The Special Collections & Archives division of Florida State University Libraries includes Special Collections & Archives, Heritage Protocol & University Archives, the Claude Pepper Library, Cataloging & Description and the Digital Library Center. The division advances research by acquiring, preserving and providing access to primary and secondary source materials through our different areas.

Our division is large; over 20 people under five different umbrellas, each with their own focus. Over the next month, we’ll be introducing our different hats to you as we re-launch this blog as a way to share our daily work, our special projects and our events and exhibits with the FSU community and beyond.

We’ll start at the top: Special Collections & Archives.

This is the name for the entire division but it is also the name for the area in the division that holds the rare books, historic maps, photographs and unique manuscripts collected by FSU Libraries since its beginning. We’re located in the Special Collections Reading Room in Strozier Library.

Headed by Associate Dean Katie McCormick, Special Collections & Archives is home base for Burt Altman, Archivist, William Modrow, Rare Books Librarian, Lisa Girard, Collections Manager and Krystal Thomas, Digital Archivist. Many student assistants as well as the faculty and staff in other areas of our division assist us in our daily work and projects.

Students work with Special Collections materials during a class taught by Bill Modrow.

In classes, programs and exhibitions, we support active learning and engagement through use of our collections. We conduct class-specific sessions and work with professors to make sure we’re enhancing the curriculum and help students with primary source material-based projects. One example of this is our collaboration each year with the Museum Objects class on campus who take over our exhibit room to get hands on experience with planning, installing and promoting physical and digital exhibits.

The faculty and staff of Special Collections work hard to create and maintain discovery tools for our materials and are constantly re-evaluating and editing our finding aids, library catalog records and digital collection records to make sure our materials are easily findable.

We’re also always on hand when materials are being used in the Reading Room to answer any questions and de-mystify even the most challenging of our collections. We know using our collections is unique for many of our patrons so whether it’s a one on one research consultation with our materials or a short tutorial on navigating our online finding aids, we make sure you can find what you need.

One of our staff talks through what needs to be digitized for a patron.

We are lucky to have varied collections for patrons to use. We hold one of the largest collections of French Revolution and Napoleonic research materials in the world in order to support the Institute on Napoleon & The French Revolution at FSU. We also have an extensive collection of children’s poetry and literature in the John Mackay Shaw Collection and a large Florida history collection in both books and manuscript materials. Our rare book collection stretches from the earliest cuneiform tablets to the artist books being produced today.

We’re also well aware that we live in the 21^st century and we have many avenues open to us to share our materials with those patrons who can’t make it to Tallahassee. The FSU Digital Library (FSUDL) holds many items from Special Collections & Archives and will continue to add more as we work to make our collections more and more accessible, as well as searchable, for our users. In this work, we often digitize materials for patrons who need images for publications or special projects that we can then bring in to the FSUDL.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll introduce the other parts that make up the Special Collections & Archives division at FSU!

In the archives world, sometimes the least expected finds are somehow the most rewarding. The satisfaction of unearthing a rare gem derives not from the serendipity (or luck) of it all, but rather from the feeling of having been working in your field long enough to have earned the reward –much like gold prospecting.

So it was in 2012, while transferring audio for Q2 Music’s collaboration with Carnegie Hall, American Mavericks. One of the requested items, stored in an offsite vault in New Jersey, was a set of three open reel tapes in boxes which were scarcely labeled as “Varèse 4/17/81.” After a quick turn in the oven (the tapes are of an era and type which require this special treatment), we put the tapes on the reel-to-reel machines. But wait: this crowd noise…this reaction… this sound… surely this was not a concert of classical music –much less of music by the notorious enfant terrible of the avant-garde, Edgard Varèse? Had a rock concert recording somehow been placed in the wrong tape box?

Further research was necessary. Was this… could this be… the legendary 1981 tribute to Varèse at New York City’s Palladium? The concert famously hosted by Frank Zappa (a longtime Varèse fanatic) and performed by Joel Thome’s Orchestra of Our Time, bootlegs of which had been circulating for decades?

Indeed it was: a complete, pristine recording of a remarkable show that has not been forgotten by those who participated or attended –a “curious but appropriate meeting of music and milieu,” as the New York Times put it (mildly). When else has there been a concert of decidedly uncompromising music been performed in a 3000-seat rock venue for an enthusiastic, young audience?

