The Art Collection has been awarded a grant from Museums Galleries Scotland to hold an Environmental Festival highlighting our Under Threat exhibitions and events.

The open day will bring these themes together with music, words and other activities. The day will include public tours of the Under Threat exhibitions which are currently on display within our Pathfoot Gallery, and Danni Thompson, photographer and seabird ecologist, will talk about her exhibition ‘On the Edge’. There will also be the launch of the ‘Pathfoot project’ which is a publication created by students on the MLitt in Creative writing at the University of Stirling. The students have created written works inspired by the Art Collection’s current exhibitions and the event will include a public reading of works from the publication. This will be followed by a musical performance by the Edinburgh Quartet (University Musicians in Residence) and students from the Conservatoire who have composed works inspired by the Under Threat exhibitions. Throughout the event, there will be the opportunity for visitors to go to stalls run by environmental charities and organisations and learn about the work they have been doing in the local community, and the Conservation volunteers will hold children’s workshops and an open garden session in the Pathfoot Garden. In addition, Stirling Active Travel Hub will be in attendance and will bring electric bikes and cargo bikes for visitors to trial.

This event was due to take place on 13th June but has now been rescheduled to 20th September 2020. Further information to follow soon.

The National Archives and Records Administration exists to provide access to the records that document the history of the United States. However, sometimes history happens around us and forces us to change the way we approach our work, at least for the time being. All of us are living through a historic crisis as we adapt to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. We at the National Archives are keenly aware of the uncertainty faced by our staff and our colleagues in the archival community and cultural and educational organizations. Institutions and individuals are facing unprecedented challenges in an effort to continue their regular operations.

This isn’t easy for any of us. We stand with all of you in our efforts to protect the health and welfare of our families, staff and organization members, archivists, researchers, educators, and other stakeholders. We are also doing our best to continue services you rely on in a highly fluid and challenging environment. Like other institutions and businesses, the National Archives has closed all public spaces and cancelled all events and programs until further notice. As of March 23, all National Archives buildings are closed to staff as well except for those performing emergency functions. National Archives staff are teleworking to the greatest extent possible, which means that we are still operating and available to assist, although some of our capabilities are limited by current circumstances. 

Importantly, many of our services are available online:

• The National Archives Catalog is the online portal to our digital records, and information about other records held at the National Archives
• National Archives staff are responding to reference questions or requests for records sent to inquire@nara.gov.
• Researchers can ask—or answer—research questions on History Hub, or search to see if a question has been asked before.
• Members of the public can explore our online resources by visiting www.archives.gov and viewing our online exhibits.
• Teachers and parents can use our educational resources.
• Everyone can help the whole community by volunteering in our Citizen Archivist Missions.

Where possible, we will also conduct public events and outreach activities online and through virtual meetings. We will regularly update the event calendar with current information. Follow the National Archives on Facebook (USNationalArchives) and Twitter (@USNatArchives) for our current status. Or share your thoughts here on my blog. 

We will continue to share updates about what we’re doing and the services we can provide as the spring progresses and circumstances change. We send our best wishes for your continued good health and wellbeing and that of your communities during this unprecedented time.

In 1915 Francis X. Bushman made the great migration to Hollywood to do what many established theater actors did at that time: slum it in that little backwater of a West Coast town (part of Los Angeles since 1910) to make some serious cash. Upon his arrival, Bushman —who would go on to become one of the first bona fide movie stars and an accomplished film director in his own right— was introduced around one of the studios to get a feel for the process. One of the first stops on this introductory tour was the set of none other than the great Cecil B. DeMille, where Bushman arrived to see a giant swimming pool filled with crystal clear water and a gaggle of nude actresses frolicking within. Above the pool an array of lights and a motion picture camera had been rigged to catch the action, and DeMille enthusiastically informed Bushman that the goal was to film the actresses in a way that only their backs could be seen as they swam, creating a tasteful yet tantalizing spectacle of grace and beauty.

