war although many have been restored or rebuilt.  Berlin now seems to be a city of glass and steel and many more changes are happening.

Roelie

50 years ago presidential aide Walter Jenkins, a father of six, was arrested for having sex with a man in a YMCA bathroom, weeks before the 1964 presidential election.

Rumors of the arrest circulated for days and eventually Republican Party operatives promoted it to the press. On October 14, after the White House unsuccessfully tried to lobby the Washington papers not to publish the story, the scandal broke in the Washington Star. President Johnson, already facing pressure over the Bobby Baker and Billie Sol Estes affairs, was clearly not pleased, as you can hear in the clip above; Jenkins resigned immediately. For a few days afterward Johnson’s opponent Barry Goldwater made veiled references to the incident by mentioning LBJ’s “curious crew,” and his campaign headquarters printed buttons with slogans such as “ALL THE WAY WITH LBJ, BUT DON’T GO NEAR THE YMCA.” But the event ended up not influencing the outcome of the election (Johnson swept Goldwater), as it was soon eclipsed by other international news at the time such as Khruschev’s deposition and the United Kingdom’s elections. Lyndon Johnson later stated “I couldn’t have been more shocked about Walter Jenkins if I’d heard that Lady Bird had tried to kill the Pope.”

The Jefferson Market Library is an iconic building in Greenwich Village. Located at 6th Avenue and 10th street, the building is known for its bright red brick exterior, gothic windows, charming (and public!) garden, and its 11-story high clock tower. But what is most likely not known is the fascinating history of this building, and the many times it was saved from destruction by a team of active Village residents, led by one Margot Gayle.

The building was originally a wooden firehouse, built in the early 1800s with a tall tower that overlooked Manhattan and kept watch for fires, invasions, and any other threat to the city. In 1875 the wooden structure was torn down, and a brick courthouse was erected, complete with a brick tower that included a 4-sided clock, added to continue to keep watch over the city.

In 1945 the city ceased to use the building, and it sat empty for over 10 years. Eventually the clock – nicknamed “Old Jeff” – stopped running, and the city began to talk about tearing down the whole structure. That is when Margot Gayle and her Committee of Neighbors to Get the Clock on Jefferson Market Courthouse Started (which is a fairly long name with sadly no chance of a catchy acronym) stepped in. They began to petition the city to restore the clock and save the building. While the city refused to do anything on their own, they did allow the committee to take over. Gayle’s committee rented the tower from the city for $1 a month, and hired a repairman to fix and maintain the clock. In 1961 the city commissioned the courthouse to become a branch of the New York Public Library, and the Committee worked to transfer ownership and repair of the clock over to the NYPL. After another threat of closure and destruction in the 1970s, the building was declared a historic landmark, and has been in active use as a library since.

We recently came across a great, brief interview with Margot Gayle about her Committee and the clock they worked to save. In the interview from the 1960s (though the actual date is unknown), she gives a brief history of the courthouse and clock, what the Committee has done so far, and her thoughts on the transition of the space into a library.  Ms. Gayle, who died 6 years ago last week, was a prominent and outspoken conservationist in the Village, working throughout the 1950s and 1960s to not only preserve historic buildings, but to give them a new life in the modern New York City. When fixing the clock, she noted the importance it plays in the daily life of all people in the neighborhood, “children have gone to school by it, people catch their bus, get off to work by it, come home and find out if stores are still open by it…” Fixing the clock meant providing structure to the surrounding community.

Margot Gayle’s work is still present in today’s Greenwich Village.  In the 1960s she helped to successfully lobby for a landmark preservation law to help secure buildings after the destruction of the original Pennsylvania Station. She also worked to prevent the construction of a highway in downtown Manhattan. And of course, she went on to help save many more clocks all over Manhattan and Brooklyn.

The last time I wrote about detective work in my job, I mentioned “authority work” and linked to the Library of Congress’ explanation of what it entails. Here’s another example, from earlier this week.

I began to catalog these two recently-purchased pamphlets from the 1940s:

Navajo Life Series: Primer and The Little Turtle, early mimeographed versions from 1942 and 1943.

The cataloging itself was straightforward, but a piece of accompanying information gave me pause. These mimeographed pamphlets seem to be the earliest version of a series that was published several more times over the years. Some of the later versions had illustrations by a different artist, Andy (or Van) Tsihnahjinnie.¹ These early ones were illustrated by William Morgan, better known for his work on The Navajo Language.

