At the end of the academic year, we do a report to the Digital Projects Priorities Team on the past year’s activities. This is an edited version of that report. It was a very productive year.

My thanks to the team: to Erica Rau and Kathy Howard in Digital Projects, who did such great work on so many projects; to Callie Coward and Anna Craft from Cataloging; and to Scott Hinshaw, Kathelene McCarty Smith, and everyone else in the Martha Blakeney Hodges Special Collections and University Archives. Thanks as well to the department where Digital Projects “lives”, Electronic Resources and Information Technology, for a level of support that goes far beyond the call of duty. We couldn’t so many great projects without a real collaborative team and I really appreciate the way everyone pulls together to accomplish all our goals!

Special thanks to Stephen Catlett, who completes his tenure as Textiles, Teachers, and Troops project manager this week after doing some amazing work over the past two years. Stephen did an incredible job working with our partners and students on TTT as well as with community outreach on our CBR/local history grant project and coordination of displays and our launch event in April. We are very much going to miss having him around and hope we can rectify that situation soon!

Also, many thanks to this year’s team of student workers (Evan Chu, Megan Coker, Tatiana Cox, Rachel Sanders, James Stewart, Phil White, and Hayley Whitehead) and our volunteers (Larry Daniels, Bernitae Reed, and Touger Vang). Your efforts are much appreciated and we couldn’t do any of this without you!

An announcement of this year’s approved and continuing projects will be available in the next few weeks.

2013-2014 Project Status:

• American Publishers Trade Bindings Phase 6: Complete and online (159 images).
• Campus Life Photos: In progress (322 images).
• CBR Project/Community Collections: Complete and online (1137 images).
• Class of 1951-present: Complete and online (11031 images).
• Creative Writing Manuscript Collections: Nearly complete, mostly online.

• Robert Watson Papers: Complete and online (5973 images).
• Randall Jarrell Papers: Nearly complete, partially online. Should be fully online by September. (6544 images to date).

Other Projects:

• DigitalGreensboro.org interface completed by ERIT Development Team.
• Civil Rights Greensboro Migration To CONTENTdm: Complete and should be live this summer.
• Women Vets Migration: Data dump and work plan complete. Target date for completion: early October.
• Worldcat Integration: Most collections now included in Worldcat. 
• DPLA Submission: Most collections now included in Digital Public Library of America. We are currently the third largest contributor in the state (24641 items) with three times as much material as number four.
• Creation of CONTENTdm landing pages based on priority focus areas:

• Local and Regional History
• Performing Arts
• University History
• Women’s History

Some Numbers:

We now have 251003 digital files in CONTENTdm, our digital content management system, making 25243 items and spanning nearly a thousand years of history…although most are admittedly from the past 150 years or so.

Included are:

• 8243 newspapers
• 4968 photos/photo folders
• 2223 clippings/folders and items containing clipping
• 1529 pamphlets
• 928 pieces of correspondence
• 702 music scores

Gerard Foley
Wednesday, June 25, 2014 – 09:54

Penelope Hetherington’s book The Marriage Knot has won the 2014 Margaret Medcalf Award.

The 2014 Margaret Medcalf Award was presented on 18 June 2014 to University of Western Australia history research fellow Penelope Hetherington for her book The Marriage Knot: Marriage & divorce in colonial Western Australia 1829–1900. In presenting the Award to Dr Hetherington, the Minister for Culture and the Arts, Hon. John Day MLA, said that the book had been meticulously researched and would form an excellent reference work on a topic that little had been written about. The Marriage Knot is published by UWA Publishing.

A Special Commendation was also presented to author Annie Boyd for her book Koombana Days, which documents the loss of the S.S. Koombana in a cyclone off the North West coast in March 1912. Koombana Days is published by Fremantle Press.

Since 2003 the State Records Office has hosted the Margaret Medcalf Award which rewards excellence in referencing and research of archival materials. Named after Margaret Medcalf OAM, the second State Archivist for Western Australia (from 1971 to 1989), it honours her valuable contribution to the development of archives in Western Australia. Works nominated for the Award must demonstrate use of archival sources, and substantial (but not necessarily exclusive) use of State Archives held by the State Records Office. The Award is unique is that is enable works, produced by students and amateurs, and in any format, to be considered alongside books by professional authors.

The Award is a prize of $1000 and nominated works may be fiction or non-fiction, published and unpublished, and may comprise any format (i.e. book, article, conference paper, website, index, etc.). Nominated works may be submitted by anyone, including the author of the work and must have been completed or published during the previous calendar year – this year from 2013.

The judging criteria for the Award comprise; the level of use of the State archives collection including original use of archival material; how well archives are referenced in the work; level of contribution to knowledge and presentation of the work. The judging panel for 2014 comprised State Records Commissioner Justine McDermott, State Archivist Cathrin Cassarchis, and Professor Jenny Gregory AM from the University of Western Australia.

