We continue our introductions of the FSU Special Collections & Archives division with the Cataloging and Description department. This post was written by Amy Weiss, Annie Glerum and Ruth Ziegler.

The faculty and staff of the Cataloging and Description department.

The Cataloging and Description Department supports the academic programs of Florida State University by organizing and describing print books, e-books, video recordings, streaming video, microforms, maps, and other monographic materials purchased or received by the library. Four librarians, two library specialists and four library support staff catalog 36,000 titles per year following national standards of bibliographic control and in keeping with established cataloging practices and priorities. The department works with Acquisitions to load e-resource packages, which add thousands of records to the library catalog each year. Original records are contributed to OCLC, an international bibliographic database. FSU contributes nearly 1,000 original records per year. The department participates in international cooperative cataloging programs including NACO (Name Authority Cooperative) and SACO (Subject Authority Cooperative) through the Library of Congress. We contribute 500 to 600 records every year to the national authority file. Two units – Complex Cataloging and Authorities/Catalog Management collaborate to create workflows and apply the latest technologies in its routine work and projects.

A sample of new technical work for Cataloging and Description are the ETDs (Electronic Theses and Dissertations). Instead of receiving MARC (Machine-readable Cataloging) records for the ETDs, we receive non-MARC metadata and convert it into MARC so it can be loaded into the online catalog for users to find. Data conversion is also key to another recent job, the London project, where we are processing a file of records that were converted from the Access database the FSU London branch library uses for their local catalog to MARC records for FSU’s main campus catalog. After the records have been processed, they will be loaded in the FSU catalog so that professors and students visiting London will know whether or not they need to bring a given book with them. Librarians Annie Glerum and Yue Li and Library Specialist Dominique Bortmas have been working on these projects.

Remodeling the Dirac Science Library has been a major concern for the University Libraries. When the Libraries received funding for compact shelving, weeding the collection quickly became a priority. Librarian Ruth Ziegler and Library Specialist Nakia Davis collaborated with the University of Florida and worked out a withdrawal plan to remove 62,000 unwanted volumes from the catalog using global change. Reports were given to Collections Access so that they could remove books from the shelves for resale or to discard. Using this method, books did not have to be moved to the Catalog Management unit and there was considerable savings of time and effort.

Rare Books and Special Collections materials are cataloged in Cataloging and Description. When the University Libraries acquired a complete run of books published by the Grove Press Department Head Amy Weiss assembled a team of catalogers (Melissa Burel, Tim Kanke, Valeria Kosmynin and Annie Glerum) and instructed them in Special Collections cataloging. The team was able to get the books cataloged in time for a special event planned around the collection this past spring.

Ordinary cataloging is not what it once was. Cataloging of most English language materials is done in conjunction with vendors who supply both the books and the bibliographic records, as well as physically processing the book with property stamps, security strips, and barcodes. After two years of working with the Coutts/Ingram, we have changed vendors to Yankee Book Peddler (YBP). YBP will supply electronic and print books with accompanying MARC records. We will continue to do quality control checking to make sure all books have full records.

Cataloging and Description called 711 W. Madison Street home

Cataloging and Description loads catalog records for large e-resource packages, e-books and streaming media. This can be a complicated process. FSU is part of the shared State University System (SUS) Libraries catalog. Loading electronic records requires coordination between the schools. Librarian Ruth Ziegler works with FSU’s Apryl Price, E-Resources Librarian and with FALSC (formerly FLVC). Collaboration with the other schools who have purchased the same materials is sometimes necessary when errors occur in batch loading.

There are still some traditional cataloging functions performed in Cataloging and Description. We receive books which are not yet cataloged and which require original or close to original cataloging. Most of these books are in foreign languages, but not all. Many of the books are held by very few United States libraries, with FSU being one of a very few copies held. In cases like these, FSU performs a public service by providing high quality cataloging for these materials so that they can be located by scholars throughout the country.

A traditional cataloging task which is taking on new significance is authority control. Authority control provides the underlying structure of the catalog. It’s something that most users and librarians don’t think about. It’s a very important component in cataloging and the post cataloging process. Authorities are established forms of personal, corporate, conference, geographic names, subjects, uniform titles and series records that link to records in the bibliographic file. This involves using the Library of Congress authority file from which we follow established access points. New access points are set up when there is a conflict in the Library of Congress Name Authority File (NAF). In this way, works by a single author or on a given subject can be found together in the catalog. In current thought about the future of cataloging, authorities will become linked data, which will associate each name or concept with a number or code so that items can be linked out to the web and not just collocated in a catalog. From the traditions of library cataloging, come the innovations of tomorrow.

