Klee Wyck from the archive!

Continuing our introduction of all members of the Commonwealth Games Mascot family, this week we have Klee Wyck!

A large Orca – also known as as a killer whale – Klee Wyck was the proud mascot of the XV Commonwealth Games for 1994 in Victoria, Canada. Seen as intelligent, sociable and graceful, these native animals were regarded as the perfect symbol for the ‘Friendly Games’.

‘Klee Wyck’ was the name given to this mascot in the Nuu-chan Nulth language, which roughly translates to ‘Laughing One’ in english.

The Victoria 1994 Games were unique in that they marked the return of South Africa after a thirty year absence following the end of apartheid. This was also the last time that Hong Kong participated in the Games before the transfer of sovereignty from Britian to China was complete.

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Much has been written about letters sent during World War II – movies and books chronicle the stories of undelivered correspondence found decades later, letters between young lovers parted by an ocean, advice from mothers and fathers to their sons. Last fall, Heritage Protocol and University Archives were excited to acquire a collection of letters and photographs sent by FSCW student Frances Isaac to her deployed fiance, Herbert Dotter. From 1944 through ’47, Frances “Frannie” Isaac sent hundreds of letters to her fiance who was stationed in Liberia during WWII.

Frances started school at FSCW in 1943, and worked as an attache for the press in the Florida Legislator. She was an introvert, and often expressed in her letters that she preferred the solitude of studying in the library to gossiping with her classmates. In a letter from 1944, Frances wrote that she felt “pretty disgusted with the girls,” describing how her peers would gather at the gates of campus to talk to young military personnel. Many of the letters document the mundane, recounting what she ate for dinner that night, the new dresses she’d bought, difficult homework assignments. In some letters, she would talk about the multiple health ailments she faced, like a pulled tooth she had in 1946.

The binding theme throughout all of the letters, however, was the future of their relationship. In earlier letters, Frances would gush with love for Herbert, soliloquies filled with plans for their marriage and how she felt when she thought about him. But by 1947, her letters had become increasingly antagonistic until she eventually called things off. In a letter from March 1947, Frances compared their relationship to that with her father, explaining that the unconditional love Herbert showed her reminded her of the way her father treated her: “I can’t marry you – it would be like marrying my own father.” A few letters later, with a returned engagement ring, Frances tells Herbert about how she met someone new: “we’re like two lost souls adrift in an ocean who understand the fears hopes, frustration and desires of the other.”

Unfortunately, we only have half of the narrative from this epic love story. Not much is known about Frances Isaac after she graduated from FSCW. Herbert Dotter eventually married someone else, and passed away at the age of 92 in 2009.

To see more photographs, ephemera, and artifacts related to the history of Florida State, check out the FSU Heritage Protocol Digital Collections or like the Heritage Protocol Facebook page.

*This is not to say that I don’t believe Feminists cannot celebrate Valentine’s Day, because it is most certainly your right (as it is anyone’s) to celebrate or not celebrate what you wish. These books simply came up when I searched key words related to this February holiday. 

–Brandi Russell, Trinity Student, Class of 2015 

A long time ago I had a boyfriend who used to unconsciously signal that he was about to deliver unwelcome news by saying, “ya gotta love this…” As it turned out, I didn’t gotta, and his “love” was a hollow thing. A more solid love – in this case, a father’s love for his daughter – is this post’s Valentine offering.

The “valentine” (as I think of it) came to us in 2007 as part of a generous gift from Bruce Gimelson of letters and photographs relating to Henry Ward Beecher, Class of 1834. To reduce a huge life to a few sentences, Beecher (1813-1887) was a wildly popular preacher at the Plymouth Church in Brooklyn (1847-1887), a rebellious son of Calvinism, an eloquent anti-slavery advocate, and the 50-year husband of Eunice Bullard, by whom he had 11 children, 7 of whom died early.

The Beechers had a troubled marriage and Henry was rumored to have had several affairs, the first as early as his ministry in Indiana during the 1840s. According to Debby Applegate’s superb biography of Beecher, The Most Famous Man in America, the minister may also have been the father of Violet Beach, who is on paper the daughter of Moses Sperry Beach, publisher of the newspaper “The Sun” and son of the founder, Moses Yale Beach, of the Associated Press. Applegate’s biography considers the affair between Henry and Moses’ wife Chloe and the likelihood that Henry was Violet’s father. While we might wish for DNA evidence, what we have in this case is photographic and manuscript evidence. Among the former is this:

Violet Beach, ca. 1890

Henry Ward Beecher, ca. 1845

Henry Ward Beecher & Violet Beach, ca. 1875

In addition to the convincing documentation of the relationship between Chloe Beach and Beecher that Applegate assembles in her biography, we also have evidence of Beecher’s attachment to Violet Beach in 12 letters that were part of Gimelson’s gift. In 8 of the letters, Beecher signs off as “grandpa,” which he means “in spirit”; in the other 4 letters, he is “Henry Ward Beecher,” safer still. But in a letter signed with his full name in the spring of 1885, Beecher refers twice to a “daughter” and writes with good-humored outrage as a protective father whose child has been slighted. Surely this energetic letter soothed Violet’s wounded heart and made her laugh too. What more could Beecher do, what more could Violet ask? Maybe it doesn’t matter whether he was her “real” father or not.

My dear Violet –
You are quite right in all you say about Will’s engagement, but you don’t go half far enough. It is a crime that cannot be excused, nor can language be found that will make it more odious. I am ready to stab him & poison her. Should such conduct go unpunished, the whole world might catch the infection & grow as wicked as they were before the flood. For is it not said that they were “marrying & giving in marriage” – until the flood came & swept them all away” & served them right too! I don’t know – I fear stabbing will be too good for Will. It will let him off too soon. Let’s see if we can’t think of some choice torment. What say you to letting him marry this outrageous sweetheart, & be compelled to live with her? And then, in about 25 years let them have some good for nothing fellow walk up & marry their daughter. Yes, that will be better.

But nourish your wrath. Don’t let it go out. I will send you a vocabulary of words, & a few oaths suited to this occasion – and you can copy them off & recite them morning & evening instead of the good prayers in the Episcopal Book – which are weak & cool affairs whereas you want damnatory & red hot petitions. Trust Providence, my dear. Read the Objurgatory Psalms. Begin with Psalm 137:7-9, Psalm 69: 22-28, Ps. 59: 10-17. But, above all, that choice Psalm 109.

I would suggest, also, that for a while I would let the New Testament alone – as it may somewhat interfere with the sentiments expressed in the psalms.

I will try to help you all I can, & will invent a few new oaths by the time the old [staple ones] get cool.

Yours in the bonds of an Everlasting hatred of all who get married to anyone’s daughter.

Henry Ward Beecher
Apr 8, 1885, three days after Easter

This letter sent me scurrying to find Psalm 109* and vowing to add “objurgatory” to my regular vocabulary.

