Happy Birthday Governor Collins!

On March 10, 1909 Thomas LeRoy Collins was born in Tallahassee, Florida. In 1955, he was elected 33rd Governor of Florida and held that position until 1961. Collins attended Leon High School in Tallahassee, and earned his law degree from the Cumberland School of Law in Birmingham, Alabama. In 1932, he married Mary Call Darby a great-granddaughter of two time territorial governor of Florida, Richard Kieth Call. Today LeRoy Collins is remembered as a voice for civil rights and on March 20, 1960 he delivered a speech wherein he declared that, as governor, he represented all Floridians “whether that person is black or white, whether that person is rich or poor, or whether that person is influential or not influential.”

The Thomas LeRoy Collins papers are housed at the Claude Pepper Library and are available to researchers Monday through Friday 9AM-5PM.

In honor of Women’s History Month, please enjoy this post about Ruby Diamond, originally published on March 18, 2013 by Gina Woodward.

Ruby Diamond was born in Tallahassee on September 1, 1886. She was one of thirteen members of the Florida State College’s 1905 graduating class and received a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Chemistry. Ms. Diamond preferred that her wealth help those in need, and she contributed to many charities in Tallahassee and across Florida and was a generous donor to more than thirty-seven organizations.

Ms. Diamond was also a political activist and fought for lower taxes and racial equality. She and her brother Sydney, along with other members of the Jewish community, founded Temple Israel in 1937.

Ms. Diamond was a generous benefactor to Florida State University and established two scholarships for disadvantaged scholars. She supported the Alumni Association and the Department of Educational Research, Development, and Foundations.

In 1970, for her contributions to the university, Florida State University expressed its appreciation to Ms. Diamond by naming its largest auditorium, located inside the Westcott Building, in her honor. In 1971, she donated property in Tallahassee worth $100,000 to the university, and at age 95 in 1981, she donated downtown property assessed at more than $100,000 to partially fund an endowed chair of “national excellence” in the College of Education. In 2010, the Ruby Diamond Concert Hall was reopened after a $38 million renovation.

The Ruby Diamond Family Papers in our collection include family photographs, correspondence between Ms. Diamond and her friends and cousins, genealogical materials, news clippings about the Diamond family, and her eulogy. The materials in the collection also contain information about the history of Tallahassee and Florida State University.

Our new exhibition, “Amending America,” opens on March 11, 2016.

2016​ ​marks the 225th anniversary of the Bill of Rights, written in 1789 and ratified on December 15, 1791. The original Bill of Rights, on permanent display in the National Archives Rotunda for the Charters of Freedom, is still closely connected to the biggest issues of today–and to each of our citizens.

Here is a sneak peak of a musical number explaining how we amend our Constitution.  This animated video was made in collaboration with HISTORY and shows the story of how we amend, through the proposal and ratification process. It also illustrates why our Founders made it possible to amend, and explains the important role of the Archivist of the United States in the amendment process!

Did you know that more than 11,000 amendments have been proposed in congressional history, but never made it through the approval process? As part of the work preparing for the “Amending America” exhibition, NARA volunteers and staff transcribed and edited over 11,000 entries of proposed amendments to the U.S. Constitution, as recorded by congress from 1787 to 2014. We have made this work available as an open dataset in CSV format, available for anyone to download on Archives.gov and Data.gov. What can you visualize or do with this data? Have suggestions for improvements, let us know!

“Amending America” is on display in the Lawrence F. O’Brien Gallery of the National Archives Museum in Washington, DC, from March 11, 2016 through September 4, 2017. Featuring more than 50 original documents from the National Archives, this exhibit highlights the remarkably American story of how we have amended, or attempted to amend, the Constitution in order to form “a more perfect union.”

Amending America is presented in part by the National Archives Foundation through the generous support of AT&T, HISTORY®, and the Lawrence F. O’Brien Family.

The cover of the August 1960 issue of Genii: The Conjurors’ Magazine features Ron Urban and two assistants partaking in some truly magical mischief.

At first glance, this is a fairly typical 1960’s stage magician’s scene: sequins, demure female assistants, a hodgepodge menagerie. Looking more closely, however, one begins to ask questions: are those… pigeons? Why are they different colors? How is that toy poodle so serene? Is one of those assistants wearing fishnets beneath her bloomers? Are all three of them on… ice skates?

Seeking answers, I turned to the magazine’s feature article. Since you’re undoubtedly asking questions that are 100% identical to mine, I’ll share my discoveries: those are not pigeons, they’re doves. They’re different colors because Ron Urban dyes his doves, in what the article calls a “living magical rainbow of pastel doves, very appealing to the eye.”  I know nothing about the tranquil canine. As for the costumes, as well as the ice skates, this photo is from Urban’s six month engagement at Chicago’s Conrad Hilton Hotel performing in an ice show called “Persian Parad-ice.”

Yup.

On that note, let’s appreciate this fantastic head shot of the magician, complete with white bow tie, fetching finger waves, and mysterious boutonniere.

If you’re not yet smitten, listen to this: he also plays the saxophone.

“Do you believe in a democracy? Do you believe taxation without representation is tyranny? Or is it tyranny only for men? Do you want a government of the people, for the people and by the people? And aren’t women people?

When Gertrude Foster Brown (1867-1956) recorded these remarks for Pathe’ more than a century ago, she was addressing voting aged men. At that point, women could only vote in 12 states and there was a referendum on female suffrage for New York State scheduled for Election Day 1915. But the suffragettes didn’t have the votes in the legislature. It wasn’t until two years later that New York State became the first Eastern state to adopt fully a women’s right to vote in the state constitution. In a letter to the editor of The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Brown called the vote “a modern weapon that women must have to get at the cause of social evils instead of treating their symptoms.”[1] And as she embraced the emerging media technology of the day, she was confident that women would soon be armed.

“Women’s suffrage is coming; everybody knows that. President Wilson and his cabinet, Theodore Roosevelt, W.J. Bryan, Governor Whitman and Mayor Mitchell of New York City are in favor of it. Gentlemen, women have been working for 75 years for a share in your democracy. Won’t you give your wives and daughters, sisters and mothers, the rights you enjoy of enfranchised American citizenship?”

Gertrude Foster Brown began her adult life as a music teacher and concert pianist before becoming a women’s rights activist. Following the national passage of women’s suffrage in 1920, she wrote Your Vote and How to Use It, published by Harper’s the next year.

Impressed with her work and activism, women’s movement leader Carrie Chapman Catt asked Brown to take over The Women’s Journal, founded in 1870 by Lucy Stone and Henry B. Blackwell. She remained there until the magazine’s closing in 1931. Brown was also active in the League of Women Voters and the New York Women’s City Club. She spoke out forcefully for the League of Nations, and during World War II, was a representative of the Women’s Action Committee for Victory and Lasting Peace at the founding United Nations conference in San Francisco, in 1945.

Gertrude Foster Brown, President of the New York State Suffrage Association circa 1913.
(Library of Congress)

[1] Brown, Gertrude Foster, “Want Suffrage First,” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, June 14, 1914, pg. 8. 

[2] You may have noticed that Brown’s speech is on side “B”. Side “A” was given to a man, Rabbi Stephen Wise, also speaking in favor of women’s suffrage.

[3] Thanks to Ben Houtman and Wayne Schulmister for digital signal processing.

You can read a full transcript of Gertrude Foster Brown’s recorded remarks below:

The most important question before the country today is that of women’s suffrage. It is not only votes for women but the entire question of democracy that is at stake.  Ever since our government was founded, men have been proclaiming a government that should not be for the benefit of any man or class of men, but that everybody should have equal representation, where those who obey the law should have a voice in making that law. Gentlemen, that is the real question in votes for women. Do you believe in Democracy? Do you believe taxation without representation is tyranny? Or is it tyranny only for men? Do you want a government of the people, for the people and by the people? And aren’t women people?

Women vote already in twelve states, one-half of the total area of the United States. The women of Chicago, of San Francisco, of Los Angeles, Denver, Portland and Seattle are going to vote for the next President. Aren’t the women of this state as intelligent as the women of Chicago? Or, are eastern men less generous than men of the west? 

Millions of women taxpayers are asking for the vote so that they may have representation. Millions of women housekeepers are asking for the vote so that may help men with public housekeeping. Millions of mothers are asking for the vote so that they may stop child labor and help men protect the children and give them a better chance. Millions of working women are asking for the vote so that they may have the same power to protect themselves that men have. Women should have the vote because it would draw husbands and wives, fathers and daughters, brothers and sisters closer together, giving them an equal share and interest in important public questions. Women should have the vote because it would compel men in public office to think more of the welfare of women, of the children, of decency and morality. Women should have the vote because it is unjust, shameful and cowardly for men to deprive women of that which they demand for themselves.

The home is the bulwark of our nation. Give the home two votes instead of one. Give the mother a vote as well as the father. If the Almighty can trust women to bear children, cannot men trust them to use their vote for the welfare of those children?

Women’s suffrage is coming; everybody knows that. President Wilson and his cabinet, Theodore Roosevelt, W.J. Bryan, Governor Whitman and Mayor Mitchell of New York City are in favor of it. Gentlemen, women have been working for 75 years for a share in your democracy. Won’t you give your wives and daughters, sisters and mothers, the rights you enjoy of enfranchised American citizenship?