Advertisement, Moving Picture World, May 1919 for the film For Better, for Worse (1919).
(Paramount Pictures/Internet Archive)

Now, from a modern perspective, there are a number of reasons why this is a bad idea, not least of which is the potentially tragic and gruesome demise that might befall those poor women should one of those high-voltage lights come loose from its moorings. However, as Bushman was later informed by a crestfallen DeMille, the lesson learned that day was the folly in trying to film a reflective surface. (Think of what happens when you take a picture of a mirror). Instead of capturing in celluloid an image of ethereal beauty as tastefully nude nymphs frolicked in the clear water, all he recorded was a few hours of his own camera and lights looking back at him. It seems insane to think that a professional Hollywood director wouldn’t understand that you can’t point a camera directly at a mirror-like surface, but it makes sense when you think about the moment in context: it was 1915 and no one had ever tried that before. We can imagine DeMille smacking himself in the forehead as soon as he saw the developed footage and thinking, “You idiot, of course!” (Click on the audio player above for a snippet of this delightful anecdote.)

Myrna Loy is a host for Memoirs of the Movies.
(Publicity photo by George Hurrell/Wikimedia Commons)

This is just one of the many colorful and informative tales recounted in Memoirs of the Movies, a radio program from the early sixties that featured prerecorded interviews with Hollywood greats, from the silent era all the way through the golden age of Hollywood and beyond. The list of legends who lend their considerable experience and flair to this program is awe-inspiring. It includes Buster Keaton, Dorothy Lamour, Gene Kelly, Arthur Freed, Paul Newman, Ben Hecht, Adolph Zukor, King Vidor, David O’Selznick, Basil Rathbone, Myrna Loy, Harold Lloyd, Cecil B. DeMille, Otto Preminger, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, and many, many others. This collection of shows is a veritable treasure trove of film history, and some of the stories related here appear to exist nowhere else. What’s more, those involved in the program are actors and film directors, old-school producers, writers and musicians —in other words, professional storytellers with huge personalities and an immense talent for spinning a good yarn. And, boy, do they bring it! Jack Lemmon recounts his first meeting with Harry Cohn. Ben Hecht recalls the undeserved credit he received for the innovative camera movements of Lee Garmes in Angels Over Broadway (1940). Cecil B. DeMille recounts going to California to shoot 1914’s The Squaw Man and —because he needed a locale with desert and prairie— renting an old barn on Vine Street that would later become the first Hollywood studio. Reginald Denham tells a hilarious story about legendary film producer Sir Alexander Korda and the insanely convoluted process of writing a script and getting it into production.

Motion Picture Production Code (Hays Code), cover of a paper copy.
(Internet Archives)

Throughout it all there’s a certain polite reserve to the series indicative of the era in which it aired and frequently absent from contemporary media. The ability to tell a good story, juicy bits and all, while being mindful of the censors and the public tastes was a skill developed early by the Hollywood set due to the rigors imposed by the Hayes Code and, later, the MPAA. It lends the proceedings a measure of class and old-school cool both charming and sophisticated, and makes the whole collection feel warm and inviting. These assets are true treasures and we at the WNYC Archives hope you enjoy them as much as we’ve enjoyed bringing them to you.

The Cinema Sound collection in the New York Public Radio Archives has several documents and letters related to Memoirs of the Movies that constitute a small treasure in and of themselves. Some of the letters and signatures on these documents are a film buff’s dream find; we’ve included two below. Also, there are a few episodes we’re missing: episode #17 The New Hollywood and episode #18 The Rusk to Reality. If anyone has heard them or has copies, please let us know here at the WNYC Archives —we’d love to hear them.

A letter from Lucille Ball for the Memoirs of the Movies project.
(NYPR Archives/NYPR Archives)

A letter from Cecil B. DeMille for the Memoirs of the Movies project.
(NYPR Archives/NYPR Archives)

The Fiscal Year 2020 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) requires the Secretary of Defense to submit an unclassified “report on reducing the backlog in legally required historical declassification obligations of the Department of Defense” to the Armed Services Committees of the House and the Senate (P.L. 116-92, Sec. 1759). The report is due to these committees on April 18, 2020 – 120 days after enactment of the NDAA.  The Public Interest Declassification Board (PIDB) wholeheartedly support the actions called for in the NDAA.