96 Columbia Heights, Brooklyn

I wish I knew who the odious Will was. I wish I knew whether it was on account of the inexcusable little cur that Violet never married. Instead, she lived out her life in her family’s palatial apartment at 96 Columbia Heights, Brooklyn, and died in 1946 two days after Valentine’s Day.

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

*Psalm 109 from the “New English Bible: the Old Testament,” Oxford University Press/Cambridge University Press, 1970.

In the 19th century, New York became a railway hub, and steam tugs aided in transporting rail freight down the river into Manhattan, guiding boxcar barges. By 1929, there were over 700 tugs working in busy New York Harbor. Towing has been largely a family business in the past and many of the tugboat captains you’ll hear in this episode work for McAllister Towing, founded in 1864 and still a leading name in New York tugboats. In fact, McAllister won last year’s Annual Great North River Tugboat Race, which took place at Pier 84. 

In this short piece, you’ll hear the sounds of the harbor, the toot of tugboats, and you’ll hear from the hard-working captains who head out into the harbor tirelessly time and time again. At the time of this recording, the tugboats in New York Harbor were running on diesel, and not steam as they first did. A tugboat can have a life of almost three quarters of a century, so it is possible that one of the McAllister tugboats heard in this episode may still be towing today. 

Below you can hear two clips from the raw tape of the Cinema Sounds interview with Brian McAllister. He describes what it is like to steer a tug and what tug captains do in the event of a disaster in the harbor. You can hear Brian speak more recently about the towing business in a 2005 interview published by the Ireland House Oral History Collection, Archives of Irish America at New York University.

“New York is a city of the sea. It’s strength and greatness come from the sea. And the sounds of the waterfront beat like a pulse in the sound of the city.”

This is New York Harbor in 1904. The steam tugboat Primrose with the Brooklyn Bridge in the background.(vanderbiltcupraces.com)

In nearly every case, “historical geodata” means a paper map. Digitizing that map gives us an image of a paper map. While an image can be useful, historical maps turned into actionable data are much more useful. Moving geodata from paper to electronic data can be complicated and involve many actions, including:

• Describe the map accurately, preferably using standard terms
• Digitize the map
• Georectify the digitized image (associate points in the image with their geocoordinates, for example, so that the image can be positioned on OpenStreetmap or Google Maps exactly where it belongs)
• Extract image features—such as polygons, text, or contour lines—as digital layers

Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, flagship building of the New York Public Library. Photographer Sue Bigelow.

From November 5-7, 2014, I attended a meeting of 54 people from three continents at the New York Public Library called Moving Historical Geodata to the Web. This meeting, including expenses for attendees, was funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. We were the only archives and the only Canadian institution represented.

This was not the kind of meeting where participants give presentations and then go home. It was a mix of presentations, discussions and collaborative brainstorming designed to produce long-term working relationships, projects and infrastructure.

Screenshot from NYPL’s Building Inspector application

Our host, Matt Knutzen, Geospatial Librarian and Curator for NYPL, explained the inspiration for this meeting. In 2001, NYPL started digitizing maps and has since digitized thousands. They always wanted them to be more than just images, and to be usable by the public. NYPL Labs has worked with Topomancy LLC to create Map Warper, an award-winning web application which allows anyone to georectify images of maps and extract some features. NYPL Labs also created Building Inspector, an application which allows the public to contribute “bite-sized” quality inspection and correction of map features which have been extracted by machine. Realizing that other institutions also wanted to make their maps actionable in some way, they organized this meeting to organize the community.

Participants work as developers, librarians, researchers, institutional administrators, conservators, educators, artists, geospatial specialists, visualization and public access professionals, bringing diverse perspectives to the group. Lightning talks showed us some of the projects they were involved in and gave an indication of where there might be overlap and gaps.

Here’s a sample of the projects mentioned in these talks:

The National Library of Scotland has, among other things:

• over 91,000 digitized maps online, with hundreds georeferenced
• a viewer which allows comparison of maps side by side
• Visualizing Urban Geographies, which provides mapping tools for historians

Screenshot of side-by-side comparison viewer on National Library of Scotland’s site

The University of Virginia created Map Scholar, an online application that allows georeferencing, annotation, image processing and curation of geospatial data.

Stanford University developed Orbis, an interactive mapping application of transportation (“the circulatory system of human movement”) in the Roman Empire. It would be wonderful to create an Orbis of other times and places.

Screenshot of Orbis

Shift (creators of Historypin), based in London, created Mapping Emotions in Victorian London, a crowd-sourced project to annotate a map with emotions from Victorian fiction.

The University of Portsmouth and the Great Britain Historical GIS Project have created Old Maps Online with technological development from Klokan Technologies. Scans of maps in repositories around the world can be found and viewed.

Screenshot of Old Maps Online looking at London

OpenStreetMap has a new OpenHistoricalMap project to make georectified historical maps available in different time layers.

MIT Libraries, Princeton University and Stanford University have collaborated on GeoBlacklight, a project which improves searching and sharing of structured geospatial data and is also useful with scanned map images.

The Library of Congress, working with Topomancy LLC, has created a digital gazetteer (geographical dictionary), drawing on information from over 100 different databases.

Screenshot from Library of Congress gazetteer

Wikimedia Finland is starting to make archival maps available through Wikimaps and would like to contribute to the OpenHistoricalMap project and work toward a seamless online historical experience which would include georeferencing and a gazetteer.

Having reviewed the current state of the relevant technology, we broke into groups to discuss issues. This gave us some useful ideas, including:

• One big vision, an ambitious common goal, roughly summarized as “the sum total of human geography, rasterized, vectorized, made available to everyone, everywhere for free”.
• We also recognized that there are many different types of users of geographic data (not just academic researchers), so it needs to be available in different, flexible ways.
• Tools to automatically extract information from scans are either rudimentary or do not exist: much of this work is being done by hand.
• It is important to continue to preserve the original paper map and to build digital preservation into our work.
• It would be useful to adapt Tim Berners-Lee’s 5-star system for publishing data to create a similar system for publishing geodata

Five stars of open data, summarized. Photograph by W3C consortium.
Mug available in W3C shop on Café Press.

We also realized we need to find more ways to collaborate on the large projects. The next step was for everyone to identify people they could collaborate with, and discuss how that could happen. Many specific plans were made for collaboration on digitization, software development on Github, gazetteer development, and more.

Finally, each participant made a pitch for a specific project or idea, large or small, which could be worked on, and participants voted with stickers on which ones they thought were feasible, which they thought would have the greatest impact and which they would commit to working on. Top-voted ideas are here. A sample of these ideas are:

• United (States|Kingdom) of (Sanborn|Goad). Sanborn Fire Insurance maps exist of the entire United States, held by various institutions; some other countries are shown in Goad’s maps. We should locate them, describe and scan them all.
• Map CAPTCHA. Create a CAPTCHA-like way for the public to contribute to verifying map data.
• Build a reliable and automated feature extractor.
• Contribute data to OpenHistoricalMaps.

