Detail from title page of Black Elk Speaks (1932)

You may have heard through other sources, such as this college press release, that the Archives and Special Collections recently acquired a very large and exciting collection of Native American literature. As we have explained on our page about the collection, it is…

…one of the most comprehensive collections of books by Native American Indian authors ever assembled by a private collector. A generous gift from Younghee Kim-Wait (AC 1982) made it possible for the library to purchase the Pablo Eisenberg Native American Literature Collection. Pablo Eisenberg devoted years of his life to collecting nearly 1,500 books written by Native American Indian authors ranging in date from 1772 (Samson Occom) to living writers still publishing today (Louise Erdrich).

I’m taking a very short break from cataloging the collection to share a couple of small gems that have passed across my desk so far. Yes, these are the proverbial drop in the bucket. Over the course of the next few months, you will be able to search the library catalog for all the items in the collection, as they will all have an access point of “Younghee Kim-Wait (Class of 1982)/Pablo Eisenberg Collection of Native American Literature.” To do this with the least amount of typing, I recommend a keyword search of the phrase “eisenberg collection”:

Click the image to see the search results

It’s also helpful to remember you can use the Advanced search functions for more options:

Click the image to see the search results

One of the “gems” cataloged so far, which was mentioned in the press release, is this copy of the Constitution and By-Laws of National Council of American Indians:

Click the image to see the entire pamphlet

This 12 page pamphlet surprised and delighted Kiara Vigil, Assistant Professor of American Studies, who has done extensive research on its author, Gertrude Bonnin (also known as Zitkala-Sa).

Bonnin’s life and writings are central to my first book on turn-of-the-20th-century Native intellectuals. As far as I know no other archival collection, including those that have Bonnin’s personal papers, have a copy of this particular document. It may be worth noting that by 1926, Bonnin had made political contacts and reshaped Indian policy in a number of ways, as a writer for national magazines and secretary and treasurer for one of the earliest pan-tribal reform groups, the Society of American Indians. But, as the President of the National Council of American Indians, Bonnin became a representative figure of Indianness in a new and different way. In her own words, this political organization aimed “to establish Local Lodges in Indian country for self-help and study” among Indians “to use their new citizenship” so that “the Indian may become a producer and not a consumer only” in American society.  –Kiara Vigil

To continue the “good things come in small packages” theme, another little book that caught my eye was published during the Exposition of 1898 in Omaha, Nebraska. Oo-mah-ha Ta-wa-tha (Omaha city) 1854-1898 by Fannie Reed Giffen is probably the first book ever to be illustrated by a Native American woman. The illustrator was Susette La Flesche Tibbles (also known as Inshta Theumba or Bright Eyes) who was better known for her eloquent oratorical skills as a native-rights advocate¹. Her sister, Susan La Flesche Picotte, was a physician, and also contributed to the book. I can’t resist the temptation of playing the “six degrees of Amherst” game by pointing out that Susette La Flesche was friends with the author Helen Hunt Jackson, who was the daughter of Amherst College professor Nathan Fiske.

Portrait of Susette La Flesche in upper left corner

Another copy of this book is freely available via the HathiTrust Digital Library.

More images of other books in the Kim-Wait/Eisenberg collection can be found on our Flickr site.

I want to also publicly thank Michelle Fredette, our Metadata Resident, for all the good work she’s putting in, helping to catalog this collection. That’s all from me for now. As you can see, I have plenty to keep me busy:

¹Wilson, Dorothy Clarke, Bright Eyes: The Story of Susette La Flesche, an Omaha Indian (McGraw-Hill, 1974).

A few weeks ago, Jim posted about OCLC Control Numbers and their public domain status. In that posting, Jim wrote, of the OCN, “It’s an important element in linked library data that helps in the creation and maintenance of work sets and provides a mechanism to disambiguate authors and titles.” He went on to detail the numerous ways that the OCN has been “widely used within the broad system of information that flows among libraries, national information agencies, commercial information providers and organizations that supply consumers with book and journal-oriented services.”

While that’s all well and good (and true) I wanted to provide some specific details on how the OCN is being used outside of what most of us consider normal channels of book information flows, and that is how the OCN is being used in (English Language) Wikipedia and in the ambitious Wikidata project. These are based on some counts that Max and I did a while ago, but I think they are current enough to make my point, which is that the OCN is recognized as having value outside of the library and publishing domain.

