Are there ghosts lurking in the subbasement of Strozier Library? Probably not. But there are ghost stories, and some of them are hiding where you might not expect them: in Christmas books.

I came across some of these ghost stories while cataloging the Christmas Greetings Collection. Like the Dime Novels Collection, the books in the Christmas Greetings Collection were discovered in boxes stored in the subbasement of Strozier, forgotten and uncatalogued. They needed records so that they could be found by any researcher who might want to look at them, and since I’m one of the Special Collections catalogers, I got to create some of those records.

Most of the books in the Christmas Greetings Collection are gift books. They were privately printed and sent out by printers, booksellers, or book collectors to their friends as holiday gifts.

They are little books, often the length of a single poem or short story, and they tend to be beautifully made. Some of them showcase a special technique of papermaking, printing, or binding. Some of them tell a heartwarming Christmas story or describe an old-fashioned holiday custom. And some of them are creepy.

One of the books in the Christmas Greetings Collection gave me a shock when I opened it. The cover looks fairly cheerful, with its “Season’s Greetings 1944.” Then you open it up.

Inside, the holiday season is being celebrated by a group of skeletons and skinless figures.

This isn’t really one of the ghost stories in the Christmas Greetings Collection. Instead, these skeletons are the “Vesalian muscle-men,” a series of anatomical drawings from one of the earliest and most important works on human anatomy, Andreas Vesalius’ De Humani Corporis Fabrica (1543). The book in the Christmas Greetings Collection was published in 1944 by Henry Schuman, an antiquarian bookseller who specialized in the history of medicine. It makes sense that he would send anatomical drawings to his friends at Christmas.

It makes even more sense, though, when you look at all of the skeletons, ghosts, and other creepy things found in Christmas stories of the past. Christmas ghost stories are a British tradition, one that really caught on in Victorian times after Charles Dickens published A Christmas Carol in 1843.

For a while, both U.S. and British authors were writing Christmas ghost stories, although the custom continued much longer in Britain than it did in America, where Halloween become the holiday most associated with scary stories.

So it’s not really surprising to find skeletons in the Christmas Greetings Collection. In this context, Vesalius’ anatomical drawings are not just scientific illustrations; they’re also connected to a larger tradition of Christmas literature. They reflect Henry Schuman’s interest in medical history, and at the same time they make an appropriately macabre holiday greeting. They belong with the Christmas ghost stories in our collection.

Are there ghosts lurking in the subbasement of Strozier Library? Probably not. But there are ghost stories, and some of them are hiding where you might not expect them: in Christmas books.

I came across some of these ghost stories while cataloging the Christmas Greetings Collection. Like the Dime Novels Collection, the books in the Christmas Greetings Collection were discovered in boxes stored in the subbasement of Strozier, forgotten and uncatalogued. They needed records so that they could be found by any researcher who might want to look at them, and since I’m one of the Special Collections catalogers, I got to create some of those records.

Most of the books in the Christmas Greetings Collection are gift books. They were privately printed and sent out by printers, booksellers, or book collectors to their friends as holiday gifts.

They are little books, often the length of a single poem or short story, and they tend to be beautifully made. Some of them showcase a special technique of papermaking, printing, or binding. Some of them tell a heartwarming Christmas story or describe an old-fashioned holiday custom. And some of them are creepy.

One of the books in the Christmas Greetings Collection gave me a shock when I opened it. The cover looks fairly cheerful, with its “Season’s Greetings 1944.” Then you open it up.

Inside, the holiday season is being celebrated by a group of skeletons and skinless figures.

This isn’t really one of the ghost stories in the Christmas Greetings Collection. Instead, these skeletons are the “Vesalian muscle-men,” a series of anatomical drawings from one of the earliest and most important works on human anatomy, Andreas Vesalius’ De Humani Corporis Fabrica (1543). The book in the Christmas Greetings Collection was published in 1944 by Henry Schuman, an antiquarian bookseller who specialized in the history of medicine. It makes sense that he would send anatomical drawings to his friends at Christmas.

It makes even more sense, though, when you look at all of the skeletons, ghosts, and other creepy things found in Christmas stories of the past. Christmas ghost stories are a British tradition, one that really caught on in Victorian times after Charles Dickens published A Christmas Carol in 1843.

For a while, both U.S. and British authors were writing Christmas ghost stories, although the custom continued much longer in Britain than it did in America, where Halloween become the holiday most associated with scary stories.

So it’s not really surprising to find skeletons in the Christmas Greetings Collection. In this context, Vesalius’ anatomical drawings are not just scientific illustrations; they’re also connected to a larger tradition of Christmas literature. They reflect Henry Schuman’s interest in medical history, and at the same time they make an appropriately macabre holiday greeting. They belong with the Christmas ghost stories in our collection.

For an upcoming event, I am working with a speaker who is not from the library world. He asked, “is there a commonly held mission statement or manifesto that would resonate with all librarians?” Good question…

On our own website, we talk about OCLC’s mission and purpose. (I’ve added the emphasis here and elsewhere):

Libraries fuel learning, research and innovation. Together we make breakthroughs possible. Both big and small. Whether we’re supporting advancements on the leading edge of science or helping children build a strong learning foundation, shared knowledge is the common thread. People can find the answers they need to solve important problems in their lives, in their communities and in the world.

The American Library Association (ALA) has a distilled core values of librarianship which is easier to point to than to reproduce in full but in glancing at this, providing access is front and center. This is tied up with concepts like democracy, education and lifelong learning, intellectual freedom, and social responsibility. But access comes first.

I also found this from the Urban Libraries Council, a word cloud made up from member libraries’ mission statements – the Urban Libraries Council of course represents large public libraries in the US and Canada.

Mission Cloud from the Urban Libraries Council

I also asked colleagues, who supplied some great suggestions.

• Eric Childress nominated S. R. Ranganathan’s “five laws of library science.” (Of course, my colleagues Lynn Connaway and Ixchel Faniel recently “reordered” those laws).
• Jim Michalko pointed me to the Association for Research Libraries’ text mined corpus of strategic plans, which may help to show where commonalities are for collaborative investment. Terms that were common among many of the plans include: research, learn, teach, collaborate, create, innovate. 
• Ricky Erway reminded me of our 2009 Support for the Research Process: An Academic Library Manifesto which urges research libraries to remain relevant in support of scholarly research and publishing.
• Roy Tennant nominated David Lankes’ formulation, “The Mission of Librarians is to Improve Society through Facilitating Knowledge Creation in their Communities” as well as his own further distillation, “The mission of librarians is to empower individuals and the communities of which they are a part.” [Roy has an entire blog post on this at the Digital Shift.]
• Jackie Dooley proposed Andromeda Yelton’s “Libraries are really about transforming people through access to information.” (From a recent Boston Globe article.)

What is your mission statement or manifesto of choice? What guideposts do you have for your own work? Leave a comment and let us know!

This picture was taken on May 10th, 1906, looking south at Walker Hall (left) and Williston Hall and college row (right). Forbes was standing on what would now be the street in front of the Arms Music Center.

One of the projects that I’m working on right now is a complete survey of all the photographic and audio/visual materials in our collections. The ultimate goal of the survey is to make sure that all of these vulnerable materials are being housed in appropriate conditions and to flag items that need conservation work or conversion off of unplayable media.

An impromptu grave for one A. Pair Pants, from October 25, 1906. The text at the bottom reads, “died of skunk juice.”

In the course of this project, it has been my deep pleasure to explore the many small collections of photography by students, professors and others associated with the college. One of my personal favorites is the collection of Allan W. Forbes, class of 1908. Forbes, who went on to become an engineer after Amherst, was clearly a passionate amateur photographer. His collection contains more than 100 glass plate negatives, nearly 40 nitrate negatives and prints of around half of the images.