Monday, March 7th is the premier of the eighth season, and 100th episode, of RuPaul’s Drag Race, a reality competition series to crown “America’s next drag superstar.” RuPaul’s media and merchandise empire, among a bevy of new TV and web series, now includes an annual drag convention and podcast.

In honor of this queen of queens, we look back to a 1995 interview, with Leonard Lopate, promoting her autobiography Lettin’ It All Hang Out. 

(RuPaul at Quick Night Club, New York, 1980s. (Photo by Steve Eichner)/Getty)

RuPaul discussed her transformation from the child who used “every crayon in the box” to being named the first drag queen supermodel for MAC Cosmetics. Before moving to New York and becoming a glamazon, RuPaul started her career as a precocious teenage punk in Atlanta Georgia:

“My drag… was an extension of the punk rock that was a reaction to 80s Reagan era and it was social satire… making fun of our society and the things we held really dear to our hearts. Like the image of… this woman which wasn’t real but was like the image of Nancy Reagan which was this very coiffed, together a [doll-full] suit wearing thing. So we were making fun of that and it was called Gender-blank drag.” 

Anticipating this pressing rights movement, the topic of gender fluidity comes up frequently in the interview, “I think those formalities are becoming obsolete…It’s not important anymore. Just so long as you call me baby, that’s all I ask.” When asked about the newly elected conservative dominance in the 1995 house and senate, RuPaul is optimistic. She sees it as a clearing a path for a “massive revolution.” Perhaps that revolution has come and gone in light of current Republican control in congress. However, in a 2015 interview with Variety magazine on marriage equality, she speaks to the cyclical nature of politics. ”These windows of openness are literally that: They open and they close.”

This interview was recorded at a tipping point that lead to bigger success, bigger productions and of course bigger hair. From the uncomfortable ad lib insults between RuPaul and Milton Berle at the 1993 MTV Awards to breaking into acting and her three hour transformation process into drag, RuPaul presents her philosophy that hasn’t changed much in 21 years: “We’re all born naked and the rest is drag.”

Listen to RuPaul’s return appearance to The Leonard Lopate Show in 2010 to promote her second book, Workin’ It! RuPaul’s Guide to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Style. 

The 1966 restructuring of the  Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB) was one of Lindsay’s most contentious actions as mayor, an indelicate handling of a seemingly minor issue that returned the year’s briefly simmering racial tensions back to an aggressive boil. The effect of the fight over the CCRB on the growing racial animus has been studied thoroughly, and while we certainly hope to add this to the available primary sources, we introduce this recording to show another side of the debate over the Board, which depending on your perspective is either dramatic irony revealed in history’s slow-release or a classic example of another unheeded Cassandra.

First, some background: Civilian review had existed in New York for over a decade, but until Lindsay had had no civilian presence on its governing board. Lindsay restructured the board to include 7 members, four of whom were civilians vetted by Lindsay, with the rest of the board and its staff comprising members of the Police Department. John Cassese, then president of The Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, the main union of New York’s Finest, was having none of it, drawing implicit racial undertones to the fore: “I am sick and tired of giving in to minority groups, with their whims and their gripes and shouting. Any review board with civilians on it is detrimental to the operations of the police department.” The PBA swiftly drafted a referendum combating Lindsay’s new board, to be voted on by the citizens of New York City on November 8, 1966.

This brings us to this October 28, 1966 recording, in which we hear Mayor Lindsay call to his press conference dais Russell Niles and Sam Rosenman, president and president emeritus of New York City Bar Association respectively, to give the Bar’s assessment of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent referendum number 1 on the November 8 ballot.* To hear Lindsay tell it, New Yorkers were not being asked to dissolve the CCRB, the referendum’s ostensible purpose, but something much worse:

“Its specific language would do far more than destroy the new Civilian Review Board [sic]. The language of the referendum would also prohibit the mayor, the city council, the board of estimate, and the commissioner of investigations from investigating complaints against the members of the police department…. We are speaking of the entire entire breadth of citizen grievances including graft and corruption…. The people of New York have been denied the opportunity to vote to abolish the board and nothing more.”

Under the wording of this referendum, which ultimately won by a nearly two to one margin, investigations of the police could only begin within the department itself. It would allow the police to become “a law unto itself.” In Lindsay’s mind, the referendum was a Trojan Horse. 

It’s Samuel Rosenman rather than Lindsay who performs the role of Cassandra in this press conference radio drama however. In the news that day was Commissioner of Investigations Arnold Fraiman’s recent work cleaning up the Sanitation Department, which like seemingly every department in the City government was hopelessly corrupt. Rosenman saw fit to bring this timely hero forth as an example of the kind of hands that could be tied with the passage of referendum 1.

Whitman Knapp Led the Mayor’s Commission to Investigate Alleged Police Corruption in the early ’70s.

(U.S. Department of Justice)

It is here where the irony drops in: This was the same Commissioner Fraiman who later declined to investigate further the descriptions of the rampant graft of the 81st precinct made by Frank Serpico (whose story became a film and hit play). Serpico was a police officer, not a civilian, so Fraiman almost certainly should have and legally could have acted upon his tip, but given the passage of the referendum breaking up Lindsay’s civilian review board and handicapping inquiries into police misconduct, a promising avenue of investigation had arguably been legally blocked. Moreover, Commissioner Fraiman would have found it difficult if not impossible to receive the corroboration of citizens without an active civilian-led board to give voice to the people’s reports. It would take a New York Times cover story to get Serpico’s story out, leading ultimately to the Knapp Commission‘s efforts to fight police corruption. While this points to the potential of the fourth estate as a vehicle for social justice, I would note that this news conference, in which Lindsay, Niles, and Rosenman warn against the dangers that the passage of the referendum held for independent investigations of the police, in spite of landing on the front page of the Times, then and now the paper of record, did nothing to stop the referendum from passing with a substantial majority.

Lindsay’s battle over civilian reviews would later find an echo in the Dinkins administration’s efforts to install an independent board in the early ’90s, as well as in today’s clarion call that Black Lives Matter. As important as those efforts were and are, we should not ignore the other reverberations sounded in the efforts to reform civilian review in the Lindsay Administration’s first year – the October 28 warnings of Lindsay and the New York City Bar.

*Please refer to the recording for details on the Bar’s assessment of the referendum and its take on civilian review boards in general, as well as Lindsay’s, Niles’, and Rosenman’s comments.

Audio courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives WNYC Collection.

WNYC archives id: 92395
Municipal archives id: T2679

When I applied to the Special Collections & Archives graduate assistantship, I had one thing in mind: rare books. As an undergrad at FSU, I frequently visited Special Collections for class projects and assignments related to medieval manuscripts and early printed books, knowing that someday I wanted to work with rare material like these. So naturally when I received the news that I was selected for the assistantship, my first thought was of all the rare books I would get to “work with.”

The concept of “working with” rare books was always a very abstract one to me. I assumed rare book librarians got to study the materials, give lectures to visiting classes, and create exhibit displays. A very glamorous position in academia. As a young and naive soon-to-be graduate assistant I really had no idea what rare book maintenance would entail because my only previous job experience included retail, banking, and an archives internship. Now that I’m slightly older and much more experienced, I can say I have insight into “working with” rare books. The epitome of rare books. The vault books!

That’s right, I left my career as a community banker to find myself auditing yet another vault. Just like the huge quantities of money safeguarded behind lock and key, the rare books that live in the Special Collections vault are the most valuable items in the collection. And I was tasked with examining just over 1,000 of them to determine their condition and assess whether or not they needed any preservation treatment. Most of them (71%), I’m happy to report, are holding up just fine considering their age. The other couple hundred are in need of various types of enclosures that will preserve all of their fragile, decaying, or detached parts. 

This naturally led to a practicum in box making. Under the high-quality tutelage of the Uppsala University Rare Books YouTube channel, the Rare Books Librarian and I tried our hand at custom box making. This turned out to be much more difficult than the 5-minute duration of our video lesson implied. And if rare book box making was an Olympic sport, our Swedish friends at Uppsala would take home the gold. But in the end, with a lot of time spent practicing, we were able to construct several excellent enclosures to protect some of the most deteriorated books in the vault.

These days my glamorous vision of rare books librarianship still includes spontaneous bouts of paging through incunables to appreciate the illustrations, hand binding, and old book smell. But the reality of the job entails a lot more dust, red rot, and wormholes. Ultimately, the basis of “working with” rare books is preservation; removing the dust, and stopping the red rot and wormholes so that librarians and patrons alike may continue to marvel at illustrations, hand binding, and old book smell for centuries to come.

One of the many avenues that the National Archives offers to engage with our customers is online through our websites. In the recent blog series “By the Numbers” we reported we had over 24 million visits our websites last fiscal year. Additionally, there were more than 8 million visits to FederalRegister.gov last year and more than 158 million documents views on the OFR’s eCFR website.

Thanks to an interesting new feature from the Digital Analytics Program in GSA’s Office of Citizen Services and Innovative Technologies, citizens are now able to view real time online website traffic through a feature added to analytics.usa.gov.

NARA is one of the first ten federal agencies to participate in the pilot to create agency specific dashboard pages. These pages provide insight into how the public interacts with our websites.

There is a real time view showing how many people are on our websites at that moment and the top pages visited. The drop-down at the top of the page allows you to select an individual agency to view.

There’s also a 7-day and a 30-day view that showing traffic to all of our web domains currently utilizing the analytics code as well as the top file downloads from the previous day.