This year six nominations were received for the Award. Apart from The Marriage Knot and Koombana Days, the other nominations were:

Phil Bianchi – “Work completed, Canning”: a comprehensive history of the Canning Stock Route 1906 – 2010, published by Hesperian Press.

Michelle Bunn and David J. Gilchrist – “A few good men”: public sector audit in the Swan River Colony, 1828-1835, a journal article in Accounting History. Volume 18, number 2.

Cliff Burns and Arlene Collings; with special assistance by Lyn Myles – Darlington and Surrounds: Historic Structures and Buildings of Darlington 1829 – 1925, published by the Darlington History Group. 

Ingrid van Bremen – Western Building Construction. Roofs, published by the National Trust of Australia (WA).

In the Summer of 1964 following the disappearance of civil rights workers Andrew Goodman, James Chaney and Michael Schwerner, attorney and reporter Eleanor Fischer had the opportunity to do a series of interviews with some key figures of the unfolding story there. Among them, Rita and Steve Schwerner, the wife and brother of Michael Schwerner. While the tape is undated it appears to have been recorded not long after the bodies of the missing men had been discovered on August 4, 1964.

Rita Schwerner from the interview:

“Mickey’s reason for going was an overpowering feeling that a person can’t live like an ostrich ignoring what’s going on all around him. If you believe something, you do something about it…He really believed, as I did too, that to bear children into a world and a country as confused and as unfair and as unjust as this one is right now would be an injustice to these children. And since we selfishly believed we wanted a family we had to do something to create an environment in which these children had a chance.”  

Eleanor Fischer produced several documentaries for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation with the tape she collected in Mississippi and had this to say about her welcome to the state.

“I first visited Mississippi in February, 1964. I had come down as a lawyer to give legal advice and to defend a group of white ministers engaged in voter registration work in among Negroes in the city of Hattiesburg.  I remember being introduced to the county prosecutor and the cold hard stare with which I was greeted. And I also remember the first words spoken to me by this white citizen of Mississippi. ‘Miss Fischer, this is war.’ War had indeed come to Mississippi but its full impact was not felt until several months later when the Mississippi Summer project got under way. Sponsored by the Conference of Federated Organizations, 600 young people from outside of Mississippi descended upon the magnolia state much to the outrage of an already beleaguered white community. They came as a peaceful army because of the way things are in Mississippi for the Negro, because they wanted to help.”

Special thanks to Elizabeth Starkey.

This post marks the formal end of our Preserving Local History project. Both Rachel Sanders and Megan Coker graduated in early May and are off to  graduate school pursuing library and information studies degrees; Rachel will be attending UNC Chapel Hill, and Megan is entering the USC in Columbia in the fall. We wish them well and the very best as they continue their studies  They really made our project possible and were wonderful representatives for UNCG out in the community, and a delight to work with. as well.

David Gwynn, Digital Projects Coordinator, at final CBR group presentation on April 24.

We participated in the final CBR group presentations on April 24, which included this PowerPoint presentation We also submitted our final report to the Office of Leadership and Service-Learning in May. For the project proper, one of our primary goals was to create a best practices manual. This publication brings together information we uncovered from our camera and equipment tests and from working out various procedures, and combines them in a short, hopefully readable, manual. As you will see there were both successes and challenges, most of which we overcame to our satisfaction. If you are interested in using a portable camera-based digitizing approach to capture and preserve your valuable historical materials, we hope you will find this helpful. It is possible that we will update it in the future, as we find other or better approaches to field-based digitization, so you might want to check back in the next year. If you have any questions whatsoever, please feel free to contact David Gwynn at jdgwynn@uncg.edu.

One additional item we would like to share, which took a lot of work on Rachel’s part, is a transcript of the team and community meeting conversations that occurred at the November 19, 2013 meeting held at College Place Methodist Church. This was a very useful and informative event and we were very appreciative of those who came to the meeting and shared information and concerns.

Finally, and most importantly, you will see on the UNCG Digital Collections website that we created a Community Collections section where we have placed the digitized material we did for College Place United Methodist Church. You will also note that we did some additional field scanning at Lindley Elementary School, First Presbyterian Church, and at West Market Street United Methodist Church. Several other organizations who attended the November 19 meeting at CPUMC expressed an interest in having us come out during the Spring to their locations. We sincerely apologize that we were not able to accommodate more of you, since we certainly value your institutions and your historical materials. We would love to do more, and in fact are hoping that we can continue this process in some form in the future.

This has been a great experience for us, for the University, and hopefully for the organizations that participated in our survey and meeting.

We hope to continue the community outreach in the future as we move forward toward creating a local history website that can accommodate a wide range of material from organizations and individuals throughout the city.