• Revering Varèse

It is unclear how or why these tapes were recorded, but we are thrilled to present this concert in full. If you were at that concert, tell us about it in the comments section.

PLEASE NOTE: There are several obscenities uttered in this recording.

The program:

Ionisation, for percussion ensemble
Density 21.5, for solo flute
Intégrales, for Small Orchestra
Offrandes, for soprano and chamber orchestra
Déserts, for 15 Instruments. Percussion and Magnetic Tape of Electronically Organized Sounds

BONUS: Listen to John Schaefer and Joel Thome speak about Zappa and the concert in 1993.

Claude Pepper speaking before a Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies rally ca. 1940

Born on September 8, 1900 in Camp Hill Alabama, Claude Denson Pepper was a devoted public servant who served the state of Florida for over 40 years as a member of the Florida House of Representatives (1926-27), the US Senate (1936-1950) and the US House of Representatives (1963-1989). During his time in the Senate, he was a proponent of President Roosevelt’s New Deal Legislation and was instrumental in the passing of the Wage and Hour Bill as well as the Lend Lease Act.

In the House of Representatives, he served as an impassioned advocate for elder rights, health care and for strengthening and protecting Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and other government sponsored programs on behalf of millions of Americans. He died in Washington D.C. on May 30, 1989 and was the 26th individual to have lain in state in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda.

Senator Pepper’s collection resides within the Claude Pepper Library at Florida State University and reflects the many of the challenges and changes that took place in American life throughout his distinguished career. You may see a complete finding aid of the collection here. Topical strengths within the Pepper Collection include aging, Civil Rights, crime and drug prevention, National Health Care, New Deal Legislation, Lend-Lease, McCarthyism, U.S. foreign and domestic policy, welfare and worker’s rights.

The Pepper Library is currently working on re-housing several portions of the Pepper Papers as well as digitizing and making available the Pepper Photograph Collection, portions of which are currently available in the Florida State University Digital Library.

Stay tuned for more posts on the life and papers of Senator Claude Pepper on this blog as we continue to bring more of this great collection to your fingertips. Happy Birthday Senator Pepper!

The defending national champions Florida State University Seminoles host a sold out football home opener this weekend against the Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina.

In the 1950s and 1960s, FSU played the Bulldogs of the Citadel fairly often when both schools were part of the Southern Conference. The homecoming game of 1955 featured the Citadel and a rather useful program which laid out definitions of penalties and a referee hand signal guide.

Hand Signal Guide from the 1955 Homecoming Program [see full description]

The 1962 game versus Citadel, following the Citadel’s 1961 championship year, was also FSU’s home opener that year and was widely discussed before it was played. Here, FSU HB Terry Hollman is brought down by two Citadel defensemen during the game.

Florida State HB Terry Hollman is brought down by a partially obscured player for The Citadel, as Cadet center Mike Reardon (55) rushes to assist. [See full description]

In the wake of that game, The Grandstand Coach, a weekly publication of the FSU Boosters, recapped the game in comical fashion.

Comic from the Grandstand Coach – The Citadel Edition [see full item]

Here’s wishing the team a great weekend! Go Noles!

The Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation (GVSHP) works to preserve the architectural heritage and cultural history of Greenwich Village, the East Village, and NoHo. In the mid-1990s GVSHP started an active series of oral history interviews —and, not surprisingly, in 2000 it sat down with Edwin Fancher, co-founder of the Village Voice, to document his role in the founding of the iconic publication. As GVSHP’s Senior Director of Operations I was excited to recently learn of a much earlier interview, when Fancher spoke to four student journalists about the state of the Village for the WNYC show Campus Press Conference on October 4, 1959. At that point the Voice was not even four years young, and the neighborhood was going through some sea changes.

The Campus Press Conference conversation includes diverse issues affecting Greenwich Village at the time, such as racketeering, the relationship between local Italian immigrants and bohemian newcomers, the community’s reaction to interracial and homosexual couples, expansion of New York University, gentrification, and Greenwich Village as an intellectual center. Fifty-five years later, some of the concerns in the neighborhood remain strikingly similar, while some have evolved, and yet others are a distant memory. Although the interview is dated in terms of its language and cultural understanding, particularly as it relates to race and sexuality, it also offers great insight into the time.