The FY 2020 NDAA specifically requires that the report include the Department of Defense’s (DOD) plans to reduce backlogs in “legally mandated historical declassification,” and increase productivity. The NDAA recognizes the importance of DOD adopting use of advanced technology, including Artificial Intelligence (AI) and other Machine Learning technologies. It requires the Secretary of Defense to include a plan for DOD to adopt and implement technologies into declassification processes. The law also requires the Secretary of Defense to provide an assessment of records released for each of the past three years under 25- and 50-year automatic declassification review programs, and an estimate of how many records DOD will review and declassify in each of the next three years.

In addition to this report, Congress requires that the Secretary of Defense to provide a report on the “progress and objectives” of DOD in reviewing and declassifying records for publication in the Department of State’s Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series, and for public access at the National Archives and Records Administration  and the presidential libraries.

Each of these requirements in the NDAA embody recommendations of the PIDB. The PIDB has consistently advocated for the implementation of AI and other advanced technologies to improve declassification efficiency and effectiveness. First, use of these technologies are essential in reducing backlogs of records awaiting declassification review, and in ensuring consistency of declassification decisions. Second, current manual declassification processes are not sustainable nor desirable in handling the volume of digital data. The PIDB highlighted the need for advanced technologies in its 2016 Report to the President, The Importance of Technology in Classification and Declassification.

The NDAA included specific reporting requirements for DOD to describe its plan for assisting historians and the Department of State in publishing FRUS and assisting National Declassification Center in declassifying records accessioned to NARA and in the Presidential Libraries. These records are of historical interest and should be prioritized for declassification review. In 2014, the PIDB advocated for prioritizing the review of records of historical significance in its report to the President, Setting Priorities: An Essential Step in Transforming Declassification.

Submission of the Secretary of Defense’s report to Congress on the growing declassification challenges at DOD and DOD agencies directly affects the public and its ability to learn about our history and participate in the democratic process of holding Government officials accountable.  As the 120-day deadline approaches in mid-April, the members of the PIDB – and all stakeholders – will be interested to learn of the Secretary of Defense’s plans for modernizing its declassification policies and processes to include technology and his plans for prioritizing the declassification review for records sought for publication in the FRUS and held by the NARA and the presidential libraries.

The PIDB’s Transforming Classification blog and the Information Security Oversight’s new blog, The ISOO Overview, intends to post additional information about the contents of the Secretary of Defense’s report to Congress as it is made available to the public.

Considering how long students have been coming through the walls of our historic university, it goes without saying that we have a rich and varied history of extracurricular, student-run activities. At Florida State University, many of these long-standing traditions and activities were established during our time as an all women institution, between 1905 and 1947. Campus-wide extracurriculars were an extremely important part of student life during this time. Students felt taking part in events with peers built pride and appreciation for their alma mater. For this year’s Women’s History Month, we’ll be looking into the early years of recreation at Florida State College for Women (FSCW): how our peers of the past made friends, garnered school spirit, and just passed the time.

Two of the earliest student organizations were the Thalian Literary Society and the Minerva Club, founded and run by our female predecessors. These organizations were formed with the goal of “enabling the girls to speak more fluently in public,” but they did much more for the student body (Talisman, April 1906, Pg. 26). They were an expressive outlet for students and encourage peer-to-peer discourse and connection.

In 1906, just one year after our transition to a women’s college, the Thalian Society and Minerva Club began publishing the first college literary periodical in the state of Florida, The Talisman. (The Book Lover’s Guide to Florida, 1992) It served as a recreational avenue for students to express their thoughts and to learn about campus happenings. The Talisman went on to become the Florida Flambeau newspaper in 1915, still run entirely by women.