Walker Hall by moonlight, November 24, 1906. This print was toned a reddish color. The halo around the picture is caused by the silver particles in the image degrading and migrating to the surface of the paper.

In addition to providing an interesting view of the campus and surrounding areas, Forbes’ images show an approach both analytical and artistic; he experimented with taking pictures of running water and there is a delightful series of night shot of campus. His prints show his experimentation with various development techniques, including different color toning, and different types of photographic paper.

A frozen waterfall on Mt. Toby, December 5, 1906.

Please enjoy this photographic glimpse back to 1906-1908 and look for highlights from other collections in the coming months.

Students celebrating Mountain Day on Mt. Toby, October 1907

Students celebrating Mountain Day on Mt. Toby, October 1907.

The view south to the Holyoke Range from Pratt Gymnasium (now Charles Pratt Dormitory), June 20, 1908

View of the rear of Stearns Church, September 1907. All that remains of the church is Stearns Steeple by the Mead Art Museum.

This picture was taken on May 10th, 1906, looking south at Walker Hall (left) and Williston Hall and college row (right). Forbes was standing on what would now be the street in front of the Arms Music Center.

One of the projects that I’m working on right now is a complete survey of all the photographic and audio/visual materials in our collections. The ultimate goal of the survey is to make sure that all of these vulnerable materials are being housed in appropriate conditions and to flag items that need conservation work or conversion off of unplayable media.

An impromptu grave for one A. Pair Pants, from October 25, 1906. The text at the bottom reads, “died of skunk juice.”

In the course of this project, it has been my deep pleasure to explore the many small collections of photography by students, professors and others associated with the college. One of my personal favorites is the collection of Allan W. Forbes, class of 1908. Forbes, who went on to become an engineer after Amherst, was clearly a passionate amateur photographer. His collection contains more than 100 glass plate negatives, nearly 40 nitrate negatives and prints of around half of the images.

Walker Hall by moonlight, November 24, 1906. This print was toned a reddish color. The halo around the picture is caused by the silver particles in the image degrading and migrating to the surface of the paper.

In addition to providing an interesting view of the campus and surrounding areas, Forbes’ images show an approach both analytical and artistic; he experimented with taking pictures of running water and there is a delightful series of night shot of campus. His prints show his experimentation with various development techniques, including different color toning, and different types of photographic paper.

A frozen waterfall on Mt. Toby, December 5, 1906.

Please enjoy this photographic glimpse back to 1906-1908 and look for highlights from other collections in the coming months.

Students celebrating Mountain Day on Mt. Toby, October 1907

Students celebrating Mountain Day on Mt. Toby, October 1907.

The view south to the Holyoke Range from Pratt Gymnasium (now Charles Pratt Dormitory), June 20, 1908

View of the rear of Stearns Church, September 1907. All that remains of the church is Stearns Steeple by the Mead Art Museum.

The core mission of the National Archives has always been to make the holdings of the U.S. government available to the public. As the number of views on our website and social media platforms continue to grow each year, we are reminded of the importance of providing access to those holdings in a variety of ways to ensure that all citizens have the information they need to learn from the past, ensure their rights as citizens, and to participate in the civic process.

This post is the first in a series for American Archives Month exploring the impact the National Archives is making through our increased efforts to foster engagement with our nation’s history.

According to Google Analytics, in Fiscal Year 2015, our websites reached more than 24 million people who collectively viewed more than 80 million pages on archives.gov. (That’s up from 19 million people and 69 million pages in FY14, a 26% increase and 16% increase, respectively.) More than one third (33.6%) of website sessions are from a mobile or tablet device. This is a growing trend (a nearly 18% increase over the previous year) and we’re currently working to improve the user experience of our websites for smartphone and tablet users.

While the number of people visiting our websites is impressive, Archives.gov is just one of the many platforms we use to make access happen online. Across the country, more than 200 National Archives staff are actively contributing to our 130 social media accounts (including Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, and others). In FY15, almost 250 million people viewed content posted to those social media platforms, which is up significantly over the previous fiscal year (141 million).

As an example of the power of social media outreach, we recently uploaded nearly 3,500 September 11-related photos from the Office of Vice President Dick Cheney to our Flickr account in response to a FOIA request. Photos like this one of Vice President Cheney with Senior Staff in the President’s Emergency Operations Center (PEOC) were picked up by national news sources and quickly became some of our most highly viewed records on Flickr (this image alone received more than 516,000 views). With new social media platforms and apps launching all the time, our staff are constantly on the lookout to ensure we are leveraging their power to share our records where the people are.

Vice President Cheney with Senior Staff in the President’s Emergency Operations Center (PEOC), September 11, 2001. National Archives Identifier 20932904

Stay tuned throughout October for more posts in this series exploring our efforts to make access happen and connect with our customers.  Coming soon: connecting with customers to meet researcher needs and our digitization efforts.

Written language is a persistent tool for information communication. Many cultures develop it somewhere during their history. A written language allows groups to share records, instructions, and cultural heritage across many years (some examples of written language held by Special Collections & Archives date to 2000 BCE). The modern world still relies heavily on written language for the transmission and storage of data, information, and knowledge. Academic communication is still largely conducted through the world’s written languages, and the internet is an incredibly complex mechanism for moving text between computers around the world, whether that text be in the form of tweets, emails, or webpages.

Over this long history humanity has refined written languages to indicate the nuances of the data being transferred or stored. Bibliographic information (such as title and author) are often set apart from other text, whether that be physically as a title page in a book or typographically with differences in type sizing and decoration. We as readers have learned that large type placed above bodies of smaller type is usually a title. Likewise we recognize the white-space in prose and poetry as paragraph, line or stanza breaks.

These intuitions are not explicit to computers. Strides have been made in natural language processing (as this focus of computer science is called), but it is not perfect enough for robust analysis. The Text Encoding Initiative Consortium (TEI-C) is a group of scholars and institutions interested in joining the computational powers of modern computers with the study of “manuscripts, research papers, historical archives, early printed books, linguistic corpora, anthologies, critical editions, ancient inscriptions, and a wealth of other literary, historical, and cultural material”.

To this end they developed and continue to refine the Text Encoding Initiative Guidelines (TEI). TEI is a suite of technologies designed to make explicit to computers what is implicit to us as readers. The fundamental part of TEI is a markup language expressed through eXtensible Markup Language (XML). TEI encoding is similar in form to HTML. A key difference is HTML provides a computer with instructions for text display, TEI provides instructions for text comprehension.

By providing a computer with a marked-up text, and the rules for precisely interpreting the markup, a computer can access a text in a similar way as to our human readers’ intuition. This level of access also allows a computer to process a text quickly in ways that take humans a long time and a lot of intellectual effort. Traditional bibliographic tools such as index and concordances (which can take humans months or even years to create by hand) can be completed in seconds by a computer with a properly encoded text.

TEI has become a valuable tool in the developing field of Digital Humanities. Florida State University’s (FSU) faculty is using it to open texts up to new kinds of analysis. Dr. Will Hanley, Assistant Professor in FSU’s Department of History, uses TEI to analyze persons and places in colonial era Egyptian newspapers. TEI has the capacity to assign unique identifiers to personal and topological names. Doing this for several regional newspapers for several years allows a scholar to extract names and contextual information from the texts. Techniques from network and graph theories can then be applied to the data, uncovering insights that were buried.