Wikipedia relies pretty heavily on a number of templates — one such template is the Authority Control Template, which Max has written about before. Another template, which I know you’ve all seen before, is the Infobox Book template.

Infobox Book For Alice Munro’s Too Much Happiness

This template, like most Wikipedia templates, contains what we would immediately recognize as metadata. This example, of Alice Munro’s Too Much Happiness, includes the author, date and country of publication, ISBN, and our friend the OCN. The OCN has been used in this template for a long time, and helps, as does the ISBN, to disambiguate works from one another. In Wikipedia, as in library catalogs, disambiguation is important, which is why the Wiki community values trusted identifiers like the OCN. And the OCN can really come in handy when there is no ISBN, as is the case with any book published before 1970.

Although not every Wikipedia article that is about a book has this template, but many do, so it can be a good way to see how many books have Wikipedia articles about them. A few months ago, I did a count on a dump of Wikipedia (using some jazzy scripts that Max wrote) and found that there were 29,673 instances of Infobox Book. In those templates, there were 23,304 ISBNs and 15,226 OCNs. Let’s hear it for identifiers!

Max did a count of identifiers in the newer Wikidata, and found that of around 14 million Wikidata items, 28,741 were books. 5403 Wikidata items have an ISBN-13 associated with them, and 12,262 have OCNs. Why is the number of ISBNs so low? Because Wikidata has a slot for ISBN-13 only; they are assuming that contributors will pad any ISBN-10s, but the numbers speak for themselves. Identifiers are of even greater importance in Wikidata than in Wikipedia, since Wikidata is all about metadata.

So there’s a look at how the humble OCN is being used, even outside the library and publishing context.

As a sidenote, there are several different flavors of Infobox Book, and one of them, I recently learned, is Infobox Dr Who Book. Go figure.

12 years ago, Michael Jordan came back to his hometown of Wilmington, NC, and to the game of professional basketball after retiring in 1998. 

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Reading Room, Carnegie Library, Woman’s College of the University of North Carolina, late 1930s

We’re really excited to get this scrapbook online because it speaks so directly to our own history here in the University Libraries. The Carnegie Library opened in 1905 in what is now the Forney Building. The building was partially destroyed by fire on September 15, 1932, and was enlarged during its reconstruction. The Library reopened in 1933 and vacated this building in 1950, when a new facility, now part of Jackson Library, opened across College Avenue. In 1955, Forney Building was extensively renovated for classroom use and in 1957 was named for Edward Jacob Forney, the school treasurer and chair of the Commercial Department from 1892 to 1940.

Greensboro was unusual in that it had within its current city limits  four different Carnegie Libraries associated with four different institutions: one each at Woman’s College (now UNCG), Bennett College, and Guilford College, and one serving as the Greensboro Public Library. All but the Greensboro Public Library building are still standing and Guilford’s building is still serving as part of the Hege Library.

The scrapbook contains clippings, photographs, and other material and is a great time capsule of a college library in the late 1930s and early 1940s. It was digitized as part of a three-year project that will make over 300 scrapbooks available online.

This blog posting evolved out of an assignment we received, to share with colleagues at OCLC Research how to build and maintain a social media brand. While there’s nothing on this list that is particularly original, we both thought that the advice we came up with for colleagues was also worth sharing with a larger audience. Some of you may be consumers of social media, but not already actively blogging, Tweeting, or Tumbling. Others of you are hardened experts and we hope you will share your wisdom in the comments below!

Your online brand is the reputation you establish over time by providing useful and appreciated value to others. Establishing your brand and maintaining requires commitment, since constant activity is better than episodic participation. Also, it is much easier to damage your online brand than it is to build it, so participate thoughtfully and with grace.