This application’s data helps us ensure that we design, maintain and update our websites to reflect the types of devices and browsers visitors use on our websites.  We can also see what content the users are interested in. The analysis of data points such as these will help us effectively use our limited resources to best serve our customers.

One of the pillars of Open Government is transparency. By working with other agencies to create and participate in projects such as this, NARA continues to open more access to our customers. This is just one more way that the National Archives is developing as an increasingly transparent, data-driven agency.

Learn more about the Digital Analytics Program from DigitalGov.

“It’s Good to Be Alive,” is both the title of Roy Campanella’s book and the message he brings to this 1959 meeting of the Books and Authors Luncheon. A quiet, unassuming speaker, he confesses, “I don’t really know where to start. I have so many starts.” Only a year-and-a-half earlier, Campanella, star catcher for the Brooklyn Dodgers, had damaged his spinal cord in a car accident.

Now a quadriplegic, he addresses a hushed audience, telling how difficult it is having to ask his six-year-old daughter for a glass of water or to try and eat while lying down. He frankly relates how devastated he still is, warning, “It’s what you tell your own self” that determines if you will survive such an experience. He describes many people in the rehabilitation center as not wanting to live, being unwilling to go home because they feel they have no future there. He encourages youngsters who seem to have no hope, telling them, “It’s just good to be alive, even if you can’t do nothing!” Although he does talk about faith, and tells a moving story about reciting The Lord’s Prayer during his first night in the hospital, Campanella does not offer any saccharine prescriptions for overcoming adversity. Rather, his message is one of plain-spoken strength. Surprisingly, he does not mention baseball until the end of his talk, crediting it for giving him a livelihood and teaching him how to be a gentleman. But his final thoughts, though perhaps bleak, are also inspiring. “It’s not a real tough story. It’s something that has happened in life.” Finished, he is greeted with tumultuous applause.

Roy Campanella (1921-1993) had two careers, one as trail-blazing, color-barrier-breaking baseball superstar, and the other as one of the most visible and public handicapped people of his time. It’s important to remember that only a generation before, FDR’s use of a wheelchair was kept so quiet that people meeting him for the first time were shocked to learn the extent of the president’s disability. But with the advent of television and the inherent newsworthiness of Campanella’s accident, being a paraplegic or quadriplegic was no longer a condition no one spoke about. As the website Society for American Baseball Research recounts:

“After enduring years of therapy, Campanella regained some use of his arms. He was eventually able to feed himself, shake hands, and even sign autographs with the aid of a device strapped to his arm, though he remained dependent on his wheelchair for mobility. Through it all he managed to maintain the positive, upbeat attitude that was his trademark and became a universal symbol of courage. In 1969, the same year he was inducted into the Hall of Fame, he received the Bronze Medallion from the City of New York, the highest honor the city confers upon civilians, awarded for exceptional citizenship and outstanding achievement. Three years later his uniform number 39 was retired along with Robinson’s number 42 and Sandy Koufax’s 32. Though Campanella remained in New York, continuing to operate his liquor store and host a radio sports program called Campy’s Corner, he still remained a part of the Dodgers family. He worked in public relations, helped with scouting, and served as a special coach and adviser at the club’s Vero Beach spring-training facility.”

But it is important not to overlook the first part of Campanella’s story. Along with fellow Dodgers Jackie Robinson and Don Newcombe, he broke the color barrier in professional baseball. Despite the brevity of his major league career (he spent almost ten years in the Negro and Mexican leagues) he is generally considered to be one of the greatest catchers who ever played, winning the National League MVP Award three times. As the New York Times reported in its obituary: 

“Although his achievements as a power-hitting catcher were sometimes exceeded by those of his American League rival, Yogi Berra of the Yankees, Campanella at his height was the best catcher in baseball and one whose greatness seemed only partly reflected by his statistics. This view was once summed up by Ty Cobb, the legendary outfielder who was one of the five original members of the Hall of Fame and a man not known for hyperbole. “Campanella,” he said, “will be remembered longer than any catcher in baseball history.”

Unlike Robinson, Campanella, as we hear in this speech, was not by nature given to public pronouncements. This reportedly caused tension between the two, with Robinson criticizing Campanella’s tendency to “get along” with the prevailing racist tendencies of the time rather than vocally oppose them. But his nature was just as crucial to the fascinating chemistry that enabled the Dodgers of that era to overcome baseball’s shameful past. In the Los Angeles Times his friend Don Newcombe recalled:

‘”Jack would blow his top, and Campy would calm him down, and then calm me down,” said Newcombe. “We were all going through so much back then, we needed Campy as our stabilizing influence.”

Audio courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives WNYC Collection.

WNYC archives id: 150250
Municipal archives id: LT8956

March 6, 2016 would have been the 99th birthday of cartoonist and writer Will Eisner (1917-2005), and once again the week surrounding it has been declared Will Eisner Week by the Eisner Family Foundation.  Will Eisner Week is an annual celebration promoting graphic novels, literacy, free speech awareness, and the legacy of Eisner.

In 1938, the popularity of characters like Superman proved to magazine publishers that comic books with original content could turn a profit, and a young Will Eisner partnered with cartoonist Jerry Iger to create one of the first comic artist studios.  Eisner & Iger employed and trained many young artists who later became widely-recognized in the comics publishing industry, including Bob Kane (creator of Batman) and Jack Kirby.

Will Eisner is perhaps best remembered for his creation of and contributions to the long-running The Spirit comic strip.  The Spirit was first published as a Sunday magazine supplement in American newspapers from 1940 to 1952.  It was nominally an adventure strip featuring a crimefighting vigilante named the Spirit, but also included elements of comedy, horror, mystery, and romance.  Eisner preferred to compose his strips as complete short stories, rather than mimic the never-ending chapters of other daily newspaper strips.  He said “I could never work successfully in a daily strip. A daily strip is too confining to me…it’s like trying to conduct an orchestra in a telephone booth. I have an almost neurotic need to do something different each time, to have a conclusion to what I did yesterday and start something new.”  Eisner’s work on this run of Spirit strips is critically-acclaimed and considered ground-breaking and influential.  In 1965, Marilyn Mercer wrote that “[Eisner] thought of comic strips as movies on paper and in ‘The Spirit’ pushed this idea as far as it would go. He made his format work for him; he rarely stuck to the conventional nine panels to a page but geared panel size to speed of the action. Sometimes there were no panels at all, just words and characters wandering around loose. His repertoire of visual gimmicks was limitless…”

Eisner wrote and spoke passionately and articulately on the narrative language of comics.  His monographs Comics and Sequential Art and Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative are considered seminal works in the field of comic studies.  He often gave interviews and lectures on the subject of comics art, and in 1974 wrote an article for the School Library Journal encouraging libraries to collect comic books (a practice now common in public and academic libraries).  His scholarly writing popularized the term “graphic novel,” now the standard description of long-form works in the comics medium.  Eisner helped shape a new generation of comic artists as a teacher at the School of Visual Arts in New York, and his creative work continues to inspire artists and scholars long after his death.  We invite you to take a moment between March 1st and 7th this year to appreciate the legacy of this master artist, teacher, and advocate, through comic books available in Special Collections & Archives in the Robert M. Ervin Jr. Collection, or in works by and about Eisner throughout FSU Libraries.

Further Reading:

Eisner, Will. (2008). Comics and Sequential Art. New York : W.W. Norton.

Eisner, Will. (1974). Comic books in the library. School Library Journal, 21(2), p. 75-79.

Eisner, Will. (2008). Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative. New York : W.W. Norton.

Robert M. Ervin, Jr. Collection, Special Collections & Archives, Florida State University Libraries, Tallahassee, Florida.

Inge, M. Thomas. (Ed.). (2011). Will Eisner : Conversations. Jackson : University Press of Mississippi.

Today is the day when we say goodbye to our leader and colleague Jim Michalko. Rather than wallowing in our loss, we’d like this post to celebrate Jim’s accomplishments and acknowledge his many wonderful qualities.

Jim Michalko February 2016

Before OCLC, Jim was the president of the Research Libraries Group. He came to RLG from the administration team at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries in 1980. In those relatively early days of library automation, RLG was very much a chaotic start up. Jim, with both a MLS and an MBA, came on as the business manager and as part of the senior administrative team helped to get the organization on more stable footing. He was named RLG president in 1989.

In 2006, Jim once again played a key role in a time of uncertainty, helping to bring RLG into the OCLC fold. This included both integrating RLG data assets into OCLC services and bringing forward programmatic activities into OCLC Research. A key part of those programmatic activities is collaboration with the research library community, and the OCLC Research Library Partnership is a key component in driving our work agenda. Under Jim’s leadership, the Partnership has grown from 110 in 2006 to over 170 institutions now, including libraries at 25 of the top 30 universities in the Times Higher Education World University rankings.

Jim is a wise and gentle leader with a sardonic sense of humor. We’ve appreciated his ability to foster experimentation (and his patience while those experiments played out), his willingness to get obstacles out of our way so that we can get our work done, his tolerance of our quirks and other personal qualities, and his ability to maximize our strengths.

Jim’s retirement is part of a larger story that is playing out in the larger research library community as those who have overseen generations of change in technology, education, and policy are moving on. We will honor these leaders by following in their footsteps, while reminding ourselves that the path they set was marked by innovation.