–  by Stephen Catlett

On June 21, 1964 three young members of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) went missing in Mississippi. Their bodies were found on August 4, 1964. Listen to what Dr. Robert Spike and Arthur C. Thomas said the following day. To listen to the whole recording, click here.

As New York state struggles with its stance on drugs, listen to Seymour Siegel interview Seymour Boyer, a democrat from Queens, about the new dangers of “pep pills and goofballs,” and (perhaps) adopting the “British system” of de-criminalizing drug usage.

The Florida State University Digital Library now shares a selection of the cuneiform tablets held by the Florida State University Libraries Special Collections & Archives.

In 1922, Dr. Josiah Bethea Game (1869-1935) negotiated the purchase of twenty-five tablets for the Florida State College for Women (FSCW). The tablets range in size from one to two square inches, and are square, rounded and cone shaped. The tablets were found by archeologist Dr. Edgar J. Banks (1866 –1945)  while excavating in Babylonia (present-day Iraq) for the University of Chicago in 1903-1904. The ancient inscribed Babylonian clay tablets illustrate the oldest of writings and were are mostly temple records and business documents dating from over 4000 years ago.

Among the cuneiform artifacts are a ritual tablet from Warka dated 2100 BC; a memorandum from Senkereh, the ancient Larsa, 22 BC; a temple record, sealed with the royal seal of the King of Ur of the Chaldees, 2350 BC; sun-dried business contract, 220 BC; sun-dried exercise tablet, 2200 BC; butchers bill for four sheep, 2150 BC; a votive cone, King of Amanu, from the temple of the goddess Ishtar, which he built in the royal residence of his kingdom 2100 BC; a tax bill, 2350 BC; and a business contract dated in Nebuchadnezzar’s reign.

This selection of our cuneiform collection was digitized and translated as part of a project in 2008 and now join the growing digital collections in the FSUDL!

Thomas B. Morgan, the President of the WNYC Communications Group from April 1990 to April 1994, died today. Morgan was an honorary trustee of New York Public Radio. He had not been well for some time.

Morgan was a writer, editor and had been Press Secretary to Mayor John Lindsay from 1969 to 1973. Previously, he served in a similar capacity on behalf of the presidential candidacies of Adlai Stevenson in 1960 and Eugene McCarthy in 1968. From 1975 to 1976 he was editor of the Village Voice and from 1974 to 1975 he served as vice president and assistant to the publisher of New York Magazine.  He joined the Dinkins Administration as the city’s director of communications services. Here he is at his City Hall swearing-in ceremony.

In his first letter to listeners in the station program guide, Wavelength, Morgan wrote:

“To this day, the relevance and integrity of WNYC’s programs make the station a model for publicly owned and supported broadcasting systems in cities around the country. My appointment by Mayor David Dinkins gives me the opportunity to continue to build on that excellent tradition, and I welcome the challenge. I feel the way a Mets or Yankee fan would who suddenly has been chosen to manage the team.”[1]

During his tenure at WNYC, Morgan restructured WNYC-TV and continued the independent fundraising activities initiated by former WNYC chief Mary Perot Nichols. He bolstered the AM station’s commitment to news and talk and the FM station’s focus on music and a younger audience. 

Morgan’s most controversial act was the hiring of Curtis Sliwa as a program host in January 1994. Critics charged he was pressured to hire the Guardian Angels founder by Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who was partial to Sliwa’s populist views. Morgan, however, denied the charge, saying he was only acting on “a hiring tip” and that Sliwa’s contract ran only to December, providing an “out” should things prove unworkable. The real threat, said Morgan, was the Giuliani Administration’s threat to sell WNYC.

A few weeks later, and shortly before his resignation, Morgan wrote an op-ed piece for The New York Times decrying the Giuliani Administration’s plan to sell WNYC AM, FM and TV to help close a $2.3 billion city budget gap. Morgan maintained that the loss of the city’s broadcast stations would be akin to the demolition of Penn Station –  particularly, he argued, because the stations were so close to self-sufficiency. [2]

Morgan appeared on WNYC’s On The Media with host Alex Jones on March 6, 1994, for a discussion about his tenure and the potential sale of WNYC, in a segment titled “Who Owns Public Radio?”

__________________________________________________

[1] Morgan, Thomas B., “A Letter From the New President,”Wavelength, May, 1990, pg. 5.

[2] Morgan, Thomas B., “Sell WNYC? Unthinkable,” The New York Times, February 23, 1994, pg. A 19.

A page from this volume.

There was some celebrating back in early May, when we completed the cataloging of the 1,397 titles in the Younghee Kim-Wait/Pablo Eisenberg Native American Literature Collection. Thankfully, no one got Gatorade poured on them, as had been threatened. I thought I would share in this post a little bit of the detective work that the last few titles required, and suggest questions that may be worth further research.

