Join amateur-film enthusiasts, film and video archivists, and your neighbours for Home Movie Day 2014, this Saturday, October 18 at the Hangar at the Centre for Digital Media. Home Movie Day is a free public event celebrating amateur film and video and honouring the unique contribution of home movies to our understanding of social and cultural history. Home Movie Day is a volunteer-driven international initiative, and this year, events will be held in Japan, Wales, Indonesia, and Austria, among many other countries. The Vancouver edition will be hosted by the Audio-Visual Heritage Association of British Columbia (AVBC) and the Centre for Digital Media (CDM). Check out the Facebook page!

Fun for one and all! Source: Home Movie Day, Center for Home Movies.

Home Movie Day is a chance to find out what’s on those old reels or cassettes in your attic, chat with an archivist about care and preservation of your movies, discuss a transfer with a vendor, and share your discoveries and memories with the community, if you wish. Last year, 22 people brought in films on 8mm, Super 8, and 16mm. Among the highlights:

• A participant brought in an 8mm film, shot on glorious Kodachrome, of his parents’ wedding in early 1960s Uganda
• An experimental time-lapse film from the late 1970s/early 1980s wowed the audience
• A couple celebrating their 50th year of marriage saw the film of their wedding for the first time

Below is a 1928 home movie from our motion picture film collection: Greencroft – Badminton ’28. Reference code AM1036-S10-:MI-140.

This year, Home Movie Day will include video as well as film! Video archivists will be on hand to assist in format identification and advise on preservation, and playback decks will be available for VHS and DV/MiniDV cassettes, popular formats in the 1980s and ’90s.

The classic SMPTE colour bars. Who else automatically hears the test tone when they see this image? Source: Denelson83, CC-BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons.

Don’t have any home movies lurking in a forgotten corner of your house? Come out and enjoy some popcorn, and see what your fellow Vancouverites have to share. The screening will include home movies from the City of Vancouver Archives’ holdings, as well as a selection of orphan films. October 18 has been proclaimed Home Movie Day in the City of Vancouver. See you there!

Home Movie day 2014 proclamation, City of Vancouver

Date: Saturday, October 18, 2014

Time: 12-4pm

Place: The Hangar at the CDM, 577 Great Northern Way, Vancouver

Accepted film formats for playback: 16mm, 8mm, Super 8

Accepted video formats for playback: VHS, DV, MiniDV

Now on the verge of retirement from Florida State University Libraries after 34 years, and as my contribution to Archives Month, I’d like to reflect on my work experience as an archivist in the Division of Special Collections and Archives. I wanted to share with you not only the unique aspects of my professional career but also describe some of the most interesting collections I’ve processed, my observations on how the field has evolved, and how I’d like to transfer these experiences and skills into my retirement. I am hoping that for my fellow FSU library colleagues and students wishing to enter the archives field that my narrative will provide an insight into not only how diversified archival work can be, but also how projects can be accomplished with limited resources, and how professional practices in archives have changed over time.

AT THE BEGINNING…….SERVING AS A CONGRESSIONAL ARCHIVIST

Because the better part of my tenure at FSU Libraries was serving as the archivist of the Claude Pepper Library, most of this story will be devoted to that work.  I arrived in Special Collections in 1981 and was originally hired as the congressional archivist to arrange, describe, and make accessible the Claude Pepper Papers.  Because of the enormous size of the collection, the Papers were housed in a separate room in Strozier Library, and I was fortunate to have a library para-professional and two student assistants to process the collection. The first 900 boxes of the collection originally arrived in 1979, but a library para-professional with little or no archival experience began to arrange the collection. Unfortunately, a portion of the collection had to be reprocessed and it took another ten years to acquire additional materials and to make it accessible.  By that time, the collection and its staff had moved to at least three different locations in Strozier.  Furthermore, in preparation for the opening of the Claude Pepper Library (originally the Mildred and Claude Pepper Library, as a tribute to the Congressman’s late wife) portions of the collection were stored in the old Post Office on Woodward Avenue and the old Dodd Hall Reading Room (now the Florida Heritage Museum) while Dodd Hall was being renovated. I moved into the new Pepper Library facilities at the Claude Pepper Center in 1997.

It was exciting to finally be in a permanent location.  I found my work at the Pepper Library most enjoyable and satisfying.  The collection was fascinating, too. Congressman Pepper served over 40 years combined in the U.S. Senate and House, and his papers truly document all the major events of the 20th Century.  I originally met Congressman Pepper and his staff several times when we were planning the original Pepper Library in Dodd Hall, and continued to work with them at the Pepper Center and with the architect who designed and built the adjoining Claude Pepper Museum.

In my earlier years working at Dodd Hall, I joined the Society of American Archivists’ (SAA) Congressional Papers Roundtable, an association that continues to this day.  Through my contacts in the early 2000s, I learned that several congressional archives were beginning to digitize their collections. After I visited some of these institutions, and fortunately with the support of the Claude Pepper Foundation and FSU Libraries, John Nemmers, my archivist colleague at Pepper, and I proposed and implemented a digitization project. Over a period of three years (2001-2003), we and several student assistants selected materials to be scanned and made available on our new Claude Pepper website. We also prepared metadata for discovery of the materials and monitored search traffic to the website on a monthly basis. To publicize the project, we also wrote an article for the American Archivist; it served as a case study about how the value of digitization projects and how online finding aids can increase the use of archival collections.

Unfortunately, because Microsoft no longer provided server support for the software client we used for digitization and access, we had to discontinue our project. About that time, the FSU Libraries developed a long-range vision to create a repository of Florida political papers, not just congressional papers but those of Florida governors and senators as well. Subsequently, we began to acquire other papers of Florida statesmen, notably the Reubin Askew Papers, and transferred other Florida political papers from Special Collections & Archives housed in Strozier.  In addition, during the early 2000s, the FSU Libraries began developing a disaster preparedness program and created a “disaster plan working group;” I served as its preservation officer.  It was a monumental task, but our preservation “team” representing all FSU Libraries contributed to the development of the plan.  It has periodically been updated since that time.

Up until the time I began processing this collection, my archival experience had been limited to arranging and describing a collection of 18th Century deeds and other land records between settlers and Indian tribes in Long Island. Before I came to FSU, I lived in Long Island and worked at a local historical society. Once I arrived here, since I was the only archivist in the FSU Libraries (known in professional circles as a “lone archivist”), I had to reach out for help to the staff at the State Archives of Florida and begin attending SAA workshops to gain experience. This really paid off when it came time to reprocess and to add more materials.  However, since the concept of “More Product, Less Process” (MPLP) for archival materials hadn’t caught on yet in the 1980s, processing work was more time-intensive because staff had been removing all the original staples from attached documents and were counting all the documents in every folder! Because I was an archival “greenhorn” when I first arrived, I continued this practice but learned from my professional peers that these kinds of tasks weren’t absolutely necessary when working with large congressional papers. So the practice stopped. And by the time MPLP came to light in the early 2000s, we no longer arranged and described these large collections down to the individual document level. Furthermore, as long as the temperature and humidity were fairly stable, we no longer saw the need to remove every staple, either.

BECOMING A MANUSCRIPTS ARCHIVIST AT STROZIER

Because there was a growing need to reduce the backlog of archives and manuscripts that were gathering in Special Collections & Archives, and since additional archivists could not be hired to process university and non-university collections due to limited resources, priorities changed and I was transferred to Strozier in 2006 as the sole Special Collections archivist.  Since that time, and with the help of a student assistant, intern, and a graduate assistant, we eliminated this backlog. I supervised the students, interns, and a graduate assistant and it was great experience, because they were fascinated by the work and I enjoyed teaching and training them in archival practices for a variety of individual, family, and organizational collections.

CHANGING TECHNOLOGY

To describe these collections through archival finding aids, many of which were created in HTML, the Digital Library Center’s digital archivist created a template to encode the finding aid using the Encoded Archival Description (EAD) standard, and content was entered in the template from older finding aids and new collections with the text editor NoteTab.  After some initial training, the staff created finding aids, through NoteTab, to all of their archives and manuscript holdings (including the Shaw Collection). To present the finding aid on the web, the Digital Library Center exported the EAD content through a stylesheet using DigiTool.  I soon learned that it was not a practical tool for creating archival finding aids. There were too many false and irrelevant search results and it was not clear where in the particular collection searched the content could be found.

As more and more Special Collections repositories began using Archon, a platform for archival description and access, Special Collections & Archives decided that Archon provided a more user-friendly way for archival staff to record descriptive information about collections and digital objects and for end-users to view, search, and browse this content through the web.

However, it soon became evident that since finding aids existed in a variety of formats (Paper, HTML, DigiTool, Archon), it was difficult to discover what we really owned. Therefore, shortly after these backlogged collections were processed, I found myself part of a team headed by our Associate Dean of Special Collections, and consisting of the digital archivist, three professionals, and our library associate.   We became engaged in a major project to locate missing collections, classify collections properly as to whether they were university or non-university materials, and consolidate smaller collections into parent collections, since they were all part of one collection. Fortunately, we have now assessed what needs to be done and are in the process of parceling out projects to complete one major goal: enable discovery of our archives and manuscripts through one venue: Archon.

FAVORITE COLLECTIONS I’VE PROCESSED

As manuscript archivist, I processed quite an interesting variety of collections.  These ranged from Antebellum Civil War Plantation Records, to Florida Railroad Company records, diaries, turpentine industry records, shipbuilding company records, FSU faculty papers, and church records.  Two in particular stand out:  the Stanley Gontarski Grove Press Research Materials and the Cinema Corporation of America Collection.

The Gontarski materials were used by Dr. Gontarski to research his forthcoming book about Barney Grove Press, and Barney Rosset, founder of Grove Press. What I found particularly intriguing, and which formed a major part of this collection, were the intelligence files Gontarski obtained from Rosset’s personal papers, compiled by various branches of American intelligence (FBI, CIA, U.S. Army Intelligence) under the Freedom of Information Act. For example, there were U.S. Department of Justice and CIA memoranda regarding pornography, offensive material, and actions taken against Grove Press for importation of the film “I Am Curious Yellow” and other films deemed offensive.

The Cinema Corporation of America Collection documents film director Cecil B. De Mille’s role in the founding of the company – based in South Florida — and its film distribution activities in later years under Vice President Alan F. Martin. Through the work of this company and Martin’s activities, DeMille’s most enduring film, “The King of Kings,” has been in constant theatrical and non-theatrical distribution since 1927. The collection is a real treasure trove for documenting American motion picture history and will have great research value for students in FSU’s College of Motion Pictures Arts. In this collection can be found such unique items as a publicity photo for the original 1927 silent “King of Kings” movie, as shown below.