As a digital archivist, when I’m working with exhibits, they are usually of the digital variety. However, when we wanted to make a splash for the launch of DigiNole: FSU’s Digital Repository which combines the digital library with the research repository, we knew we needed to do something a bit bold, a bit crazy and very impressive.

What’s Past is Pixels: Developing the FSU Digital Library is an exhibit opening today about our work on the digital library. Perhaps our introduction to the exhibit says it best:

For over 10 years Florida State University Libraries has hosted a digital library in some form or another. In that time technology has evolved, changing how we can interact with physical objects in a digital space. The FSU Digital Library continues to evolve as well.

Today, the Florida State University Digital Library, under DigiNole, our new digital platform, provides online access to thousands of unique manuscripts, photographs, pamphlets, rare books, historic maps and other materials from across the FSU campus libraries and beyond. Our goal is to support active learning and engagement by providing ample opportunities for discovery and scholarship. In order to achieve this goal new resources and projects are constantly being added to the digital library.

The exhibit takes you through the process of materials being selected, digitized, and described before they find their way into DigiNole. It then explores the new uses for materials that can occur in the digital environment and what the future may hold for the development of DigiNole over time.

We’re having some Opening Day festivities today for the new exhibit. A Coffee Talk at 10am, Cake (!) from 12-1pm and then a Closing Reception from 3-4pm. Also throughout the day, there will be demonstrations of DigiNole and what you can find and do with our materials.

What’s Past is Pixels: Developing the FSU Digital Library is located in the Strozier Library Exhibit Room and is open 10am to 4pm, Monday through Friday. It will be held from February 29 until April 8, 2016.

There is a new exhibition in the display cases in the Library. To coincide with the University’s recent Japan Week events, we have a display of books relating to Japan, some in Japanese and some in English. All of the books are from the Library’s collections.

Daguerreotype of Charles Thompson by Chandler Seaver, Jr., of Boston, ca 1855

Charles Thompson, custodian at Amherst College for more than 40 years in the second half of the 19^th century – do you know him?  Have you seen photographs of him before, perhaps in an old Olio yearbook?  For over 40 years Amherst students graduated and left town with a photograph of Charles Thompson in their copies of the yearbook.  Thompson was deeply connected with the College, and with the students’ experience of it, and there is no doubt that those who knew him remembered him fondly.

Most of what we know about Thompson’s life comes from a volume written to raise money for Thompson’s old age by President William Augustus Stearns’ daughter Abigail Eloise Lee.  I’ve looked at the book many times over the years, both for the purpose of learning about Thompson’s life and to find details about the College and town during those days.  Recently I looked at it again and this time I happened to focus on a passage in which Lee mentions Thompson’s experiences as a sailor.  I’d never noticed this information enough to wonder about it, but this time I did.

People who spoke with or heard about Thompson might have known about his years at sea.  Apparently he told stories about his adventures, first to the Stearns children, and then to people in Amherst.  In the years since his death, though, we’ve probably associated Thompson primarily with his work for the Stearns family and later for the College, while those years on a ship have been unexplored and would probably have been lost to history if it weren’t for Lee’s book.

Lee quotes from a manuscript of her father’s to describe Thompson’s career as a sailor:

and

Pres. William A. Stearns (ca. 1858), Thompson’s friend and employer.

In other words – and this is what interests me – by the time Charles Thompson followed the Stearns family to Amherst in the late 1850s he had seen far more of the world than had the great majority of the people who knew him, or thought they did.  It’s interesting to think about his experiences and what he learned as he traveled the seas in comparison to what the average citizen of Amherst – town or college – experienced or learned.  Were there times when someone said something to him that made him recall what he’d witnessed and done, and what they would never know?

I wanted to know more about Thompson’s history, so I turned to resources at my fingertips.

Lee had said that Stearns found a position for Thompson with a “Captain Charles Evans,” a mariner Stearns knew personally, and that his first trip was on a whaler, an experience he remembered vividly:

Investigations in the newspaper database and at the National Maritime Digital Library‘s “American Offshore Whaling Voyages: a Database”  led me to conclude that Thompson sailed with Charles Thomas Evans on his ship the Warren.  It’s certain that Charles Thomas Evans (not Charles A. Evans, another mariner) was Thompson’s employer: the dates, the ship names, and the details of his death match the clues.  What’s more, genealogical websites showed Evans was the husband of Stearns’ sister-in-law Lucy Drew Frazar.  She was Evans’ second wife, and the fact that the Stearns family knew her well explains how Thompson came to sail with Evans.

Lee writes that Thompson served as the steward on the Warren, which means that he served Evans in particular, along with other duties:

From the ship’s deck, Thompson would have witnessed scenes like this one, later prompting memories like the one quoted above:

Currier and Ives, “Whale Fishery,” via the Library of Congress.

Newspapers allow us to follow some of the Warren’s route between 1847 and 1851.  This evidence suggests that Thompson boarded the Warren in November 1847 while it was in Warren, Rhode Island, its home port.  From there, it went on a 41-month journey (click on first image to start slide show):

To make the point succinctly, Thompson’s voyages looked something like this:

Map via http://www.girlonawhaleship.org .

When the Warren returned from its long voyage, Evans seems to have decided he’d had enough of wrangling angry 45-ton mammals.  After about 9 months at home, he turned to merchant shipping and became the master of the Kremlin, a boat designed by his brother-in-law Amherst Alden Frazar.  According to Lee, Charles Thompson went on two voyages with Evans on the Kremlin.  They left New York in late February, 1852 for San Francisco and were reported sighted along South America on March 31.

Kremlin at latitude 6.14 S, longitude 31.40 W on March 31. (Daily Atlas newspaper, May 20, 1852.)

Meanwhile, the Warren was still sailing the seas.  Thompson was lucky not to be on it anymore: it burned on July 10, 1852.

On July 26, the Kremlin was nearing San Francisco when the crew sighted a ship in distress:

After providing assistance (no doubt with Thompson’s help as steward), the Kremlin sailed on toward San Francisco, arriving there on August 2.  The brig Rostrand limped in behind it.

The Kremlin and the Rostrand arrive in San Francisco (Daily Alta California, Volume 3, Number 214, 3 August 1852.)

Less than two months later Captain Evans died of “ship fever,” a ghastly way to go that involves infectious body lice.  Lee’s book  says that Charles Thompson tended Evans in his last illness and brought a lock of his hair home to Lucy Evans.

It took almost four months for the news to reach Evans’ family.

“We are well. You have doubtless heard of Uncle Henry’s death. Capt. Charles Evans died at sea of ship fever, Sept. last. The news has just arrived. He was, you know, Lucy Frazar’s husband.” William A. Stearns to brother Jonathan Stearns, 1853 Jan 17.

The Kremlin went on to Shanghai under the first mate, according to Thompson, and departed for London on October 23, 1852.  A newspaper report in a column titled “Via Quarantine”(perhaps for more cases of ship fever) shows it in London in the spring of 1853; June newspaper accounts have it arriving in Boston on June 8 or 9, 1853.  This was the end of Thompson’s life as a sailor.

Charles Thompson at the College well, ca. 1860.

Altogether, then, Thompson was at sea for a total of about 4 ½ years, beginning with a whaling voyage of 41 months (late November 1847 to sometime in May, 1851) through two additional voyages from early 1852, through his return to New England in June, 1853.  He remained in the Boston area for a few years and then moved to Amherst to be with the Stearns family.  Amherst must’ve seemed very quiet after his life at sea, and perhaps he preferred it that way.

**********************************************

While researching Charles Thompson’s history, I came across many fascinating sites about the history of whaling. In addition to those mentioned in the text above, here is a selection of great resources:

The New Bedford Whaling Museum , including many additional links under the tab “Digital Scholarship.”

The Whaling Museum of the Nantucket Historical Association, including pages about the whaler Essex, and the 2015 movie about it, “In the Heart of the Sea”

Mystic Seaport, with links to online materials.

The Smithsonian, with a page on whaling, including a section on African American sailors: “On the Water”

The Northeast Document Conservation Center’s project to conserve a logbook: “Starboard Boat Struck a Whale.”

Maritime Heritage Project, a “free research tool for those seeking history of passengers, ships, captains, merchants and merchandise sailing into California during the mid-to-late 1800s.”

Detailed article: Spatial and Seasonal Distribution of American Whaling and Whales in the Age of Sail. Smith TD, Reeves RR, Josephson EA, Lund JN (2012) PLoS ONE 7(4): e34905. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0034905

A blog not to be missed: Data narratives and structural histories: Melville, Maury, and American whaling

In late November, I attended the annual conference of the Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA) in Portland, Oregon. Here are a few of the highlights.

Portlandia at night

HACK DAY

Once again, AMIA partnered with the Digital Library Foundation (DLF) on a one-day event where archivists and developers could work together on digital problems. This year’s award-winning projects were:

• “Exporting OpenRefine clusters and TIDY” by Team Data Detox, which created the ability to export the problem portion of a large metadata set from OpenRefine and created a tool called “Tool for Improving Data Yourself” (TIDY). The purpose is to analyze messy data in different ways in order to decide how to fix it.
• “ffmprovisr”, led by Ashley Blewer, built on projects from the last two hack days which helped audiovisual archivists use an open source program called ffmpeg for their work by providing documentation and pre-formulated code for common commands.
• “OAIS edit-a-thon”, led by Shira Pelzman, read the current 135-page Open Archival Information System standard for digital preservation, which is under review, and proposed changes. I participated in this team.