Dr. Stanley Gontarski (Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of English) and Dr. Paul Ardoin (Ph.D. FSU 2014) have used TEI to examine the works of Samuel Beckett and William S. Burroughs. Literary analysis is typically done on final published works. Though for some writers it is difficult to establish a simple canonical version of a text. William S. Burroughs, for example, published several different versions of the same text over the length of his career. TEI is used in this case to examine a text as it moves through all of its different versions: manuscripts, typescripts, and variant published versions. Each version serves as a witness to a larger critical edition constituting the full body of the work. An outcome of this work is the Burroughs Archive.

TEI is also used to structure information so it can be accessed by visualization tools. The University of Victoria with support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada built the Map of Early Modern London (MoEML). This is a digital edition of the 1561 Civitas Londinum or “Agas Map” as it is more commonly known. Underlying TEI structures such as Placeographies and Personographies drive color-coded filters that highlight different features of the map. The value of the MoEML is not only that it extends the ability of the public to access a rare and valuable map, but also that it provides an interactive layer to further its use for research.

Another example of the visualization power of TEI comes from the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. The Historic Images, New Technology (HINT) project resulted in a new tool for accessing some of the society’s visual collections. Political cartoons are especially sensitive to a loss of temporal context: politicans change, parties rise and fall, and issues evolve. Understanding this history is often integral to understanding the messages of the cartoons. Politics in Graphic Detail uses TEI to add an annotation layer to the display of political cartoons. Even novices can glean much of the historical context of the cartoons by hovering over the appropriate sections of the image, lowering the barrier to academic inquiry.

If you are interested in getting started with TEI, a good place to begin is TEI by Example. It offers some tutorials and exercises to help you learn the structure of the mark-up language. More adventurous users can visit TEI-C for the full TEI guidelines, including instructions for constructing a custom TEI schema. TEI-C is also the portal for the Journal of TEI and TEI-L mailing list. These are both good resources for seeing how other scholars are using TEI in their research. Finally, for those interested in just having some TEI documents to experiment with, the Perseus Digital Library hosted by Tufts University has a vast amount of ancient texts encoded in TEI for download.

Written language is a persistent tool for information communication. Many cultures develop it somewhere during their history. A written language allows groups to share records, instructions, and cultural heritage across many years (some examples of written language held by Special Collections & Archives date to 2000 BCE). The modern world still relies heavily on written language for the transmission and storage of data, information, and knowledge. Academic communication is still largely conducted through the world’s written languages, and the internet is an incredibly complex mechanism for moving text between computers around the world, whether that text be in the form of tweets, emails, or webpages.

Over this long history humanity has refined written languages to indicate the nuances of the data being transferred or stored. Bibliographic information (such as title and author) are often set apart from other text, whether that be physically as a title page in a book or typographically with differences in type sizing and decoration. We as readers have learned that large type placed above bodies of smaller type is usually a title. Likewise we recognize the white-space in prose and poetry as paragraph, line or stanza breaks.

These intuitions are not explicit to computers. Strides have been made in natural language processing (as this focus of computer science is called), but it is not perfect enough for robust analysis. The Text Encoding Initiative Consortium (TEI-C) is a group of scholars and institutions interested in joining the computational powers of modern computers with the study of “manuscripts, research papers, historical archives, early printed books, linguistic corpora, anthologies, critical editions, ancient inscriptions, and a wealth of other literary, historical, and cultural material”.

To this end they developed and continue to refine the Text Encoding Initiative Guidelines (TEI). TEI is a suite of technologies designed to make explicit to computers what is implicit to us as readers. The fundamental part of TEI is a markup language expressed through eXtensible Markup Language (XML). TEI encoding is similar in form to HTML. A key difference is HTML provides a computer with instructions for text display, TEI provides instructions for text comprehension.

By providing a computer with a marked-up text, and the rules for precisely interpreting the markup, a computer can access a text in a similar way as to our human readers’ intuition. This level of access also allows a computer to process a text quickly in ways that take humans a long time and a lot of intellectual effort. Traditional bibliographic tools such as index and concordances (which can take humans months or even years to create by hand) can be completed in seconds by a computer with a properly encoded text.

TEI has become a valuable tool in the developing field of Digital Humanities. Florida State University’s (FSU) faculty is using it to open texts up to new kinds of analysis. Dr. Will Hanley, Assistant Professor in FSU’s Department of History, uses TEI to analyze persons and places in colonial era Egyptian newspapers. TEI has the capacity to assign unique identifiers to personal and topological names. Doing this for several regional newspapers for several years allows a scholar to extract names and contextual information from the texts. Techniques from network and graph theories can then be applied to the data, uncovering insights that were buried.

Dr. Stanley Gontarski (Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of English) and Dr. Paul Ardoin (Ph.D. FSU 2014) have used TEI to examine the works of Samuel Beckett and William S. Burroughs. Literary analysis is typically done on final published works. Though for some writers it is difficult to establish a simple canonical version of a text. William S. Burroughs, for example, published several different versions of the same text over the length of his career. TEI is used in this case to examine a text as it moves through all of its different versions: manuscripts, typescripts, and variant published versions. Each version serves as a witness to a larger critical edition constituting the full body of the work. An outcome of this work is the Burroughs Archive.

TEI is also used to structure information so it can be accessed by visualization tools. The University of Victoria with support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada built the Map of Early Modern London (MoEML). This is a digital edition of the 1561 Civitas Londinum or “Agas Map” as it is more commonly known. Underlying TEI structures such as Placeographies and Personographies drive color-coded filters that highlight different features of the map. The value of the MoEML is not only that it extends the ability of the public to access a rare and valuable map, but also that it provides an interactive layer to further its use for research.

Another example of the visualization power of TEI comes from the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. The Historic Images, New Technology (HINT) project resulted in a new tool for accessing some of the society’s visual collections. Political cartoons are especially sensitive to a loss of temporal context: politicans change, parties rise and fall, and issues evolve. Understanding this history is often integral to understanding the messages of the cartoons. Politics in Graphic Detail uses TEI to add an annotation layer to the display of political cartoons. Even novices can glean much of the historical context of the cartoons by hovering over the appropriate sections of the image, lowering the barrier to academic inquiry.

If you are interested in getting started with TEI, a good place to begin is TEI by Example. It offers some tutorials and exercises to help you learn the structure of the mark-up language. More adventurous users can visit TEI-C for the full TEI guidelines, including instructions for constructing a custom TEI schema. TEI-C is also the portal for the Journal of TEI and TEI-L mailing list. These are both good resources for seeing how other scholars are using TEI in their research. Finally, for those interested in just having some TEI documents to experiment with, the Perseus Digital Library hosted by Tufts University has a vast amount of ancient texts encoded in TEI for download.

Source: The Story Behind the Picture: Karakoram 1936

Special Collections & Archives had a great time taking over the FSU Libraries twitter feed for #AskAnArchivist day. We enjoyed getting to answer questions and also share information about our collections and our work in the various areas of the division. We had so much fun in fact that we decided to Storify the experience. Check out the link below for highlights from our conversations on #AskAnArchivist day and keep checking back here for more information as we celebrate American Archives Month!

FSU’s #AskAnArchivist Day Storifyed!

Special Collections & Archives had a great time taking over the FSU Libraries twitter feed for #AskAnArchivist day. We enjoyed getting to answer questions and also share information about our collections and our work in the various areas of the division. We had so much fun in fact that we decided to Storify the experience. Check out the link below for highlights from our conversations on #AskAnArchivist day and keep checking back here for more information as we celebrate American Archives Month!

FSU’s #AskAnArchivist Day Storifyed!