LOOKING AHEAD TO THE FUTURE

Now that my career in the Division of Special Collections and Archives is coming to a close in a few short months, when I reflect on my professional work, experience in processing collections, supervising projects, and training potential archivists in this field, I intend after I retire to continue my involvement in the profession by keeping abreast of developments and technology, attending conferences, and networking with colleagues in Florida and across the nation. But more than this, my real passion is to share these insights with students through teaching archival courses, and would like to contribute towards creating an archival studies program at FSU.

Kids are great at using stories to cope with frightening events in their lives.  In this audio, excerpted from WNYC’s 1979 storytelling festival, we hear some rather creative interpretations of Little Red Riding Hood and Dracula, as well a pretty decent joke about a talking skull.  Later in the episode, the theorist and scholar Brian Sutton-Smith talks about how kids often change, edit, and reinterpret stories to deal with the big and sometimes frightening matters in their lives.

Twenty five years ago, WNYC produced its first (and only) storytelling festival in New York City.  Along with live events in every borough, the station aired a week long series of programs devoted to both the story teller and the story scholar.  Unlike today’s emphasis on the genre’s more confessional or personal form, this series’ focus was more academic: each broadcast devoted itself to the origins and meaning of various oral history traditions, and the stories we hear are the kind of familiar allegoric tales meant to teach a lesson or enforce particular cultural norms.     

WNYC September 1979 Program Guide

(NYPR Archives)

Florida State University Special Collections & Archives Division is proud to present our Fall 2014 exhibit, “That I May Remember: Scrapbooks from Florida State College for Women (1905-1947),” which opens today in the Strozier Library Exhibit Space. This exhibit features scrapbooks from Heritage Protocol & University Archives.

The scrapbook is an expression of memories, unique to each individual. By preserving, collecting, and arranging everyday objects, the creators of scrapbooks shaped a visual narrative of their lives. “That I May Remember” explores the scrapbooks created by the students of Florida State College for Women (1905-1947). Although scrapbooks are generally created for the preservation of an individual’s memory, when taken as a whole, the FSCW scrapbook collection grants its viewers a rare insight into the history of FSCW and the women who made it was it was.  These scrapbooks tell the stories of students’ lives, school pride, friendships, and their contributions to the heritage of Florida State University.

“That I May Remember” will be open Monday-Friday from 10:00am-6:00pm in Strozier until December 1st.

Tony Schwartz thought people should use tape recorders like cameras to capture meaningful events. Over the years he recorded more than 30,000 sound portraits of New York City life. These included cab drivers telling stories, zoo keepers feeding lions, elevator operators calling out floors and children singing nursery rhymes. The above look into a common childhood rhyme, as Schwartz found out, takes us back to a very different time and place.

For more than 30 years Schwartz produced a weekly program of sound portraits on WNYC. We recently found this broadcast in the Municipal Archives WNYC collection. The bulk of his WNYC, WBAI and Folkways tapes are now with the Library of Congress.

The PIDB congratulates the Department of Energy’s Office of Classification Management for declassifying the complete 1954 Oppenheimer Hearing Transcript.  President Obama’s Second Open Government National Action Plan tasked Government agencies, including the Department of Energy, to systematically review and declassify historical data on nuclear activities.  The PIDB is pleased to see the Department of Energy actively working to declassify historical nuclear information and supporting the goals in the National Action Plan. According to the DOE’s OpenNet website, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) held a four-week, closed-door hearing in April and May of 1954 to determine the security clearance status of Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer.  The AEC previously released a redacted form of the original transcript, In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer: Transcript of Hearing before Personnel Security Board, in 1954.  The Department of Energy has re-reviewed the nineteen volumes of transcripts and has released them in their entirety without any redactions.  For the first time, the public and historians can read and use these full transcripts and gain new insight into an aspect of U.S. Cold War and nuclear weapons policy history.   The PIDB also commends the Department of Energy for providing the public with specific information on how to view the newly declassified information and identify the previously redacted/segregated “Classified Testimony.”  This additional effort of creating a cross-reference volume entitled, “Record of Deletions” of the declassified portions will aid researchers in their understanding of the records, an important step in the support of open government and transparency.

On October 14, 1893, Lois Lenski was born in Springfield, Ohio. She grew up and lived primarily in the midwest and northeast but because of poor health, starting in the 1940s, she often traveled to the south on doctor’s orders. In 1951, Lenski and her husband, Arthur Covey, built a house in Florida and spend increasing amounts of time in the South. It was thanks to her travels and eventual move to the American South that Lenski’s greatest works were born.

Strawberry Girl, a story about Florida Crackers in the early 1900s was inspired by Lenski’s time in Florida. An installment in a set of regional novels about children around the United States, it would win her the 1946 Newberry Medal and remains her most famous work.

The Lois Lenski Collection at Florida State University was started in the 1950s when the Libraries contacted Ms. Lenski asking for “even just a page or drawing from Strawberry Girl.” Initially, Lenski sent only two drawings but in 1958, she donated a larger collection of books, original drawings, articles and other items of interest to a Lenski or children’s literature scholar.

In the Spring of 2013, our Lois Lenski Collection was the focus of that semester’s Museum Object class. The course, a requirement of the Museum Studies minor at FSU, gives students a hands-on experience within the museum field. It requires the class to curate and design both a physical and online exhibit on their topic. You can view the online exhibit here.

This is the first of what will hopefully be a monthly series of blog posts on the progress of Continuity of Care – the project to catalogue and conserve the records of the Royal Scottish National Hospital. Thanks to a grant from the Wellcome Trust, this project started in the middle of August and will be completed by July 2015.

In 2013, the Royal Scottish National Hospital was given UNESCO status as a collection of international status (see our previous blog post). This reflects the importance of the Institution in the care of children with learning disabilities at a time when no distinction was made between mental disability and mental illness.

The Institution was founded in 1862 and the collection contains the earliest annual reports and minutes as well as a register of the first admissions.

Title page of the first report, 1862

Amongst the items of interest catalogued so far is a volume of Superintendent’s Reports 1863-1872.

The Medical Superintendent was in charge of the day to day running of the Institution and answered to the Directors. He submitted a monthly report in which he detailed admissions and discharges; the progress of building; donations and finance; requests for information from the Commissioners in Lunacy; recruitment and salaries of staff; and the health of the children. Dr David Brodie was the medical superintendent from 1862 to 1867 and he had a troubled relationship with the Directors. He had run a school for imbecile children in Edinburgh under the auspices of the Society for Education of Imbecile Youth in Scotland. Once the Society had the funds to build its Institution at Larbert, Brodie was the obvious choice as resident physician.

In Brodie’s second report he wrote ‘Seven pupils have been admitted during the month – one full payment, one reduced payment and 5 election cases’. But by his third report he was reporting that ‘the proportion of the uneducable class is already embarrassing and entails too heavy a trial on the patience of attendants…’ He made frequent requests for more staff and better accommodation and in his letter of resignation he made his feelings clear:

Part of the entry of the Directors’ Meeting, 1st October 1867

There has been a very large surplus revenue which as derived chiefly from payment cases I had a right to expect would be devoted to the practical work in which I have been engaged yet this has…been absorbed in the payment of past liabilities while I have had to bear unaided all the discredit and discomfort attendant on the deficient staff and accommodation and have had to feel and acknowledge that the work that we were professing to do at the Institution was not being accomplished’ (from the minutes of a Special Meeting of Directors 1^st October 1867).

This tension between the needs of the Institution and the financial reality in which it operated was to continue throughout its history as later posts will illustrate.

As a University Archivist, each day brings unique challenges, and every day is different. What most people don’t realize are the variety of duties, responsibilities, and actions that take place to keep everything moving forward to acquire, preserve, and provide access to Florida State’s historical collections. In the course of a week, a multitude of activities take place.

Outreach is one of my main duties, and at the top of the list this week is printing and mounting all of the visual components, and then staging everything for our upcoming exhibit on Florida State College for Women’s Scrapbooks. For this project I also get to supervise and mentor two great graduate assistants, work on a postcard, reception, and logistics for all of that. Giving presentations and instruction to support classes on campus is another outreach activity. I presented on using our finding aids database Archon, how to find materials in the FSU Digital Library, and the important aspects of creating oral histories to ensure their long-term preservation and access. Students will make appointments and come in to meet with me and to look at primary resources for their projects. Their topic is FSU students and their experiences, right up our alley! I also spend time on ideas and posts for Facebook, and writing blog posts like these to get the word out about what we do.

Every week I receive multiple requests for materials, most often images for use on the web, in print, and for events. The bulk of the requests I receive are from other departments on campus, especially administration. For example, University Communications contacted us to provide historic images for the President’s House that we will scan and provide for them to print. We have provided images for the scoreboard at Doak Campbell Stadium, for galas, for the newspaper, for student projects, and for local media outlets.

To administer Heritage Protocol & University Archives requires quite a few meetings with groups inside and outside of the libraries. Meetings this week include those to discuss how our Special Collections & Archives reading room operates, how the libraries support scholarly communications, and how the University Archives will preserve all of FSU’s historic seals and logos.I also meet with other departments on campus about transferring their records to the University Archives, which acts as the official repository for FSU.

Professional roles often cross over, and as President of the Society of Florida Archivists, my goal is  to support the profession by collaborating with other archivist across the state and providing support to new professionals. In addition to my duties as FSU, organizing and planning activities for Archives Month this October, and our annual meeting next May in Miami, I stay busy, but also connected to other archivists and institutions across the state which in turn enhances my abilities at FSU. I also participate in different committees and activities related to the Society of American Archivists.

This is one week, and certainly not all that I do as an archivist, but it certainly goes beyond sitting in a dusty room sifting through boxes of old papers (I like doing that too). The collections we have are rich and full of the evidence of the people who created them illustrating FSU over time, including faculty, staff, and students. When I explain to people what an archivist is and what I do here at Heritage Protocol & University Archives, they often exclaim, “You have the best job ever!”

Yes, yes I do.

Comic Con has descended on New York City. We dug this little snippet from the archives of Angelina Kruppe, a parent of Junior High School 29 in Brooklyn, interviewed on the WNYC show Youth Builders in 1949. When asked about her opinion about the perniciousness of comics on children, she sounds equivocal –probably reflecting the feelings of many parents at the time– but ultimately states that comic books have had no apparent ill effect in her home.