This meeting was a great success, as it brought together a community of interest and created several plans of action. We are pleased to be able to contribute to some of these initiatives.

Historical geodata is a valuable resource and we have already digitized and made available some key maps in our holdings. In 2015, we intend to make more historical geodata available, and make it useful in different ways. We will be announcing these projects as they are completed.

In this March 1, 1988 talk, Harrison Salisbury, a giant of 20th century journalism, explains that a newsperson’s obligation is to report an event “to convey the essence of what happened and why it’s significant.” “This may sound simple,” says Salisbury, a former World War II correspondent for United Press International who then went on to have a distinguished career with The New York Times, “but it is an extremely hard task.”

Salisbury says the parable of “Rashomon,” the classic Japanese film of people who recount multiple conflicting versions of a murder they think they have witnessed, parallels the travails that a journalist encounters on a routine basis. As an example, he describes his first reporting assignment in his home state of Minnesota, covering what he initially thought was a simple automobile accident but which turned out to have as many versions as there were witnesses. Later, his editors killed a story he wrote in the early 1930’s about the unemployed in the Twin Cities because local politicians and business leaders insisted that the Depression hadn’t come to their towns. “People see what they want to see.” The listener can almost hear Salisbury’s shoulders shrug. “It’s a living phenomenon that can’t be stopped.”

His most profound encounter with multiple versions of the truth came during his coverage of the United States air attacks on North Vietnam. Salisbury — reporting from Hanoi during the Christmas of 1966 — described bombs that leveled dwellings and killed civilians. His account did not coincide with the story that was being touted by President Lyndon Johnson and the Pentagon; they insisted that the bombing was “surgical,” only hitting steel and concrete targets of military value. Salisbury, who huddled with North Vietnamese civilians in bomb shelters, knew otherwise, and filed accounts that made trouble for the powerful, who then launched ad hominem attacks against him. But it was later revealed that the information he presented regarding the scope of the bombing damage turned out to have been independently and immediately verified as accurate by the Central Intelligence Agency.

Winner of multiple George Polk Awards, Salisbury insisted that a journalist’s true job is to bear witness. This often requires being confrontational and getting “brickbats rather than bouquets” from those who come under the journalist’s lens. He ironically describes reporters who perceived themselves as having friendly relationships with Presidents Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan. Salisbury says these leaders were all master manipulators capable of swaying journalists to write favorably of them. Salisbury confessed that he was not immune from Presidential blandishments. Thus, he actually found himself more comfortable covering Presidents Harry Truman and Richard Nixon: neither made any bones about their dislike of the press, which made it easier for the journalist to keep a professional distance.

“To be uppity, to be contradictory,” Salisbury says, “is the essence of the American system” of press freedom. Salisbury reached such a conclusion during the years 1949 through 1954, when he reported from the Soviet Union as Moscow Bureau Chief for The Times. The Soviet government press conferences were attended by dozens of Russian “journalists” who asked no questions and took no notes as Communist officials delivered policy statements and offered statistics. The Russian reporters didn’t need to gather facts: the stories had already been prepared and delivered to their offices in officially approved manuscripts.

Salisbury, who later won the Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the Soviet Union, said all dispatches from the American press during the late Stalin and early Khrushchev years were subjected to relentless censorship. He tells of using subtle techniques with mixed results to get information past the censors.

Journalists in this country have often been challenged for making Americans uncomfortable, too. When Salisbury was seen taking notes by Barry Goldwater supporters at a campaign rally, they demanded that he stop writing what the candidate was saying. “It was as if I would do damage by revealing what he said.” He notes that such an attitude is widely held in this nation. But Salisbury maintains that for America to continue as a healthy society, it’s important that the media be willing to accept criticism by those it covers. “The turbulent mix of ideas brought forth by the press is our strength.”

Salisbury died at the age of 86 in 1993. In addition to his newspaper achievements, which included founding The New York Times Op-Ed page in 1973, he wrote 29 books on world events including the Nazi siege of Leningrad, Mao Zedong’s long march to revolutionary victory in China, the Vietnam War, and the protest at Tiananmen Square.

___________________________________

Note: Harrison Salisbury’s 46-minute talk is followed by short interviews with American journalists Edwin Diamond of New York Magazine and Richard C. Hottelet of CBS News. In this 12-minute segment, the two journalists discuss their own encounters with the “Rashomon” effect.

This program originally aired on WNYC on June 13, 1993.

Initially launched in 1921, the first Cutter OAK of the US Coast Guard serviced the harbor’s aids to navigation. This included maintaining the buoys and lighthouses in the New York Harbor. By 1962, when this episode of New York: A Portrait in Sound aired, the Cutter Oak managed the same responsibilities from the ocean surrounding the NY area, all the way up the Hudson River to Albany, at times. The OAK worked seven days a week in good, and especially in bad, weather.

In 2002, the present day Cutter OAK was launched, where it continues to service waters surrounding the southeast borders of the United States, as well as areas around the Bahamas, Cuba, Haiti, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Before pre-recorded music became widely commercially available, a song plugger’s job was to entice customers to buy the sheet music, often by sitting down at department store pianos and playing the latest hits. Many musicians and composers started their careers as pluggers, some of the more notable people including George Gershwin, Ron Roker, and Lil Hardin Armstrong. Song pluggers have come a long way since the early Tin Pan Alley days; by 1962 their duties were adapted, and their job mostly involved pitching to publishers, who were always looking for the next big hit.

This change in a song plugger’s responsibilities caused unease in some. In the words of Redd Evans, music publisher: “We’ve become slaves to the taste of children. This is a very bad thing because pretty soon we’ll start wearing knee breeches again and this is something I want to try to avoid.”

In the background you can hear J. Fred Coots, American songwriter, plugging his biggest hit, Santa Claus is Comin’ To Town.

“At the Fencers Club and half a dozen salons throughout the city, you can always hear the ringing clash of foils, the courtly language, and the dancing footsteps.”

This episode of New York: A Portrait in Sound looks into the sophisticated sport of fencing. Listen as champions, such as Dr. Daniel Bukantz, 4 times national champion, describe what it’s like to be a fencer.

Since 1881, the Red Cross has been around to offer emergency assistance and relief to those affected by disasters. The Red Cross was on the scene during the Great Blizzard of 1888, the sinking of the steamship General Slocum in 1904, and the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire in 1911.

This episode of New York: A Portrait in Sound focuses on the flooding of the mid-Atlantic states, brought by the Ash Wednesday Storm of 1962. Testimonials from survivors describe how much they lost from the storm, and how the Red Cross provided shelter when all they had was gone.

In 1962, the Delacorte Theater officially opened in the heart of Central Park as a place for free performances for the public. This episode of New York: A Portrait in Sound takes a look into Shakespeare in the Park, a festival that has turned into a long-running and beloved summer tradition.