The National Archives is proud to be the co-organizer and host site of WikiConference USA, which is being held in the National Archives Building in Washington D.C. Oct. 9–11. WikiConference USA is the annual national conference of Wikimedia enthusiasts and volunteers in the United States, and is open to anyone—regardless of their level of Wikipedia editing experience or skepticism.

WikiConference USA will include speeches, workshops, panels, and presentations on Wikimedia’s outreach to cultural institutions, community building, technology development, and role in education. Aside from hosting, NARA will be putting its stamp on the conference in several ways. NARA staff are presenting in two regular sessions:

• “Why Wikipedia Works for Us: an Exploration of Innovation at the National Archives,” a keynote panel where our Office of Innovation will present its major ongoing initiatives
• “A Report from the GLAM-Wiki U.S. Consortium,” where we will hear from the advisory board of this effort—which NARA helps lead—to improve cultural heritage representation on Wikipedia

Conference participants will also be invited to tour exhibits in the National Archives Museum and stop by the newly opened Innovation Hub, where they can volunteer to help us digitize records.

Wikipedia represents a key resource for us to make access to our records happen to a wide audience in a way that is relevant to them. We collaborate with Wikipedia because it is in line with our mission. Hosting WikiConference USA reaffirms the National Archives’ commitment to promoting broad public access to government records on Wikipedia. Previously, NARA has uploaded records to Wikimedia Commons, hosted in-person Wikipedia events, and developed Wikipedia best practices for our peer institutions. We were also a (non-host) conference partner for Wikimania, the global Wikimedia conference, when it was in Washington, D.C. in 2012. You can read more about our Wikipedia strategy in NARA’s most recent Open Government Plan. Since our missions and future plans are so intertwined, I look forward to hearing over the course of the conference about the Wikipedia community’s successes, challenges, and opportunities, so the National Archives can participate and learn ourselves.

David Ferriero speaks to Wikimedians at Wikimania 2012

We are happy to work together with our conference partners—the Wiki Education Foundation, Wikimedia District of Columbia, and Wikimedia New York City—on this project in support of our shared values: citizen engagement, collaboration, innovation, and the sharing of free knowledge.

To learn more about attending, please visit the conference’s FAQ, program, and registration pages.

The events in the McGowan theater will be livestreamed for remote participants. Tune into the livestream of each day’s event through NARA’s YouTube channel:

Friday, October 9: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gj6U22uJzGM
Saturday, October 10: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkHbg9V5wnI
Sunday, October 11: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kS-Y-FuzAH4

From his first day as a United States Senator on January 1st 1937 to within four years of his death in office as a United States Representative on May 30, 1989, Claude Pepper kept a detailed personal account of his life as a public servant. During the summer of 2015, the staff of the FSU Digital Library Center undertook the project of scanning each of Senator Pepper’s 48 diaries and uploading them, as well as their accompanying enclosures and transcripts, into the FSU Digital Library hosted in Islandora. Now, researchers worldwide have the ability to search the diaries online and have access to over forty years of commentary on some of the most significant events of the 20th Century.

A perusal of the Senator’s diaries allows researchers to step inside the mind of one of America’s most active politicians and glimpse firsthand his thoughts on topics ranging from the Lend Lease Bill, the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Medicare and Medicaid, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Social Security reform in the 1980s and hundreds of interactions between Pepper and the many influential figures of his day from Eleanor Roosevelt to Tip O’Neil. In addition to this excellent electronic resource, the Pepper Diaries are also available to be viewed in person at the Claude Pepper Library, which opens its doors Monday through Friday from 9:00am to 5:00pm.

From his first day as a United States Senator on January 1st 1937 to within four years of his death in office as a United States Representative on May 30, 1989, Claude Pepper kept a detailed personal account of his life as a public servant. During the summer of 2015, the staff of the FSU Digital Library Center undertook the project of scanning each of Senator Pepper’s 48 diaries and uploading them, as well as their accompanying enclosures and transcripts, into the FSU Digital Library hosted in Islandora. Now, researchers worldwide have the ability to search the diaries online and have access to over forty years of commentary on some of the most significant events of the 20th Century.

A perusal of the Senator’s diaries allows researchers to step inside the mind of one of America’s most active politicians and glimpse firsthand his thoughts on topics ranging from the Lend Lease Bill, the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Medicare and Medicaid, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Social Security reform in the 1980s and hundreds of interactions between Pepper and the many influential figures of his day from Eleanor Roosevelt to Tip O’Neil. In addition to this excellent electronic resource, the Pepper Diaries are also available to be viewed in person at the Claude Pepper Library, which opens its doors Monday through Friday from 9:00am to 5:00pm.

In a symposium held at the LBJ Presidential Library recently, the Central Intelligence Agency released 2,500 previously classified daily briefings created for Presidents Lyndon B.  Johnson and John F. Kennedy in the 1960s.  The President’s Daily Brief (PDB) began as the President’s Intelligence Checklist (PICL) in June of 1961 as a way to keep the President apprised of the world situation and gathered information from multiple intelligence sources with analysis added.  The released documents include a once top-secret  update on President Kennedy’s assassin and classified briefings on the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Tet Offensive in Vietnam.

CIA Director John O. Brennan and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper spoke at the public event in Austin celebrating access on the CIA website to PICLs from June 1961 to November 1964 and PDBs from December 1964 through the end of President Johnson’s term in January 1969.  The entry in the President’s Intelligence Checklist for 22 November 1963:

In honor of President Kennedy for whom the President’s Intelligence Checklist was first written on 17 June 1961

For this day, the Checklist Staff can find no words more fitting than a verse quoted by the President to a group of newspapermen the day he learned of the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba.

Bullfight critics ranked in rows
Crowd the enormous plaza full;
But only one is there who knows
And he’s the man who fights the bull.

Ernest Hemingway Ticket Stub for Bullfight. National Archives Identifier 192658

We’ve had great response to making Goad’s 1912 Fire Insurance map available as a Vanmap layer and as downloadable open data. We received a request to make it available in a different type of service so that the information can be used a variety of ways. As a result of all the feedback, we plan to contribute the information through Open Historical Map and the Province of British Columbia’s innovative BC Developers’ Exchange is collaborating with us to help make it happen.

BC DEVELOPERS’ EXCHANGE

The BC Developers’ Exchange is an experiment to find ways that help the public and private tech sectors innovate and collaborate. They are helping share code created by BC’s public sector and collaborating with vendors to make that code better. The Exchange is also supporting the sharing and re-use of other digital resources.

We were told that if we could put the Goad’s Vanmap layer into a web map service (WMS), then the information could be added to OpenHistoricalMap. We asked BC Developers’ Exchange if they could help us, and they very quickly found a server with DataBC and added the map layer.

Screenshot of the Goad’s 1912 layer in the DataBC WMS.

With the help of the BC Developers’ Exchange, it is now possible to add the information as a WMS map service. If you have a collaborative digital project you need some help in launching, we encourage you to contact them.

OPENHISTORICALMAP

OpenHistoricalMap was created by the same community responsible for OpenStreetMap which crowd-sources current mapping data and makes it freely available for the public or as part of an open application. You may be using OpenstreetMap data already: it’s used by craigslist, Foursquare, and Maps.Me, among others.

OpenStreetMap integrated with rental listings in the Vancouver Craigslist.

OpenHistoricalMap is crowd-sourcing historical mapping data and making it freely available. They want to create “the world’s most universal, detailed, and out-of-date map”. There’s more information in this 2012 presentation on SlideShare. OpenHistoricalMap still has a lot of the world to map and we’d like to see some Vancouver content on there.