• Determine what your online “handle” (nickname) will be and use it everywhere. The more consistent you can be with the use of your chosen handle the more likely your potential audience will recognize that it represents you in a variety of contexts (e.g., Twitter, Facebook, etc.). Register the domain name as well, in case you ever want to have your own web site.
• Select the fora in which you will participate (e.g., Twitter, Facebook, Google+, etc.). You should participate in sites and services where the audience you wish to reach can already be found. For example, if no one you know hangs out on Google+, then skip it. Don’t forget mailing lists, which can still be an important venue for participating with a given community.
• Participate consistently. Participating in online forums should be a regular part of your professional life if you are trying to build and maintain an online brand. Being a consistently contributing member of a community is the most important method to build your reputation.
• Contribute real value. Your contributions should carry value for those who will likely see it. For example, if you are trying to establish a reputation for insightful commentary about libraries you may wish to avoid commenting a lot about politics or what you had for dinner. This can vary a bit by venue, with some being more formal than others, but always consider the impression you are trying to make within a given venue.
• Say why. If you’re linking to something, say why your readers should click through to it. Be a good citizen and give as much context as possible, even with character limits.
• Do not post when impaired (e.g., angry, drunk, depressed, etc.). What seems like a good idea at the time may not be. If you must, write it up but don’t post it until you’ve slept on it.
• Consider reposting key items at opposite times of day (to make your impact felt in the broadest set of timezones possible).
• Use the option to schedule posts when appropriate. Most social software clients have methods to schedule a post hitting a particular service at a particular day and/or time. This can be used, for example, to keep up an online presence during a vacation or to repost in a different timezone.
• Keep in mind that nothing on the Internet can be considered private. Nothing. Whatever you write can show up in places you don’t expect, so be nice. Always. This doesn’t mean you should not forcefully argue your point, just be respectful about it.
• Post appropriately for the venue. Twitter, for example, is a friendly venue for humor and personal comments. LinkedIn groups, however, are likely not.
• Avoid “tweet bombing”. If you only check your social media account once a day, don’t make the mistake of posting or tweeting a lot during that one session. If people see many posts coming from you during a short period, it becomes more annoying than helpful. Rather, use the scheduling feature that your client software may (should) have to space out your posts or shares over time.
• Be a good (and reciprocal) citizen. Everyone loves to have their links and wisdom shared. If you share something you got from someone else, give credit where credit is due. A name check at the right time will go a long way towards establishing good relationships.
• Be in the flow. At conferences, you can leverage the conference stream both to keep up with what is happening in parallel sessions but also to boost your own signal. People who don’t normally follow you will follow a conference stream — if you are active in the stream, you will pick up new followers and also find some new people to follow yourself.
• Periodically review your online presence. Are you participating in the right forums? Are there new venues you should add to your repertoire? Others that you can withdraw from? Keep in mind that your assessment of a given venue may change over time. I initially thought Twitter was only really useful at conferences, but later assessments changed my mind.
• Use services such as Klout.com, Feedburner, etc. to assess, not obsess. That is, services that rate the impact of your social media presence can be useful to get feedback on your impact, but do not become obsessed with increasing your score. Remember that your overall professional brand also includes other important factors, such as the articles you publish and the presentations you give.
• Don’t worry about turning your back: Once you’re engaged, it can be hard to step away from the stream, but it will be okay. Anything really important will come back around again.
• Be yourself (within limits!). Although social media is durable, there is no reason to hide who you are. In fact, expressing your personality let’s people know that you are not just someone who works for a particular organization, but a person with passions, interests, and (hopefully) a sense of humor.

With time and consistent performance, your online reputation can be a strong complement to your overall professional reputation. By establishing a strong and valued online presence you can increase the demand for your work in other venues, such as presentations at professional conferences or invited articles for professional journals. Without such a presence in an era dominated by electronic communication, you may run the risk of damaging an otherwise stellar professional reputation.

Pioneering news commentator Quincy Howe (1900-1977) was on WQXR between August, 1939 and June, 1942. His essay for the September, 1941 WQXR Program Guide was introduced this way:

Mr. Howe needs no introduction to the WQXR audience for he has been the station’s news commentator since the outbreak of World War II. In addition to his radio duties, he is Editor-in-Chief of Simon & Schuster, and is the author of numerous books, the latest being “The News and How to Understand It.”

Eddie Cantor once said that there are two businesses everybody thinks he understands — his own and radio. But I wonder if even the news commentators understand that branch of radio which has to do with commenting on the news over the air. Lecturers, actors and singers can attend schools, read text-books, and draw on generations of experience. The news commentator can learn from nobody except himself and his colleagues, to whom he seldom has time to listen to anyway.