Word cloud analysis of artist’s names. Created by Team Data Detox (Kathryn Gronsbell, Cora Johnson-Roberson, Michelle Roell and Caleb Sayan).

SOFTWARE PRESERVATION

Preservation of software—games and other programs—is beginning to be addressed on a larger scale than it has been before. Charlotte Thai presented on Stanford University’s collaboration with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) on a project to document, copy and preserve the Cabrinety Collection, a donation of more than 18,000 unique software packages in many formats. They create forensic disk images; produce photographic documentation of all the materials, including the packaging; and will ingest the files into Stanford’s Digital Repository. To verify that the files have remained unchanged, they produce checksums. One side benefit of this project is that a set of these checksums are provided to law enforcement. When a computer is confiscated, running these checksums against the contents of the hard drive can identify standard software and games so that law enforcement can focus their examination on the other, more suspicious files.

Screenshot from demonstration of OLIVE Executable Archive with educational software. Screenshot from https://olivearchive.org/demo/

Eric Kaltman of the University of California at Santa Cruz spoke about the preservation of software games, the enormity of the problem, and the successes and problems with current preservation efforts. They have so far identified 116 different game platforms and 28 different operating systems. The Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator (MAME) is an open source project to provide access to old games. The OLIVE Executable Archive will allow someone to use the software they make available online, including games, educational software, browsers and word processing. See Stanford’s How They Got Game site for more information.

PREFORMA PROJECT

PREFORMA is a project funded by the European Commission to determine the best PREservation FORMAts for cultural information. The purpose is to define standardized file formats suited for long-term preservation and provide open source software tools to verify that files conform to the standard.

MediaConch in action. Screenshot from presentation given by Ashley Blewer, Dave Rice and Erwin Verbruggen.]

One of the formats in the project is one that we funded early specifications for (as part of our video digitization program) and have been using since 2011: moving images encoded with the ffv1 codec and packaged in a Matroska (MKV) container. It is a very efficient codec, and has allowed us to create small compressed video files with no loss of information (“lossless”). The ffv1/MKV combination had been recently accepted by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF, the body that approves internet technical standards) as the lossless video standard for the internet. This will help archives by encouraging widespread adoption of the format beyond just archival use. The checking software for standards conformance being developed for AV formats is called MediaConch and is currently available as downloadable software. MediaConch is working with Artefactual, who created the software we use for digital preservation and access, to test MediaConch and integrate the tools into the Archivematica digital preservation software. See here for an in-depth report on this presentation, with slides.

The 2015 AMIA conference was a valuable exchange of the latest information in audiovisual preservation and access.

Please welcome Micah Vandegrift and Sarah Stanley from the Office of Digital Research and Scholarship (DRS) here at FSU for a guest post on a project we have worked closely with them to bring to the FSU Digital Library.

GIF made with the NYPL Labs Stereogranimator

One of the best things about working in what we’re calling “digital scholarship” is the chance to collaborate with scholars on unique projects. Several years ago, one such project walked in the door of our special collections research center. Jennifer Pride, a doctoral candidate in Art History, was the fortunate recipient of the late Courtauld Professor John House’s vast collection of stereoscopes, which she decided to donate to the Department of Art History. Several of our librarians and archivists met with Jennifer and decided on a course of action.

The primary goal of the project is to build an online collection of the material, allowing scholars and the public to enjoy and learn from it. Jennifer had learned the late professor’s collection strategy and organization, and had already begun scanning some images for her own research. After an initial meeting with Matthew Miguez, our metadata librarian, Jennifer completed the description of about 700 images. The physical materials were then transferred to our Digital Library Center, where Stuart Rochford, Studio Manager, processed and digitized the stereographs. These digitized versions were then loaded and made publicly available through the FSU Digital Library.

This is where the newly-formed Office of Digital Research and Scholarship comes in. One of our areas of interest is the creative reuse of digital collections. We often talk about digital scholarship as being the layer of context, visualization, or analysis that sits on top of a collection of material. Based on the uniqueness of this type of photography, and the collection’s distinct place in space and time, we decided to quickly attempt a “proof of concept” project with a few items.

The NYPL (New York Public Library) Lab’s Stereogranimator was a perfect first test. This tool was designed to take stereographs, two images, and allow you, the (re)user, to mash the images together in creative ways. We GIF-ized a few and 3D-ified some others as you can see below. Fun with history and the internet!

GIF made with the NYPL Labs Stereogranimator

Another activity often done with geographic/culturally recognizable objects is finding a way to place them back in their location. HistoryPin is a tool built on Google Street View that allows the (re)user to “drop a pin,” like a historical photograph, directly where the thing existed once upon a time. So, we took stereogranimated images (not the best quality) and placed a few of them around Paris.

As proof of concepts, both of these show that the John House Stereograph collection is deeply useful and has great potential for further study. We plan to continue to work with Jennifer and other Art Historians to explore the stories and patterns that emerge from this digitally re-presented collection. What would you do with 1400 digitized 3D stereographs of Paris from the 1850’s to early 1900s?!

There are a pair of questions that pop up again and again in Mayor John Lindsay’s early press conferences, to his ever fresh annoyance. “What can you tell us about the SanitationTransitWelfareCabdriversTeachers strike?”, and “What are you doing to clean up the Village?”

While the former lends some credence to the notion that the New York Lindsay had inherited January 1, 1966 was indeed “ungovernable” from the outset, with strike upon strike landing on the young, stumbling, beleaguered administration, the latter makes one wonder if Lindsay ever bothered to try to govern in the first place.

The version of the Village question posed on December 29, 1967, asks the mayor for comment on a recent decision handed down from New York State Supreme Court Justice Charles A. Tierney ordering Lindsay, Commissioner of Licenses Joel Tyler, and Police Commissioner Howard Leary to enforce existing laws concerning the rash of unlicensed coffeehouses dotting MacDougal Street. Lindsay can barely hide his frustration.

The problem of “unlicensed coffeehouses” might seem innocuous today, but it wasn’t at the time. Coffeehouses in 1967 New York had to have a special kind of cabaret license to have live music with drums and vocals. They also had to close at 3 AM and were subject to a variety of regulations intended to keep the peace with local residents. When Lindsay, reporters, and others refer to “unlicensed coffeehouses,” they are referring to restaurants, legal in many other ways, which flaunted the cabaret laws of the time, playing live music, employing aggressive “sidewalk hawkers” to hustle in clientele, and staying open well after 3 AM, serving alcohol long past their allotted midnight cutoff. These “restaurants” were allowed only incidental music performed by at most “3 string[ed] instruments, plus an accordion and a piano.” No singing, no drums. They frequently had both.

When Lindsay was set to take office there were approximately 25 such unlicensed coffeehouses in the area. The number of licensed ones in the neighborhood was 6. Such a surfeit of activity was naturally a huge attraction to the City’s youth, but it was getting out of hand. It was felt that by enforcing current laws, the disorder plaguing the area could be brought under control.

The majority of the locals merely wanted peace and quiet, and the young people a place to hang, but once attention to the issue of scofflaw coffeehouses had risen beyond the local level, a thinly veiled subtext emerged, one that washed out the nuanced views of all those intimately involved – it became an intergenerational conflict between young, white hippies gone to seed, occupying the east coast Hashbury of MacDougal Street and Washington Square Park, and the staunch and strict middle-class values of the area’s long-standing old-law tenement residents.

The boisterous boho allure of 1960s Greenwich Village seems to have been a constant concern during the early months of Lindsay’s first term. Even before, in fact. In 1965, just before his election as mayor, Lindsay had met with the MacDougal Street Area Neighborhood Association (MSANA) and Emanuel “Wally” Popolizio, their president, to discuss the problem of the unlicensed coffeehouses along the street.

Lindsay’s initial solution was to send unpaid assistant (and future disgraced ex-Water Commissioner) James Marcus to clear up the problem in a series of February 1966 meetings with the MSANA. (Lindsay wisely but disingenuously declines to mention this in the December 29th, 1967 press conference we present above, with Marcus’ kickback indictment having occurred December 18, a mere 11 days earlier.) While Marcus was appalled by state of MacDougal Street after a Friday night visit in March of ’66, saying “[t]he situation in the Village now is really desperate” and arguing for a curfew, according to Popolizio, “nothing came of the [February] meetings, except that after they stopped MacDougal Street was really wide open.”

Curiously, Marcus ultimately sought to absolve himself of some of the guilt from his later transgressions by turning in Carmine DeSapio, from whom he had taken bribes during his tenure as water commissioner. Whether their relationship began here is unclear, but it’s interesting that at the time, DeSapio was a newly anachronistic Tammany man, recently deposed as Democratic District Leader for the Village by a young Ed Koch, coincidentally enough the other main shaker in the local fight to shut down MacDougal Street’s unlicensed coffeeshops. The future congressman and New York City mayor Koch cut his political teeth in this and other battles, beginning his long rise in New York politics here. In the December 29th press conference a reporter asks Lindsay if partisan politics played a role in the MacDougal controversies. One can’t help but wonder if he’s in part asking about Koch.