There is Vancouver content there now, but it’s just the Vancouver Arena (later called the Denman Arena) and a portion of Georgia Street.

Vancouver 1912 in OpenHistoricalMap as of this writing.

How can we add more of the Goad’s 1912 Fire Insurance map to this project?

MAPTIMEYVR

Vancouver is fortunate to have a chapter of Maptime, an international organization that supports learning about and creating things with maps. Although map professionals do take part, Maptime was formed to help non-professionals—even beginners—learn about mapping and work on interesting projects. In April, MaptimeYVR worked with the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap team to help map resources in Nepal after the earthquake. In June, MaptimeYVR hosted a meetup to show them what map resources we have, how we digitize them and our future plans.

In July, they held a meetup where attendees learned the step-by-step process of how to use digitized historical maps (such as the ones we provide for free) to make digital interactive maps, and created their own.

Sometime this year, MaptimeYVR plans to hold a meetup to show people how to use the Goad’s 1912 map to contribute to OpenHistoricalMap. If you’re interested in maps or are a history buff keep watching the MaptimeYVR Meetup site for the announcement.

Thanks again to all the partner organizations who are involved in this project, and we hope to see you at the meetup!

This week’s star magician is T. Nelson Downs, who was both a Mystic Wonder and a Celebrated Prestidigitateur.

The image above is an advertisement from the back pages of Will Goldston’s Secrets of Magic (London: A. W. Gamage, 1903).

Downs was a highly successful self-taught magician, performing in well-known venues across the United States and Europe and prestidigitating (is that a verb?) for royalty. Because of his many well-known and elaborate coin tricks–illustrated by the spooky disembodied hands above–he was known as “The King of Koins”, an epithet that is engraved on his tombstone.

Also, and this seems too good to be true: T. Nelson Downs had two wives over the course of his 71 years, one named Nellie Stone and one named Harriett Rocky.

The internet archive has a digitized version of Downs’s The Art of Magic, and Brown University’s Library houses the T. Nelson Downs Collection, which includes correspondence, documentation of tricks, photos, programs, and advertisements.

What is it?

October 1, 2015 is #AskAnArchivist Day!  Archivists around the country, including those in FSU Libraries Special Collections, will take to Twitter to answer your questions about any and all things archival. The day-long event, sponsored by the Society of American Archivists, will give you the opportunity to connect directly with archivists at FSU—and around the country—to ask questions, get information, or just satisfy your curiosity.

What questions can be asked?

Archivists participating in #AskAnArchivist Day are eager to respond to any and all questions you have about archives and archival work.

No question is too casual . . .

• What’s your favorite thing you’ve come across in your collections?
• If your archives had a soundtrack, what songs would be on it?
• What do archivists talk about around the water cooler?

. . . or too practical!

• What should I do to be sure that my emails won’t get lost?
• How do you decide which donated items to keep?
• How can I get my students more interested in using archives for projects?

How does it work?

#AskAnArchivist Day is open to everyone—all you need is a Twitter account. To participate, just tweet a question and include the hashtag #AskAnArchivist in your tweet. Your question will be seen instantly by archivists around the country who are standing by to respond directly to you.  Have a question specifically for FSU Special Collections ?Include @FSULibrary with your question.  We will be answering questions live on Twitter from 10 am to 2 pm on October 1st; questions we don’t get to will be saved and answered on this blog next week.

Don’t have a question? Use the #AskAnArchivist hashtag to follow the action!  Search Twitter for #AskAnArchivist and follow along as questions and answers are shared.

Get those questions ready, and we’ll see you on Twitter!

What is it?

October 1, 2015 is #AskAnArchivist Day!  Archivists around the country, including those in FSU Libraries Special Collections, will take to Twitter to answer your questions about any and all things archival. The day-long event, sponsored by the Society of American Archivists, will give you the opportunity to connect directly with archivists at FSU—and around the country—to ask questions, get information, or just satisfy your curiosity.

What questions can be asked?

Archivists participating in #AskAnArchivist Day are eager to respond to any and all questions you have about archives and archival work.

No question is too casual . . .

• What’s your favorite thing you’ve come across in your collections?
• If your archives had a soundtrack, what songs would be on it?
• What do archivists talk about around the water cooler?

. . . or too practical!

• What should I do to be sure that my emails won’t get lost?
• How do you decide which donated items to keep?
• How can I get my students more interested in using archives for projects?

How does it work?

#AskAnArchivist Day is open to everyone—all you need is a Twitter account. To participate, just tweet a question and include the hashtag #AskAnArchivist in your tweet. Your question will be seen instantly by archivists around the country who are standing by to respond directly to you.  Have a question specifically for FSU Special Collections ?Include @FSULibrary with your question.  We will be answering questions live on Twitter from 10 am to 2 pm on October 1st; questions we don’t get to will be saved and answered on this blog next week.

Don’t have a question? Use the #AskAnArchivist hashtag to follow the action!  Search Twitter for #AskAnArchivist and follow along as questions and answers are shared.

Get those questions ready, and we’ll see you on Twitter!

Source: Dating our Stonehenge Images

In college student life, it’s sometimes hard to tell the difference between raucous traditions and random acts of stupidity. Traditions often degrade over time, ultimately ending with some egregious incident — or series of them, each progressively worse — that causes their dissolution. At Amherst College, the statue of the mythical nymph Sabrina is perhaps the best known but not the only example. Fraternity hazing rituals, silly pranks, drunken stunts, rivalry-fueled acts of humiliation, stolen vehicles, property damage — these, unfortunately, are constants at colleges and universities. But the nature of such incidents, and the nature of college traditions in general, have a somewhat different flavor in earlier eras as compared to today; it may be the long winters, the lack of entertainment options, the stifling isolation of campus life, and the inherently strict moral codes of its community that have made colleges a breeding ground for antics of every sort.  Many of them are documented in the College Archives, though probably the great majority of them are not.

Last year I wrote about the “Squirt-Gun Riot of 1858,” which seems to have put me on the lookout for more “Acts of Stupidity” (yes, that’s an actual subject heading in our General Files, where we compile odds and ends related to the history of the college). Today let me share a few more of these with you. (Maybe this will be an occasional series?)

1. Chicken Stealing: William Hubbard (AC 1844), Non-Graduate

Hubbard’s problem seems simply to have been impulse control. He was dismissed from Amherst for a string of offenses culminating in the incident of March 5, 1842, involving the theft of chickens. Hubbard later graduated from Brown University (1845), practiced law in Minnesota, and later taught school in the South. Interestingly, despite his unfortunate experience at Amherst, he sent three of his sons there (William 1871, Charles 1876, and Edward 1885).

This letter from Prof. William S. Tyler (PDF) lays out the facts:

Amherst College, Mar. 9, 1842.

Mrs. Hubbard

Dear Madam,

I regret extremely, that I am obliged so soon again to be the bearer of unwelcome intelligence respecting your son. When he returned, he made many fair promises of amendment both as a scholar & a Christian. But he has disappointed our hopes, returned to his former bad habits & even committed higher misdemeanors. You will learn, what I mean, from the following note of the Faculty: “Whereas on Saturday night the 5^th of March last, Sophomore Hubbard, after indulging in festivities & cardplaying till a very late hour with several of his classmates at the room of a classmate, proceeded with one of his companions to take without liberty several fowls from a neighboring barn roost for the purposes of continuing the entertainment, & whereas this is but one of a series of offences of which he has been found guilty & for which he has been subject to college censure; therefore vote that he be & hereby is dismissed & that his parent be informed, that unless there is a radical change in his character, it cannot be safe or [wise?] for him ever to return to this college.”