Ms. Kruppe’s concerns were widespread among American parents at the time: while most could not discern the damaging effects of comic books on their own children, reports seemed to increasingly link the medium to delinquent behavior. This culminated in the 1954 hearings of the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, where –among many amusing moments– presidential hopeful Estes Kefauver stated that “Hitler was a beginner compared to the comic-book industry.“

Of course such arguments are bound to happen with every new medium: today’s debates over video game content very much parallel those over comic books in the 1940s and 1950s. But such oddly strident statements as Senator Kefauver’s were also a reflection of the times, where post-war optimism gave way to the Second Red Scare and, ultimately, the McCarthy era.

We can only hope to be wiser in our current media discussions –much like Ms. Kruppe above.

You can listen to the entire show here.

If you’ve been following this blog, then you may already be familiar with the Amherst College Digital Collections — ACDC for short.  ACDC is the result of collaboration between Robert Frost Library Digital Programs and Technical Services departments, and Amherst College’s Information Technology department.  ACDC focuses on digitizing and making available unique or rare content from collections owned by the Library or the College at large, as well as open access scholarly content created by Amherst College faculty.¹  The Amherst College Digital Collection continues to grow with monthly ingests of new content, including materials from the Archives and Special Collections.

Here are a few highlights from recent additions to ACDC:

51 books from the Younghee Kim-Wait/Pablo Eisenberg Native American Literature Collection

https://acdc.amherst.edu/browse/partOf/Younghee+Kim-Wait+(Class+of+1982)_2F_Pablo+Eisenberg+Collection+of+Native+American+Literature

The Native American Literature Collection continues to be a very exciting collection, highly used in classes and by visiting researchers.  Now there are 51 books from this collection freely available to the public through ACDC.

Indian Melodies by Thomas Commuck

A sermon: preached at the execution of Moses Paul, an Indian, who was executed at New-Haven, on the 2d of September 1772, for the murder of Mr. Moses Cook, late of Waterbury, on the 7th of December 1771

22 Medieval manuscripts:

https://acdc.amherst.edu/browse/partOf/Manuscript+Collection

Thus far, 22 of Amherst’s 24 Medieval manuscripts have been added to ACDC.  These manuscripts, primarily from the late-fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, have been digitized as part of a Mellon-funded Five Colleges digitization project.  More about that project here.  Included in this collection are manuscripts of Cicero, Horace, Persius, and Frontinus.

20 Years of the Amherst College Catalog:

https://acdc.amherst.edu/browse/partOf/Amherst+College+Catalogs

Amherst College Catalogs from 1975-1997 are now available on ACDC.  These College Catalogs are a source of information about the growth and history of the College as well as the College’s role in adapting to and shaping changes in higher education in the United States.  Recent catalogs include information such as the mission statement; academic calendar; lists of members of the corporation, faculty, administrative and professional officers; admissions requirements; courses of instruction; professorships, readerships, and lectureships; prizes and awards; and enrollment.

And more great material has been added from the Edward and Orra White Hitchcock Collection:

https://acdc.amherst.edu/browse/partOf/Edward+and+Orra+White+Hitchcock+Papers

Orra White Hitchcock painting of sugar maple leaves

For a list of all Amherst College Archives and Special Collections’ materials available through ACDC: https://acdc.amherst.edu/collection/asc.

¹ Amherst College Digital Collection Development Policy: https://www.amherst.edu/library/digprog/digitalcolldev

This past weekend at the FSU vs. Wake Forest football game, one of FSU’s most beloved members was honored with a retirement ceremony. While he doesn’t play football or coach athletes, he is known for his tireless training and impeccable composure on the field. I’m talking about none other than Renegade V, the fifth horse bestowed with one of Florida State’s most prestigious titles. Renegade V’s last performance was at the 2013 BCS National Championship, but has since lost vision in his right eye due to a medical condition. Renegade V has been performing with Chief Osceola since 2000.

The Renegade Program was started in 1978 by Bill Durham, 25 years after he originally proposed the the idea for the 1962 FSU Homecoming. His vision for a lone Chief Osceola mounted atop a leopard appaloosa, galloping onto the field and planting a flaming spear before kickoff picked up traction after he approached new head football coach, Bobby Bowden, in 1976. Coach Bowden loved the idea and after securing permission from the Seminole Tribe of Florida, Chief Osceola and Renegade premiered at the 1978 Oklahoma State game. Jim Kidder, the first student to assume the role of Chief Osceola, described the selection process as secretive – he didn’t even know what he was auditioning for until he won the position, saying that “they tried to keep it a secret as long as they could.“

The Renegade Program is truly a family affair. Since its inception, Bill Durham and his wife Patty both had a hand in training  Chief Osceola and Renegade. In 2002, Bill Durham passed the reins of the program to his son Allen, who had previously been Chief Osceola from 1992-1994. Since the 70s, the Durhams have truly established one of college football’s most beloved traditions.

Check  back for photos of Renegade V’s Retirement Ceremony!

The National Archives’ Strategic Plan includes a simple, but audacious initiative: to digitize our analog records and make them available for online public access. We have over 12 billion pages of records, so yes, this is our moon shot.

To achieve this goal, we know we need to think in radically new ways about our processes, and we have started by creating a new digitization strategy.  From the time we published our 2008 digitization strategy through today, we have scanned over 230 million objects.  This is a huge number, but we have a long road ahead.  Our new strategy pushes us further.

Scanning technique demonstrated by Mattie Woodford, Powell Group film scanner, taken April 1961. National Archives Identifier 7665735.

We know we cannot do all of this by ourselves. We will continue to collaborate and build on efforts with private and public organizations to digitize records, as well as branch out to citizen archivists, other federal agencies and institutions worldwide. We will develop clear processes and technologies to support a workflow from staff digitization efforts, as well as ensure that records arriving at NARA are accompanied by standardized metadata, and make them available online in a shorter period of time.

We will set measures and track progress for each of these approaches, because we believe we can make digital access happen and we … [ Read all ]

By the time Shirley Zak Hayes joined the WNYC staff in June 1966 as the station’s first full-time woman announcer, she had already distinguished herself as a community activist. In the late 1950s she led the fight against Robert Moses’ plan for a four-lane highway through Washington Square Park. (This activism was duly noted in Jane Jacobs’ book The Life and Death of Great American Cities). Hayes had also worked for the Lindsay campaign, and was a charter member of the National Organization for Women.

A Chicago native, Hayes hosted the overnight classical music program While the City Sleeps and created, produced and hosted the shows Landmark Reports and Planning Board Reports (the above audio is from a 1967 episode of the latter). Hayes had plenty of experience and knowledge for both programs, having been a member of Planning Board 2 since 1952 and organizing the successful campaign to preserve Washington Square Park. Planning Board Reports was launched in conjunction with Manhattan Borough President Percy Sutton’s office on June 4, 1967. The show presented capsule reports and meeting dates for the city’s Planning Boards.

On March 8, 1974 Hayes took on the bulk of WNYC’s special programming for International Women’s Day. This included discussions with experts on women’s health, employment, women in broadcasting, and African-American women. She continued to produce special programs focusing on women’s issues throughout the year and into 1975.

Hayes chaired several committees of the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA) union, and represented fellow broadcasters at annual conventions as chair of the AFTRA Committee for the Creation of a Television and Film Center in New York City.

Hayes produced and announced for WNYC for 10 years and was among the earliest full-time woman radio announcers in New York City. She worked hard to break into the ‘boys club’ of announcing, but her repeated efforts to obtain a management position at the station were ultimately unsuccessful.

WNYC Announcer Shirley Zak Hayes in the 1960s.

(Courtesy of Alfred Tropea/WNYC Archive Collections)

Special thanks to: Christopher Hayes; Kenneth R. Cobb, NYC Department of Records; Ted O’Reilly, The New York Historical Society; and Danielle Cordovez, NYPL Rodgers and Hammerstein Archives of Recorded Sound.

The Special Collections & Archives graduate assistants, Rebecca L. Bramlett and I, are busy preparing for the opening of our exhibit next Wednesday, October 15th. “That I May Remember: the Scrapbooks of Florida State College for Women (1905-1947)” showcases many of the scrapbooks from the Heritage Protocol & University Archives’ collections and explores the scrapbook as a means of communication, focusing on the themes of school spirit, friendship, and creating self. With each scrapbook we opened, Rebecca and I were struck by the way the unique personalities of the women of FSCW jumped off the pages at us. As a whole, the FSCW scrapbooks provide an invaluable insight into what student life was like at one of the largest women’s colleges in the country – a college with rigorous academics, zealous sporting traditions, vibrant community life, and even secret societies. Individually, they present a visual narrative of each student’s college journey, as seen through her own eyes. Which got me thinking… As a means of creating and communicating self, the FSCW scrapbooks operate in much the same way that popular forms of social media do for students today.

Facebook

Wall posts, friends, messages, memes, event invitations, and “likes” – these conventions are not reserved for the twenty-first century. Many of the FSCW scrapbooks, like Laura Quayle Benson’s (pictured right), contain autograph pages signed by the scrapbook creator’s friends. Like a Facebook wall, these pages list a person’s friends along with personal notes from each of them. Some of the notes seem to be the generic words of a passing acquaintance (“With best wishes”), while others are rich with suggestions of inside jokes (“I love Laura ‘heaps’ – I wonder if (?) does?”). The scrapbooks are full of other forms of communication between friends and family – letters, notes, calling cards, package slips, greeting cards, and telegrams. Invitations to join sports teams, honor societies, and sororities are given pride of place as signs of belonging to a group, and collections of event programs read like a personal news feed of where each girl was on a given date. Flipping through the FSCW scrapbooks is a bit like scrolling through each girl’s Facebook wall. It gives one a sense of who she was at a certain point in her life – who she was friends with, what she did, what her interests were – even if the deeper, more personal meanings of the scrapbooks are sometimes obscured from the outside observer.

Tumblr and Pinterest

Creating a scrapbook is an act of curation – carefully selecting texts and images and arranging them in a meaningful way. Although the creators of scrapbooks manipulate physical objects, users of sites like Pinterest and Tumblr use digital media to create collections of text, image, video, and sound meant to express something of themselves. The scrapbook of Annie Gertrude Gilliam (pictured left) contains many excellent examples of well-curated pages. Her clippings from advertisements, theater bills, and magazines are carefully arranged and replete with lively commentary (“A real knock out,” “Exciting and thrilling to the end”). These pages speak of a timeless need to organize our thoughts, express ourselves visually, and voice our opinions, whether in a private scrapbook or a public webpage.