Joseph Papp, founder of The Public Theater and director of that year’s show The Merchant of Venice, describes the beauty of these events: how people of all colors, backgrounds, and economic levels congregate to enjoy Shakespeare. One actress describes how “often we found with the tragedies in particular, you start with the daylight and the play usually deepens in its tragic nature as it moves along, so that as the night falls, the drama gets more and more complicated and moving towards its final conclusion.”

Celebrating its 53rd Anniversary this year, the Delacorte Theater still calls itself home for Shakespeare in the Park.

Exterior of New York Shakespeare Festival at Delacorte Theatre in Central Park, 1968.

(George E Joseph/New York Public Library)

This image from our lantern slide collection is labelled “PALACES OF MECHATTA: ON EDGE OF SYRIAN DESERT, CARVING” “SYRIA (6th AD) “XEm”

The monumental unfinished palace of Qasr Mshatta was discovered and excavated in 1840, and lies about 30km south of Amman in Jordan. It probably dates to the mid 8th century. The huge intricately carved southern facade, illustrated in this image, was given as a gift to Kaiser Wilhelm II and transported to Berlin in 1903. A significant proportion of the carvings have been reconstructed and are now on display at the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, having suffered damage from bombing during WWII.

In an article of 1908, P. Siméon Vailhé described the site as: ‘this fairytale palace, pearl of the Syrian desert, before the facade was taken to Berlin’. He also added that ‘the legendary palace of Mechatta has been measured, drawn and photographed to the last detail’, and noted that the 24 extremely good, large format photographs allowed the facade to be studied as it was when it was still in place.

HEIR, the Historic Environment Image Resource, contains many evocative images which provoke a debate about how and why ancient sites have changed, whether changes are beneficial or destructive, and how the treatment of material culture in the past and present represents a complex interplay of political, social and cultural attitudes. Change is inevitable, and the value of a resource such as HEIR is the opportunity it gives to study lost views of the past, as Simeon Vailhe noted.

P. Siméon Vailhé (1908) Chronique byzantine et médiévale de Palestine (Vizantijsky Vremennik, xiv p462-482)

Nelson Mandela’s walk to freedom came after more than 27 years in prison, most of them at the notorious Robben Island in Cape Town harbor. As pictured above, Mandela walked some seventy yards from the car that had driven him from prison gates to the steps of Cape Town’s Victorian City Hall. There he thanked the African National Congress and his supporters at home and abroad and told the excited crowd of some 50,000 that apartheid has no future.

The veteran ANC leader said that the negotiations on dismantling the white supremacist policy and its infrastructure will mean an end to the white monopoly on political power and will address “the overwhelming demand of our people for a democratic nonracial and unitary South Africa.” Mandela closed by referring to his remarks made at trial in 1964:

“I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the idea of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”

This semester, the Special Collections & Archives Graduate Assistants are delving into the world of rare books!

The Special Collections & Archives at Florida State University has an impressive collection of rare books–from Sumerian cuneiform tablets (created in approximately 2000 BCE) to the Grove Press Collection (published in the 20th century) and almost everything in between.  Some areas of particular collecting strength include the French Revolution and Napoleonic era, early English Bibles, poetry about childhood, and the history of Florida.

Students and researchers can always access the materials held by Special Collections & Archives in the Special Collections Research Center Reading Room.  But students can also engage with rare books and archival materials from Special Collections & Archives as part of a classroom visit.  An instruction session is a unique opportunity for students to analyze rare books and manuscripts in the classroom setting.  With the background knowledge they’ve gained in class, students are able to learn from and interact with primary source materials.

Part of the Graduate Assistants’ job this semester has been to assist Katie McCormick, Associate Dean for Special Collections & Archives, with preparing for the different class instruction sessions in Special Collections & Archives.  Before a classroom visit takes place, there are meetings with the class instructor to discuss the goals for the

session.  This helps us determine what materials from the collection might best serve the instructor’s focus.  While sometimes the professor knows exactly what materials he or she wants to see, because of our knowledge of the collection, the Special Collections staff are often able to suggest additional items in the collection that might complement the themes the instructor wishes to stress.

One of the great things about assisting with classroom instruction has been this opportunity to discover different aspects of the collection.  With each class I assist, I learn new things about the rare volumes held in Special Collections & Archives.

In preparing for a graduate class on “Renaissance Observation,” I discovered the 1584 volume of the Cosmographia by Peter Apian.  Peter Apian (1495-1552) was a German mathematics professor and printer.  His Cosmographia is one example of the popular Renaissance genre of cosmography.  In the sixteenth century, cosmography combined areas as diverse as astronomy, natural history, and geography.  Written in Latin, Peter Apian’s Cosmographia is an exploration of sixteenth century astronomy.  One unique aspect of Apian’s Cosmographia is its mathematical focus.  The 1584 edition held by Special Collections contains moving diagrams that help to illustrate his astronomical concepts.  In the illustration pictured below, the images of the zodiac are used to map the night sky.

Other examples of the Renaissance cosmography genre held by Special Collections include Sebastian Munster’s 1550 edition of Cosmographia.  First published in 1544, Munster’s Cosmographia is counted as the first German description and categorizations of the world.  Munster’s Cosmographia focuses on geography, the customs of different cultures, and the history of animals and plants.  Its detailed illustrations are considered particularly important.

You can find these volumes (and many others) in the Special Collections Research Center weekdays, from 10:00 am – 6:00 pm.

Rebecca L. Bramlett is a graduate assistant in the Special Collections & Archives Division.  She is working on her Master of Library and Information Science at Florida State University.

This Friday in Jackson Library, the digital projects team will be hosting Vintage Viands, a taste-testing exhibit featuring recipes from the Martha Blakeney Hodges Special Collections and University Archives (SCUA) Home Economics Pamphlets Collection. In addition to the food,  SCUA will be displaying some of the actual pamphlets and there will also be laptops available so guests can view the digital collection.

Come early before the food is gone!

As we prepare for the Hosts and Champions exhibition, there is a family of mascots waiting to be introduced! Jocelyn, our Exhibition Assistant, presents a Scottish favourite…

Continuing from the introductions already given to Clyde and Wee Mannie, Mac the Scottish Terrier is the first from the mascots family to appear. Adored by children and adults alike Mac was bred in the highlands of Scotland and became an incredibly successful Scottish mascot for the Commonwealth Games 1986 in Edinburgh.

A giant Mac towers above

Unlike Wee Mannie, – who had been proposed as the original Scottish mascot in 1970, but was later dismissed – Mac is the first official mascot for the Commonwealth Games in Scotland that was made public. With a host of available merchandise and memorabilia Mac was reproduced as toys, pins, on tea towels, scarfs, ties and more, and has become an iconic image for the second Edinburgh Games.