From the first five years of the establishment of FSCW, our women students were establishing recreational sports teams of all kinds. By 1906 our small campus had facilities for tennis, basketball, field-hockey, croquet, a swimming pool, and a full gymnasium! (Talisman, April 1906, Pg. 30)

Student organizations are a crucial part of university life and this has been the case at our university for over 100 years! The 1910 and 1911 yearbooks from FSCW show us that students were forming all sorts of clubs for a wide variety of interests and commonalities…

Scrapbooking was an extremely common practice between students at Florida State College for Women. Here at Heritage & University Archives, we have over 30 of these student-made scrapbooks and they give us endless insight as to how they chose to spend their free time.

Many of these records are available online at DigiNole. For more information about our University related collections, please contact Sandra Varry, the Heritage & University Archivist.

As this pandemic unfolds, our daily lives have been and will continue to be affected by unprecedented decisions, restrictions and realities. As archivists we started to ask ourselves this week – ‘How will we document this? What can we gather to preserve the reality of this period for the future?’ and we have taken inspiration from our colleagues at Glasgow City Archives and decided to ask for your help.

We’re encouraging residents in the NHS Forth Valley area to keep a daily diary documenting your experiences with coronavirus so that we can preserve the many varied experiences that we are all going through for future generations.

Entries can be as long or as short and as detailed as you would like to make them. You could add drawings and creative writing or keep it to prose. Document how you feel, what your routine is like, what you’re doing with your days, how the situation is affecting you and the people you care about. No detail is too small to record if you feel comfortable doing so, from what you ate for breakfast to what Netflix show or book is seeing you through.

We want to use these to show the whole range of experiences unfolding during this time so you could encourage your children to keep a diary, your parents, and grandparents. We’d love for everyone to have a chance to contribute to this collective account and for it to be as representative of the region as it can be.

Once our lives become a bit more normal, we will post details of how to get your diaries to us. Once they arrive, they will form a part of our NHS Forth Valley collection and be made available to researchers and archive users of the future. Though we will always treat personal information with sensitivity and may, therefore, restrict the public use of your diary for an extended period of time, it is also your choice should you wish to remain anonymous. Whether or not you would like to remain anonymous is perhaps something you would like to consider before you begin writing your diary.

We will accept hand written or electronic diaries, whichever you prefer to keep. We hope that this process might also provide you with a therapeutic way to spend some time and so it is for you, as well as for us. Please don’t worry about what we would like you to be recording, record what life is like for you and, ultimately, the things that are making up your days and you cannot go wrong.

If you have any questions about the project, email us at archives@stir.ac.uk

While the Pathfoot Building is closed, the Art Collection will each week focus on an object of interest. You can also search our entire collection online here.

Pathfoot Building
Architect: John Richards
1967

Our first object of the week is the jewel in the crown of the Art Collection – the Pathfoot Building itself. Constructed in 1967, it was the first to be completed on the new campus and is now a listed building. 

This is how David Baxandall, at the time the Director of the National Galleries of Scotland, began his review of the first building to be constructed on the University of Stirling campus:

[The Pathfoot Building] is probably the most beautiful, the most civilized, the most sensitive and intelligent piece of large scale modern architecture and planning that has been achieved in Scotland. The architect is John Richards, of the firm Robert Matthew, Johnson Marshall and partners and he’s done wonders.

He was speaking on a Radio 4 programme called Arts Review, transmitted on Thursday 8 January 1970, and continued:

It is well outside the town, on a sloping site facing south. As you approach, you see a series of very long low buildings stepped down the hillside on terraces. The emphasis is all in horizontals, and the relation of the buildings to landscape is one of great courtesy.
When you go inside it’s equally successful. It is very humane… Everything seems designed and scaled for the human individuals who use it whether to delight their eyes or to serve their needs. There are pictures or pieces of sculpture all over the place, many of them borrowed and frequently changed. Every now and then you look out on to small grassed and flagged courts between the buildings, rather like Japanese gardens. There is something to raise your spirits on every side.

Even though the Pathfoot Building has been altered and extended over the years, the spirit of the original design remains, and is appreciated by those who visit, study and work there. Alongside the offices and lecture theatres, Pathfoot is a public art space, displaying the University’s permanent art collection as well as a series of temporary exhibitions in its main concourse and corridors, the large Crush Hall and some of its seventeen courtyards.