Two topics in the conversation stand out. The first is change in Greenwich Village: when one of the reporters asks Fancher if the area has been experiencing change and whether it is for the better or worse, Fancher wisely explains that Greenwich Village has historically been a neighborhood of great change. But even in 1955 this was nothing new.  When Fancher notes, for example, an increase in the development of luxury housing and the dwindling of the Italian community, I am reminded of a New York Times article from 1902 noting how 

Greenwich Village, that quaint old district of New York. . .  though its history is rich, has within recent years fallen low in the social scale. Italians are now in great part colonizing it —Italians of the laborer order. Even the architectural charm of this district, extending for some blocks below Fourteenth Street, and between Sixth Avenue and the North River, is rapidly going, tenements now replacing the curious old dwelling houses for a half century its feature.

When GVSHP talks to current residents concerned about new development or the loss of businesses, we often explain that Villagers have always worried about change. Indeed, although Greenwich Village is a neighborhood that continually experiences change, many of us today worry about the loss of tenement housing and its impact on the character of the neighborhood.

The second topic that stands out is the role of the Village as a cultural center. One reporter asks Fancher about the Village’s reputation as an intellectual center, and Fancher prophetically responds that in his opinion, the cultural scene of the Village of the 1940s and 50s will come to be known as “a golden era,” even comparing the bohemian character of the 1940s and 50s with that of the 1910s and 20s. It is natural for Fancher to more easily identify with Allen Ginsberg than say, Edna St. Vincent Millay: for example, Fancher’s oral history with GVSHP from 2000 notes how he and his Village Voice partner Dan Wolf “were part of what could probably be called a kind of a bohemian culture, focused around the San Remo and Louie’s Bar. We were friends with Jimmy [James] Baldwin and Kerouac and Ginsberg—a whole lot of literary people.” But in many ways, Fancher was right. Young people today often refer to the “iconic Greenwich Village” as that of the mid-century, forgetting those who paved the way two generations earlier.

While other issues mentioned in the interview (such as racketeering) are a distant memory for the Village, its citizens still worry very much about change and the state of the neighborhood as a place for artists. As a historic preservationist, I worry about insensitive changes to the neighborhood’s historic architecture. As a historian, I think deeply about how different groups have influenced the culture of the neighborhood. But like Fancher, I can see the very positive points in the neighborhood’s current incarnation: enjoying an afternoon spent in the Jefferson Market Garden or an evening at the Cherry Lane Theatre; listening to music at Smalls or having a coffee at Café Reggio; leafing through books at the Strand or shopping for toiletries at C.O. Bigelow. Perhaps someday, this time might be described as a “Golden Age” of the Village as well.

The Paul Yee fonds is now available for research. The fonds consists of approximately eight metres of textual records, 4000 photographs and 50 posters that Yee created or accumulated in the course of his work as an activist, historian, curator, archivist, public servant, and writer of fiction for children and adults. The fonds also includes records of Yee’s personal life and family history.

Crew taping on Pender Street for the Saltwater City video. Photographer: Paul Yee. Reference code AM1523-S5-1-F019-: 2008-010.1423.

Paul Yee was born in Spalding, Saskatchewan, in 1956. His father, Gordon Yee, emigrated from China to Canada in 1922. In 1951, four years after the Government of Canada repealed the Chinese Exclusion Act, Yee’s mother, Gum May Yee, immigrated to Canada to join Gordon Yee in Naicam, Saskatchewan, where he ran a café.

Both of Yee’s parents died within a few years of his birth. His mother’s brother Foon Wong and Foon’s wife Lillian adopted Yee and his elder brother Vernon. We hold photographs of the boys at the Wongs’ house at 350 East Pender Street, and elsewhere in Vancouver.

Yee attended Strathcona Elementary School and Britannia Secondary School, as well as the Mon Keang School , where he studied Cantonese. Report cards, photographs, and other records relating to Yee’s education at these institutions are in the fonds.

Mon Keang School at 123 East Pender, ca. 1960. Photographer William E. Graham. Reference code AM1135-: cva 1135-2.

Yee’s work as a cultural and social activist began when one of his high school teachers encouraged him to join the organizing committee for a conference on identity and awareness for Chinese Canadian youth. Yee worked on two more such conferences while an undergraduate at UBC. His fonds includes programs, workshop handouts, promotional materials, reports, and Yee’s notes from these conferences.