The original is secured under glass at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. But according to Laurence H. Tribe, America’s leading liberal interpreter of the United States Constitution, “it’s not embalmed in a time capsule of amber as though it was not meant to change over time.” In this 1988 lecture at the New York Public Library’s Celeste Bartos Forum, the Harvard Law School Professor of Constitutional Law, marks the 200th anniversary of the Constitution, originally drafted on parchment and signed September 17, 1787 by 39 of 42 delegates to the Constitutional Convention.

Tribe, whose many books include his widely taught treatise, American Constitutional Law, passionately argues that the now centuries old document is a living blueprint, whose drafters left to future generations the tasks of filling out the notions of liberty and equality under the law. Seeking scholarly support for his argument, Tribe goes back to the historical moments when the Constitution was literally prepared, first as the hand-drafted parchment, and then the day after, on September 18, 1787, when 500 copies were printed en masse and delivered to Congress in New York City, the early capitol of the United States.

The law professor posits that the written words in this monumental document, while critical to the formation of our democracy, are not the sole source of the Constitution’s power. For evidence, Tribe notes that the early printed copy used when the Constitution was ratified by the original States contains errors of punctuation and capitalization. It was this printed copy that was relied on by Congress and the Judiciary until 1878, after the original parchment was removed from storage for the Philadelphia Exposition. Tribe suggests that an errant semi-colon in Section 8 of Article 1 of the original Constitution could have been discovered in that document creating an argument that the Framers meant Congress to have unbridled power to pass laws. Yet, such a discovery, says Tribe, would not have affected the long history of Constitutional interpretation limiting Congressional authority.

Tribe believes evolving understandings of the human needs of a changing American society injected meaning into the Constitution at its very outset beyond the limits of written words or grammar. Indeed, the Articles of Confederation, which convened the first and only Convention, required a unanimous vote of all the States to adopt a Constitution. Yet a desire for a governmental structure for the young nation drove the delegates at the 1787 Constitutional Convention to adopt the Constitution with just the votes of nine of the thirteen states.

While acknowledging that there has been only one official Constitutional Convention in this nation’s history, the Constitutional expert argues that there have been several defacto Conventions. He sees a Second Constitutional Convention in the ratification after the Civil War of the 13th , 14th and 15th Amendments, which granted freedom to slaves and conferred due process of law to all and voting rights for men regardless of race.

He contends that the Supreme Court’s 5 to 4 ruling in 1937 upholding a minimum wage law amounted to a 3rd Constitutional Convention because it effectively overturned past High Court interpretations of the 14th Amendment precluding laws limiting the property interests of businesses. The ruling opened a door extending Constitutional protections to the long line of laws existing today that establish labor and environmental rights.

The Harvard professor sees the Supreme Court’s recognition under Chief Justices Earl Warren and later Warren Burger of criminal due process rights, privacy rights, and the rights of women as the functional equivalents of Constitutional Conventions, in keeping with his theory of an evolving Constitution not bound by the idea of an “original intent” of its drafters. “We the People once just meant white, property owning men,” says Tribe. But that is no longer the case. As this renowned Harvard legal scholar proposes, the Constitution continuously grows along with the American social understanding of what constitutes liberty and equality, concepts that cannot remain stagnant.

Tribe, the author of God Save This Honorable Court, has argued more than any other living lawyer in front of the Supreme Court. He acknowledges the paramount importance of the Court in the development of a vibrant Constitutional Law, transformed over the years through decades of interpretation. This point of view compelled Tribe, who has testified many times before Congress, to lead the 1987 fight to reject Federal Circuit Court Judge Robert Bork, then President Ronald Reagan’s nomination to the Supreme Court. The reason for Tribe’s opposition: Bork steadfastly refused to acknowledge the existence of legally protected liberty interests, such as privacy rights, because such rights were not literally spelled out in the Constitution.