Click here to watch ‘Corridor of Dreams’, a 2013 film which celebrates works of art in the collection through the eyes of the artists who made them, and the people who pass them on a daily basis in the Pathfoot Building.

With our work on extension service scrapbooks with the Havana History and Heritage Society for Gadsden County, we took a look at our own collections and found Leon County scrapbooks for a similar period on our own shelves! The Florida Home Economics Association Records holds scrapbooks which are mostly Leon County extension service records from 1923-1966. The collection also holds the administrative records of the Association and Florida State College for Women (FSU’s predecessor) was an integral part of the instruction branch of the association.

Digitization of scrapbooks is always a challenge. The scrapbooks were dis-bound before being brought up to our studio for digitization. Dis-binding scrapbooks such as these and other similar material allows us to capture higher quality images of individual pages faster than if they were left in their original, bound state. From a preservation standpoint, this also reduces the amount of potential wear-and-tear on older items such as these can sustain during the digitization process. 

Since we digitized the material as individual pages instead of bound scrapbooks, we relied primarily on our overhead camera setup to complete this project. This setup utilizes an IQ180 reprographic camera system and Capture One Cultural Heritage software to create high quality, high resolution images. We digitized all material in this collection as 400 PPI (pixels per inch) TIFF images as recommended by our FSUDL Imaging Guidelines document. 

Being a tethered system, all images are automatically and instantly transferred from the camera to the computer where the Capture One software handles basic editing of the images including color correction, cropping, file naming, and exporting the final images to our internal server before being loaded into the FSU Digital Library

The Cultural Heritage version of Capture One allows us to increase the rate of image processing by providing helpful features such as auto-cropping and advanced white balance adjustments. The software also acts as a file management tool and allows us to batch-edit and export the images we’ve digitized. We use this to apply the same color and exposure settings to all pages of an item at once instead of performing the edits one-by-one on individual pages, which would take much longer to complete.  

The scrapbooks, once they were digitized and images ready for the digital library, were loaded into the FSU Digital Library. Please enjoy browsing these materials and the fascinating glimpse they offer into the work of the extension services in Leon County over several decades.

The Public Interest Declassification Board (PIDB) members and staff remain active preparing for an in-person meeting to be scheduled as circumstances allow under the current COVID-19 national emergency.  In addition to supporting PIDB members in scheduling the in-person meeting, PIDB staff will continue to publish here on Transforming Classification, and remain responsive to questions and input from the public and stakeholders in the PIDB community of interest.  We welcome your comments to on Transforming Classification, and look forward to better days, as we work together with you in expanding the conversation in the public interest about improving classification and declassification across the Federal Government.

Following advice issued by the Scottish Government on steps
to be taken to slow the spread of COVID-19 the University of Stirling Art
Collection and our Archives reading room are
closed to the public until further notice. However, we aim to continue to
provide access to our fantastic collections throughout this difficult period.

Over the coming months we will be taking our collections online, adding content to our new Culture on Campus website and sharing highlights via social media with #CultureOnStirCampus

In April we will be taking part in #Archive30 a promotional campaign on twitter organised by the Archives and Records Association. Like many other services across the country we will be taking up the challenge of tweeting all 30 daily topics throughout the month!

We will be highlighting some of the treasures of our Art Collection through interviews with the curators, films from exhibiting artists and a featured ‘object of the week.’

Where possible we will also endeavour to respond to your
research enquiries.

We will also be adding newly digitised content from our collections to our new website at https://collections.stir.ac.uk/

We hope our collections can provide a source of information,
education, inspiration and amusement during these uncertain times. Look out for
updates on social media and on our Culture on Campus blog

University of Stirling Art Collection

University of Stirling Archives

Hello, loyal blog readers. We wish that, right now, we were posting under normal circumstances to impendingly welcome you back into our newly-renovated library and enthusing about a soon-to-open exhibition, but alas, that’s not the case given the current COVID-19 situation in the U.S. However, we do have an update on library services and Special Collections access during our closure, as well as some information about where we left off our reopening preparations (with photos near the bottom of this post):

First, as you likely know, Providence Public Library has wisely postponed the date when we will re-open to the public; if you didn’t receive the library’s email announcement, you can find it here. You can also check our website for updates about virtual library services and announcements about our rescheduled opening. (To answer your most pressing questions: no, you don’t need to return your books right now, nor will they incur overdue fines until we re-open; and yes, you can apply for a temporary library card online if you don’t have one and want to access the library’s e-books and other digital services.)