The information that was puzzling me came from a brief email conversation that our Head of Archives and Special Collections shared with me. He had inquired of the library at the Navajo Nation Museum whether they had any additional information about these pamphlets. Their reply indicated that while Tsihnahjinnie was Navajo, Morgan was not. This bothered me because I remembered other materials in our collection listing Morgan as a translator, and identifying his tribal affiliation, so I double-checked his Name Authority Record (NAR):

http://lccn.loc.gov/n91090353

Note the three citations listed under the “Found in” section. These references can be sources that catalogers have used for information on Morgan, or other works he produced. NARs are often updated over time–this particular one was first created in 1991 as “Morgan, William, 1917-” and most recently edited in 2011 to add the death date and citation for the Anthropological Linguistics article.²

After a little more investigation, I discovered that the confusion lay with the second citation attributed to Morgan. Human-wolves among the Navajo (1936) is a monograph in the Yale University Publications in Anthropology series. It was not listed in the bibliography of Morgan’s works in the Anthropological Linguistics article. I was beginning to suspect it was authored by a different William Morgan, but I needed proof. I also needed a way to narrow my searching, since “William Morgan” is a common name, with well over 100 different NARs. I checked our stacks copy of Human-wolves among the Navajo–no foreword, afterword, or any ‘about the author’ information at all. I checked several of my “go to” reference sources³ without luck. Standing in our Reference stacks after checking American Indian Biographies, I had one of those “Hooray for browsing!” moments when I spotted Native American Folklore, 1879-1979: An Annotated Bibliography.

A “William Morgan” was listed, along with six of his published works. They included Human-wolves among the Navaho and ended with ‘The Organization of a Story and a Tale’ by William Morgan with a preface by Alfred North Whitehead, in The Journal of American Folklore, vol. 58, no. 229 (July-Sept. 1945) pp. 169-194. Looking up the article, I got a “Hooray for footnotes!” moment:

After a couple of dead-ends (not helped that the 1935 date turned out to be wrong) I googled Christiana Morgan, which led me to the recent biography Translate this Darkness by Claire Douglas. This was my prize: a well-researched biography identifying “William Otho Potwin Morgan” (1895-1934) as the writer of Human-wolves among the Navaho, citing the Morgan papers held in the Archives at Harvard University (his alma mater). Armed with that, I can file a request for a correction to the Name Authority Record for William Morgan, 1917-2001 to remove the citation to the work by William Morgan, 1895-1934 and in addition, to create a new NAR for William Morgan, 1895-1934.

The Five Colleges Library Consortium has begun the process for becoming authorized to participate in a “funnel project” of the Name Authority Cooperative Program (LC/NACO), which will allow us to make such changes to the NAR directly.

¹We hold a couple of items illustrated by Tsihnahjinnie, and his Authority Record is a great example of an author using a variety of names.

²If you are interested, and have access to JSTOR, here is the link for that article.

³Some of which include:

•  The Cambridge Companion to Native American Literature edited by Joy Porter and Kenneth M. Roemer (Cambridge, UK ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 2005).
• Resources within Gale Biography in Context, which includes Contemporary Authors.
• American Indian Biographies edited by Carole Barrett, Harvey Markowitz, project editor, R. Kent Rasmussen (Pasadena, Calif. : Salem Press, 2005).
• Native American Authors website created by the ipl2 Consortium.

Please join us on October 22^nd at 7:00 pm at the H.R. MacMillan Space Centre for “Vancouver—An Ever-changing City,” a fascinating virtual walking tour of Vancouver then and now, and a chance to support the work of the Archives.

Andy Coupland and John Atkin will explore the changing nature of the city through before-and-after images selected from the blog Changing Vancouver and the Archives’ holdings. Set against the background of selected historic panoramas, they will take you through a hundred or so years of development, displayed on the dome of the H.R. MacMillan Space Centre’s Star Theatre.