In 1976, inspired by a suggestion made at one of these conferences, Yee and several other young Chinese Canadians established the Pender Guy Radio Collective, which produced a weekly program on Vancouver Co-operative Radio until 1981. As the Pender Guy radio scripts, photographs, oral history transcripts, and promotional material in Yee’s fonds demonstrate, the collective advocated for recognition of the unique experiences and histories of Chinese Canadians.

Signs outside an office at Strathcona Community Centre in which an on-air broadcast of Pender Guy was taking place, ca. 1978. Photographer: Paul Yee. Reference code AM1523-S6-F12 -: 2008-010.0999.

Pender Guy volunteers interviewing people on Pender Street. Photographer: Paul Yee. Reference code AM1523-S6-F68-: 2008-010.0428.

Vancouver-based activist band Kokuho Rose Prohibited performing during a marathon weekend at Vancouver Co-op Radio, May 1978. Photographer: Paul Yee. Reference code AM1523-S6-F14-: 2008-010.1087.

Yee volunteered with several other Vancouver-based cultural organizations, including the Chinese Cultural Centre of Vancouver, and participated in Katari Taiko and the Asian Canadian Writers Workshop. As a member of the latter group, Yee co-edited and published essays, poetry, and short stories in the Inalienable Rice anthology (1979) and the Vancouver edition of Asianadian magazine (1980).

A band performing in a variety show at Strathcona Community Centre as part of the 1977 Mid-Summer Festival organized by the Chinese Cultural Centre of Vancouver. Photographer: Paul Yee. Reference code AM1523-S6-F11-: 2008-010.0256.

Yee completed a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1978 and a Master of Arts degree in history in 1983, both from UBC. He worked for the City of Vancouver Archives beginning in 1979, first as a summer student and later as a full-time archivist, writing poetry and prose in his spare time.

In 1981, publisher James Lorimer & Company asked Yee to write a book of stories about children living in Vancouver Chinatown. These stories were published as the book Teach Me to Fly, Skyfighter and Other Stories. Drafts of Skyfighter and many of Yee’s subsequent publications are in his fonds;the most recent set of manuscripts in the fonds is for Shu-Li and Tamara, a picture book published in 2008. A future donation from Yee may include drafts of some of his more recent publications.

The first page of an early handwritten draft of Chapter 1 of The Curses of Third Uncle. This draft was likely written in 1984.

From 1985 to 1987, Yee served as chair of the committee that mounted a major exhibit at the Chinese Cultural Centre in celebration of Vancouver’s centennial. Titled Saltwater City, the exhibit was the first to assemble and display artifacts, photographs, oral histories, and written records of immigrant and native-born Chinese Canadians living in Vancouver in the 19^th and 20^th centuries. Photographs, correspondence, a guest book, reports, and other records in Yee’s fonds document the exhibit committee’s work and the enthusiastic response the exhibit received from the public.

The Saltwater City exhibit viewed from the second floor of the Chinese Cultural Centre in 1986. Photographer: Paul Yee. Reference code AM1523-S6-F28-: 2008-010.1567.

Yee’s book based on the exhibit was published in 1989, winning the Vancouver Book Award. His updated version of the book was published in 2006. Drafts and research materials for both editions of Saltwater City: An Illustrated History of the Chinese in Vancouver and related correspondence are in the Yee fonds.

Wing Hing Dry Goods owner Lin Bei-lian standing at the front entrance to his shop prior to the business’s final closure. In the 1970s and 1980s, Yee photographed many Chinatown buildings and businesses to document changes in the neighbourhood’s landscape. Photographer: Paul Yee. Reference code AM1523-S6-F72-: 2008-010.0489.

Yee moved to Toronto in 1988 to work as the multicultural coordinator for the Archives of Ontario. In 1992, he joined Ontario’s Ministry of Citizenship as a policy analyst, and in 1997 he left public service to write full-time.

While Yee’s records of his own life and work comprise the bulk of his fonds, he has also donated more than 1000 photographs left to him by his Aunt Lillian and Uncle Foon Wong. The Wongs’ photos include portraits of Lillian, Foon, and their family and friends in Vancouver from the early 1900s to the mid-1980s, when Lillian passed away, as well as photographs of members of the Wong Kong Har Tong, the Chinese Empire Reform Association, and other Chinese-Canadian community organizations active in the early and mid-20^th century.