Instagram

Photographs are a common feature of almost all of the FSCW scrapbooks, and many of these photos include captions written by the scrapbook’s creator, such as those by Jewell Genevieve Cooper (pictured right). Photos in scrapbooks are, in a sense, “tagged” by the scrapbook creator. Jewell Genevieve Cooper’s “tags” tell us what the photos are of (an Odd-Even baseball game, one of FSCW’s wildly popular inter-school rivalries) and who is in them. These social layers added to photographs in scrapbooks are similar to the tags and descriptions users add to photos in social media sites like Instagram. Even though a picture says a thousand words, we can’t seem to resist adding our own words anyway.

The FSCW scrapbooks give a unique window into student life as told by the students themselves. While the scrapbooks present plenty of cataloging and preservation challenges for archivists, they are at least physical objects that can be stored and displayed as such. Students today are also telling their own stories, but they are doing so through social media sites like Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, and Instagram. How these stories will be preserved and shared with future generations remains to be seen and is a question beyond the scope of this blog post. In the meantime, “That I May Remember: the Scrapbooks of Florida State College for Women (1905-1947)” will be on display in the Strozier Library Exhibit Space from October 15th through December 1st.

Katherine Hoarn is a graduate assistant in Special Collections & Archives. She is working on her Master of Library and Information Science degree at Florida State University.

I recently decided to take a look at one of the Benedict Arnold letters in our Updike Autograph Collection, and came across a curious situation. Here’s an image of the letter:

and the verso:

The letter is dated May 19th, 1775, just a month after the battles of Lexington and Concord, and it describes Benedict Arnold’s successful raid on Fort St. Jean in Quebec, where Arnold had captured a ship and the small group of soldiers at the fort. Here’s Arnold’s account from the letter:

Manned out two small batteaux with 35 men and at 6 the next morning arrived there and surprised a sergeant and his party of 12 men and took the King’s sloop of about 70 tons and 2 brass six-pounders and 7 men without any loss on either side. The captain was hourly expected from Montreal with a large detachment of men, some guns and carriages for the sloop, as was a captain and 40 men from Chambly at 12 miles distance from St. Johns, so that providence seems to have smiled on us in arriving so fortunate an hour. For had we been 6 hours later in all probability we should have miscarried in our design.

The letter is also notable for a passage in which Arnold describes an encounter with Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys:

 I must here observe that in my return some distance this side [of] St. John I met Col. Allen with 90 or 100 of his men in a starving condition. I supplied him with provisions. He informed me of his intentions of proceeding on to St. Johns and keeping possession there. It appeared to me a wild, expensive, impracticable scheme…

What makes the letter particularly interesting, though, is that it doesn’t seem to be the only version that Arnold wrote. An alternate version (addressed to the Massachusetts Committee of Safety) is available in a compilation of Revolutionary War documents published in the 1830s-40s (text | page image). The letters are both dated May 19th, 1775, and are basically the same in content, but there are routinely differences in language, and occasionally major differences in content. Our draft of the letter, for instance, doesn’t include the following passage, which appears in the other version:

I wrote you, gentlemen, in my former letters, that I should be extremely glad to be superseded in my command here, as I find it next to impossible to repair the old fort at Ticonderoga, and am not qualified to direct in building a new one. I am really of opinion it will be necessary to employ one thousand or fifteen hundred men here this summer, in which I have the pleasure of being joined in sentiment by Mr. Romans, who is esteemed an able engineer….

… I beg leave to observe I have had intimations given me, that some persons had determined to apply to you and the Provincial Congress, to injure me in your esteem, by misrepresenting matters of fact. I know of no other motive they can have, only my refusing them commissions, for the very simple reason that I did not think them qualified. However, gentlemen, I have the satisfaction of imagining I am employed by gentlemen of so much candour, that my conduct will not be condemned until I have the opportunity of being heard.

It’s illuminating to note that these lines — which move beyond the immediate reporting of forts taken and cannons captured — were ones that Arnold seemed to hesitate to send.

So why two copies, and why would they be different?* Unfortunately, our letter isn’t addressed, so we can only guess that it was intended for the same recipients (the MA Committee of Safety). But one bit of evidence appears in the last lines. Our copy concludes with this note:

For particulars [I] must refer you to Capt. Oswald, who has been very active and serviceable and is a prudent, good officer.

Indicating, it seems, that Oswald was delivering our copy of the letter. The other letter ends this way:

I must refer you for particulars to the bearer, Captain Jonathan Brown, who has been very active and serviceable, and is a prudent, good officer…

Scholars of the American Revolution (who are hopefully more knowledgeable of the conventions of military correspondence of the time) are encouraged to comment on whether Arnold was more likely to be sending two copies of a letter like this with different couriers, to ensure that it arrived safely, or sending a similar letter to two different sets of recipients.

In either case, it’s a reminder that even what seems like a clear piece of historical evidence might be only part of the story.

Here’s a transcription (spelling adjusted) of our copy of the letter:

Crown Point 19th May 1775

Gentlemen-

I wrote you the 14th instant by Mr. Romans, which I make no doubt you have received. The afternoon of the same day I left Ticonderoga with Capt. Brown and Arnold and fifty men in a small schooner. Arrived at Skenesborough and proceeded for St. Johns. The weather calm. 17th at 6 PM being within 30 miles of St. Johns. Manned out two small batteaux with 35 men and at 6 the next morning arrived there and surprised a sergeant and his party of 12 men and took the King’s sloop of about 70 tons and 2 brass six-pounders and 7 men without any loss on either side. The captain was hourly expected from Montreal with a large detachment of men, some guns and carriages for the sloop, as was a captain and 40 men from Chambly at 12 miles distance from St. Johns, so that providence seems to have smiled on us in arriving so fortunate an hour. For had we been 6 hours later in all probability we should have miscarried in our design. The wind proving favourable in two hours after our arrival we got on most all the stores, provisions and weighed anchor for this place with the sloop and 5 large batteaux, which we seized, having destroyed 5 others, and arrived here at 10 this morning, not leaving any one craft of any kind behind that the enemy can cross the lake in if they have any such intentions. I must here observe that in my return some distance this side [of] St. John I met Col. Allen with 90 or 100 of his men in a starving condition. I supplied him with provisions. He informed me of his intentions of proceeding on to St. Johns and keeping possession there. It appeared to me a wild, expensive, impracticable scheme and provided it could be carried into execution of no consequence so long as we are masters of the lake, [and] of that I make no doubt we should be as I am determined to arm the sloop and schooner immediately. For particulars [I] must refer you to Capt. Oswald, who has been very active and serviceable and is a prudent, good officer.

Bened: Arnold

Verso:

P.S. to the foregoing letter

By a return sent to Gen. Gage last week I find there are in the 7th and 26th regiments now in Canada 717 men including 170 we have taken prisoner. Enclosed is a list of cannon here at Ticonderoga:

[list follows]

—
* It’s also possible, of course, that one or the other letters wasn’t actually composed by Arnold at all, or at least not on May 15th, 1775. Arnold seems to have signed his name in a number of ways, as evidenced by comparing this signature with this one, both dating from 1775. The latter version uses a two-story form of the “A” in “Arnold,” and seems similar in other ways. I haven’t seen a copy of the other letter, which may be part of the Library of Congress’s Peter Force Library, donated by the author of compilation in which that copy appears.

A trip to Berlin had been planned for a long time and this gave me the opportunity to combine research with pleasure.  At the archives, we are digitising glass lantern slides so that this rich bank of history will be available for future generations.   One way for the public to become involved with the project is to visit and re-photograph the sites from the lantern slide and so I went to Berlin with two photographs from the archive.  We had no information what the buildings in the lantern slide image were, but a quick search on the internet identified one of the pictures as the Bode Museum on the Museum Island.  I could not find any reference to the other picture.

The Bode Museum c.1890 (l) and 2014 (r)

The weather was great and on our first day in Berlin we took a bus tour of the city.  I, of course, was armed with the two pictures and almost right at the start of the tour found the “unknown” building  –  there are now traffic lights right in front of the building – it is the Humboldt University on Unter den Linden.

The Humboldt University c.1890 (l) and 2014 (r)

While comparing the photographs, differences become apparent almost immediately.  At the Bode Museum, the statue has disappeared, the railings along the river have changed, and modern buildings , cranes and pipework that carries the ground water are now prominent.

The changes at the university are less pronounced, although there is now a busy road rather than a quiet square in front of the building, the main change is the inscription on the building – now in modern German rather than Latin!

Not many of the old buildings survived the war although many have been restored or rebuilt.  Berlin now seems to be a city of glass and steel and many more changes are happening.

Roelie

50 years ago presidential aide Walter Jenkins, a father of six, was arrested for having sex with a man in a YMCA bathroom, weeks before the 1964 presidential election.

Rumors of the arrest circulated for days and eventually Republican Party operatives promoted it to the press. On October 14, after the White House unsuccessfully tried to lobby the Washington papers not to publish the story, the scandal broke in the Washington Star. President Johnson, already facing pressure over the Bobby Baker and Billie Sol Estes affairs, was clearly not pleased, as you can hear in the clip above; Jenkins resigned immediately. For a few days afterward Johnson’s opponent Barry Goldwater made veiled references to the incident by mentioning LBJ’s “curious crew,” and his campaign headquarters printed buttons with slogans such as “ALL THE WAY WITH LBJ, BUT DON’T GO NEAR THE YMCA.” But the event ended up not influencing the outcome of the election (Johnson swept Goldwater), as it was soon eclipsed by other international news at the time such as Khruschev’s deposition and the United Kingdom’s elections. Lyndon Johnson later stated “I couldn’t have been more shocked about Walter Jenkins if I’d heard that Lady Bird had tried to kill the Pope.”

The Jefferson Market Library is an iconic building in Greenwich Village. Located at 6th Avenue and 10th street, the building is known for its bright red brick exterior, gothic windows, charming (and public!) garden, and its 11-story high clock tower. But what is most likely not known is the fascinating history of this building, and the many times it was saved from destruction by a team of active Village residents, led by one Margot Gayle.