West Cordova Street – east from Cambie. From “Changing Vancouver”

Sponsored by the Friends of the Vancouver City Archives, the event is the Friends’ annual fall fundraiser. Founded in 1993, the Friends have played a key role in promoting the Archives and raising funds for various projects. Among their most notable purchases:

• The first web publishing software that allowed the Archives to make its database searchable on the Web
• The dye-sublimation printer that for years produced 8×10 photo reproductions of images in the Archives’ holdings
• A portion of the cost of the Archives’ cold storage facility (for preservation of deteriorating photographic negatives)
• The lease of an early public-use photocopier for the Reading Room
• Indexing of Major Matthew’s’ 7-volume Early Vancouver
• Reproduction of damaged Vancouver City Directories

Most importantly, since 1999, the Friends have received over $98,000 in provincial gaming grants to allow the Archives to describe and digitize images in its holdings. They have contributed over $90,000 of their own funds to the program, as matches on the applications. Tens of thousands of the images you see on the Archives’ website are there due to the generosity and fundraising efforts of the Friends. These include photographs by Williams Bros. Photographers Ltd., Stuart Thomson, James Crookall, John Davidson, and over 18,000 of the images collected by Major Matthews.

Net proceeds of ticket sales and all donations will go toward the Friends’ support of the Archives. We hope to see you at the event, and we sincerely thank you for your support.

Tomorrow is the birthday of Siri, Apple’s ubiquitous personal assistant since iOS 5. Although plenty of amusing siri-isms are posted all over the web, we at the Archives decided to see if Siri could recognize the voice of her forebears. To do this we used a 7″ vinyl record of computer speech published by Bell Labs in 1963. You can hear the amusing results above.

Max V. Mathews was a computer music legend. In 1957 he created at Bell Labs MUSIC, the first music composition program, which had several iterations through the decades. He also experimented with electronic instruments and researched human-machine interactions. He famously wrote the musical accompaniment to John Kelly’s voice-synthesized “Daisy Bell,” performed in 1961 by an IBM 704 computer.

John Larry Kelly, Jr. was also a brilliant Bell Labs scientist, a gregarious Texan gunslinger with manifold interests. He created (with Carol Lochbaum) the speech synthesis system above, but may be best remembered for developing a gambling formula (based on Claude Shannon’s information theory) called the Kelly criterion, which is now part of standard investment theory. Tragically, he died at age 41.

1963 Computer Speech 7″ vinyl

(Bell Labs/NYPR Archives)

“Daisy Bell (Bicycle Built for Two)” was written by English songwriter Harry Dacre in 1892. That year Dacre was visiting the United States and complained to a friend about the duties levied on the bike he had brought. When his friend commented that he was lucky not to have brought with him “a bicycle built for two,” (since then the duties would double), Dacre was inspired to write the song that became his biggest hit.

You may remember “Daisy Bell” as the song that the computer HAL 9000 creepily sings as he is powered down in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). This is because the movie’s screenwriter, Arthur C. Clarke, happened to hear John Kelly’s speech synthesis experiment while visiting a friend at Bell Labs.

Can your personal assistant recognize the audio above? Let us know in the comments section.

Thanks to David Satkowski for the use of his shiny new iPhone 6 and to Andy Lanset for the disc.

The Special Collections & Archives Division is celebrating American Archives Month which is celebrated every October by archivists throughout the United States.

American Archives Month is an opportunity to raise awareness among various audiences of the value of archives and archivists. These audiences may include students, scholars, policy makers, influential people within our communities, prospective donors, and the general public. It’s also a time to focus on the importance of records of enduring value and to enhance public recognition for the people and programs that are responsible for maintaining our communities’ vital historical records.

This month, Illuminations will share behind the scenes posts about what our archivists do here at FSU and how we contribute both to the success of our patrons and the FSU Libraries as a whole. We’re also participating in the Society of Florida Archivists Archive Month festivities, which this year includes an exhibit on the theme Weird Florida, celebrating all that is weird and wonderful about our state.

Let Archives Month commence!

For our first project as graduate assistants, Katherine Hoarn and I have been given the unique opportunity to delve into the history and heritage of Florida State University.  From the years 1905 – 1947, Florida State University was Florida State College for Women, one of the largest women’s colleges in the country.  To explore this fascinating aspect of FSU’s past, Katherine and I are putting together an exhibit centered on the scrapbooks of the students of Florida State College for Women. In preparing for this exhibit, I’ve not only learned about proper handling of archival material, but about the heritage of Florida State University.

The first step in deciding how to approach the exhibit was to research the history of Florida State College for Women.  We consulted numerous resources, but my favorites were the primary sources themselves—the scrapbooks. As historical documents, scrapbooks are special.  Each scrapbook is an individual and unique combination of text, photographs and papers.  They are arranged in such a way that the interests and personalities of Florida State College for Women students come through.  It’s also been interesting to see some similar themes and concerns fill the pages of scrapbooks across the forty plus year span of Florida State College for Women.