A stand full of ‘Macs’

Mac and his memorabilia

Actively displaying the spirit of ‘The Friendly Games’ Mac sent ‘Macvalentines’ to each of the member countries of the Commonwealth Games Federation five months before the start of the event. Sending all participating athletes his love, each of the 25 countires received a valentines card graced with the lovely mascots face, and inside a description of his impeccable charater:

“typical of his breed, a real friend of the family, bright eyed, intelligent, courageous, energetic, and always willing to please…The Commonwealth Family will undoubtedly take him to their hearts in 1986″

A living Mac with an example of his valentines card

And indeed they did, with the famous terrier apppearing once again at the Opening Ceremony for the Glasgow 2014 Games and introducing each country in turn.

A Scottish terrier introduces Team Scotland at the opening ceremony

Stay tuned for more news from the mascot family next week!

The Institute of Archaeology holds some of the archives of archaeologist Martin Harrison, who was Professor of  the Archaeology of the Roman Empire at Oxford. He is perhaps best known for his excavations in Turkey, particularly his work at Sarachane and Amorium. So we were intrigured when we received an unexpected addition to his archive – this suitcase:

This is a serious suitcase – wooden structure, cloth covers inside and out, metal locks – but it has obviously seen better days. When we opened it we saw this:

– a small collection of maps and papers. But what you can’t get from this picture is the SMELL. The suitcase had been stored in damp conditions, and unfortunately it had developed mould and a lively colony of weevils:

Luckily we check all new acquisitions in the post-excavation area away from the archive before we let anything through the door, and fortunately most of the papers in the suitcase were published maps and photocopies which we did not need to retain.

Archiving – always something new!

In honor of the upcoming Global Divestment Day urging institutions to divest from fossil fuel companies and the work being done on the Amherst Campus in support of divestment from coal, I thought we should take a moment to look back at an earlier time that Amherst divested its investment holdings on ethical grounds. I’m referring, of course, to the international campaign to pressure the South African government to dismantle its apartheid system in the 1970s and 80s (although Amherst also divested from Sudan in 2006 on ethical grounds).

Picketers outside the fall Board of Trustees meeting, 1977

The first official action on South Africa by the trustees was at their fall 1977 meeting. Following some years of talks, debates and student organizing, a petition was presented to the Trustees at this meeting demanding that the college seek “corporate withdrawal from South Africa.” During the meeting around 70 students picketed Alumni House, while two spokesmen were invited to speak at the meeting.

During the meeting, the Trustees adopted a “Trustee Statement Concerning Investment in South Africa,” which referenced the ethical investment policy adopted by the college in 1972 and decided that the college would not divest outright, but would use its shareholder power to attempt to change the practices of companies that operated in South Africa. They were following what were known as the Sullivan principles.

Following a packed open meeting held by the Board of Trustees and the South African Support Committee in February, the Board again took up the question of divestment in their spring and fall 1978 meetings, affirming their previous decision both times. Divestment was one of the major topics on campus in the academic year of 1977/78, it was front page news in a quarter of Amherst Student issues and by November 1978, President Ward was able to state regarding the previous two years, “there has not been a meeting of the board in that time when the investment in corporations doing business in South Africa has not been a matter for discussion.”

Divestment remained a hotly debated, much committeed, and frequently demanded subject in the following years, throughout a great deal of turmoil and change at the college. In June 1985, following the lead of Reverend Leon Sullivan, President Pouncey and the Board of Trustees issued a statement that Amherst College would divest from South Africa if it had not made “significant progress toward eliminating statutory apartheid” within two years and instructed the College’s investment managers to prepare for such an eventuality.

Students encircle the Alumni House in a silent vigil during the October 1985 Trustees meeting

Just four months later, in October of 1985, the Trustees made the unexpected decision to divest completely.

Ending apartheid in South Africa was a fraught and complicated topic, as President Ward said in a talk on divestment in Johnson Chapel in spring of 1978, it is not easy “for someone on either side to be confident about what actions one might take that would work toward betterment of the society.” Climate change and fossil fuel divestment are very different (some would say simpler) than the issues of institutionalized racial violence and inequality being addressed by the anti-apartheid movement, but we can hope for ongoing action and debate on campus that echos the passion, broad engagement, and thoughtful deliberation of this earlier era… and perhaps it will serve as inspiration the next time that Amherst has the opportunity to use its fiscal weight to leverage ethical change.

(For additional material on South African divestment at Amherst and much, much more, visit Archives and Special Collections for our upcoming “Race and Rebellion at Amherst College” exhibition planned for late February through June)

We’re now just under two weeks away from our big type event of the year, when Tobias Frere-Jones will be our guest speaker at an event to award our first ever Updike Prize for Student Type Design.

It should be a fantastic night, so put it on your calendar now: Thursday, February 19th at 6pm. You can get a sense of Tobias Frere-Jones’s engaging take on typographic history by visiting his terrific blog.

At 5:30 we’ll be offering a short tour of our latest exhibition, “Inhabited Alphabets,” which highlights some typographic oddities from our Updike Collection as well as our other collections including children’s books, Civil War items and more. The Washington Street entrance will be open starting at 5:15. The event is free and open to the public, but you’re welcome to RSVP on the Library’s website.

And that’s not all! If you’re a proper typographic enthusiast, you need a great typographic t-shirt, and we’ve got one for you:

Visit our Teespring campaign and order a t-shirt now. We’ve taken one of our favorite images from the current exhibition (from an 1838 Austin Letter Foundry specimen book) and turned it into a t-shirt that proclaims your typographic allegiance. Not only do you get a great shirt, but you also support Special Collections. The campaign runs through February 25th, so don’t delay. After that, they’re gone.

Thanks to Michael McDermott for once again designing the event poster featured at the top of this post. And thanks also to our event sponsor, Paperworks!

On a Sunday afternoon in the summer of 1962, a tourist venturing through Washington Square Park would find it packed with singers, banjo pickers, and guitar strummers all playing folk music. The park was generally “packed in so tight, you can’t even lay a guitar case down flat.” 

These “citybillies” were mostly students, transplanting a little piece of Tennessee to Greenwich Village. It was a good and cheap way to spend a Sunday afternoon, according to Major Wiley, and might even be a chance to meet a charming young lady or man.

Man singing and playing guitar, Washington Square Park, New York, New York, August 5, 1962. (Photo by Frederick Kelly/The New York Historical Society/Getty Images)

(getty images/Getty)

 A year before, performing in Washington Square Park required a permit – something that was not given out frequently to folksingers especially. Izzy Young, featured in the recording, says that “all music belongs to the city,” including folk. A protest was held and a song was written in response to defend the right to make music in Washington Square, declaring that “this square is your square, this square is my square.”

Included are other raw clips of music that might be heard in the park – anything from blues and bongos to Spanish guitar. The person who recorded these clips left a typewritten sheet of notes telling which ones to use in the final version. The first clip was labeled by the recorder as “solo guitar w. rich negro voice – blues” and the second recording was labeled “‘La Seine’ mandolin and voice – not too bad”.