The building was originally a wooden firehouse, built in the early 1800s with a tall tower that overlooked Manhattan and kept watch for fires, invasions, and any other threat to the city. In 1875 the wooden structure was torn down, and a brick courthouse was erected, complete with a brick tower that included a 4-sided clock, added to continue to keep watch over the city.

In 1945 the city ceased to use the building, and it sat empty for over 10 years. Eventually the clock – nicknamed “Old Jeff” – stopped running, and the city began to talk about tearing down the whole structure. That is when Margot Gayle and her Committee of Neighbors to Get the Clock on Jefferson Market Courthouse Started (which is a fairly long name with sadly no chance of a catchy acronym) stepped in. They began to petition the city to restore the clock and save the building. While the city refused to do anything on their own, they did allow the committee to take over. Gayle’s committee rented the tower from the city for $1 a month, and hired a repairman to fix and maintain the clock. In 1961 the city commissioned the courthouse to become a branch of the New York Public Library, and the Committee worked to transfer ownership and repair of the clock over to the NYPL. After another threat of closure and destruction in the 1970s, the building was declared a historic landmark, and has been in active use as a library since.

We recently came across a great, brief interview with Margot Gayle about her Committee and the clock they worked to save. In the interview from the 1960s (though the actual date is unknown), she gives a brief history of the courthouse and clock, what the Committee has done so far, and her thoughts on the transition of the space into a library.  Ms. Gayle, who died 6 years ago last week, was a prominent and outspoken conservationist in the Village, working throughout the 1950s and 1960s to not only preserve historic buildings, but to give them a new life in the modern New York City. When fixing the clock, she noted the importance it plays in the daily life of all people in the neighborhood, “children have gone to school by it, people catch their bus, get off to work by it, come home and find out if stores are still open by it…” Fixing the clock meant providing structure to the surrounding community.

Margot Gayle’s work is still present in today’s Greenwich Village.  In the 1960s she helped to successfully lobby for a landmark preservation law to help secure buildings after the destruction of the original Pennsylvania Station. She also worked to prevent the construction of a highway in downtown Manhattan. And of course, she went on to help save many more clocks all over Manhattan and Brooklyn.

The last time I wrote about detective work in my job, I mentioned “authority work” and linked to the Library of Congress’ explanation of what it entails. Here’s another example, from earlier this week.

I began to catalog these two recently-purchased pamphlets from the 1940s:

Navajo Life Series: Primer and The Little Turtle, early mimeographed versions from 1942 and 1943.

The cataloging itself was straightforward, but a piece of accompanying information gave me pause. These mimeographed pamphlets seem to be the earliest version of a series that was published several more times over the years. Some of the later versions had illustrations by a different artist, Andy (or Van) Tsihnahjinnie.¹ These early ones were illustrated by William Morgan, better known for his work on The Navajo Language.

The information that was puzzling me came from a brief email conversation that our Head of Archives and Special Collections shared with me. He had inquired of the library at the Navajo Nation Museum whether they had any additional information about these pamphlets. Their reply indicated that while Tsihnahjinnie was Navajo, Morgan was not. This bothered me because I remembered other materials in our collection listing Morgan as a translator, and identifying his tribal affiliation, so I double-checked his Name Authority Record (NAR):

http://lccn.loc.gov/n91090353

Note the three citations listed under the “Found in” section. These references can be sources that catalogers have used for information on Morgan, or other works he produced. NARs are often updated over time–this particular one was first created in 1991 as “Morgan, William, 1917-” and most recently edited in 2011 to add the death date and citation for the Anthropological Linguistics article.²

After a little more investigation, I discovered that the confusion lay with the second citation attributed to Morgan. Human-wolves among the Navajo (1936) is a monograph in the Yale University Publications in Anthropology series. It was not listed in the bibliography of Morgan’s works in the Anthropological Linguistics article. I was beginning to suspect it was authored by a different William Morgan, but I needed proof. I also needed a way to narrow my searching, since “William Morgan” is a common name, with well over 100 different NARs. I checked our stacks copy of Human-wolves among the Navajo–no foreword, afterword, or any ‘about the author’ information at all. I checked several of my “go to” reference sources³ without luck. Standing in our Reference stacks after checking American Indian Biographies, I had one of those “Hooray for browsing!” moments when I spotted Native American Folklore, 1879-1979: An Annotated Bibliography.

A “William Morgan” was listed, along with six of his published works. They included Human-wolves among the Navaho and ended with ‘The Organization of a Story and a Tale’ by William Morgan with a preface by Alfred North Whitehead, in The Journal of American Folklore, vol. 58, no. 229 (July-Sept. 1945) pp. 169-194. Looking up the article, I got a “Hooray for footnotes!” moment:

After a couple of dead-ends (not helped that the 1935 date turned out to be wrong) I googled Christiana Morgan, which led me to the recent biography Translate this Darkness by Claire Douglas. This was my prize: a well-researched biography identifying “William Otho Potwin Morgan” (1895-1934) as the writer of Human-wolves among the Navaho, citing the Morgan papers held in the Archives at Harvard University (his alma mater). Armed with that, I can file a request for a correction to the Name Authority Record for William Morgan, 1917-2001 to remove the citation to the work by William Morgan, 1895-1934 and in addition, to create a new NAR for William Morgan, 1895-1934.

The Five Colleges Library Consortium has begun the process for becoming authorized to participate in a “funnel project” of the Name Authority Cooperative Program (LC/NACO), which will allow us to make such changes to the NAR directly.

¹We hold a couple of items illustrated by Tsihnahjinnie, and his Authority Record is a great example of an author using a variety of names.

²If you are interested, and have access to JSTOR, here is the link for that article.

³Some of which include:

•  The Cambridge Companion to Native American Literature edited by Joy Porter and Kenneth M. Roemer (Cambridge, UK ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 2005).
• Resources within Gale Biography in Context, which includes Contemporary Authors.
• American Indian Biographies edited by Carole Barrett, Harvey Markowitz, project editor, R. Kent Rasmussen (Pasadena, Calif. : Salem Press, 2005).
• Native American Authors website created by the ipl2 Consortium.

Please join us on October 22^nd at 7:00 pm at the H.R. MacMillan Space Centre for “Vancouver—An Ever-changing City,” a fascinating virtual walking tour of Vancouver then and now, and a chance to support the work of the Archives.

Andy Coupland and John Atkin will explore the changing nature of the city through before-and-after images selected from the blog Changing Vancouver and the Archives’ holdings. Set against the background of selected historic panoramas, they will take you through a hundred or so years of development, displayed on the dome of the H.R. MacMillan Space Centre’s Star Theatre.

West Cordova Street – east from Cambie. From “Changing Vancouver”

Sponsored by the Friends of the Vancouver City Archives, the event is the Friends’ annual fall fundraiser. Founded in 1993, the Friends have played a key role in promoting the Archives and raising funds for various projects. Among their most notable purchases:

• The first web publishing software that allowed the Archives to make its database searchable on the Web
• The dye-sublimation printer that for years produced 8×10 photo reproductions of images in the Archives’ holdings
• A portion of the cost of the Archives’ cold storage facility (for preservation of deteriorating photographic negatives)
• The lease of an early public-use photocopier for the Reading Room
• Indexing of Major Matthew’s’ 7-volume Early Vancouver
• Reproduction of damaged Vancouver City Directories

Most importantly, since 1999, the Friends have received over $98,000 in provincial gaming grants to allow the Archives to describe and digitize images in its holdings. They have contributed over $90,000 of their own funds to the program, as matches on the applications. Tens of thousands of the images you see on the Archives’ website are there due to the generosity and fundraising efforts of the Friends. These include photographs by Williams Bros. Photographers Ltd., Stuart Thomson, James Crookall, John Davidson, and over 18,000 of the images collected by Major Matthews.

Net proceeds of ticket sales and all donations will go toward the Friends’ support of the Archives. We hope to see you at the event, and we sincerely thank you for your support.

Tomorrow is the birthday of Siri, Apple’s ubiquitous personal assistant since iOS 5. Although plenty of amusing siri-isms are posted all over the web, we at the Archives decided to see if Siri could recognize the voice of her forebears. To do this we used a 7″ vinyl record of computer speech published by Bell Labs in 1963. You can hear the amusing results above.

Max V. Mathews was a computer music legend. In 1957 he created at Bell Labs MUSIC, the first music composition program, which had several iterations through the decades. He also experimented with electronic instruments and researched human-machine interactions. He famously wrote the musical accompaniment to John Kelly’s voice-synthesized “Daisy Bell,” performed in 1961 by an IBM 704 computer.

John Larry Kelly, Jr. was also a brilliant Bell Labs scientist, a gregarious Texan gunslinger with manifold interests. He created (with Carol Lochbaum) the speech synthesis system above, but may be best remembered for developing a gambling formula (based on Claude Shannon’s information theory) called the Kelly criterion, which is now part of standard investment theory. Tragically, he died at age 41.

1963 Computer Speech 7″ vinyl

(Bell Labs/NYPR Archives)

“Daisy Bell (Bicycle Built for Two)” was written by English songwriter Harry Dacre in 1892. That year Dacre was visiting the United States and complained to a friend about the duties levied on the bike he had brought. When his friend commented that he was lucky not to have brought with him “a bicycle built for two,” (since then the duties would double), Dacre was inspired to write the song that became his biggest hit.

You may remember “Daisy Bell” as the song that the computer HAL 9000 creepily sings as he is powered down in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). This is because the movie’s screenwriter, Arthur C. Clarke, happened to hear John Kelly’s speech synthesis experiment while visiting a friend at Bell Labs.

Can your personal assistant recognize the audio above? Let us know in the comments section.

Thanks to David Satkowski for the use of his shiny new iPhone 6 and to Andy Lanset for the disc.

The Special Collections & Archives Division is celebrating American Archives Month which is celebrated every October by archivists throughout the United States.

American Archives Month is an opportunity to raise awareness among various audiences of the value of archives and archivists. These audiences may include students, scholars, policy makers, influential people within our communities, prospective donors, and the general public. It’s also a time to focus on the importance of records of enduring value and to enhance public recognition for the people and programs that are responsible for maintaining our communities’ vital historical records.

This month, Illuminations will share behind the scenes posts about what our archivists do here at FSU and how we contribute both to the success of our patrons and the FSU Libraries as a whole. We’re also participating in the Society of Florida Archivists Archive Month festivities, which this year includes an exhibit on the theme Weird Florida, celebrating all that is weird and wonderful about our state.

Let Archives Month commence!