Lillian Ho Wong and her co-workers at a millinery shop, ca. 1919. One of Paul’s Aunt Lillian’s first places of employment was the Wonder Millinery Shop at 776 Granville Street in downtown Vancouver; this photograph may have been taken there. Reference code AM1523-S5-1-F013-: 2008-010.3056

Yee’s efforts to document and preserve the history of Chinese Canadians in Vancouver and elsewhere in British Columbia extended to salvaging records from abandoned community association buildings. Yee has given us the records he collected from the Hoy Yin Association of Vancouver and the Duncan, B.C., branch of the Chinese Nationalist League, or Kuomintang (KMT). These materials include records of fundraising for Chinese Nationalist causes during the Second World War, association members’ personal correspondence and photographs, and records of the two associations’ respective operations. The majority of these records are written in traditional Chinese.

The Archives is grateful to Paul Yee for the donation of his records, and we invite researchers to use them.

At the risk of sounding ghoulish and terribly morbid…

Like any good news organization, when we heard Joan Rivers went into the ICU at Mt. Sinai, we tried to prepare for the worst. The Archives Department got into gear and started looking for all the material we had with the funny woman. Lo and behold a ten-inch reel of back-coated polyester tape from 1999 shows up in the catalog. And, perhaps Rivers would have appreciated it, the 15-year-old tape of her needed a face lift.

It was, like a lot of our tape collection, suffering from binder breakdown and/or hydrolysis, a.k.a sticky-shed syndrome. In short, the goo that holds the oxide particles to the tape itself becomes a bit undone, which makes playing the tape next to impossible without squeaking and squealing and gummy residue left on the tape machine heads. It leaves a mess and a muddy sound.

A quick remedy? Baking. The tape goes into a laboratory convection oven for four hours at 53 centigrade (130 Fahrenheit). Then, out on a shelf like a fresh apple pie to cool. More often than not, the tape plays back through the tape machine transport without a hitch allowing us to create a digital master from the original analog tape.

So, here she is on July 18, 1999, with Leonard Lopate in the old WNYC studios having a grand time making jokes and puns about getting old and dying.

“A truly American sentiment recognizes the dignity of labor and the fact that honor lies in honest toil.” -Grover Cleveland

Public Law 53-95: An Act Making Labor Day a Legal Holiday, June 28, 1894
General Records of the U.S. Government, National Archives and Records Administration

… [ Read all ]

Annual report and map, City Of Greensboro, North Carolina, 1965-1966

There are many changes and updates afoot in out digital collections, and more are on the way.

Civil Rights Greensboro
This collection, online since 2009, has recently been migrated into our CONTENTdm hosting platform. This move provides some significant benefits, including faceted search capability, full-text search within the oral histories and many other documents, and higher-resolution images. The move will also allow this collection to be added to the Digital Public Library of America and to Worldcat. As part of the upgrade, we have also added to the collection over four hundred newspaper articles dating from the 1960 sit-ins that were digitized by the Greensboro Public Library.

A similar migration is planned for the Women Veterans Historical Project later this year.

Digital Library on American Slavery
The Development Team here in the University Libraries has built an outstanding new interface that brings together the search functions of the Race and Slavery Petitions Project and the NC Runaway Slave Ads project. But this is just the beginning. We will soon be adding other databases from different institutions  to the search interface so as to allow “one-stop shopping” for any number of slavery-related collections. Hats off the ERIT Development Team for pulling this all together!

Greensboro Urban Development
We are currently adding material to a new Greensboro history collection, spotlighting urban development in Greensboro, particularly in the years after World War II. This collection will include planning documents, maps, scrapbooks, and other materials documenting downtown development, urban renewal activities, the growth of historic districts, and more. The collection currently features planning-related content held by UNCG University Libraries but we will soon be adding additional material from the Greensboro Public Library and the Greensboro Historical Museum. In addition, we are currently digitizing the archives of the Fisher Park Neighborhood Association, Greensboro’s first designated historic district.

New material is going online every week.

Home Economics and Nutrition Pamphlets
We have completed the second phase of digitization on this popular project and are in the process of placing online approximately three hundred new pamphlets that run the gamut from product manuals to cookbooks, all of which are held by the Martha Blakeney Hodges Special Collections and University Archives. This is a great look at home culture throughout the Twentieth Century and it’s also a lot of fun.

Three hundred new items should be online by early September.

More soon:
Watch this space for updates coming soon to our Manuscript Collections, Cello Music Collections, and University Archives Images and Documents.