At first glance, a collection of poetry, stories, and art created in 1969 by students at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) certainly looked as if it were a one-of-a-kind manuscript. Indeed, a note from the book dealer had called it “a unique collection.” Closer examination revealed that the text was printed (probably by silk-screening), although some of the artwork may have been done by hand before the printing. With no title page on our copy, I searched WorldCat in several different ways before I felt confident that there are at least two other copies of this work in libraries, one at the New Mexico State Library, and one at UC Davis. I suspect no copy has an actual title page, and this can lead to different libraries accidentally cataloging the same work in different ways. The copy at UC Davis was given a title based on the first poem in the book…which can be a valid choice according to cataloging rules, but sometimes is confusing for researchers.

If I were looking for a research project, I might look into the history of the IAIA. When this book was created in 1969, the school was primarily a high school, and has since become a college. Did any of the creators of this volume go on to do other things in the arts? Is there anything in the student newspaper, Drumbeats, that mentions this project? How many copies did they create? Is there some connection between the IAIA or one of the authors to the Beat Generation poet Gary Snyder, who was the former owner of the copy at UC Davis? And our copy contains the inscription “For the Indian Room from M. M. May;” who was May?

The other mystery is about the author of a small pamphlet, self-published in 1948. I can find no other library holdings for “The Hollywood story 7.” As you can see from the pictures below, the author is only identified as “J. Gordon.” Thankfully, our copy is inscribed, so I had additional name information: “Jane Z. Gordon,” who also called herself “Who-shon-no.” The Library of Congress Catalog of Copyright Entries from 1949 provided the middle name “Zane.” Some web searching led me to this short biography on the Wyandotte Nation page, which names her “Jane Zane Wallace Waters Gordon,” and provides a birth date but no death date. I am most intrigued by the statement that “Jane was a bookkeeper, weigh master, stenographer, hair dresser and play write by profession.” The biography does not list any of the plays that she wrote, mostly concentrating on her role as an activist in the 1920s. What name did she write her plays under? Were any ever published? And what’s the story behind “American Indian Unity, Inc.,” the sponsor of the publication? Are there Hollywood stories 1 through 6 out there somewhere?

This is the point where quality and quantity must be balanced. I have identified the author as “Gordon, Jane Zane, 1871-.” From my searches, I have not been able to identify her as publishing any other works under the same or a different name. Should more information come to light, I will pursue the authority work necessary to make cross references between her pseudonyms. But for now, I have far too many other things waiting in my “to do” list.

Every radio station has a government mandated station identification – a host is required to announce a station’s call letters every hour, on the hour. Here’s a look back at some of the most unique station IDs from the past 90 years. 

This station ID is from November 25, 1936.

Change came in 1938. With the storm of World War II less than a year-and-a-half away, the fascist governments of Italy and Germany were bombarding resource rich South American countries with shortwave radio broadcasts with the hope of gaining new allies. Mayor La Guardia and then Station Director Morris Novik decided to counter this propaganda. On May 27, 1938, WNYC initiated a series of half-hour programs extending ‘good will greetings’ to South America through General Electric’s shortwave station (W3XAF) in Schenectady, New York. Each program ended with this statement[1]:

“This program comes from WNYC, New York City’s own station, where seven-and-a-half million people, who have come from all parts of the world, are now living in peace and enjoying the benefits of democracy.”

Soon after it was slightly modified and adopted as WNYC’s regular station identification as heard in this February 22, 1941 clip, the one you now hear on our air a few times each day.

Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December, 1941, the phrase “in peace” was dropped. [2] It remained absent until the end of World War II. Sometime after the war the station ID was reworked to include the chimes from the clock at New York City Hall and sounded like this through much of the 1950s:

It is interesting to note, however, that as a consequence of WNYC’s effort to respond to fascist broadcasts, it decided to set up its own shortwave station W2XVP, operating with 1,000 watts of power at frequency of 26.1 megacycles. The original idea was to broadcast programs in Spanish or Portuguese to South America.[3] But it appears that by January, 1941 the notion of WNYC successfully countering the shortwave punch of the Axis powers was a bit over-extended. The facility instead went on the air for a couple hours a day following WNYC-AM’s regular sign-off at sundown, repeating the classical music program The Masterwork Hour, along with other selected music, news and commentary.[4] These shortwave broadcasts continued until WNYC-FM went into regular service in March, 1943.

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[1] The New York Journal American, May 26, 1938.

[2] Associated Press report, December 13, 1941.      

[3] A History of WNYC, unpublished drafts of 1940 WPA manuscript, New York City Municipal Archives microfilm.

[4] “WNYC on Shortwave,” The New York Sun, January 4, 1941. p. 20.