For our first project as graduate assistants, Katherine Hoarn and I have been given the unique opportunity to delve into the history and heritage of Florida State University.  From the years 1905 – 1947, Florida State University was Florida State College for Women, one of the largest women’s colleges in the country.  To explore this fascinating aspect of FSU’s past, Katherine and I are putting together an exhibit centered on the scrapbooks of the students of Florida State College for Women. In preparing for this exhibit, I’ve not only learned about proper handling of archival material, but about the heritage of Florida State University.

The first step in deciding how to approach the exhibit was to research the history of Florida State College for Women.  We consulted numerous resources, but my favorites were the primary sources themselves—the scrapbooks. As historical documents, scrapbooks are special.  Each scrapbook is an individual and unique combination of text, photographs and papers.  They are arranged in such a way that the interests and personalities of Florida State College for Women students come through.  It’s also been interesting to see some similar themes and concerns fill the pages of scrapbooks across the forty plus year span of Florida State College for Women.

It would be difficult to choose a “favorite” scrapbook.  As each is unique and individual, they are all remarkable in different ways.  Marion Emerett Colman’s (HP 2007-130, go here for more information) combination of scrapbook and journal gives the reader a glimpse into the triumphs and concerns of an academically minded college sophomore in 1917.

Some scrapbooks delve into current events.  Alberta Lee Davis’s scrapbook devotes pages to the end of World War I.  (Alberta Lee Davis’ scrapbook is currently unprocessed.  This means that it hasn’t yet been assigned an accession number, the number by which Special Collections & Archives will identify the scrapbook.  For the scrapbooks from Heritage Protocol & University Archives, the accession number looks like HP ####-###.  This also means that a finding aid hasn’t yet been created in Archon, the database for searching through the manuscript collections in Special Collections & Archives).

The scrapbooks of Jewell Genevieve Cooper (HP 2007-089, go here for more information), with its newspaper clippings and personal photographs gives its viewer a special glimpse into the traditions of Florida State College for Women during the 1920s.

Other scrapbooks, such as that of Victoria J. Lewis (HP 2007-079, go here for more information) shows similar concerns to that of contemporary teenagers, showing us the commonalities between teenager girls at the beginning of the twentieth century and at the beginning of the twenty-first century.  The past really isn’t that distant.

Finding the connections between past and present has been wonderful, as has learning more about the history of Florida State University.

“That I May Remember: The Scrapbooks of Florida State College for Women (1905-1947)” is scheduled to open October 15 – December 1 in the exhibit space in Strozier Library.

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.  

Two days ago, we discovered a small box of lantern slides in the archive, which had previously escaped our notice.

“Geography” Lantern Slide Box

 
The unprepossessing brown cardboard cover with pencil markings revealed six stunningly beautiful images of the Himalayas and Baltoro glacier.

Himalaya Lantern Slides

 
As the reverse of one of the lantern slides shows (top middle), they are images by the Italian photographer and explorer Vittorio Sella of the Baltoro Glacier, taken during his 1909 expedition to the Karakorum accompanied by Prince Luigi Amedeo of Savoy, Duke of the Abruzzi  (for more images of the expedition, see the Library of Fratelli Alinari Museum of the History of Photography, Florence –  http://www.alinariarchives.it/en/). The others (clockwise) are marked Staircase Windy Gap, Mustagh Tower from Baltoro gl., 1st Camp on Baltoro gl., Mt. Paiju & Towers from Rdokass, and K2 & Camp III.

The beauty of the Himalayas was not only appreciated by mountaineers, but also held interest for a wide range of explorers, including archaeologist and poet Stuart Piggott (1910 -1996), who travelled around India and Tibet in 1942-3.

Celebrating National Poetry Day today http://www.forwardartsfoundation.org/national-poetry-day/, we take this opportunity to share Stuart Piggott’s Poem ‘The Explorers’ of 4 May 1946

 
THE EXPLORERS

WE are the geographers bringing back reports
from inward Himalayas –
the difficult pass, the bridge that rains have broken,
the snow-peak sighted, unmapped, unclimbable.
But the theodolite bearings, the aneroid readings,
these we note down –
they may help the expedition leaving to-morrow.
 
The ethnologists recording daily adventures
among unknown tribes,
with anthropophagi met between luncheon and tea-time
in small clans ruled by magic we do not share:
a suburban bus-stop lonelier than jungle clearing –
nothing more strange
than our incomprehensible daily encounters.
 
Ours the plane-table survey of the desert,
the mind’s intersections
cobwebbing the squared paper of experience,
plotting the rare oasis, the wind eroded
fantastic rocky horizon black against sunsets –
promise or menace
the warm dawn after the starred night’s vigil may tell us.

[Female acrobats on trapezes at circus | Library of Congress ]

[This post is in honor of American Archives Month, which starts today!]

This year at the Society of American Archivists annual meeting, incoming SAA president Kathleen Roe kicked off her initiative “A Year of Living Dangerously for Archives.” You can read about the initiative on the SAA Website, but I can also boil this down for you. Those of us who work in cultural heritage institutions get it — archives are important. We spend a lot of time telling one another how about our wonderful collections, and about the good work we do. However, despite our passion and conviction, we don’t spend nearly enough time making the case outside the building how important archives are.

I like this formulation: Archives change lives. Tell people about it.

I’m eager to hear all the stories that come out of this Year of Living Dangerously (YOLDA, as I’m dubbing it, which goes nicely with YOLO, don’t you think?). I urge you to participate in YOLDA by sharing your stories on the SAA website but also by pointing us to your work in the comments. Let’s use this year to inspire one another. I think it’s more dangerous to not take action than to find ways to advocate for ourselves, but if it makes you happy to think of yourself as an action hero, than go for it!

We’re starting a new feature here on Illuminations, a monthly “Scoop” as a quick way to share what our different areas have been up to over the last month and keep you up to date and informed about what our hard working staff are up to!

Special Collections & Archives

For several months, Burt Altman, Archivist, has been engaged in a project to reprocess the Paul A.M. Dirac Papers. The work has involved shifting and reboxing his vast collection of personal and professional correspondence, calculations, articles, photographs, and travel files, as well as his late wife Margit’s papers. These materials were housed in archival boxes, many of which were underfilled, so that the folders couldn’t stand upright, and there were preservation issues with storage of photographs and several photo albums. Also, most photographs were not properly described in the finding aid, which impeded access. These activities will insure better long-term preservation and more efficient access for this extremely significant collection. To continue providing access during this project, a note was placed in the catalog record and in the finding aid informing researchers that preservation and rehousing is being done, and if materials are needed, to contact Burt or the Special Collections Reading Room. Burt is happy to report that as of the last week of September, nearly 65% of this collection has been reprocessed, and the project will be completed sometime in October.

Heritage Protocol & University Archives

Outreach: HPUA attended the Emeritus Coffee Chat and celebrated the 100th birthday of 1936 FSCW alumna and emeritus chemistry professor, Kitty Hoffman. We had a great time hearing stories and sharing memorabilia with alumni!

Preservation and access: We disbound two books that contained West Florida Seminary catalogs from the late 19th century and they will be digitized and added to the Digital Library. The catalogs provide a unique look at our predecessor institution, and will be an invaluable resource for researchers interested in the West Florida Seminary.

Claude Pepper Library

This month, the Claude Pepper Library brought a new collection into its stacks. In 1990, Larry Durrence was named a Visiting Professor at FSU with a full-time assignment with the Florida Tax & Budget Reform Commission (TBRC). In January 1991 he was then promoted by the Commission members from Senior Analyst to Executive Director for his remaining term with the TBRC. This past Friday the 26th, Mr. Durrence donated three boxes of material related to the work of the Commission during his time there. The collection will be processed and made available to researchers by the early spring of 2015.

The Pepper Library also hosted Dr. G. Kurt Piehler’s ‘The American GI in War and Peace in World War II” class on the 18th of September. Coming in as part of a larger tour hosted by History Liaisons Sarah Buck-Kachaluba and Bill Modrow, the history seminar class was introduced to Claude Pepper and his work during the Second World War while a member of the US Senate. The class was also able to hear an excerpt of a Pepper speech given in late June of 1941 which warned of the dangers of the Nazi threat.

Cataloging & Description

Amy Weiss, Head of Cataloging & Description, taught a workshop entitled “RDA without tears” to help put RDA coding into a practical perspective. A lot of RDA training is very theoretical in orientation, but this class was intended as a “how to” class.  Three members of the medical school library joined up for the class, as did one of the serials catalogers. We went over the basics of the RDA record in the MARC format, and we discussed “hybrid records” where some features of RDA are used in an AACR2 record.

The Authorities/Catalog Management Unit and Linda Brown in Serials finished the ASERL Documents Project. To explain, Florida State University Libraries is a member of the Association of Southeastern Research Libraries (ASERL). Last year, the ASERL libraries were asked to select three areas to catalog for the Centers of Excellence – an ASERL program envisioning the creation of comprehensive collections of U.S. government information from each Federal government agency. FSU’s 3 ASERL collections are Economic Development Administration (1965-) Call number is C46… approx. 400 items, Federal Security Agency (1939-1969) Call number is FS2… approx. 3,000 items and the Library of Congress Country Studies Call number is D101.22:550- approx. 316 items.

Digital Library Center

The DLC started several new projects this month. The Florida Handbook from 1947-2012 and Florida State College for Women scrapbooks were in the DLC for digitization. Image quality control continues on the Florida Flambeau images and we’ve started a pilot project for the loading and metadata creation of the issues in the FSU Digital Library. We completed the digitization of the latest batch of papers from the Paul A.M. Dirac collection which now goes into post digitization processing before loading into the FSU Digital Library. We also attended the History program mixer event hosted in the Special Collections Exhibit Room and enjoyed introducing the DLC to the faculty and students in that department.

old book by Thalita Carvalho | Flickr | cc:by

Recently, this has been going around on Facebook:

List ten books that have stayed with you in some way. Don’t take more than a few minutes, and don’t think too hard. It is not about the ‘right’ books or great works of literature, just ones that have affected you in some way.

Once you’ve listed your books, you are supposed to “tag” 10 people. I am not usually a big fan of these chain letter things, but I really enjoyed reading the lists that were posted, particularly when they involved commentary. When my college friend Cathy tagged me, in turn, I asked OCLC Research colleagues to contribute.

Earlier this month, the Facebook Data Science team posted an analysis of the “top” books from the meme. It was interesting to see how many of the books listed showed up on our lists but perhaps even more interesting to see the interests of our group reflected in some of the more unusual choices.