Finally, Professor Tribe applauds the public’s involvement in the Supreme Court nomination process, as well as vigorous advise and consent by the Senate on the President’s nominee. The law professor rejects the notion that this politicizes the selection of High Court Justices. Tribe sees it more as a collaborative process necessary to assure that the Constitution continues to be interpreted as a living document.

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Laurence Tribe’s talk was broadcast as part of the Voices At the New York Public Library series airing originally on February 14, 1993.

Lauren Love is an intern working in Special Collections

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This summer we started a multi-year project to reprocess one of our most visually rich, fascinating, least known and hardest to use collections (hoping, of course, to change these latter points).

Students exploring the newly opened Frost Library in September of 1965

The College Photographer’s Negatives Collection is a large collection of negatives and prints created by the official college photographers from 1960 to 2005. The college photographers documented all aspects of the college and college life: events, staff, buildings, sports, theater, daily student life, and everything in between. The current project is to rehouse the negatives (which are already listed in the finding aid) and organize and integrate the many boxes of prints. Our hardworking student assistant, Tessa McEvoy ’16, has already rehoused the 21,000+ negatives from the 1960s and is moving full steam ahead into the 1970s.

The old and the new.
The negatives will be much easier to use in their new mylar sleeves.

Once this is complete our dream is to digitize all the negatives (by rough estimate there are 240,000 images) and make them available on the Amherst College Digital Collections site. We also hope to add the digital photographs of campus that have been taken since 2005 (many of which are available on the College’s flickr site) to the collection so we can ensure proper long-term storage and access to this more recent college history.

We will certainly be back on the blog to give updates on this epic project but for now, please enjoy this small selection of images from Amherst College in the 1960s (click through for larger images):

I am pleased to announce that the Office of Management and Budget and the National Archives released a memo yesterday afternoon to the heads of executive departments and independent agencies on managing email. Over the past few weeks, this issue has been brought into focus through testimony that I delivered to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. In addition, we have received questions from agencies as they are reviewing our Capstone Bulletin to determine if this approach is feasible for them. This is also important in light of the requirement in the Managing Government Records Directive (OMB M-12-18) for all email to be managed electronically by December 31, 2016.

The memo reinforces the importance for each agency to manage their email properly and includes a new NARA Bulletin to assist agencies. NARA Bulletin 2014-06 reminds agency heads of existing NARA guidance and resources to assist in managing email.  The memo also reminds agencies of the upcoming deadline in the Directive to develop suitable training for all agency personnel.

Our Office of the Chief Records Officer is leading our efforts to work with agencies to meet all the goals in the Directive. For more information about this work, and other initiatives they are undertaking, please visit their Records Express blog.… [ Read all ]

The Claude Pepper Library was established in 1985 as the official repository for the Claude Pepper Papers, a unique and multi-faceted collection of manuscripts, photographs, audio/video recordings, and memorabilia documenting the life and career of U.S. Senator and Congressman Claude Pepper (1900-1989).

A campaign card from Claude’s 1938 senate bid.

Since that time, the holdings at the Claude Pepper Library, located on West Call Street on the FSU Campus, have grown in size and scope. The Pepper is currently home to 17 collections with varying focuses including the papers of lobbyists, governors, political action groups and those dealing with landmark legal cases.

Our staff consists of Claude Pepper librarian Robert Rubero, archives assistant Mallary Rawls and part time assistant Maria Meade. The mission of the Claude Pepper Library is to support and advance research, teaching and engagement by acquiring, preserving and providing access to collections dealing with the political history of the State of Florida on national and local levels for use by students, faculty and researchers worldwide.

Tallahassee National Organization for Women parade banner ca. 1970’s.

At the Pepper Library we also enjoy posting to our Facebook page and enjoy updating our followers through our “Today in Pepper History” posts. More importantly, we offer patrons a firsthand experience with primary source materials from a variety of creators, all giving a glimpse into the political landscape in the State of Florida with a range of over 75 years. The Pepper Library has regularly hosted archives training sessions, class tours and guest lecturers and plans to continue these events in the future. There is also a museum component located in the Pepper Center which chronicles the life of Senator Pepper and is based on his book, Eyewitness to a Century.

Recent projects include the online ingestion of over 6,000 photos from the Pepper Papers, all of which can currently be seen in the FSU Digital Library.

Stay tuned for future blog posts as we bring you more great examples from our collections here at the Pepper Library!