Listen here:

Founders Online, a tool for seamless searching across the papers of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Alexander Hamilton, launched in 2013. Since then, the tool has grown to a fully searchable online database of over 165,000 documents, including thousands of documents that have not yet appeared in the published volumes.

The site has had nearly 750,000 unique visitors—an average of over 42,000 people each month.

We continue to hear remarkable stories about how researchers are using the site and the surprising items they’ve found. Here are some unique uses of the content found on Founders Online:

• Founders Online is cited in Harvard’s Arnoldia magazine article, “The Pawpaw, a Forgotten North American Fruit Tree”.
• The Philadelphia Museum of Art used Founders Online to conduct research for their catalogue of American silver in their collection.
• Users can also search Founders Online for Oaths of Allegiance during the Revolutionary War. One noteworthy oath is the one taken by Alexander Hamilton when he was Washington’s Aide-de-camp.

• Gates Thomas, a composer and associate professor at Berklee College of Music, has written a cantata based on George Washington’s Revolutionary War letters found in Founders Online. You can hear the cantata in this “With Good Reason” radio broadcast at about the 26:00 mark.

 What have you found in Founders Online?

[Thanks to Geneva Henry, University Librarian and Vice Provost for Libraries at the George Washington University, for contributing this guest blog post.]

Geneva Henry, George Washington University

While many may think of the scholarly record as the products surrounding scholarly works that are eventually disseminated, usually through publications, there is another aspect to the scholarly record that people at academic institutions – especially administrators – care about. This can be thought of as the campus scholarly record that frames the identity of an institution. In considering this perspective, there is an even more compelling reason to consider how the many activities surrounding scholarly dissemination are captured and managed. The libraries at academic institutions are arguably the obvious leaders to assume responsibility for managing these resources; libraries have been the stewards of the scholarly record for a very long time.  But librarians must now recognize the changing nature of the elements of that record and take a proactive role in its capture and preservation. Moreover, they have a responsibility to the many campus stakeholders who have an interest in these resources for differing and sometimes conflicting purposes.

Research activities and early dissemination of findings have changed with the proliferation of social media and the Web. Scholars can exchange information via blog posts, twitter messages, Facebook posts and every other means of social media available, with feedback from colleagues helping to refine the final formal publication. The traditional methods of peer review are now being further enhanced through web-based prepublications and blogs where reviewers from anywhere can provide less formal feedback to authors. For an increasing number of scholars, social media is the new preprint. Data is posted and shared, comments are exchanged, methods are presented and questioned, revisions happen and the process can continue, even after the “formal” publication has been released in a more traditional form. This requires librarians to think about how they’re preserving their websites and social media outputs that now need to be part of the scholarly record as well as the overall campus record of scholarship.

The campus is full of stakeholders who have an interest in this new, constantly evolving record. Some would like all of this information fully exposed to publicize the work being done, while others feel that there are limits to how much should be made available for everyone to view. Systems such as VIVO and Elements provide platforms that will highlight faculty activities to provide more visibility into the research activities on campus. Sponsored research offices want insights into what people are doing so that they can match research opportunities with relevant researchers and help with identifying partners at other institutions. Media relations staff want to identify experts as media inquiries come in related to current issues happening in the world. Academic departments are interested in showcasing the scholarly record of their faculty in order to attract more graduate students and new faculty to their departments. Promotion and tenure committees want a full understanding of all of the activities of faculty members, including their service activities; increasingly, social media is blurring the line between scholarship and service as one feeds into the other.

Faculty members, the source of creating these resources, are understandably confused. Their attitudes and perceptions range from excited to worried, from protective to open. Their activities on social media do not always relate cleanly to a single scholarly record and will often be mixed with personal, non-scholarly information they may not want the world to see (e.g. pictures of their dinner, political commentaries, stories of their family vacation). This mixed landscape helps to fuel the legal concerns of an institution’s general counsel and the image consciousness of the public relations folks who are cautious about what might end up in the public with the exercising of academic freedom.

Circling back, now, to the library as the logical keeper of the academic record, it is important to realize that there is a vast range of stakeholders that the records serve. These stakeholders become partners with the library in helping to determine what information will be kept, what will be exposed and what needs to remain in restricted access. Partnerships with campus IT units that manage security and authoritative feeds from enterprise systems are critical. Sometimes some stakeholders will ask that exposed information be “redacted” from its online availability and librarians must be able to intelligently communicate the limits of successfully removing this from the world wide web.

The change in the scholarly record raises many questions and will continue to present challenges for libraries and academic institutions. As faculty change institutions, who will be responsible for managing their record of scholarship that is disseminated through social media so that it is preserved long-term? Constantly changing methods for communicating and sharing knowledge will require a scholarly record that can readily accommodate innovations. What will the scholarly record of the future be and what should be captured?  While we don’t have a crystal ball to help with this prediction, we do have a good barometer surrounding us in our libraries everyday: study your students and how they communicate.

We are currently preparing our Hosts & Champions exhibition for a touring programme that will visit a variety of locations around Scotland in 2015 and 2016. In this article Jocelyn Grant, one of our Exhibition Assistants, provides an update on some of the material she has discovered while researching our Commonwealth Games Scotland Archive.

For each of the consecutive Commonwealth Games that comes to pass there are many items and ideas that cross between countries as the process of organising such a large event becomes more established, and each new host has more examples and materials to learn from and improve upon. Those ideas, items and events that are carried on are usually some of the things most clearly remembered by those who visit the Games. These include some obvious contenders such as the opening and closing ceremonies, the Queen’s Baton Relay, the creation of unique medals, the design of a new baton and so on. However there are many things that are created during the Games that we do not always have the opportunity to see and enjoy, let alone compare and contrast against every one that has come before! However, I am in the happy situation of being able to help.

As I investigate the Commonwealth Games Scotland Archive I have the happy job of going through materials from – the great majority of – past Games in preparation for our touring exhibition (#HostsandChampions and #Legacy2014) and directly seeing how things have progressed and changed. Among my many trawls through the minutes, mascots, medals and uniforms that make up this archive I have come across a great number of newsletters/bulletins that provide wonderful information on the progress of preparations, and the opinions and thoughts of the people involved. While many of these newsletters are made directly available to the public – materials that will no doubt make a re-appearance on this blog – there are several unique series that are designed to serve the Athletes’ Village and its inhabitants.

The Once & Future Voice

“It will be designed on the Olympic model, both in general construction and its stern definition of the amateur. But the Games will be very different, free from both the excessive stimulus and the babel of the international stadium. They should be merrier and less stern, and will substitute the stimulus of novel adventure for the pressure of international rivalry”. The Commonwealth Games: The First 60 Years 1930-1990. 10. Cleve Dheensaw

For those of you that went to see some of the sports and events on offer in Glasgow this past July/August, I think you will understand how this desire for the Commonwealth Games to be ‘merrier and less stern’ is a sentiment that has very enthusiastically been carried through! This desire for a friendly, jovial and participatory atmosphere is not only encouraged among the host’s people but among the athletes, and this is wonderfully highlighted through the Village newsletters that appear across the years. Variously titled Village Courier, Village Daily Bulletins, Village NewZ  (note the ‘Z’ for late 90’s cool), Village View, Village Voice (with more yet to be discovered); these publications promote events locally and within the Village while highlighting interesting information about competitors and organisers.