If you’d like to check out our lists, please read on. If you’d like to play, consider yourself tagged — leave your list of books below. And enjoy!

Karen Smith-Yoshimura (WorldCat list here)

• Rublowsky, John. Is Anybody Out There? Read this as a kid – my introduction to what was then called “exo-biology”. Have been fascinated by astro-biology ever since.
• Ridley, Matt. Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters. This book is just fascinating, and I keep re-reading it…
• Laozi, Bi Wang, and Zhe Su. Laozi dao de jing. Not sure which edition I read, but this was the first Chinese book I read cover-to-cover and served as a basis of a discussion with a philosophy professor at TaiDa. Really opened my mind to a completely different way of thinking, and influences me still..
• Hersey, John. The Wall. Read this as a teenager. My introduction to Holocaust fiction and inspired me to read far more about it.
• Bosworth, Allan R. America’s Concentration Camps. Read as a teenager. My introduction to Japanese internment camps. One of the books that made me realize that the US has a number of dark periods in its history beyond what I had learned in school…
• Sartre, Jean-Paul. Huis clos. The first French book I read cover-to-cover, again as a teenager. It was a time when “L’enfer, c’est les autres” really resonated!
• Cheng, Nien. Life and Death in Shanghai. This autobiography really gripped me as no others about the Cultural Revolution.
• Polo, Marco, William Marsden, and Jon Corbino. The Travels of Marco Polo, the Venetian. Not sure which edition I read, but read it as a teenager and likely put the “traveling bug” into me. A factor in my living/traveling for 9 years before returning to the US…
• Hofstadter, Richard. Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. A book I read in college – understood from then on that the ignorance I often see around me is nothing new…
• Carroll, Lewis. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. One of the first books I remember reading ALL BY MYSELF as a child – and reread later for the wonderful portmanteau’s of language.

Devon Smith (WorldCat list here)

• Laozi, and Stephen Mitchell. Tao Te Ching: A New English Version. The first translation I read as a teenager. Others are good, better maybe, but this one was very accessible.
• Bultmann, Rudolf. Jesus Christ and Mythology. My first introduction to the concept of hermeneutics. It wasn’t even central to the book, but it’s such an important concept to understand that I’ll probably always remember where I first read about it.
• Frankl, Viktor E. Man’s Search for Meaning. It just put all the petty bullshit “problems” of my life into perspective and offered insight into creating meaning in life.
• Palmer, Parker J. Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation. For being so short, it’s a pretty gut wrenching book. The short version is that you’re probably not spending your working hours in the most fulfilling way. A simple insight, but the journey there is tough.
• Wallace, David Foster. This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion About Living a Compassionate Life. A little sermon on being intentional in a seemingly arbitrary and unintentional world.
• Pausch, Randy, and Jeffrey Zaslow. The Last Lecture. How to live your life so you don’t have to answer the question “how would you spend your last days”
• Heinlein, Robert A. Stranger in a Strange Land. The point I got from this book is that Love is genuinely alien to most people.
• Peck, M. Scott. The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values, and Spiritual Growth. Introspection is tough. Do it anyway.
• Peck, M. Scott. People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil. This one is tough because of the accounts of “evil” throughout, but an important read so that you don’t convince yourself that evil isn’t real.
• Peck, M. Scott. A World Waiting to Be Born: Civility Rediscovered. The dynamics examined in “The Road Less Traveled” and “People of the Lie” are reexamined in the context of larger organizations.

Jackie Dooley (WorldCat list here)

• Hijuelos, Oscar. The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love. Cuban American brothers in New York City and their visions of the perfect woman. I felt like the heat and humidity was enveloping me the entire time I was reading. Painfully human characters.
• Tartt, Donna. The Secret History. An incredible writer in the technical sense who also weaves weird and wonderful tales. Classics prof draws his students into the supernatural, woo hoo! Many didn’t care for her next (The Little Friend), but I did. Can’t wait to dive into The Goldfinch.
• Borges, Jorge Luis. Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings. Borges: the most amazing short story writer of all time. And of course the most fascinating fantasy library ever imagined is the centerpiece of The Circular Ruins.
• Irving, John. A Prayer for Owen Meany: A Novel. Such a weird but endearing protagonist, matched only perhaps by Iggy J. Reilly in A Confederacy of Dunces (which, alas, didn’t occur to me until my list was already at ten).
• Solženicyn, A. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. My first view of life as a member of Soviet society. Indelible.
• Gardner, John. The Sunlight Dialogues. Gardner was one of my favorite novelists when I was in my 20s (add to that Vonnegut, Irving, and Robbins, weirdos all). Sunlight stands in for them. Or maybe I should have picked his retelling of Beowulf from the perspective of the monster Grendel.
• García Márquez, Gabriel. One hundred years of solitude. Speaking as a student of Latin American literature, is it necessary to explain why this was, and is, so affecting and influential?
• Eco, Umberto. The Name of the Rose. It’s the librarian in me, but also, I suppose, the fallen Catholic. Not to mention his amazing depiction of the Middle Ages.
• Craig, Charmaine. The Good Men: A Novel of Heresy. More ex-Catholic fascination with Medieval times and the joys of the Inquisition! Craig evokes the era with extraordinary skill. And she did her research in lots of Medieval libraries. Oh, and the Cathar Heresy is a fascinating bit of French history.
• Neruda, Pablo, and Nathaniel Tarn. Selected Poems. Extraordinarily beautiful use of the Spanish language, generally well-translated into English–but read him in the Spanish if you’re able. One of the top reasons why I’m glad I majored in Latin American literature.

Bruce Washburn (WorldCat list here)

Bruce says, “Not all of these remain influential, for me anyway. One thing they have in common is that I’ve read each one multiple times and have recommended them to others.”

• Gilliam, Harold, and Gene M. Christman. Weather of the San Francisco Bay Region. This might be the little book that has influenced me the most. I still have my copy from 1970. The great Harold Gilliam taught me all about fog. His 1962 commentary at the end regarding climate change is fascinating from this distance.
• Lee, Harper. To Kill a Mockingbird. This shows up on many lists, I imagine. If you read it when you were young, especially. Old Atticus is still kind of a role model. And I learned what a “chifforobe” is. That’s important information for a 12 year old.
• Tolkien, J. R. R. The Fellowship of the Ring: Being the First Part of The Lord of the Rings. Actually the whole series. I read it in the early 70’s before LOTR became an industry. I remember an intro by Peter Beagle about these works, saying “the strangest strangers turn out to know them”. That hooked me.
• DeLillo, Don. Libra. I’ve read this a bunch of times and am always entertained. It influenced me to read everything else from DeLillo.
• Banks, Russell. Affliction. The take-away for me was advice given to Wade Whitehouse by his brother. Wade is plagued by problems, including a bad tooth. His brother says list your problems in priority order and tackle one at a time starting with the tooth. Wade doesn’t listen.
• Catton, Bruce. Mr. Lincoln’s Army. Actually, the Army of the Potomac trilogy. Here’s Catton describing the battle of Antietam: “south of the fence, filling all of the ground between the road and the wood, was Mr. Miller’s thriving cornfield — THE cornfield, forever, after that morning.
• Gibson, William. Pattern Recognition. I’m not exactly sure why but I always really enjoy re-reading this one. There must be some pattern to that.
• Ricks, Thomas E. Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq. Everything that can go wrong, does. Not that this should influence any further adventures, I’m sure those will be great.
• McCarthy, Cormac. Blood Meridian, or, The Evening Redness in the West. Not everyone’s cup of tea, I imagine. But after reading it I looked at the West differently. Harsh and arbitrary rather than pastoral and benign.
• Wright, Lawrence. The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. Probably a good time to re-read this one again. I was willfully ignorant about the forces and people involved. Still kind of am.

Roy Tennant (WorldCat list here)

Roy says, “Although I cheated and did 15. So sue me. ;-)” Never a rule follower, that Roy….

• Kazantzakis, Nikos. Report to Greco. I fell in love with Kazantzakis before I met my Greek American wife. So my inevitable trip to his beloved Crete was made all the more sweet when it happened. I raise a glass of Raki and toast him and his work.
• Gonzales, Laurence. Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why : True Stories of Miraculous Endurance and Sudden Death. Read it. Understand it. And one day, when you need to live it, you’ll be ready.
• Herbert, Frank. Dune. The single best marriage of Ecology and Science Fiction there ever was, or ever will be. Two of my loves, joined at the hip and completely believable. Amazing.
• Eiseley, Loren C. All the Strange Hours: The Excavation of a Life. Loren Eiseley is my hero. I need no other. A scientist, a thinker, an outdoorsman, a writer, a poet and a prose poet, a true Renaissance Man. What I aspire to be, and fall short of, but love to strive to achieve.
• Shirer, William L. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany. I read this in two weeks as a teenager, and I felt like I was 80 when I was done. It was like mainlining all the hate and disaster this world has to offer and it was almost more than I could take. It still is.
• Zinsser, William Knowlton. On Writing Well The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction. My bible of writing. May I one day prove worthy.
• Tolkien, John Ronald Reuel. The Lord of the Rings. I read this as a mid-teen and the poem “All That is Gold Does Not Glitter” become my mantra, as I spent 17 virtually alone in my treehouse on an Indiana farm.
• Trevor, Elleston. The Flight of the Phoenix. I’ve always tried to be the ultimate Boy Scout — prepared for anything, and ready to deal with whatever is thrown at me. So I fell in love with this story of doing exactly that to survive. Rebuild a crashed plane and fly it out of the desert. Awesome.
• White, T. H. The Once and Future King. Because some legends require a whopping good telling.
• Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle. One of the best introductions to Socialism, buried, in the end, by its account of slaughterhouses. Which goes to prove that people care more about what they eat than just about anything else.
• Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West. There are no words.
• Solženicyn, Aleksandr I. The Gulag Archipelago: 1918 – 56 ; an Experiment in Literary Investigation. It was slow going in a lot of places, but this is one of the most important accounts of 20th Century history. And every now and then you would come across a true gem of insight. Without him no one outside of Russia would know.
• Robbins, Tom. Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. If you can only read one thing before you die, read the Preface of this book. I mean, srsly.
• Stegner, Wallace. Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West. As someone who learned to run rivers at 21, and within a few months of that set off down the Colorado River as a guide, I cannot begin to imagine what Powell and his men thought as they made the same journey for the very first time. And with science.
• Abbey, Edward. Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness. I’ve always been in love with the outdoors, so this paean to nature, and to the desert that I learned to love in my teens and early 20s, really spoke to me. It still does.