It would be difficult to choose a “favorite” scrapbook.  As each is unique and individual, they are all remarkable in different ways.  Marion Emerett Colman’s (HP 2007-130, go here for more information) combination of scrapbook and journal gives the reader a glimpse into the triumphs and concerns of an academically minded college sophomore in 1917.

Some scrapbooks delve into current events.  Alberta Lee Davis’s scrapbook devotes pages to the end of World War I.  (Alberta Lee Davis’ scrapbook is currently unprocessed.  This means that it hasn’t yet been assigned an accession number, the number by which Special Collections & Archives will identify the scrapbook.  For the scrapbooks from Heritage Protocol & University Archives, the accession number looks like HP ####-###.  This also means that a finding aid hasn’t yet been created in Archon, the database for searching through the manuscript collections in Special Collections & Archives).

The scrapbooks of Jewell Genevieve Cooper (HP 2007-089, go here for more information), with its newspaper clippings and personal photographs gives its viewer a special glimpse into the traditions of Florida State College for Women during the 1920s.

Other scrapbooks, such as that of Victoria J. Lewis (HP 2007-079, go here for more information) shows similar concerns to that of contemporary teenagers, showing us the commonalities between teenager girls at the beginning of the twentieth century and at the beginning of the twenty-first century.  The past really isn’t that distant.

Finding the connections between past and present has been wonderful, as has learning more about the history of Florida State University.

“That I May Remember: The Scrapbooks of Florida State College for Women (1905-1947)” is scheduled to open October 15 – December 1 in the exhibit space in Strozier Library.

Rebecca L. Bramlett is a graduate assistant in the Special Collections & Archives Division.  She is working on her Master of Library and Information Science at Florida State University.  

Two days ago, we discovered a small box of lantern slides in the archive, which had previously escaped our notice.

“Geography” Lantern Slide Box

 
The unprepossessing brown cardboard cover with pencil markings revealed six stunningly beautiful images of the Himalayas and Baltoro glacier.

Himalaya Lantern Slides

 
As the reverse of one of the lantern slides shows (top middle), they are images by the Italian photographer and explorer Vittorio Sella of the Baltoro Glacier, taken during his 1909 expedition to the Karakorum accompanied by Prince Luigi Amedeo of Savoy, Duke of the Abruzzi  (for more images of the expedition, see the Library of Fratelli Alinari Museum of the History of Photography, Florence –  http://www.alinariarchives.it/en/). The others (clockwise) are marked Staircase Windy Gap, Mustagh Tower from Baltoro gl., 1st Camp on Baltoro gl., Mt. Paiju & Towers from Rdokass, and K2 & Camp III.

The beauty of the Himalayas was not only appreciated by mountaineers, but also held interest for a wide range of explorers, including archaeologist and poet Stuart Piggott (1910 -1996), who travelled around India and Tibet in 1942-3.

Celebrating National Poetry Day today http://www.forwardartsfoundation.org/national-poetry-day/, we take this opportunity to share Stuart Piggott’s Poem ‘The Explorers’ of 4 May 1946

 
THE EXPLORERS

WE are the geographers bringing back reports
from inward Himalayas –
the difficult pass, the bridge that rains have broken,
the snow-peak sighted, unmapped, unclimbable.
But the theodolite bearings, the aneroid readings,
these we note down –
they may help the expedition leaving to-morrow.
 
The ethnologists recording daily adventures
among unknown tribes,
with anthropophagi met between luncheon and tea-time
in small clans ruled by magic we do not share:
a suburban bus-stop lonelier than jungle clearing –
nothing more strange
than our incomprehensible daily encounters.
 
Ours the plane-table survey of the desert,
the mind’s intersections
cobwebbing the squared paper of experience,
plotting the rare oasis, the wind eroded
fantastic rocky horizon black against sunsets –
promise or menace
the warm dawn after the starred night’s vigil may tell us.

We’re starting a new feature here on Illuminations, a monthly “Scoop” as a quick way to share what our different areas have been up to over the last month and keep you up to date and informed about what our hard working staff are up to!