By May of 1966, Koch and Popolizio were fed up, and were pondering litigation. Said Koch at the time, “You can’t keep telling the residents to suffer through the weekly hell of those noisy crowds while nothing is done.” Koch also mooted moving the coffeehouses to a special district, something Art D’Lugoff, proprietor of nearby club The Village Gate, would call a “demagogic, dangerous, irresponsible, laughable thing.” Lindsay’s efforts were no better. What likely felt like compromise to Lindsay often came across as contradiction, and frustrations were rising. Neither side was satisfied, and a year later Lindsay was still struggling to rein in the inconsistencies of his administration’s actions:

The MSANA eventually sued the city and 1967 saw the suit climbing up the courts, culminating in the decision against Lindsay, Tyler, and Leary, and the December 29 post-decision press conference heard at the top of the page. Lindsay did not bring up the decision by choice that day, preferring instead to describe the new NYPD computer dispatch system and quash rumors of a Kerner Commission minority report. He was, however, fully prepared to voice his disapproval of Tierney’s “rather extraordinary decision” and mount an aggressive and obviously prepared-in-advance defense if asked. And he was.

We’ll leave it to you to listen to the recording to hear the finer points of Lindsay’s elaborate reply to Tierney’s ruling, but essentially he argued the following: he had addressed the complaint. He had done so by stepping up a specially trained law enforcement unit, the tactical police force, to the MacDougal Street area. Moreover, commissioner of licenses Joel Tyler had been increasing his department’s activity in the Village, reducing the number of unlicensed coffeehouses along MacDougal by nearly 20. Lindsay chose not to reveal that the presence of the tactical police force, essentially a special crowd control unit, was something that Koch and Popolizio had conceded was helpful over a year and a half ago, but was not what Lindsay and others had been ordered to enforce – Lindsay et al. had been ordered to enforce licenses. Lindsay blamed the lack of enforcement mainly on the courts’ failure to pursue the fines the licensing commission had doled out, but either way, Lindsay’s efforts fell short of satisfying Koch, Popolizio, and the MSANA – MacDougal Street was still a lively, noisy mess.

But, there was another side to Lindsay’s argument – that young people do need a place to congregate and, well, be young, and this was something he was loath to stamp out. Perhaps Lindsay was merely sweeping his MacDougal Street failures to the side, but it seems here that this was something he truly valued. In fact, the need for kids to have a place to hang is something all parties seemed to value, albeit in different ways – Koch’s political talents were sharpened by navigating both sides of the generational fault line MacDougal Street had seemingly become, while Popolizio fought for affordable artist housing in the Village before and after, asking “how can you create progress without creativity?”. Lindsay too later found himself mutually estranged from the law-and-order Republican Party on this and other issues, eventually switching to the Democratic Party after a brief Liberal Party limbo.

Tierney’s ruling wasn’t the last word on the issue, he reiterated his order in January of 1968 and another court later reversed it, but it was certainly the loudest. Immediately following the ruling a pair of area offenders, Four Winds Coffeehouse and Cafe Flamenco were publicly slapped with hefty fines, but for the most part Macdougal Street’s problems simply faded from media attention. Whether those problems had been solved or were merely lost in the shuffle of the City’s news cycle isn’t obvious today. Lindsay moved on to other battles, and Koch continued his political ascent, eventually becoming mayor, where he hired Popolizio to head the City’s Housing Authority. The Village Gate remained a neighborhood fixture until 1994, while Tierney heard new cases until his 1982 retirement and Marcus, well, he had a hearing of his own.

It’s hard to imagine today’s gentrified MacDougal Street inspiring such fervor – the former Four Winds location is now home to a ramen restaurant and the erstwhile Flamenco serves pizza by the slice to hungry NYU students (The Village Gate is a chain pharmacy) – but there are hints of its former glories here and there, echoing voices of the past careening along the chaotic and storied street. 

Audio courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives WNYC Collection.

WNYC archives id: 92388 (92500, 150334)

Municipal archives id: T2336, T2337 (T1834, T1871)

In 1967, the FBI arrested New York Water Commissioner James Marcus for taking kickbacks from the mob. Marcus was a close friend of Mayor John V. Lindsay, and his arrest was one of the most personally embarrassing political scandals of Lindsay’s career. In this press conference, Lindsay responds to reporters’ questions about the arrest and tries to assure New Yorkers that their elected officials are not for sale.

James Marcus was first hired in 1965 as a non-paid aide for Lindsay, dealing with issues like the clean up of MacDougal Street. Despite various scandals and even a lawsuit, he had a precipitous rise: one year later, in 1966, he was appointed the city’s Commissioner of Water, Gas, and Electric. Young, handsome, and well connected, Marcus moved well among the social circles of prominent Northeast families: he was married to the niece of Ambassador John Cabot Lodge and was a rising star in New York City politics.

Marcus’ glossy personal and professional histories, however, were a total fraud.

Various accounts describe Marcus as having dropped out of two or three different colleges despite claiming to be a law school graduate.  His entree into Lindsay’s inner circle was partially a result of his fabricating his resume experience with successful careers in business, finance, and public relations. Marcus gave everyone around him the impression he had family money, but at the time of the investigation, he was knee deep in debt to some unsavory loan sharks. In short, James Marcus was a dream come true for the Cosa Nostra. His financial woes and secret past were perfect weaknesses to exploit.

Lucchese crime family boss Antonio “Tony Ducks” Corallo leaned on Marcus.  As head of the city’s utilities, Marcus controlled construction contracts for the city’s water, gas, and electric infrastructure. Corallo convinced Marcus to award an $800,000 no-bid contract to contractor ST Grand, Inc., to cleanup the Jerome Park Reservoir in the North Bronx.  In exchange, the two would split a $40,000 kickback. The bribery scheme was exposed in the fall of 1966. Later, it blossomed into an even bigger bribery conspiracy when the FBI eventually laid down a series of indictments for Lindsay allies, including prominent politicians like former Tammany Hall leader Carmine DeSapio, whom Marcus testified against in a separate trial.

This press conference takes place right after Marcus’ 1967 arrest. Mayor Lindsay tries to position himself above the fray, adopting a bureaucratic tone in answering reporters questions.  The mayor explains the contract vetting process, the necessity for no-bid awards in “emergency situations,” and the integrity of the administrative process. Ultimately, Lindsay passes the buck to his newly appointed Commissioner of Investigations, Arnold G. Fraiman, and sidesteps several questions about other internal corruption allegations.

In time, the bribery scandal was not as far reaching as some in the press had hoped.  Corruption was exposed, but other top Lindsay officials remained unscathed, and the Marcus Affair was eventually dwarfed by many other problems that plagued Lindsay during his tenure. And yet, it seemed made for the movies – as perfect as any good pulp fiction. Main characters were a mafia hit-man and a suave political insider with a troubled financial past. Mayor Lindsay was a polished political dilettante whose good looks and squeaky-clean image contrasted starkly with the city’s seedier underbelly. And, of course, there was the backdrop of New York City in the 1960s, oozing charming urban grit. And who can forget all those stylishly noir men wearing hats.

Audio courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives WNYC Collection.

WNYC archives id: 150338
Municipal archives id: T1992

It’s Fair Use Week and lots of libraries are getting on board, offering workshops, infographics, tips, and drop in office hours that are all geared towards encouraging fair use of copyrighted materials. For some awesome examples, check out the #fairuseweek2016 hash tag on Twitter.

This is great and good activity but also a reminder (to me) that all too often, libraries, archives, and museums can be unnecessary gatekeepers when it comes to cultural heritage. We blogged about this last year and pointed to Michelle Light’s talk Controlling Goods or Promoting the Public Good: Choices for Special Collections in the Marketplace — this article calls for for an end to inappropriate control of intellectual property rights, and calls for us to change our practices around charging permission fees for use of archival materials.

Boy Scouts – With giant American flag. From The New York Public Library,

Earlier this year, and with much fanfare, the New York Public Library announced that they had released digital access to their public domain materials, making it easy for the public to use and reuse more than 180,000 digitized items. This was an important milestone to be sure, but perhaps hidden amidst the excitement about “free for all” was the fact that NYPL also does not put restrictions around use of materials that are in copyright or where copyright status is unknown. They have provided a nice request that you credit NYPL and link back to the item in NYPL Digital Collections (and, they make it dead easy to get that link in their system).

So, as you cook up your own celebrations during Fair Use Week, I encourage you to think about other ways you can empower researchers and other users, and consider how you can get out of the way in reproductions and permissions practices (and become one of the Good Guys).

The PIDB continues to hold to the principle of an Open Government recognizing that an informed citizenry strengthens our democracy. We realize that more work needs to be done on the important commitments articulated in the Third National Action Plan for Open Government, particularly streamlining the declassification process. Related to this initiative to limit secrecy to the minimum necessary is the commitment to modernize the implementation of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) across government.

Please join us on March 14, 2016, at National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) to celebrate Sunshine Week 2016. The Office of Government Information Services will hold a series of lectures and panel discussions with experts in Open Government, technology and the FOIA process in NARA’s William G. McGowan Theater from 1:00 until 4:30 p.m. The event is free and open to the public but you must register by March 11. Additionally, NARA will offer a live webcast of the event for those who are not in the DC area. Please register to attend here.

Sunshine Week is a national initiative to promote a dialogue about the importance of open government and freedom of information. Participants include news media, civic groups, libraries, nonprofits, schools and others interested in the public’s right to know. The American Society of News Editors launched Sunshine Week in 2005 to focus attention on the importance of open government. This year’s events will take place the week of March 13-19, 2016. Sunshine Week 2016 is particularly meaningful because this year is the 50th anniversary of the signing of the FOIA.