Second, all members of our Special Collections staff are currently working from home. That means that we’re available by email but not by phone, and we don’t have access to our physical collections at the moment. We do have a number of virtual services available:

• First, please avail yourselves of the plethora of images available through ProvLibDigital. They’re free to download, and could make great additions to online curricula, research projects, or creative projects.
• We can offer some virtual instruction or reference services: do you want us to offer an online session for your class on how to do primary source research? Have questions about your genealogy research? Need some ideas for your history class? Please get in touch; we’d love to work with you.
• We’re working to put together additional resources that will be available through our website, such as subject guides to common research topics, ideas for teachers and professors to integrate primary sources and historical materials into their virtual curricula, and information about preserving family history. Stay tuned!

Now, for some pictures and construction/ exhibit updates:

Up until mid-March, we were frantically preparing for the library’s grand re-opening. While construction continued outside our new office doors, we received new furniture for our Special Collections Reading Room, including a bank of lockers for researchers’ personal belongings, new tables and chairs, and an official-looking desk for the librarian monitoring the room. We don’t have pictures to share just yet, so you can act very surprised when you finally sit in our new chairs.

We also got VERY exciting new cases for our VERY exciting new exhibition gallery. The cases were manufactured in Germany and journeyed across the Atlantic on a cargo ship. They arrived via delivery truck on a rainy day in wooden packing crates, having crossed the miles relatively unscathed.

(Don’t worry, we got a replacement for this single broken glass shelf.)

Look at the cool Drop (N) Tell Impact Indicator on the side of the shipping crate that tattles on laissez-faire crate handlers:

Here are a few of the cases set up in the new gallery:

In early March, we started building custom book supports for our annual exhibition and program series. Here are some poorly-lit pictures of Angela doing math, and of freshly-made supports inside our new cases.

We’re still planning to have the exhibit completed whenever the library re-opens to the public; in the meantime, keep an eye here and on our other social media for posts highlighting Special Collections materials, and even a few exhibit sneak-peeks.

We sincerely hope you’re all staying safe and healthy and feeling supported and connected to one another.

Early program flier for Stories from Many Lands.
(Courtesy of Diane Wolkstein/WNYC Archive Collections)

Storyteller, author, and folklorist Diane Wolkstein (1942-2013) produced and hosted Stories From Many Lands. Sponsored by the New York City Parks Department, the Saturday morning children’s program aired from 1968-1980. 

Wolkstein’s career as the Parks Department’s first full-time storyteller began in 1967. The intrepid tale spinner visited ten city parks five days a week with props and a full range of folktales, fairy tales, legends, and epics from all over the world. Her captive audiences ranged in age from infants to the very elderly.

By 1971, the city’s fiscal crisis was felt at every level of public service, and the municipal bean counters put an end to her $40 per week salary as New York City’s official storyteller. Instead, they bestowed upon her the honorary lifetime title of New York City’s Storyteller, without pay. The ever passionate Wolkstein, known for her range of performance, became a leading figure in the American national storytelling revival and was reportedly called “one of the greatest storytellers in the Western world” by the myth and story scholar Joseph Campbell. 

Diane Wolkstein at WNYC in the 1970s.
(Courtesy of Diane Wolkstein/WNYC Archive Collections)

Wolkstein continued with her show on WNYC and, over the years, authored twenty-two books and released more than 10 audio collections and three videos. Wolkstein’s volumes included creation myths, legends, and folktales she collected on trips to Haiti, Asia, and Africa. She later teamed up with Samuel Noah Kramer, a scholar of Assyrian civilization, to translate and retell Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth, an ancient tale of the Sumerian goddess of fertility, love, and war. Her titles include The Magic Orange Tree and Other Haitian Folktales, The Glass Mountain, The Banza and First Love Stories.  