I feel constrained to add, not for the sake of distressing you more, but for the purpose of acquainting you fully with the facts, painful as they are, that besides cardplaying & Sabbath breaking (for by our laws, the previous night is regarded as a part of the Sabbath) the misconduct of your son was aggravated by falsehood & misrepresentation.

I think, Madam, you will agree with the Faculty that unless there is a radical change in his character, there will be as little [encouragement?] for you to send him back to College, as for us to receive him. Dismission necessarily involves separation from College for one year. At the end of that time, should you wish to send him to another College, we shall interpose no obstacle. That you may be sustained & sanctified under this event so painful to us as well as to you, is the sincere desire of myself & all my associates in whose behalf I write.

Yours Truly

Wm. S. Tyler

2. The Burning of the Peagreen Beanies (I) – 1927

As I wrote in an earlier blog post, several generations of Amherst freshmen in the first half of the 20th century were forced to wear these universally loathed, completely fashion-backward wool beanies (above) when out in public during the first months of college. Ostensibly their purpose was to identify members of the incoming class, but their true purpose, of course, was a not very subtle form of ritual humiliation: the Sophomore class asserting its newfound superiority over another peer group. Because they had to endure it, now it was time for the class below them to endure it too.

Amherst Student, Feb. 24, 1927

In late February 1927, when the members of the Freshmen of the Class of 1930 were no longer required to wear the hated beanies, they celebrated with a ritual ceremony of burning them in a bonfire. This had apparently become a tradition for the past few years. As this report from the Amherst Student (right) entertainingly describes, the celebration got a bit out of hand, with the freshmen taking over the streets of downtown Amherst, blocking trolleys, snowballing the police, turning around passing cars, and generally acting like prisoners released from confinement. The ugliest business occurred with the “liberation” of a trolley conductor’s cap by an unnamed assailant.

The archives has the following letter from the president of the Freshman class apologizing to the president of the trolley company, and the latter’s surprisingly good-humored reply:

(The cap-stealing part of the incident will no doubt remind P.G.Wodehouse fans of the hilarious efforts of several characters in his stories to steal policemen’s helmets on Boat Race Night at Oxford and Cambridge. Is it possible that the Amherst miscreant had Wodehouse in mind? Please enjoy this video homage.)

3. The Burning of the Peagreen Beanies (II) – 1930

The last incident I’d like to present also involves the cap-burning ritual, this time three years later. However, this had a much more serious and tragic outcome, and brought a lot of unwelcome sensational press coverage to the college.

During the week leading up to the February 22, 1930 cap-burning, freshmen had kidnapped some of the sophomore officers, so several members of both classes were ready for a battle. Freshmen arranged a large pile of wood on the lawn in front of Converse Library; if they successfully guarded the pile until 6 p.m., then by agreement they could have their fire in peace and burn their caps. If the Sophomores burned the wood before that time, or in some way prevented the fire, the Freshmen would have to wear their caps for a few more weeks.

The Sophomores gathered on the hill near the Octagon about 5 p.m. Suddenly they rushed down the hill with buckets of what appeared to be water, which they attempted to throw on the wood. They succeeded in getting themselves and the Freshmen as well as the wood thoroughly soaked. They returned to the Octagon, and then again very suddenly rushed down with blow torches. As Richard H. Plock (AC 1930) relates in a letter,

We discovered to our horror that they had gasoline in the buckets. In no time at all there was great confusion. Some of the boys tripped with the torches, others aimed them poorly, and before we knew it, the clothing of several of the sophomores and freshmen was on fire. […] Several of the boys received rather bad burns, but fortunately none were fatally burned.*

The Dean wanted to issue a harsh punishment to the entire Sophomore class, but officers of Scarab (an honor society then active at Amherst at that time which was mainly responsible for overseeing college traditions) intervened and had penalties loosened somewhat. However, this marked the end of the cap-burning tradition forever.

—

* TLS to Walter B. Mahony (AC 1936), Apr 23, 1936, in General Files: Student Life and Customs: Cap Burning.

In college student life, it’s sometimes hard to tell the difference between raucous traditions and random acts of stupidity. Traditions often degrade over time, ultimately ending with some egregious incident — or series of them, each progressively worse — that causes their dissolution. At Amherst College, the statue of the mythical nymph Sabrina is perhaps the best known but not the only example. Fraternity hazing rituals, silly pranks, drunken stunts, rivalry-fueled acts of humiliation, stolen vehicles, property damage — these, unfortunately, are constants at colleges and universities. But the nature of such incidents, and the nature of college traditions in general, have a somewhat different flavor in earlier eras as compared to today; it may be the long winters, the lack of entertainment options, the stifling isolation of campus life, and the inherently strict moral codes of its community that have made colleges a breeding ground for antics of every sort.  Many of them are documented in the College Archives, though probably the great majority of them are not.

Last year I wrote about the “Squirt-Gun Riot of 1858,” which seems to have put me on the lookout for more “Acts of Stupidity” (yes, that’s an actual subject heading in our General Files, where we compile odds and ends related to the history of the college). Today let me share a few more of these with you. (Maybe this will be an occasional series?)

1. Chicken Stealing: William Hubbard (AC 1844), Non-Graduate

Hubbard’s problem seems simply to have been impulse control. He was dismissed from Amherst for a string of offenses culminating in the incident of March 5, 1842, involving the theft of chickens. Hubbard later graduated from Brown University (1845), practiced law in Minnesota, and later taught school in the South. Interestingly, despite his unfortunate experience at Amherst, he sent three of his sons there (William 1871, Charles 1876, and Edward 1885).

This letter from Prof. William S. Tyler (PDF) lays out the facts:

Amherst College, Mar. 9, 1842.

Mrs. Hubbard

Dear Madam,

I regret extremely, that I am obliged so soon again to be the bearer of unwelcome intelligence respecting your son. When he returned, he made many fair promises of amendment both as a scholar & a Christian. But he has disappointed our hopes, returned to his former bad habits & even committed higher misdemeanors. You will learn, what I mean, from the following note of the Faculty: “Whereas on Saturday night the 5^th of March last, Sophomore Hubbard, after indulging in festivities & cardplaying till a very late hour with several of his classmates at the room of a classmate, proceeded with one of his companions to take without liberty several fowls from a neighboring barn roost for the purposes of continuing the entertainment, & whereas this is but one of a series of offences of which he has been found guilty & for which he has been subject to college censure; therefore vote that he be & hereby is dismissed & that his parent be informed, that unless there is a radical change in his character, it cannot be safe or [wise?] for him ever to return to this college.”

I feel constrained to add, not for the sake of distressing you more, but for the purpose of acquainting you fully with the facts, painful as they are, that besides cardplaying & Sabbath breaking (for by our laws, the previous night is regarded as a part of the Sabbath) the misconduct of your son was aggravated by falsehood & misrepresentation.

I think, Madam, you will agree with the Faculty that unless there is a radical change in his character, there will be as little [encouragement?] for you to send him back to College, as for us to receive him. Dismission necessarily involves separation from College for one year. At the end of that time, should you wish to send him to another College, we shall interpose no obstacle. That you may be sustained & sanctified under this event so painful to us as well as to you, is the sincere desire of myself & all my associates in whose behalf I write.

Yours Truly

Wm. S. Tyler

2. The Burning of the Peagreen Beanies (I) – 1927

As I wrote in an earlier blog post, several generations of Amherst freshmen in the first half of the 20th century were forced to wear these universally loathed, completely fashion-backward wool beanies (above) when out in public during the first months of college. Ostensibly their purpose was to identify members of the incoming class, but their true purpose, of course, was a not very subtle form of ritual humiliation: the Sophomore class asserting its newfound superiority over another peer group. Because they had to endure it, now it was time for the class below them to endure it too.