To this almost limitless and quite unexplored field, I have little to contribute; barely enough, in fact, to fill the allotted space in this program booklet. However, somebody has got to begin somewhere, sometime. I therefore submit the following decalogue for commentators. If it has no other virtue, at least it has the merit of novelty. If it has no other result, at least it may lead somebody else to draw up something better.

1. Be yourself. On this one commandment hang all of the laws and most of the profits of the successful news commentator. If you assume over the air a personality that is not your own, your listeners will see through your pose. If you are yourself, somebody will like you.

2. Never prophesy. The disease of prediction is fatal. Listeners have memories. They recall your errors as well as your hits. And you need a better than .500 average to get by.

3. Name your sources. The commentator cannot compete with world-wide news services in gathering information. He cannot pit his knowledge and judgement against experts. Moreover, if you credit the source of your information and interpretation, you can often get further cooperation. And your listeners will respect you more.

4. Develop a rounded and consistent point of view. This means spending more time reading basic books, less time reading superficial newspaper stories, magazine articles, and newsletters. But pick certain news sources that have proved dependable and follow them.

5. Stick to one main theme in each broadcast. Don’t confuse your listeners and yourself by rattling off ten-point programs, point by point. Don’t try to cover the whole world each time you speak. It can wait — which is more than your listeners will do if you bewilder them.

6. Converse, don’t elocute or argue. No matter how large your audience, you are talking to countless small groups, not to a mass meeting. And respect other people’s prejudices. Otherwise you will end up preaching only to those who agree with you anyway.

7. Never listen to other commentators. One of two things will happen if you do. Either you will spend all your time arguing with those you disagree with, or you will not say what you want to say because somebody else has said it, probably much better than you could. Act as if you were the only commentator on the air.

8. Speak naturally. If you try to correct certain fixed habits of speech you will make a worse mistake correcting the original one, and besides, your nervous system will suffer. If you talk fast, it can’t be helped. A rapid, interested talker holds the attention better than a slow, bored one. Moreover, you can always pause to let your listeners catch up with you. Also you can say the same things in more than one way. A corollary to this commandment is to summarize the gist of your talk in a concluding paragraph.

9. Admit your mistakes. You will make plenty of them and you might as well acknowledge them from time to time. Nobody expects perfection, even from a news commentator. Therefore take your listeners into your confidence occasionally and show where and why you went wrong. But don’t spend more than ten percent of any one broadcast alibiing yourself on the one hand or confessing on the other.

10. Never draw up a list of commandments for commentators.

                                                                              Harold Stein Photo, WQXR Archive Collections

____________________________________________

Editors Note: Quincy Howe was the Director of the American Civil Liberties Union (1932-1940) and the chief book editor at Simon and Schuster (1935-1942). He was first heard on Mutual Radio in 1938 during the Czechoslovakian crisis and started at WQXR in the summer of 1939. At that time his program was Propaganda Behind the News airing on Thursday evenings and done with radio personality Maurice C. Dreicer. By the end of the year he was doing a solo fifteen minute news commentary three times a week at 9 p.m. Before he left the station in June, 1942, he was heard every weeknight.

Following the publication of his book, The News and How to Understand It, Howe was described in Time magazine as “a cultured, loquacious, birdlike, Bostonian…with a shrewd editorial sense.” And, until the fall of France in 1940, he had been an isolationist producing a weekly newsletter called Uncensored. Howe left WQXR for CBS and then joined ABC in 1947. He was the moderator for the fourth Kennedy/Nixon debate in 1961. Howe retired in 1974 and died in 1977.

Well, I had the very best of intentions when I wrote the first ‘Five Things’ Friday… in mid-July. Let’s disregard the fact that I intended for this to be a weekly blog feature, and we are already well into the month of October.  Let’s also disregard the fact that it’s Saturday, not Friday!

1. Equal Pay Songs
A special thanks goes to our amazing volunteer, Helen, who discovered these equal pay songs in the NUWT collection.  With the ‘Clever Campaigners’ workshop on offer for primary schools, students investigate the visual, written, and verbal campaign strategies of the NUWT; these songs are a perfect example of how campaigners can use their voices to spread their message.

I can’t wait for students to come up with lyrics for their own campaign songs… however, I have a sneaking suspicion their songs will more likely be to the tune of a One Direction hit than to ’There’s a Tavern in the Town’… but you never know.