In 1980, Wolkstein, along with storytellers Gioia Timpanelli and Laura Simms, co-founded The New York City Storytelling Center which held monthly workshops for seasoned storytellers, novice tellers, and interested beginners. The Center trained an untold number of storytellers and sent them to schools, libraries, and the weekly storytelling at the Hans Christian Andersen statue by the boat pond in Central Park near Fifth Avenue at 72nd Street. Wolkstein was the director of the storytelling program at the Hans Christian Andersen statue from 1971-2012. Several generations of children, including Wolkstein’s daughter, Rachel Zucker, grew up on the summer Saturday morning programs. Many of them brought their own children to listen to Wolkstein or “Grandma D” as she was called by her three adoring grandsons. The program continues today with families gathering in front of the statue of Hans Christian Andersen every Saturday, June through September at 11 a.m. 

Diane Wolkstein was born in Newark, New Jersey, and grew up in Maplewood, New Jersey. She received a bachelor’s degree from Smith College and a master’s degree in education from Bank Street College of Education. While living in Paris, she studied mime with Étienne Decroux. She was a long time resident of Greenwich Village and passed away at the age of 70 while working in Taiwan on translating and retelling the epic Journey to the West. 

In a 1992 interview with the Daily News Wolkstein told columnist Clem Richardson, “Each time I tell a story that I love, I appreciate it in a different way.” She added, though, “If it doesn’t move you, it won’t move anyone else when you tell it. You’re really sharing your heart, exchanging love with your listeners.” Wolkstein not only told her tales, she lived their values. She was an activist for issues both local -transforming the Jefferson Library parking lot into a garden- and international as a staunch human rights and anti-racist activist. 

To learn more about Diane Wolkstein’s work and legacy please visit or contact the Library of Congress, which houses the Diane Wolkstein Collection of photographs, recordings, galleys, and correspondence. To request permission to reprint Wolkstein’s work or for questions about her literary estate, contact her daughter, Rachel Zucker.  

Listen now to Diane Wolkstein performing stories from her collection, The Magic Orange Tree and Other Haitian Folktales.

In this broadcast Diane Wolkstein joins with Shirley Keller to tell three Native American stories; The Squirrel’s Song, Shingebliss and Sunflower H.

Special thanks to Rachel Zucker for her assistance and permission to post these broadcasts and to Melissa Heckler for her help with fact checking.

1972 program flier for Stories From Many Lands
(Flier courtesy of Diane Wolkstein/WNYC Archive Collections)

Following advice issued by the Scottish Government on 16 March 2020 on steps to be taken to slow the spread of COVID-19 the Art Collection at the Pathfoot Building will be closed until further notice.

However, you can, at present, still visit and enjoy our beautiful campus and sculpture collection

An herbal is a book containing the names and descriptions of various plants, and usually contains the effects that were associated with each one. Effects could range from a plant’s toxicity to its magical power. In the 15th century, it was common practice to publish medical journals in Latin, which was only accessible to those with wealth or nobility. In 1652, Nicholas Culpeper published one of his most notable works, The English Physician, in English, allowing those who did not read Latin to be able to practice medicine. 

Culpeper’s herbal was groundbreaking for its combination of the “doctrine of signatures” with astrology. The doctrine of signatures was the idea that plants and herbs that looked like human body parts would help heal ailments that stemmed from that part. Combining this practice with astrology formed what is known as astrological herbalism. Astrological herbalists connected herbs to different signs of the zodiac. They treated specific ailments by determining what sign and planet ruled over the part of the body that needed care, and then prescribing an herb of the same astrological sign.

Culpeper’s earlier works mainly relied on written descriptions of the plants to be able to identify them. As he progressed, his herbals included more images and color, illustrating them with etchings that are then colored in with watercolors, such as the 1802 edition of his British Herbal.

The heart and blood, for example, are ruled by Leo, which is ruled by the sun, so for ailments such as anemia, the patient would be prescribed “centaury,” or centaurium erythraea. Issues like anxiety are ruled by Mercury, and depending upon your astrological sign you might be prescribed lavender as a treatment. The process goes more in depth depending on your sign and other planetary factors.