The Archivist of the United States, David Ferriero, will open the event with introductory remarks to begin the afternoon’s events. A list of impressive speakers including Richard L. “Dick” Huff, Miriam Nisbet, Andrew Lih, Archon Fung, and other leading advocates for open government initiatives, will discuss recent changes to FOIA and the promise of technology (from both inside and outside of government) to improve transparency. Be sure to check out the updated agenda on the OGIS website.

We hope to see you at this important celebration of Open Government.

Having recently seen The Lady in the Van (three times!) I was reminded of how much I have enjoyed the work of Alan Bennett over the years—which led me to his Untold Stories, published in 2005.  In a section on “Art, Architecture and Authors” he writes:

“Sometimes when one’s reading a book, a novel say, you come across a thought or a feeling, which you’ve had yourself, and, thinking it peculiar to yourself, you haven’t expressed or communicated it…and now here it is set down by someone else.  And it’s as if a hand has come out and taken yours.”

Original Caption: The Librarian Carefully Enters the Consignment Into Her Books, 12/1952. Records of the U.S. Information Agency. National Archives Identifier 23932351

Doesn’t happen to me often, but often enough for Bennett’s words to strike home.  I will sometimes be struck by a thought or use of language that makes me pause, reread, sometimes record, and always savor the moment.  What I’m Reading.

Even in his eighties Frank Lloyd Wright had a wicked sense of humor. In 1953 the infamous architect was awarded a Gold Medal in Architecture at the American Academy and the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Another giant of architecture, Ralph Walker, presents the award and his speech begins like a bit of a roast. “Certainly you are neither a shy cowslip to be gathered casually on a lower pasture in Wisconsin, nor have you been a recluse cloistered in a garden high on Taliesin. On the contrary you have built not one but many Amazonian mousetraps and the world has beaten their well-worn and widening path in merited appreciation.”

The emboldened Wright does not hesitate to fire back, “Ladies and Gentleman I had no idea how outrageously inadequate this introduction by Mr. Ralph Walker would be.” He goes on to describe the feeling of winning awards, “I think it casts a shadow on my native arrogance and for a moment I feel coming on this disease, which is recommended so highly, of humility.” Despite all this good natured ribbing, Walker presents the award with glowing admiration and Wright accepts with all the modesty he can possibly muster.

Ralph Walker is credited with designing New York City’s first sky scraper, The Barclay-Vesey Telephone Building (now known as the Verizon Building) on 140 West Street, as well as many other art deco masterpieces. The awards were hosted by poet, writer and librarian Archibald MacLeish who you hear at the beginning and end of the recording.

Audio courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives WNYC Collection.

WNYC archives id: 150189
Municipal archives id: LT3423

Hear more recordings with Frank Lloyd Wright in the Archives 

In this digital world we are increasingly creating, storing, and publishing material entirely in electronic forms. While this is great for the trees and other resources used in making paper, it introduces new challenges in the process of collecting and preserving materials.

The preservation needs of paper are pretty well understood. Guidelines for ideal environments (heat and humidity) and practices (handling and storage) have been in constant refinement for hundreds of years. The libraries, archives, and information science communities only began thinking about preservation for digital material comparatively recently. This first post of a three part series on digital preservation will take a look at the challenges unique to preserving digital materials, and why we must approach digital preservation differently than physical preservation.

What might be surprising to many is the relative fragility of digital assets. Estimates put the average operation life of conventional digital storage media at five years. These failures occur in more than just the physical components: magnetic media are sensitive to anything generating a magnetic field from batteries to the sun! Optical discs can suffer from manufacturing errors or material degradation making them unreadable. Additionally, once damaged, a digital resource is often completely lost. Physical material might be salvaged through conservation. Recovering digital assets after damage is much more difficult.

Complicating the practice of digital preservation is the fact that digital materials are meaningless without the correct hardware and software environments to render them. Consider a printed book. The information conveyed by a book is encoded with ink marks made on paper. So long as the rules of the encoding language (that is, the language it is written in) and the marks on the paper persist, the information in the book can be recalled. The ink won’t independently leave the paper and reorganize into different patterns and structures.

This is exactly what happens to digital information. The long strings of characters encoding digital assets is only intelligible to a narrow band of both software and specific hardware configurations. Many of us have likely encountered the situation of being unable to open an old file in a newer version of software. Software developers are constantly adding and removing features to their products, often with little attention to backwards compatibility. Merely storing the digital encoding (or bitstream) is meaningless without also storing instructions on how to rebuild it back into an understandable, rendered product.

These extra considerations compound when you consider the speed of technological advances, and the new behaviors and interactive experiences we’re building and sharing with our machines and networks. Even identifying what behaviors and functions of digital assets are important to intellectual understanding of the resource is a quagmire. Those of us thinking about digital preservation have ceded a pretty large head-start, and the race is constantly accelerating.

In the next posting of this blog series, I’ll cover some strategies currently being used by the digital preservation community. I’ll finish this series with a post what you can do yourself to safe-guard your digital works and memories.

Virgil Hawkins, J. Raymond Henderson, and C.K. Steele, circa 1955. From 00/MSS 2006-013.

Reverend Charles Kenzie (C.K.) Steele Sr. arrived in Tallahassee during a significant time in its history.  After graduating from the School of Religion at Morehouse College in 1938, and serving congregations in Montgomery, Alabama, and Atlanta, Georgia, Steele came to Tallahassee in 1952 as the newly-appointed pastor of Bethel Missionary Baptist Church.  Reverend Steele later rose to local and national prominence as a civil rights activist during the Tallahassee Bus Boycott of 1956.

Presumably inspired by the 1953 bus boycott in Baton Rouge, Louisiana (led by Reverend T.J. Jemison, a friend of Steele’s),  and the better-known 1955 bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, involving Dr. Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks, Florida A&M University (FAMU) students began boycotting Tallahassee city buses in late May 1956, after two black students were arrested for sitting in bus seats reserved for white passengers.  A subsequent crossburning at the residence of the two students galvanized the FAMU student body and inspired them to action.  The boycott quickly drew in community members as well, and an Inter-Civic Council was created to organize and maintain the boycott.  Reverend Steele was elected as its president.  Steele recognized the need for a local organization to take charge, for if a national organization like the NAACP were involved, the boycott would be vulnerable to charges of “outside agitation.”  Steele was not just a figurehead, but endured many personal hazards while executing the boycott.  He was arrested four times in a single day while operating a carpool for black people boycotting the bus, on charges of operating a transportation system without a franchise.  He also endured the firebombing of his home (near the present-day site of Bethel Missionary Baptist Church).  However, the boycott successfully brought attention to the segregation policies of the city bus system, and catalyzed the eventual integration of the buses two years later.

In an address to Florida State University Black Studies students in 1978 on the topic of non-violent resistance, Steele touched on meeting with Dr. King in Montgomery, the origins of the 1956 Tallahassee bus boycott, human nature, and the power of love:

In late 1956, noted civil rights organizer Bayard Rustin phoned Steele to ask him to lead a conference of Southern civil rights leaders.  Steele respectfully declined, and suggested that Dr. Martin Luther King would be a more fitting leader for the group.  Steele helped organize the first meeting of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in January 1957.  When King was called away from the meeting in response to church bombings in Montgomery, it was SCLC vice-president Steele who conducted that first conference.

C.K. Steele’s legacy in Tallahassee is evident in many ways.  In 1979, shortly before his death the next year from bone cancer, Steele was awarded an honorary doctorate by Florida State University, the first African-American so honored by FSU.  Appropriately, the current hub of the city bus system is named C.K. Steele Plaza, featuring a sculpture of Steele.  Bethel Empowerment Foundation, Inc. , a sister organization to Steele’s former congregation at Bethel Missionary Baptist Church, has operated the Steele-Collins Charter Middle School since 1996, honoring both Reverend Steele and former Florida governor LeRoy Collins for their work in advancing civil rights in Tallahassee and beyond.

Sources:

Magnum, Jeff. (December 3, 1979). Steele receives honorary degree. Florida Flambeau, page 9. https://archive.org/stream/Florida_Flambeau_1979_Dec#page/n8/mode/1up

Padgett, Gregory B. (1994). C. K. Steele, a biography (Doctoral dissertation). http://purl.flvc.org/fcla/dl/FS00000104.jpg

Tallahassee Civil Rights Oral History Collection (01/MSS 1990-001). Special Collections & Archives, Florida State University Libraries, Tallahassee, Florida. http://purl.fcla.edu/fsu/MSS_1990-001

Rory Grennan is Manuscript and Instruction Archivist at Florida State University Libraries Special Collections & Archives.

In a period when the film critic was becoming more and more integral and popular ideas about the image began to circulate in everyday discussion, silent films, and especially their stars, became increasingly interesting to the general public. Lindsay Anderson’s personal collection of film books houses a number of picture books from this era: collections of stills and glamour shots, occasionally accompanied by descriptions of films or brief histories. These books, besides providing context, stories, and interesting pictures, are a window to two worlds – that of silent cinema and that of its ‘70s revival – which speak to our own.