Edinburgh 1970

While the minutes of previous Commonwealth Game’s committees have yet to reveal the exact moment of inspiration that produced these publications, the earliest examples I have discovered appear to have a very utilitarian objective. The Village Daily Bulletin is a series of single or double A4 sheets produced for the Edinburgh 1970 Games that provide useful information on the practical elements of the Village.

British Commonwealth Games 1970 Newsletter

Adorned with nothing more than a logo banner at the top, these newsletters were made available to all members of the Village for practical purposes.

Brisbane 1982

With a leap, skip and hop the next Village news I came across is from Brisbane 1982, the Village Courier, and already the differences between the two publications could not be greater. Placing a huge emphasis on photography this publication is presented much like a newspaper, with a column lay-out and regular segments. The regular segments include the ‘Village in Pictures’ – a middle-spread featuring photographs of people in and around the Village – cartoon sketches and interviews that highlight the work of administrators and organiser.

Village Courier
September 22, 1982

Village Courier
October 1, 1982

Edinburgh 1986

The introduction of cartoon sketches in the Brisbane Village Courier is carried forward, with large caricatures of athletes in the Edinburgh 1986 Village View and the Game’s mascots beginning to make an appearance.

Village View
3rd August 1986

Allan Wells and Daley Thomson

Auckland 1990

Next we have the Village NewZ publication of Auckland 1990 which presents some of the best examples of engagement with people in the Village, containing many personal stories of competitors and staff, and the activities and work they were engaged in within the Village (and their personal lives). Some of my favourite stories in this series include:

Blues’ News

20 January 1990, CG/2/14/2/1/5

“Amongst the array of equipment for the NZ police’s biggest operation are telepagers…However, some very senior officers, found the technology a bit overwhelming and tried to engage the cool American voice at the other end in conversation. They may not have had a very enlightening experience but have certainly got the message now on how to work the pagers”.

Small Talk

31 January 1990, CG/2/14/2/1/16.

“At least six of the big boys have been too much for the Village beds, which have been crushed to the floor.

Village house manager Kris Hope-Cross is not naming teams but said wightlifters had been the major culprits behind the bed collapses…Village staff have no stronger beds available, so they have to send in the standard versions and hope for the best.”

Finally we have the past year’s publication, the Village Voice. Being able to view and directly observe the changes that have been made to the newsletters across the years it is not difficult to see the many elements that have been re-interpreted for the Glasgow 2014 Village Voice. There is still a section on entertainment for the Villagers, interviews with staff and competitors, a photographic record of daily events in the Village, a discussion of results and the opportunity to share your thoughts with the paper (although this is more regularly done via text, email and twitter, rather than by letter).

Village Voice
Thursday 31 July 2014

I will no doubt come across more of these as I investigate the archive, however we currently only have one of the series for this past Commonwealth Games 2014! If anyone does have any copies of any of the Village newsletters, or any stories about their experience of the games – in the Village or otherwise – please get in touch!

Before the Beatles invaded America and vocal groups dominated the pop charts, much of top 40 music was written by men sitting in an office building in Midtown Manhattan. 

In the 1950s and early 1960s, the Brill Building was a songwriting mecca, and it came to symbolize an entire industry that focused on factory-like efficiency in pop music composition. The history of the building and its neighborhood goes back to the Tin Pan Alley days of the late 19th century, when a small group of New York publishers wrote most of the popular music in the United States.  Scott Joplin, Jerome Kern, and Cole Porter all wrote for Tin Pan Alley publishers.  Later, Carol King, Paul Simon, and even Lou Reed did stints for music publishers, working as professional songwriters before launching their own careers.

CIRCA 1959: Singer songwriters Carole King (center) and Paul Simon talk between takes in a New York, New York recording studio, circa 1959.

(Michael Ochs Archives / Getty Images/Getty)

The short 1961 Banker’s Trust piece above, originally meant as an ad-heavy filler for local radio, only tells part of the Brill Building’s story.  We also found the raw interview tapes, and those offer a more detailed picture of the state of the music industry at the time. Some of the more notable people on the raw tapes include Harry Fenster, who penned “It’s All Over But the Crying,” made famous by Hank Williams Jr.; Frank Davis, composer of “Mama Get Your Hammer, There’s a Fly on Papa’s Head.”; Harry Woods, who wrote “Try a Little Tenderness“; and Walter Bishop, who wrote songs for Frank Sinatra and Billie Holiday.

The Brill Building at 1619 Broadway, New York City (Photo by Mel Finkelstein/NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images)

(New York Daily News / Getty Images/Getty)

Bishop tells us how in the 1930s, a good song could stay on the charts for several years. But by the time of the interview, a hit single may last only a few weeks. He blames the advent of television, people’s subsequent short attention spans, and perhaps most importantly, the recent popularity of “vocal driven music”.

The cult of personality surrounding pop front men in the 1960s was pushing composers and instrumental music to the background and performers to the front. The trend culminated in the oft-cited watershed moment of the Beatles appearing on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1964, only three years after these interviews. “The British Invasion and the rock revolution that followed produced some great work but also undermined the importance of the Brill Building Sound’s inspired professionalism. Instead, the replacements were hero worship and superstar egocentricity of monstrous proportions,” Steven Rosen would later write, These newly discovered interviews give us a sense of how these professional composers knew what was coming as they lament the closing chapter of that “Brill Building Sound”.

The Brill Building, built in 1931 as the Alan E. Lefcourt Building.

(Jazz Guy/Flickr)

Brian Lavoie, presenting in the GWU International Brotherhood of Teamsters Labor History Research Center

On December 10^th, we held our second Evolving Scholarly Record Workshop at George Washington University in Washington, DC (you can read Ricky Erway’s summary of the first workshop, starting here). Many thanks to Geneva Henry and all the staff at GWU for hosting us in the fabulous International Brotherhood of Teamsters Labor History Research Center.This workshop, and others, build on the framework presented in the OCLC Research report, The Evolving Scholarly Record.

At George Washington Gelman library attending OCLC workshop #esrworkshop

— Martha Kyrillidou (@kyrillidou) December 10, 2014

Our first speaker, Brian Lavoie (OCLC Research) presented the ESR Framework and put it into context. What is considered part of the record is constantly expanding – for example, blogs and social media, which would previously not have been included. The evolution of how scholarship is recorded, makes it challenging to organize the record in a consistent and reliable ways. The ecosystem of stakeholders is evolving as well. It became clear to Brian and others involved in discussions around the problem space that a framework was necessary in order to support strategic discussions across stakeholders and across domains.