Special Collections & Archives

For several months, Burt Altman, Archivist, has been engaged in a project to reprocess the Paul A.M. Dirac Papers. The work has involved shifting and reboxing his vast collection of personal and professional correspondence, calculations, articles, photographs, and travel files, as well as his late wife Margit’s papers. These materials were housed in archival boxes, many of which were underfilled, so that the folders couldn’t stand upright, and there were preservation issues with storage of photographs and several photo albums. Also, most photographs were not properly described in the finding aid, which impeded access. These activities will insure better long-term preservation and more efficient access for this extremely significant collection. To continue providing access during this project, a note was placed in the catalog record and in the finding aid informing researchers that preservation and rehousing is being done, and if materials are needed, to contact Burt or the Special Collections Reading Room. Burt is happy to report that as of the last week of September, nearly 65% of this collection has been reprocessed, and the project will be completed sometime in October.

Heritage Protocol & University Archives

Outreach: HPUA attended the Emeritus Coffee Chat and celebrated the 100th birthday of 1936 FSCW alumna and emeritus chemistry professor, Kitty Hoffman. We had a great time hearing stories and sharing memorabilia with alumni!

Preservation and access: We disbound two books that contained West Florida Seminary catalogs from the late 19th century and they will be digitized and added to the Digital Library. The catalogs provide a unique look at our predecessor institution, and will be an invaluable resource for researchers interested in the West Florida Seminary.

Claude Pepper Library

This month, the Claude Pepper Library brought a new collection into its stacks. In 1990, Larry Durrence was named a Visiting Professor at FSU with a full-time assignment with the Florida Tax & Budget Reform Commission (TBRC). In January 1991 he was then promoted by the Commission members from Senior Analyst to Executive Director for his remaining term with the TBRC. This past Friday the 26th, Mr. Durrence donated three boxes of material related to the work of the Commission during his time there. The collection will be processed and made available to researchers by the early spring of 2015.

The Pepper Library also hosted Dr. G. Kurt Piehler’s ‘The American GI in War and Peace in World War II” class on the 18th of September. Coming in as part of a larger tour hosted by History Liaisons Sarah Buck-Kachaluba and Bill Modrow, the history seminar class was introduced to Claude Pepper and his work during the Second World War while a member of the US Senate. The class was also able to hear an excerpt of a Pepper speech given in late June of 1941 which warned of the dangers of the Nazi threat.

Cataloging & Description

Amy Weiss, Head of Cataloging & Description, taught a workshop entitled “RDA without tears” to help put RDA coding into a practical perspective. A lot of RDA training is very theoretical in orientation, but this class was intended as a “how to” class.  Three members of the medical school library joined up for the class, as did one of the serials catalogers. We went over the basics of the RDA record in the MARC format, and we discussed “hybrid records” where some features of RDA are used in an AACR2 record.

The Authorities/Catalog Management Unit and Linda Brown in Serials finished the ASERL Documents Project. To explain, Florida State University Libraries is a member of the Association of Southeastern Research Libraries (ASERL). Last year, the ASERL libraries were asked to select three areas to catalog for the Centers of Excellence – an ASERL program envisioning the creation of comprehensive collections of U.S. government information from each Federal government agency. FSU’s 3 ASERL collections are Economic Development Administration (1965-) Call number is C46… approx. 400 items, Federal Security Agency (1939-1969) Call number is FS2… approx. 3,000 items and the Library of Congress Country Studies Call number is D101.22:550- approx. 316 items.

Digital Library Center

The DLC started several new projects this month. The Florida Handbook from 1947-2012 and Florida State College for Women scrapbooks were in the DLC for digitization. Image quality control continues on the Florida Flambeau images and we’ve started a pilot project for the loading and metadata creation of the issues in the FSU Digital Library. We completed the digitization of the latest batch of papers from the Paul A.M. Dirac collection which now goes into post digitization processing before loading into the FSU Digital Library. We also attended the History program mixer event hosted in the Special Collections Exhibit Room and enjoyed introducing the DLC to the faculty and students in that department.

When Robert “Bob” Kiley took over as Chief Executive Officer of the New York City Metropolitan Transportation Authority his mission was to revive the City’s crime-ridden, dilapidated subway system where ridership had fallen to levels not seen since 1918. By the time he delivered this lecture at the New York Public Library’s Celeste Bartos Forum in February, 1988, Kiley was five years into the job and well on the way to guiding the City’s subways back from the dark days of the late 1970’s when every car in the subway fleet was covered with graffiti and trains routinely broke down.