The biggest difference between these picture books and the few of this kind that were published before 1970 is the shift in intended audience. Older books, like the 1959 Classics of the Silent Screen, call on people’s memories. The introduction appeals to a certain generation, stating its aims as “a rich sampling of some of the highspots of the silent era… to bring back happy memories to those who remember the films and players and to stimulate interest and an eagerness to see them among those who are too young.” For later books, like The Heart of Hollywood or Hollywood Glamor Portraits, the aim becomes more to teach readers about the past and to create a kind of glamorous nostalgia.

Sometimes, the aim is more concrete, as in “ Grandma’s Scrapbook” of Silent Movie Stars , which covertly documents the worth of famous silent actors’ signed photos and teaches readers to distinguish between real and fake signatures while still providing a dizzying collage of artfully assembled glamour shots.

A selection of titles from Lindsay Anderson’s book collection.

Of course, there were a number of reasons for this revival of interest in Old Hollywood, whether more about the profit to be gained or the pure nostalgia involved. It has been argued that we are experiencing another such revival in the 21st century, but for a much different reason. Slideshows, articles, and “best of” lists from well-known companies like TCM or AFI have in many ways taken the place of these picture books. Widespread accessibility to the Internet means wider access to silent films which would otherwise be much more difficult to find. All the same, these books are an enjoyable window into the past, and a reminder that Old, Old Hollywood is not always so different from our own.

(Abigail Jenkins, M Litt Film, 2015)

We here at Special Collections and Archives would like to wish George Washington a happy birthday. Though President’s Day was originally created to honor our nation’s first Commander in Chief, many states have since adapted it into a joint celebration which includes Abraham Lincoln’s and George Washington’s birthdays.

President’s day, federally known as Washington’s Day, originally fell on George Washington’s birthday, February 22 but in 1971 was moved to the 3rd Monday of February under the Uniform Monday Holiday Act. Montana, Minnesota, Utah and Colorado all recognize today as an official holiday honoring both Washington and Lincoln, whose birthday was on February 12th. With election season in full swing, we’d like to take the time to honor all of the United States’ presidents.

Recently cataloged:

The Adventures of Valentine Vaux, or, The Tricks of a Ventriloquist / by Timothy Portwine

This is another “penny dreadful” (you can read an earlier post about others in our collection). “Timothy Portwine” was actually the prolific Thomas Peckett Prest, who also wrote many parodies (or plagiarisms!) of Dickens’ works under the pseudonym “Bos.” Prest or his contemporary James Malcolm Rymer are usually credited with the authorship of The String of Pearls, or, The Barber of Fleet Street, in which the character Sweeney Todd had his first appearance. Valentine Vaux is a parody/plagiarism/lampoon of Henry Cockton’s The Life and Adventures of Valentine Vox, the Ventriloquist.

In my earlier post I referenced the Barry Ono Collection of Penny Dreadfuls held by the British Library. Since that time, a new resource has become available: researchers at Amherst, Mount Holyoke, Smith, or UMass Amherst now have access to a digitized version of that same collection via Nineteenth Century Collections Online (Amherst College log-in required).

Our copy of Valentine Vaux happens to have a great ownership inscription, in this case a kind of “borrower beware” statement:

This belongs to Frederick Smith, 1840

If thou art borrowed by a friend

Right welcome shall he be

To read to study not to Lend

But to return to me

–

Not that imparted Knowledge doth

Diminish learnings store

But books I find if often lent

Return to me no more

This same rhyme has been noted in many nineteenth century books, both inscribed and as printed bookplates. For those interested, there is a good overview of this practice in “Traditional Flyleaf Rhymes” (in Folklore and Book Culture by Kevin J. Hayes). Other examples have been blogged about by the Bodleian Libraries Department of Special Collections and the University of Pennsylvania Libraries. This is the first one I have encountered, and I’ll certainly keep an eye out for more.

Yesterday we talked about some major projects, supported by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, documenting the contributions of African Americans to the American Story. While the history of Emancipation and the collected papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., are vital to understanding of our democracy, history, and culture, there are many other chapters:

The Oblate Sisters of Providence

The Oblate Sisters of Providence is the first successful Roman Catholic sisterhood in the world established by women of African descent. It was the work of a French-born Sulpician priest and four women, who were part of the Caribbean refugee colony which began arriving in Baltimore, Maryland in the late 18th century. The order founded the oldest continuously operating school for black Catholic children in the United States and is still educating children in Baltimore. A grant from the NHPRC helped the Oblate Sisters process and make available the historical photograph and scrapbook collection of approximately 16,000 photographs dating from the 1850s to 2003, including this touching image of orphans under their care.

Early 20th century photograph from the St. Frances Academy School, courtesy Oblate Sisters of Providence

Lena Horne

Lena Horne (1917–2010) was an American singer, dancer, actress, and civil rights activist. In a recording preserved by Pacifica Radio Archives with NHPRC support, Horne discusses her life and career, civil rights, Billie Holiday, Joe Lewis, Humphrey Bogart, and other people in her life. You can listen at https://soundcloud.com/pacificaradioarchives/lena-horne-1966-interview

Lena Horne publicity photo, c. 1950s

The Auburn Avenue Researcher Libraries

The Auburn Avenue Researcher Libraries in Atlanta received funds from the NHPRC to digitize and make Web-accessible eleven late 19th and mid-20th century manuscript collections that document the historical development of education for African Americans, primarily in the South, from the early 1860s to the early 1950s. One collection is the archives of Annie L. McPheeters, one of the first African American professional librarians in the Atlanta Public Library and an influential proponent of African American culture and history. Educated at Clark University in Atlanta, she earned a degree in English, with a minor in education in 1929. During the early part of her career, she served as city and county librarian at the Greenville Public Library, where she drove the bookmobile throughout the county’s rural areas, seeing first-hand the desire of many African Americans to learn and have access to books. In 1934 she took a job at the Auburn Branch of the Atlanta Public Library as an assistant librarian. She set out to remedy the branch’s problems of low library use by developing several initiatives, including the Adult Education Project, and launched the Negro History Collection. Two years later, she was promoted to full librarian, becoming one of the first African American professional librarians in the Atlanta Public Library. Her papers are housed in the Archives Division of the Auburn Avenue Research Library.

Grace Marilynn James, M.D.

Grace Marilynn James, M.D., (1923-1989) spent her life caring for the African American community of Louisville, Kentucky, who often had little access to regular health care. She was the first African American woman on the staff of Louisville Children’s Hospital and on the faculty at the University of Louisville School of Medicine, and served as a role model and advocate for African Americans considering a career in medicine. The National Library of Medicine includes Dr. James in their special online exhibition “Changing the Face of Medicine: Celebrating America’s Women Physicians.” The University of Louisville holds Dr. James’s papers, and they were processed through a grant from the NHPRC. A finding aid is available through the Kentucky Digital Library.

Dr. Grace M. James, c. 1953, with a young patient. Photo courtesy David James, National Library of Medicine

Thomas “Blind Tom” Wiggins

Thomas “Blind Tom” Wiggins (1849 – 1908) was an African-American musical prodigy. Born into slavery, he began composing music at age five, and he was hired out at the age of eight years to concert promoter Perry Oliver, who toured him extensively in the US, performing as often as four times a day. He was called the “human mockingbird” and was said to be able to reproduce songs after hearing them a single time. During the 19th century, he was one of the best-known American performing pianists, performing at the White House for President Buchanan in 1860. Geneva Handy Southall began researching “Blind Tom” during her Ph.D. studies, and she later wrote three books: Blind Tom: the Post-Civil War Enslavement of a Black Musical Genius (1979), The Continuing Enslavement of Blind Tom: the Black Pianist-Composer (1983), and Blind Tom, the Black Pianist Composer: Continually Enslaved (1999). She spent more than 30 years researching Blind Tom’s life and music and also made the first recording of his music. She was inducted into the Black Musicians Hall of Fame in 1988 and was a former board member of the National Association of Negro Musicians. The NHPRC funded the preservation of Dr. Southall’s papers at Emory University. A documentary on “Blind Tom,” with contributions by Dr. Southall, is online at http://vimeo.com/56242237

Arabella Chapman

One of our favorite collections was truly hidden. The Arabella Chapman Project is a great example of how archives connect with the classroom to harness the power of the crowd and make historical records vibrant. It all started with an NHPRC grant to the Clements Library at the University of Michigan to create finding aids for over 1,600 “hidden” collections. Among the records were photograph albums which had originally belonged to Arabella Chapman (1859-1927), an African American woman from Albany, New York. The albums were assembled from 1878 to 1900 using portraits taken from the 1860s to the turn of the century. The photos include Arabella, her family, friends, and admirers, and copies of pictures of well-known public figures–including Lincoln, Douglass, and others.

Arabella Chapman tintype, c. 1865. Clements Library, University of Michigan

During fall semester 2014, University of Michigan Professor Martha Jones’s African American Women’s History class embarked on a detailed examination of the albums to try to learn what they could about Arabella, her family and friends, and the role of photography in African American life in the late 19th century. Last spring, the students launched a website devoted to the Chapman albums. The Arabella Chapman Project includes scans of the album pages, genealogical information, maps, texts on the history of photograph albums, a portal for crowdsourcing more information, and more. They’ve published a series of questions and mysteries behind the images. And they’re using social media to reach out to a broader audience and to show how all black lives matter.

The Arabella Chapman Project is a fascinating approach to teaching history through historical records, and they are looking for your help. Recognize someone? Know something? Join the crowd in adding more layers to this piece of the American Story.