Ricky Erway (WorldCat list here)

Ricky says, “I’m being literal, going to earliest influences.”

• White, E. B.. Charlotte’s Web. My first “chapter book” (and my 2nd, 4th, and 6th).
• Lindgren, Astrid. Pippi Longstocking. Introduced spunk and attitude to reading.
• Hinton, S. E. The Outsiders. Exposed me to a world unlike my own
• Rand, Ayn. The Fountainhead.  Spawned all sorts of opinions, questions, and doubts
• Van Matre, Steve. Acclimatization: A Sensory and Conceptual Approach to Ecological Involvement. Gave me new ways of teaching kids about the environment
• Holt, Rinehart. Adventures in English Literature. The beginning of a passion for the British Isles
• Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Macbeth. The subject of my first serious paper in high school; it remains my favorite of the Bard’s plays
• Updike, John. The Music School: Short Stories. The Music School struck me as the most beautiful piece of writing. I’m still in awe.
• Dickens, Charles. Charles Dickens’ Hard Times. The first of many Victorian novels that really moved me.
• Abbey, Edward. Desert Solitaire. Instilled a yet-to-be-fulfilled desire to immerse myself in the desert southwest.

Melissa Renspie (WorldCat list here)

Melissa writes, “Now that I step back and look at it, I wonder what it means that my list is made up of books I read as a child or a young adult. I’ve also read most of them to my children. I can interpret this in several ways: 1.) I’ve read these books so many times they’re burned in my mind, or 2.) I really love children’s books. When I was young I wanted to write children’s books when I grew up. That hasn’t happened yet but it still could. Maybe I just haven’t grown up yet?! ;-)”

• Silverstein, Shel. The Giving Tree.
• L’Engle, Madeleine. A Wrinkle in Time.
• L’Engle, Madeleine. A Swiftly Tilting Planet.
• Keyes, Daniel. Flowers for Algernon.
• Albom, Mitch. Tuesdays with Morrie: An Old Man, a Young Man, and Life’s Greatest Lesson.
• Seuss, and Seuss. Horton Hears a Who!
• Rawls, Wilson. Where the Red Fern Grows: The Story of Two Dogs and a Boy.
• Dahl, Roald, and Joseph Schindelman. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
• Sendak, Maurice. Where the Wild Things Are.
• Hoban, Russell, and Lillian Hoban. A Bargain for Frances.

Ralph LeVan (WorldCat list here)

• Leithold, Louis. The Calculus, with Analytic Geometry. My dad pushed me into mathematics. (I suspect he felt weak in it.) I enjoyed it, but never felt the passion for it that I do for programming. But, this book was just about as good as it got. Leithold had a wonderful way of making the concepts simple.
• Heinlein, Robert A. Stranger in a Strange Land. Counter-culture in Los Angeles in the 60’s. This book defined it.
• Pratchett, Terry. Small Gods: A Novel of Discworld. A book about a man and his personal relationship with his god. This is one of the two books I try hardest to get people to read.
• Pratchett, Terry. Reaper Man. “There is no justice, there is just us.” Terry Pratchett creates characters that you care about. I often cry while reading his books. One of his most endearing characters is Death.
• Knuth, Donald Ervin. The Art of Computer Programming. My sophomore year of college was about working my way through this book. I won’t swear that a lot of it stuck to me, but the experience certainly did.
• Heller, Joseph. Catch-22, A Novel. My mother told me to read this. I’ve always respected her suggestions and this was a good one. I was depressed for a week after reading it.
• Cheech And Chong. Cheech And Chong. I know this is supposed to be books, but this album was exactly what my life in Azusa was like. I knew all the characters in this album. I snuck friends into the drive-in in the trunk of my car. Dave’s not here.
• Chabon, Michael. The Yiddish Policeman’s Union. I love this book. It’s one of two books I try to make people read. It’s a great mystery. It’s a great love story. It’s a loving insight into Yiddish culture. The story is one surprise after another right up to the end.
• Cherryh, C. J. Downbelow Station. I love the books of CJ Cherryh! This book is part of her Company series. It does a wonderful job of making you feel like you understand what it’s like to live on a space station. It’s not a happy life.
• Kraft, Philip. Programmers and Managers: The Routinization of Computer Programming in the United States. The Communist Manifesto for programmers. I was lucky to take a couple programming and society classes at UC Irvine in the late 70s. This book has a lot to say about where we fit into our businesses.

And finally, my own list.

• Eastman, P. D. Go, Dog, Go! I loved the illustration of the dogs in the houseboat, and playing in the trees — I could look at this for extended periods of time.
• Baum, L. Frank. The Wizard of Oz. …and the many other books that followed – thankfully I didn’t know it was an allegorical commentary on the gold standard
• Paterson, Katherine. Bridge to Terabithia. So beautiful, and so sad.
• McCullough, Colleen. The Thorn Birds. The first book I checked out of the adult section of the library – don’t judge, I was 10 or 11.
• Michener, James A. Centennial. I loved James Michener books because they were so very, very long. I have never wanted a story I liked to end.
• King, Stephen. The Shining. Stephen King is an amazing story teller with a very twisted mind.
• Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. For a while I could not get enough of the dystopian future thing.
• Steinbeck, John. The Grapes of Wrath. I spent several years in college and after doing research in archives trying to figure out why in the heck the Joads would move on from the FSA camp, which seemed like heaven to me.
• Steinbeck, John. East of Eden. The levels of manipulation are fascinating.
• Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. A college friend assigned it to me. I love rereading it, and of course all the derivatives are fantastic.

When Robert “Bob” Kiley took over as Chief Executive Officer of the New York City Metropolitan Transportation Authority his mission was to revive the City’s crime-ridden, dilapidated subway system where ridership had fallen to levels not seen since 1918. By the time he delivered this lecture at the New York Public Library’s Celeste Bartos Forum in February, 1988, Kiley was five years into the job and well on the way to guiding the City’s subways back from the dark days of the late 1970’s when every car in the subway fleet was covered with graffiti and trains routinely broke down.

Kiley, who before coming to New York led the Boston subway system back from a fiscal abyss, acknowledges that urban dwellers will always have an uneasy relationship with their underground trains. “The word ‘underground’ inspires fear,” says Kiley, noting that it summons thoughts of the “realm of Hades.” But the transit executive says there is nothing more important for modern cities than maintaining its public infrastructure, particularly the subway systems, which transmit the life blood of a metropolis — its people.

Kiley points out that it took New York City — the leading industrial center in the Western Hemisphere after the Civil War — a longer time than many of the world’s great cities to develop a subway system.    While technology existed at the time to operate trains under the streets of New York, Kiley says political corruption squelched civic improvements.

For much of the second half of the 19^th Century, William Marcy “Boss” Tweed controlled the political process in New York; he favored the interests of businesses that ran horse-drawn buses and thwarted subway development legislation. Kiley says that New York became “the most inconveniently arranged modern city in the world.” Indeed, in 1873 workers were spending a sixth of their day trying to get to their jobs. Only then did Tweed come out in favor of privately funded elevated train construction for the City — a boondoggle. This form of transit mainly served to further enrich the notorious financier, Jay Gould, the politically appointed Rapid Transit Commissioner and owner of these urban steam-powered railroads. As Kiley describes with disgust, the elevated trains covered the streets and the people with soot and cinders and did little to ease urban congestion.

In 1894, through the efforts of business leaders and the press, a new Rapid Transit Commission was formed, and a method of funding devised: City bonds were issued to private businesses for the construction of an electric powered subway system.

The former MTA CEO recounts how, in October 1904, the first subway line, privately owned by the Interborough Rapid Transit Company or IRT, rolled down the tracks underneath Broadway from City Hall to 145^th Street. Soon it was carrying 25,000 people a day. Kiley extolls this moment which “finally conferred order where there was almost none.” Powered by electricity, with stations decorated in ornate terra cotta and tracks just below the street surface, the new subway was, he explains “the very best that 19^th Century technology could offer.”

However, as New York City rolled through the 20^th Century, the demands on the subway system soon exceeded its capacity. When the IRT grew too crowded in 1907, Kiley wryly notes that the City Club complained: “we do not get a civilized ride for our five cents — the trains are like cattle cars.” Other subway lines were developed, such as the privately owned Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit Company or BMT. But New Yorkers remained dissatisfied.   Kiley says Mayor John Hylan, who presided over the City in the early 1920’s, enhanced his populist creds by campaigning against any attempt to raise the five-cent fare.

Kiley blames the political aversion to raising the nickel fare – it was in place from 1881 to 1948 – for restricting capital improvements on the system and causing fiscal woes for the IRT and BMT. The City had to take over those private lines in 1940, combining them with the Independent City-Owned Rapid Transit Railroad, or IND, which started in 1925 at the end of Hylan’s last term of office.

Kiley adeptly traces the decline and gradual renaissance of the City’s subways from 1948, when subway ridership reached its zenith of 2 billion riders, to 1988 when it had emerged from an almost mortal dysfunction. Statistics play an inevitable and telling role in this account. Necessary fare hikes, starting modestly with five-cent increments until the fare was doubled to a half dollar in 1977, corresponded with the loss of hundreds of millions of riders per year.

When Kiley took over the MTA in the early 80’s, the supervisory force had been depleted by retirements. There were just 300 managers for 50,000 employees. A critical train car repair shop had just one manager for 1100 workers. Train tracks that were supposed to be inspected twice weekly were so neglected that half the trains could be out of service at any one time.

Kiley describes how he moved the MTA from triage to a system of accountability, in part by jettisoning civil service and collective bargaining rules, to hire a new cadre of managers.   At the time he delivered this lecture, New York subway tracks were being regularly inspected under the supervision of 177 managers rather than just seven, graffiti had been removed from 85% of the cars, crime on the trains had declined significantly and ridership was returning to levels that existed before the City’s fiscal crisis of the 1970’s.

Bob Kiley, who later went on to manage London’s underground transit system, believes that well-maintained, publicly-funded infrastructure benefits business and maintains the life and growth of society. This well-regarded transit executive believes that New York’s subway system is its greatest public asset, albeit a fragile one, ever dependent upon a political will to continue providing capital for its sustained development into the 21^st Century.

__________________________________________

This talk originally aired on WNYC as part of the Voices of the New York Public Library series of lectures from the NYPL’s Celeste Bartos Forum on June 27, 1993.