Equal Pay Songs… we’ve come to a bit of a consensus, and I think the archive office’s favourite is No. 4.
(document reference UWT/D/1/23)

2. Speaking of song adaptations… ‘Bad Romance: Women’s Suffrage’
‘Bad Romance: Women’s Suffrage’ is a parody music video to the tune of Lady Gaga.  It celebrates the successful fight to pass the 19th Amendment in the United States, which gave women the right to vote in 1920.  The video, more information and teaching resources can be found here.

3. This badge machine.

For mini-campaigners (and perhaps adult archivists, librarians, and educators?) to design their own badges.

4. Siobhan Davies’ film All This Can Happen
A few weeks ago, I attended a conference at Goldsmiths, Past is Prologue: Making Art from a Living Archive, and heard Davies speak about her work with archives and art forms including dance and video.  Davies’ film, All This Can Happen, follows text from author Robert Walser’s The Walk and features solid archive material (primarily from the BFI’s archive) for 50 minutes.   A five-minute clip of the film can be found here, and below is a description from the site:

‘The writer’s examination of each small event on the walk leads him into a state of reverie, taking him beyond his immediate circumstances into a deeper pondering on the comedy, sadness and ceaseless variety of life. The film, like Robert Walser’s The Walk (1917), aims to delve into one individual’s consciousness, and show how he observes, experiences and thinks about the world around him.’

5. Tim Etchells’ text-based projects
Ethchell’s also spoke at Past is Prologue.  He is part of the ‘Forced Entertainment’ theatre company, a Sheffield based experimental theatre troupe.  You can head over here to browse his works, which incorporate a variety of media (often text-based), galleries, organisations, etc.

I was particularly intrigued by his project, Unsound Method (after Conrad), which responds to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and is comprised of several works (which really goes to show the potential for creating multi-media art projects through text-based documents).  The various works included…

• One where Etchells blanked out all words except those to do with darkness (black, night, etc)
• One where he blanked out all words except those to do with lightness (day, sun, light, etc)
• Then created a musical score for violin and trumpet (based on the above projects… creating a musical score based on text and the gaps in the page as a result of the blanked out text, as the artists involved experimented with taking lines and pattern and turning it into something else)
• Finally, they created a video of a live performance of the musical piece

Have you stumbled upon any interesting archive or equal rights finds lately?  Please feel free to share in the comments!

In the summer of 1968, science-fiction author Arthur C. Clarke sat down with Patricia Marx to discuss the upcoming release of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Four years earlier, hot on the heels of Dr. Strangelove, Stanley Kubrick approached Clarke with an idea for a film based in outer space. Borrowing from Clarke’s early short story, “The Sentinel”, the two collaborated on the screenplay for a film they hoped would “convey the beauty and strangeness of the universe—to make people realize […] man’s place in the cosmic hierarchy”.

Recorded just a year shy of the iconic moon-landing, this interview captures a singular moment of prescience and optimism for a world entering into the future. Clarke’s more spirited predictions for the coming century include the development of space industry and tourism replete with colonies on the moon and Mars, the establishment of contact with extraterrestrial entities, and the potential for human immortality. Even amid fantasies of celestial grandeur, Clarke expresses hope for human civilization grounded on Earth: he envisions a stable world society wherein information is communicated instantaneously, forecasting the realization of Marshall McLuhan’s Global Village.

While we have yet to conquer the New Frontier in many of the ways Clarke anticipated, his enthusiasm for the future throughout this interview is infectious. At a time when information and new technology constantly abound, this unique interview captures a refreshing moment of novelty.

The reason that we’re so careful to record everything is that eventually we are going to create a best practices manual for groups that choose to participate in the project, which will give them advice and instructions on how to best preserve and record things of value.  The idea is to make the process as simple and inexpensive as possible for these groups, which is part of why we are testing several different models of cameras.  Right now we’re working with the small Sony camera, which has been great – there is a grid and an excellent auto-focus feature on this camera.  Later we’ll be testing other types, including an iPhone camera and a professional model.  All of this is in an effort to preserve their materials, and to hopefully create an easy way for groups to preserve as much as possible in order to make the materials accessible to everyone that the groups choose to share it with.
         
 This is promising to be an exciting project – keep watching for more details!

-Rachel Sanders-