Former Florida governor Spessard Holland during World War I ca. 1918.

Heritage Protocol & University Archives (HPUA), housed in Special Collections & Archives at Florida State University Libraries, maintains the official repository of university historical records. The archive holds publications, records, photographs, audio-visual, and other material in physical or digital form created by or about Florida State University. We also archive the student experience through the acquisition and preservation of materials created or acquired by alumni while they were students at the university.

Greetings from Florida State College for Women, see full description here.

Our staff consists of Heritage Protocol & University Archivist Sandra Varry, Archives Assistant Hannah Davis, and part-time assistant Colin Behrens. We are also fortunate to have Graduate Assistants Rebecca Bramlett and Katherine Hoarn with us for the fall.

Our mission is to preserve and share the history of FSU with everyone – our FSU community and the public at large. We have a great time posting photos and interesting tidbits on our Facebook page and interacting with our fans as well as attending events on and off campus to promote HPUA. We provide images and information to news and media outlets as well as to researchers. On campus an important job we have is to provide not only historical records preservation for official records, but to provide that material to the university for everything from reports or events, or to help staff do research for projects. Factual data for administrative purposes is important, but we also get to do things like help celebrate the 100th birthday of an alumnus (two so far this year!).

Poster from a performance by Death Cab for Cutie at FSU’s Club Downunder. See full description here.

We receive photographs, scrapbooks, and everything you can imagine from loyal fans, alumni, and their families from all over the world. The actual items come from all periods of time across our 163 year history. The combined knowledge base of student and university created records plus our professional archival staff makes us the place to come for Florida State History!

Recent projects include the digitization of over 300 posters from Club Downunder. All HPUA digital collections can be seen in the FSU Digital Library.

Our fall exhibit exploring the life and times of Florida State College for Women students through their scrapbooks is in the works and will open up mid-October in Strozier Library, and we look forward to seeing you there!

1927 Faculty Baseball Team. See full description here.

In 1968, pioneering artist, musician, and inventor Thomas Wilfred sat down with Patricia Marx at the WNYC studios to discuss his life and work. Wilfred died about a month before this program aired on WNYC.

Thomas Wilfred was the inventor of the Clavilux, a device that operated much like a pipe organ, but instead of emitting sounds, the operator could slide keys to cast color projections on a screen. Debuting in the 1920s, Wilfred’s machine and accompanying color ‘conversations’ have had a lasting influence on artists working today. Remember Terrance Malick’s Tree of Life? Wilfred’s Opus 161 was used during key moments in the film.

I also had to make a living.  I found out I had a good baritone voice and I liked old songs.  So I found a lute…and I began to practice and sing unusual old songs to the lute and that took and I made money on it.  So I would go out through winter and sing until I had funds enough, then spend the summer experimenting until I went broke then go back and sing some more.

Thomas Wilfred Lute Performance, 1914.

After years of performing, Wilfred gave up music up to fully commit to building his light machines.  In 1919, he constructed a laboratory in Huntington, NY and for the next six years he developed an instrument from which one could ‘play’ light, controlling its form and motion using a keyboard-like console. His first public performance was in New York and Wilfred compared it to a Bach fugue: the forms were rigid in composition, rather uniform in movement, and he played from a strict set notations that resembled a classical score. Later on, Wilfred would loosen up his performances by allowing a more improvisational style.

These light performances were rooted in Wilfred’s well-considered artistic conceits.  He had studied traditional art earlier in life but was ultimately unconvinced that practices like painting and sculpture had the ability to capture the essence, beauty, and nature of light.   Wilfred came to the conclusion that it was impossible to depict or represent light though any medium that doesn’t employ light itself.  “Because light moves”, Wilfred said, “it becomes necessary to create art where movement is at its core and a necessarily dimension or factor where light is the subject for consideration.”

Images from the Cleveland Public Auditorium performance on April 22, 1923, and the Cornish Theatre performance on March 5-6, 1924. (Yale University Manuscripts and Archives)

While large public performances of the Clavilux became a regular occurrence throughout the 1930s, Wilfred also became interested in building machines that were specifically for home use.