Amherst Student, Feb. 24, 1927

In late February 1927, when the members of the Freshmen of the Class of 1930 were no longer required to wear the hated beanies, they celebrated with a ritual ceremony of burning them in a bonfire. This had apparently become a tradition for the past few years. As this report from the Amherst Student (right) entertainingly describes, the celebration got a bit out of hand, with the freshmen taking over the streets of downtown Amherst, blocking trolleys, snowballing the police, turning around passing cars, and generally acting like prisoners released from confinement. The ugliest business occurred with the “liberation” of a trolley conductor’s cap by an unnamed assailant.

The archives has the following letter from the president of the Freshman class apologizing to the president of the trolley company, and the latter’s surprisingly good-humored reply:

(The cap-stealing part of the incident will no doubt remind P.G.Wodehouse fans of the hilarious efforts of several characters in his stories to steal policemen’s helmets on Boat Race Night at Oxford and Cambridge. Is it possible that the Amherst miscreant had Wodehouse in mind? Please enjoy this video homage.)

3. The Burning of the Peagreen Beanies (II) – 1930

The last incident I’d like to present also involves the cap-burning ritual, this time three years later. However, this had a much more serious and tragic outcome, and brought a lot of unwelcome sensational press coverage to the college.

During the week leading up to the February 22, 1930 cap-burning, freshmen had kidnapped some of the sophomore officers, so several members of both classes were ready for a battle. Freshmen arranged a large pile of wood on the lawn in front of Converse Library; if they successfully guarded the pile until 6 p.m., then by agreement they could have their fire in peace and burn their caps. If the Sophomores burned the wood before that time, or in some way prevented the fire, the Freshmen would have to wear their caps for a few more weeks.

The Sophomores gathered on the hill near the Octagon about 5 p.m. Suddenly they rushed down the hill with buckets of what appeared to be water, which they attempted to throw on the wood. They succeeded in getting themselves and the Freshmen as well as the wood thoroughly soaked. They returned to the Octagon, and then again very suddenly rushed down with blow torches. As Richard H. Plock (AC 1930) relates in a letter,

We discovered to our horror that they had gasoline in the buckets. In no time at all there was great confusion. Some of the boys tripped with the torches, others aimed them poorly, and before we knew it, the clothing of several of the sophomores and freshmen was on fire. […] Several of the boys received rather bad burns, but fortunately none were fatally burned.*

The Dean wanted to issue a harsh punishment to the entire Sophomore class, but officers of Scarab (an honor society then active at Amherst at that time which was mainly responsible for overseeing college traditions) intervened and had penalties loosened somewhat. However, this marked the end of the cap-burning tradition forever.

—

* TLS to Walter B. Mahony (AC 1936), Apr 23, 1936, in General Files: Student Life and Customs: Cap Burning.

FSU Libraries Special Collections and Archives has many resources devoted to Florida history. The Goulding Family Collection (01/MSS 0-128) was donated by Professor Robert L. Goulding following his retirement from FSU in 1960. The collection includes several remarkable documents from Goulding’s ancestors, including primary sources chronicling military and civilian life during the American Civil War, World War I and World War II.

However, the most detailed historical testimony can be found in the diaries of Goulding’s maternal grandfather William R. Hackley. Hackley, a Virginia native and alumnus of William and Mary, moved to Tallahassee in 1826 at the age of twenty. The aspiring lawyer soon passed the Florida State Bar Association examination and settled in Key West in 1828, where he established a law practice and eventually became district attorney for the southern district of Florida from April 1849 to May 1857.

Hackley’s diaries detail his life in Key West from 1830 to 1857, giving first-hand accounts of daily life in the recently-established American settlement. Many of the entries are concerned with predictable facets of island life – changes in the weather, and ships sailing in and out of port. However, as a lawyer and man of privilege, Hackley had access to information and events that the average Key West resident would not.

Hackley provides eyewitness details of many court cases, including a first-hand look at an historical event in American Key West – the first known trial for murder.

“Tuesday, Nov 16 [1830]…The case of the Territory of Florida vs. Norman Sherwood for the murder of John Wilson on the 5 day of July last by shooting with a pistol loaded with buckshot came on today. The prisoner being anxious for trial did not make use of his right of peremptory challenge to the full extent allowed by law. I was requested by the judge to take down the evidence in the case and did so. The trial was protracted till nearly two. I left the court house before the jury retired. The jury brought in a verdict of guilty…”

The trial verdict opened the door for another Key West first – order of execution:

“Friday Nov. 19th…At 4 PM went up to the court house to hear judgement of death pronounced on Norman Sherwood—the judge made a most impressive charge and fixed the second Friday in December for the day of execution. The judge was so affected that he could hardly get thru with the sentence and many of the bystanders also were much affected. The prisoner indeed shed a few tears but was not much moved with the hearing of his doom. He walked back to jail and I am given to understand expressed but little sorrow saying that he could die but once…”

“Monday, Dec 6th. I hear that two days since, Norman Sherwood took a dose of poison which was conveyed to him by some one, but it was not sufficiently powerful to cause death. He is however sick from the effects of it and I think that if he can obtain the means he will commit suicide before the day appointed for his execution for which I would be sorry as the execution of a felon will I think have a beneficial effect on this community…”

“Friday Decr 10th…At ten o’clock A.M. Norman Sherwood was taken from the jail to the gallows erected near the road out from the courthouse to the West, and in pursuance of the sentence of the law was hung by the neck until he was dead. He said nothing at the gallows and died stubbornly and did not even change color…”

For more information on crime and punishment in the Keys, check out the Hackley diaries online or visit the Special Collections Research Center!

Rory Grennan is Manuscript and Instruction Archivist for FSU Libraries Special Collections & Archives.

FSU Libraries Special Collections and Archives has many resources devoted to Florida history. The Goulding Family Collection (01/MSS 0-128) was donated by Professor Robert L. Goulding following his retirement from FSU in 1960. The collection includes several remarkable documents from Goulding’s ancestors, including primary sources chronicling military and civilian life during the American Civil War, World War I and World War II.

However, the most detailed historical testimony can be found in the diaries of Goulding’s maternal grandfather William R. Hackley. Hackley, a Virginia native and alumnus of William and Mary, moved to Tallahassee in 1826 at the age of twenty. The aspiring lawyer soon passed the Florida State Bar Association examination and settled in Key West in 1828, where he established a law practice and eventually became district attorney for the southern district of Florida from April 1849 to May 1857.

Hackley’s diaries detail his life in Key West from 1830 to 1857, giving first-hand accounts of daily life in the recently-established American settlement. Many of the entries are concerned with predictable facets of island life – changes in the weather, and ships sailing in and out of port. However, as a lawyer and man of privilege, Hackley had access to information and events that the average Key West resident would not.

Hackley provides eyewitness details of many court cases, including a first-hand look at an historical event in American Key West – the first known trial for murder.