Kiley, who before coming to New York led the Boston subway system back from a fiscal abyss, acknowledges that urban dwellers will always have an uneasy relationship with their underground trains. “The word ‘underground’ inspires fear,” says Kiley, noting that it summons thoughts of the “realm of Hades.” But the transit executive says there is nothing more important for modern cities than maintaining its public infrastructure, particularly the subway systems, which transmit the life blood of a metropolis — its people.

Kiley points out that it took New York City — the leading industrial center in the Western Hemisphere after the Civil War — a longer time than many of the world’s great cities to develop a subway system.    While technology existed at the time to operate trains under the streets of New York, Kiley says political corruption squelched civic improvements.

For much of the second half of the 19^th Century, William Marcy “Boss” Tweed controlled the political process in New York; he favored the interests of businesses that ran horse-drawn buses and thwarted subway development legislation. Kiley says that New York became “the most inconveniently arranged modern city in the world.” Indeed, in 1873 workers were spending a sixth of their day trying to get to their jobs. Only then did Tweed come out in favor of privately funded elevated train construction for the City — a boondoggle. This form of transit mainly served to further enrich the notorious financier, Jay Gould, the politically appointed Rapid Transit Commissioner and owner of these urban steam-powered railroads. As Kiley describes with disgust, the elevated trains covered the streets and the people with soot and cinders and did little to ease urban congestion.

In 1894, through the efforts of business leaders and the press, a new Rapid Transit Commission was formed, and a method of funding devised: City bonds were issued to private businesses for the construction of an electric powered subway system.

The former MTA CEO recounts how, in October 1904, the first subway line, privately owned by the Interborough Rapid Transit Company or IRT, rolled down the tracks underneath Broadway from City Hall to 145^th Street. Soon it was carrying 25,000 people a day. Kiley extolls this moment which “finally conferred order where there was almost none.” Powered by electricity, with stations decorated in ornate terra cotta and tracks just below the street surface, the new subway was, he explains “the very best that 19^th Century technology could offer.”

However, as New York City rolled through the 20^th Century, the demands on the subway system soon exceeded its capacity. When the IRT grew too crowded in 1907, Kiley wryly notes that the City Club complained: “we do not get a civilized ride for our five cents — the trains are like cattle cars.” Other subway lines were developed, such as the privately owned Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit Company or BMT. But New Yorkers remained dissatisfied.   Kiley says Mayor John Hylan, who presided over the City in the early 1920’s, enhanced his populist creds by campaigning against any attempt to raise the five-cent fare.

Kiley blames the political aversion to raising the nickel fare – it was in place from 1881 to 1948 – for restricting capital improvements on the system and causing fiscal woes for the IRT and BMT. The City had to take over those private lines in 1940, combining them with the Independent City-Owned Rapid Transit Railroad, or IND, which started in 1925 at the end of Hylan’s last term of office.

Kiley adeptly traces the decline and gradual renaissance of the City’s subways from 1948, when subway ridership reached its zenith of 2 billion riders, to 1988 when it had emerged from an almost mortal dysfunction. Statistics play an inevitable and telling role in this account. Necessary fare hikes, starting modestly with five-cent increments until the fare was doubled to a half dollar in 1977, corresponded with the loss of hundreds of millions of riders per year.

When Kiley took over the MTA in the early 80’s, the supervisory force had been depleted by retirements. There were just 300 managers for 50,000 employees. A critical train car repair shop had just one manager for 1100 workers. Train tracks that were supposed to be inspected twice weekly were so neglected that half the trains could be out of service at any one time.

Kiley describes how he moved the MTA from triage to a system of accountability, in part by jettisoning civil service and collective bargaining rules, to hire a new cadre of managers.   At the time he delivered this lecture, New York subway tracks were being regularly inspected under the supervision of 177 managers rather than just seven, graffiti had been removed from 85% of the cars, crime on the trains had declined significantly and ridership was returning to levels that existed before the City’s fiscal crisis of the 1970’s.

Bob Kiley, who later went on to manage London’s underground transit system, believes that well-maintained, publicly-funded infrastructure benefits business and maintains the life and growth of society. This well-regarded transit executive believes that New York’s subway system is its greatest public asset, albeit a fragile one, ever dependent upon a political will to continue providing capital for its sustained development into the 21^st Century.

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This talk originally aired on WNYC as part of the Voices of the New York Public Library series of lectures from the NYPL’s Celeste Bartos Forum on June 27, 1993.