First home clavilux model built in 1930. (Yale University Manuscripts and Archives)

Built in 1928, the luminar was an automatic clavilux to be projected on a white ceiling in the home. (Yale University Manuscripts and Archives)

Wilfred talks extensively in this interview about the how his inspiration comes from nature, and how his performances and compositions are meant to tap into universal consciousness.  One can imagine how both his light shows and his rhetoric would appeal to later psychedelic art movements (in fact, the Whitney Museum featured Wilfred’s Opus 162 in its 2007 exhibition The Summer of Love). And although Thomas Wilfred’s legacy and his pioneering inventions has been somewhat preserved, he still remains a relatively unknown figure in the art world. There are only 35 extant Clavilux compositions known to exist today, and, since Wilfred had been reluctant to have his work recorded to film during his lifetime, many original pieces no longer exist. For more information about Thomas Wilfred’s life and work see. http://wilfred-lumia.org/

In a previous post I wrote about Otis Cary (AC 1943), “Amherst’s Man in Japan,” who worked with Japanese POWs after World War II and went on to represent Amherst College at its sister institution, Doshisha University, for several decades. I’ve recently had an opportunity to revisit the incredibly rich and vast unprocessed collection of Cary Family Papers to discovered another story from the war, this time featuring Cary’s father, Frank Cary (AC 1911).

Frank Cary as an Amherst senior, 1911. An all-season athlete, his nickname was “Jumbo.”

Santo Tomas Internment Camp, 1945. Shanties were built in the courtyard to relieve overcrowding. National Archives, Records of the Office of the Chief Signal Officer [111-SC-202141]

Like his father before him, Frank Cary was an ordained Congregational minister (Oberlin, 1916) who served as a missionary in Japan. From 1916 until 1941, he was involved in school and church work in Japan until the threat of war made it necessary for Americans to leave the country. Cary went to Davao, in the Philippines. When the Pacific war broke out in December 1941, the Japanese took control of the Philippines. Cary  became a prisoner, interned first at Davao; then in December 1943 he was moved to the Santo Tomas Internment Camp in Manila. (This was on the campus of the present-day University of Santo Tomas.)

The Cary Family Papers include dozens of Frank Cary’s handwritten and typewritten copies of letters to family back home in the U.S. – some of which may never have been delivered during wartime. Many of these letters were posthumously published by the Cary family in 1993 as Letters from Internment Camp, Davao and Manila, 1942-1945. Although Cary writes with an awareness of the Japanese censors, his letters provide a wealth of detail about life in the camp and his fellow internees. Several hundred prisoners occupied one-and-a-half floors of a large administration building on the campus, under careful but for the most part humane supervision of the Japanese. Crowded conditions prevailed, and makeshift shanties were erected in the building’s courtyard to relieve the problem. One of the most critical problems, especially toward the end of the war, was a lack of nutritious food. Cary describes several stays in the camp hospital. Like many internees, he suffered skin ulcers on his legs and symptoms similar to those of beriberi, caused by a lack of vitamin B1 in the diet.

Frank Cary’s notebook included these pages of detailed descriptions of his fellow internees.

An oath issued to the internees by the Japanese, with Frank Cary’s handwritten note indicating that he refused to sign it.

Letter from Santo Tomas dated January 28, 1944.

Since he spoke fluent Japanese, Frank Cary was among the small handful of internees who could communicate with the camp Commandant and his military staff.  When the day came (February 3, 1945) when American troops arrived at the camp gate to demand surrender, Cary served as an interpreter and presented the terms of surrender to the Japanese officers of the camp. Since the Japanese are culturally resistant to the humiliation of surrender, the Commandant stated that he would open the camp only on the condition that he and his men be allowed safe conduct off the campus. It was a tense hostage situation, but the Americans allowed it. (However, Cary mentions in his letter below that they later heard a rumor that the Japanese who were led out of the camp this way were later “wiped out to the last man.”)

Cary’s fascinating account of how the camp was finally liberated in February 1945.

At the end of the long ordeal in Santo Tomas Internment Camp, many prisoners had died of starvation or disease. On the day of liberation, Frank Cary’s weight was just 135 pounds — this for a large-framed man who had played football, baseball and track at Amherst and whose college classmates had dubbed him “Jumbo.” By May 1945, he returned home to his mother in Bradford, Mass.  Eventually, however, he returned to Japan to continue his missionary work, which he did until 1960, then completing his career serving as a pastor at Plainfield (Mass.) Congregational Church.