“Tuesday, Nov 16 [1830]…The case of the Territory of Florida vs. Norman Sherwood for the murder of John Wilson on the 5 day of July last by shooting with a pistol loaded with buckshot came on today. The prisoner being anxious for trial did not make use of his right of peremptory challenge to the full extent allowed by law. I was requested by the judge to take down the evidence in the case and did so. The trial was protracted till nearly two. I left the court house before the jury retired. The jury brought in a verdict of guilty…”

The trial verdict opened the door for another Key West first – order of execution:

“Friday Nov. 19th…At 4 PM went up to the court house to hear judgement of death pronounced on Norman Sherwood—the judge made a most impressive charge and fixed the second Friday in December for the day of execution. The judge was so affected that he could hardly get thru with the sentence and many of the bystanders also were much affected. The prisoner indeed shed a few tears but was not much moved with the hearing of his doom. He walked back to jail and I am given to understand expressed but little sorrow saying that he could die but once…”

“Monday, Dec 6th. I hear that two days since, Norman Sherwood took a dose of poison which was conveyed to him by some one, but it was not sufficiently powerful to cause death. He is however sick from the effects of it and I think that if he can obtain the means he will commit suicide before the day appointed for his execution for which I would be sorry as the execution of a felon will I think have a beneficial effect on this community…”

“Friday Decr 10th…At ten o’clock A.M. Norman Sherwood was taken from the jail to the gallows erected near the road out from the courthouse to the West, and in pursuance of the sentence of the law was hung by the neck until he was dead. He said nothing at the gallows and died stubbornly and did not even change color…”

For more information on crime and punishment in the Keys, check out the Hackley diaries online or visit the Special Collections Research Center!

Rory Grennan is Manuscript and Instruction Archivist for FSU Libraries Special Collections & Archives.

Tomorrow’s Tuesday open hours will feature small books– we’re defining that as books smaller than 32mo (i.e. “books that fit in Angela’s hand”).

Don’t worry, we have a magnifying glass. Stop by between 10 and 1 to see some of these little wonders!

Remember this guy?:

It’s been a year and a half since we celebrated Giambattista Bodoni and the 200th anniversary of his death. In all those years, no one has written a full-length English biography of the great printer and type designer – until now.

Join us at 6:00pm on Wednesday, October 7th for a lecture by Valerie Lester, whose biography of Bodoni is being published this month. Copies of the book will be available for purchase, and refreshments will be served. We’ll also have a selection of items from our collections of Bodoniana on display.

There’s nothing like getting up-close and hands-on with some of the rare books in FSU’s Special Collections department, but sometimes it’s not possible for visitors to visit our Reading Room in Tallahassee to see them. Digitization allows us to make our materials available to a global audience who would otherwise never be able to interact with or use our collections.

To help alleviate this problem, the Digital Library Center (DLC) has been hard to expand access to some of our most important collections. We have digitized thousands of pages of our rare books and uploaded them for the public to access at their convenience. Digital reproductions of these books can be viewed in FSU’s Digital Library as individual pages or with the animated book viewer.

Ever wonder how these collections end up in the Digital Library? Turning books into ebooks is a complicated, but exciting process. So, the burning question is:

How do we get from this…

…to this?

Typically our Digital Archivist has a queue of projects lined up for us which range from quick scans of reference material to digitizing vast collections of rare books and manuscripts. Once a project is decided upon, the material makes its way up the production studio where the imaging work is done.

Creating these images using a conventional flatbed scanner is not ideal due to the fragile condition of many of our rare books. Also, many books we digitize in the DLC have tight binding that would be nearly impossible to accurately scan without compromising the integrity of the books themselves. Improper scanning practices can lead to poor image quality and potential damage to the books.

In this case, as it is with most rare books, we’ll head over to our ATIZ BookDrive Pro station to start our work.

As you can see, this setup is specifically designed for book digitization. The V-shaped, adjustable book cradle and platen gently hold the book in place while dual Canon 5D Mark ii DSLR cameras photograph the left and right pages. Freedom to vertically and horizontally adjust the cradle and platen allows us to get the pages nice and flat before shooting, all without putting too much pressure on the book.

Each camera is tethered to the computer via USB and, as they fire, the digital images are automatically loaded into our processing software, Capture One 8 Pro. This powerful piece of software handles the file-management, editing, and exporting of the final image files. Within Capture One we can make any necessary color/exposure corrections, cropping adjustments, sharpening and QC work.

Once all the images are edited and double-checked for errors, they are exported as high-resolution TIF files and are ready for the next step: metadata!

Here in the studio we primarily focus on image production, however we do create basic metadata for certain items. In order for these images to recreate a traditional book-reading, page-turning experience within the Digital Library, we need to provide some basic information about this book’s contents. Some of the metadata we create for digitized books includes the front cover, page numbers, title page, table of contents, back cover, etc… Essentially, we are connecting each image file to its corresponding location in the actual book. This information, along with the more complex metadata entered later by our Metadata Librarian allows the book to be virtually perused and navigated with ease.

By using the Internet Archive’s book viewer within our Digital Library, the individual pages we scanned and edited earlier can be turned back and forth, from cover to cover. This animated display of the full book is designed to give users the next-best experience to actually thumbing through our rare books in the Research Center Reading Room.

So there you have it! That’s our basic workflow from book to ebook. We’ll continue adding more interesting content to the Digital Library, so keep checking back to see what we have to offer. At the moment we’re deep in the middle of scanning a large collection of cookbooks and herbals dating all the way back to the 1400s. There are some fascinating recipes in these books and we can’t wait to share them with you!

Open-book image downloaded from freeimages.com

David Whiteford
Thursday, September 24, 2015 – 11:45

Where SRO’s old AEON online catalogue could only show item titles – which can be uninformative – our new online catalogue allows us to add content and scope notes to the catalogue record. Work is underway on some 1890s Mines Department files in Consignment 964 and catalogue records are now including names of people applying for positions with the Department, people applying for mining leases, Asiatics applying for miner’s rights, and other detail of value to researchers. Some interesting discoveries have been made, such as the employment file (1896/13575) for Ernest Giles, the well-known explorer, who was employed as a clerk with the Department in Coolgardie in 1896 until his death the following year. The file records his feeling unwell and having to go home from work, and his death a few days later.   Two files relating to David W Carnegie, whose book Spinifex and Sand detailing his explorations in W.A. has rarely been out of print, were also found. The Western Australian explorers’ diaries project is presently working on Carnegie and was excited to learn of these two files. File 1897/03219 covers his arrival in Halls Creek and an offer to immediately leave to search for a missing party and file 1897/09856 has correspondence between Carnegie and the Government regarding remuneration for his exploration expenses. This latter file had escaped online cataloguing and is awaiting commencement of loading of new collection listings into the new system.

Today’s brief update highlights wayward youth from Robert Grant’s 1888 book Jack Hall, or the School Days of an American Boy.

The book’s illustrator, F. G. Attwood, created the below likeness of some school boys, including the eponymous Jack Hall, who are obviously, blatantly up to no good:

Cigarettes! A variety of casual yet dashing hats! Big mugs! Knives stuck in the table!

These masked marauders are members of “Big Four”, a secret society of fourth-class boys who expressed their “vitality” through hijinks such as “the pilfering of neighborhood hen-roosts, the sealing up of the lock of the schoolroom door, [and] the firing of a tar-barrel in front of the Doctor’s very window”. A later illustration also shows them executing a daring, late-night escape involving a basket and a rope. Dreadful!

Fall and winter are great seasons for settling in to a comfy chair with a good crossword, a compelling book, or a warm quilt– and they’re also great seasons for settling in to a less-comfy wooden chair in our reading room with a compelling whaling logbook, an 18th-century scientific treatise, or a folio of beautiful architectural plates.

To celebrate the arrival of these studious seasons, we’ve extended our weekly open hours. You now have your choice of seven different hours during the week when you can stop by Special Collections unannounced and appointment-free.

The new open hours are:

Tuesdays: 10:00 – 1:00
Wednesdays 3:00 – 7:00

Of course, we’re still open by appointment during other times when the library is open, and you’re welcome to call ahead if you plan to come to open hours and would like to see specific materials during your visit.