Formats shift (print to dig), boundaries blur (from books to data sets), characteristics change (static works to dynamic) #esrworkshop

— Keith Webster (@CMKeithW) December 10, 2014

In addition to traditional scholarly outcomes, there are two additional areas of focus, process and aftermath.

Process is what leads up to the publication of the outcomes – in the framework, process is composed of method, evidence and discussion (important because outcomes usually consolidate thanks to discussions with peers). Anchoring outcomes in process will help reproducibility. Scholarly activities continue in aftermath: discussion (including post publication reviews and commentaries), revision (enhancement, clarification), re-use (including repackaging for other audiences).

In the stakeholder ecosystem, the traditional roles (create, fix, collect, use) are being reconfigured. For example, in addition to libraries, service providers like Portico and JSTOR are now important in the collect role. Social media and social storage services, which are entirely outside the academy, are now part of create and use.  New platforms, like figshare, are taking on the roles of fix and collect. The takeaway here? The roles are constant, but the configurations of the stakeholders beneath them are changing.

How does the traditional "scholarly record" fit into today's consumer-producer model of web content? Not well, it seems. #esrworkshop

— Scott W. H. Young (@hei_scott) December 10, 2014

Our second speaker, Herbert van de Sompel (Los Alamos National Laboratory) gave perspective from the network point of view. His talk was a modified reprise of his presentation at the June OCLC / DANS workshop in Amsterdam, which Ricky nicely summarized in a previous posting. Herbert will also be speaking at our workshop coming up in March, so if you’d like to catch him in action, sign up for that session.

Wow @hvdsomp is basically reading my mind. "The web will fundamentally change from human-readable to machine-actionable." #esrworkshop

— Scott W. H. Young (@hei_scott) December 10, 2014

Our third speaker was Geneva Henry (George Washington University) – Geneva represented the view from the campus. We will be posing her viewpoint in a separate blog post, later this week but her remarks touched on the various campus stakeholders in the scholarly record – scholars, media relations, promotion and tenure committee, the office of research, the library.

Look to your students: How are they communicating? asks Henry. They’re future scholars; don’t expect drastic behavior changes #esrworkshop

— Mark Newton (@libmark) December 10, 2014

Daniel Hook (Digital Science), shared his “view from the platform.” (Digital Science is the parent company of several platform services, such as FigShare, AltMetrics, Symplectic Elements, and Overleaf). Daniel stressed the importance in transparency and reproducibility of research – there is a need for a demonstrable pay-off for investors in research. There is a delicate balance to be reached in collaboration versus competition in research. We are in an era of increased collaboration and the “fourth age of research” is marked by international collaboration. Who “owns” research, and the scholarly record? Individual researchers? Their institutions? Evaluation of research increasingly calls for demonstrating impact of research. Identifiers are glue – identifiers for projects, for researchers, for institutions. The future will be in dynamically making assertions of value and impact across institutions, and to build confidence in those assertions.

Funders keen to assess impact of research they funded at a macro-level – have you influenced policy? The economy? #esrworkshop

— Keith Webster (@CMKeithW) December 10, 2014

Finally Clifford Lynch (Coalition for Networked Information) gave some additional remarks, highlighting stress points. Potentially, the scholarly record is huge, especially with an expanded range of media and channels. The minutes of science are recording every minute, year in year out. Selection issues are challenging, to say the least. Is it sensible to consider keeping everything?  Cliff called for hard questions to be asked, and for studies to be done. Some formats seem to be overlooked — video, for example.

We concluded the meeting with a number of break-out sessions that took up focused topics. The groups came back with tons of notes, and also some possible “next steps” or actions that could be taken to move us forward. Those included.

• Promulgating name identifiers and persistent IDs for use by other stakeholders
• Focusing on research centers and subject/disciplinary repositories to see what kinds of relationships are needed
• Mining user studies/reviews to pull out research needs/methods/trends/gaps and find touch-points to the library
• Following the money in the ESR ecosystem to see whether there are disconnects between shareholder interests and scholar value
• Pursuing with publishers whether they will collect the appropriate contextual processes and aftermaths
• Investigating funding, ROI, and financial tradeoffs
• Getting involved during the grant planning processes so that materials flow to the right places instead of needing to be rescued after the fact

Thanks to all of our participants, but particularly to our hosts, our speakers, our notetakers and those who helped record the event on Twitter. We’re looking forward to another productive workshop in Chicago (in March) and then expect to culminate the three workshops at the ESR workshop in San Francisco (in June) where we’ll focus on how we can collaboratively move things forward to do our best to ensure stewardship of the scholarly record now and into the future.

I have 19 pages of notes from 5 breakout sessions. We'll boil down discussions and talking points for next steps soon #esrworkshop

— Merrilee Proffitt (@MerrileeIAm) December 10, 2014

The @DANSKNAW & #esrworkshop events on archiving the future scholarly record have given me focus on tech aspects that must be tackled first

— Herbert (@hvdsomp) December 11, 2014

We’re pleased to announce the availability of our first group of the Florida Flambeau, the student newspaper at FSU. The issues from 1915-1930 are now available in the FSU Digital Library (FSUDL).

Each issue is fully text searchable using Advanced Search in the FSUDL as well as browsable by year and month. We hope to continue to grow this collection over the following years. A larger collection of the Florida Flambeau is currently available in the Internet Archive as well.

One of the most difficult tasks in archiving (as in archaeology) is deciding what to retain, and what to dispose of (or put on the spoilheap). Similar underlying principles govern both disciplines.

Firstly, the research agenda: what is the archive for? Who will be using it? How significant is the material within the framework of a) what we think we know about the past and b) what future researchers might want to know about the past?

Second, the pragmatic agenda: is there space for this material? If it is kept, will this take up space and prevent us from retaining more important material (measured against criteria 1 above)? How much will it cost to conserve this material?

In archiving as in archaeology, the rule-of-thumb should be the same: if in doubt, keep!

All this ‘what is the point of an archaeological archive’ angst has been provoked by these:

Christopher Hawkes’ original box files. The contents – letters, documents etc – have been catalogued and been placed into acid-free archival storage boxes. We don’t want to continue using the original boxes for storage because they are not acid free, and their internal spring mechanisms will damage the contents.

Normal archival practice would be to discard these boxes. But the archaeologists in us think of the history of objects, and the story these box files have to tell. The labels on the outside are written in Christopher Hawkes’ own distinctive handwriting. These labels represent how Hawkes thought about and partitioned his research. These were the boxes which formed part of his research environment: a physical embodiment of his ideas and framework for thinking and retrieving information.

Some of the boxes may have older histories: this one, re-used by Hawkes, was made in Germany. Did it once hold part of Paul Jacobsthal’s archive?

On the other hand, these boxes take up a lot of valuable space. What would you do – would you keep them?