While we cannot recommend depending upon Culpeper’s prescribed treatments — medicine has come a long way in 400 years — it is fun to see what herbal applications he found for a variety of ailments. FSU Libraries Special Collections and Archives possesses seven editions of The English Physician, from the 1652 first edition up to one from 1932. Fortunately, three editions have been digitized and are available for your perusal from home!

Culpeper’s English Physician and complete herbal. (1798)

Culpeper’s British herbal; and, Complete English family physician. (1802)

Culpeper’s Complete herbal. (1817)

As many institutions are doing at the moment, Florida State University is changing operations for a period to respond to coronavirus. What does that mean for Special Collections & Archives?

Until further notice, the Special Collections & Archives public areas, including all reading rooms, are closed to the public for the safety of our staff and our patrons. However, our collections are still available even if you can’t come visit them in person. Please contact Special Collections & Archives at lib-specialcollections@fsu.edu for help in doing research in the archives. Also, our online catalog, finding aid database and digital library remain open for remote use. Please be aware much of our staff is working remotely at this time so answers to reference questions or digital reproduction requests may be delayed until we are in the building again.

The Heritage Museum and the Claude Pepper Library and Museum are closed at this time as well.

This is a very fluid and rapidly changing situation and we will do our best to provide updates if and when any of this information changes. Please check back with the FSU Libraries COVID-19 Updates and Resources webpage for the latest information. We ask everyone to be safe during this time.

Following advice issued by the Scottish Government on 16 March 2020 on steps to be taken to slow the spread of COVID-19 the University of Stirling Archives will be closing its public reading room from 17 March until further notice.

The closure will have the following impact on our service:

• A temporary suspension of our volunteer projects
• Cancellation / postponement of current
  researcher visits
• No bookings made for future researcher visits at
  present

The University Archives will continue to offer a limited
service to researchers:

• We will endeavour to answer remote enquiries received by email to archives@stir.ac.uk
• Where possible we will provide access to digitised copies of material to researchers unable to visit the reading room to carry out research in person
• Priority will be given to University of Stirling students currently using our collections for dissertations and projects
• We will continue to promote our collections and provide updates on our service via social media (@unistirarchives)

The health and safety of our staff and public is important to us and we will endeavour to continue to provide a service to our users through this difficult time.

Karl Magee, University Archivist

Its creators might cringe at the description, but since its debut in 1996, Comedy Central’s The Daily Show has become a television institution. From its constellation of “anchors,” “correspondents,” and “commentators,” the show has spun off stars and superstars like Jon Stewart, Trevor Noah, Stephen Colbert, Samantha Bee, Steve Carrell, Mo Rocca, Lewis Black, Michelle Wolf, Wyatt Cenac, Aasif Mandvi, John Hodgman, and others. Like On the Media, it shines a sometimes harsh light on the media, though in a different manner: skewering the media, politics, and popular culture with its satirical send-up of a nightly newscast.

In May 1999, just four months into Jon Stewart’s tenure as the show’s anchor, Kaari Pitkin produced a “Fly on the Wall” segment, bringing OTM listeners behind the scenes of a day in the life of The Daily Show.

Effective March 11, only current students, staff, and faculty with Amherst IDs are permitted entrance to buildings on campus, including Frost Library. We appreciate your understanding.

We are closed to the general public. On-site services and research hours will be limited to the Amherst College community. We will be open regular hours March 12-13 for Amherst College students, faculty, and staff. Reading room access for Amherst College students, faculty, and staff will be by appointment only beginning March 16. Please contact us at 413-542-2299 or archives@amherst.edu to schedule an appointment.

For those no longer able to conduct research on site, Archives and Special Collections staff will work with you to determine the best course of action. If you are concerned about access to archival material, please email us at archives@amherst.edu

A number of archival collections are digitized and available through Amherst College Digital Collections.

For faculty concerned about class visits to the Archives, we will be in touch with all faculty who have currently scheduled classes to determine how plans can be adapted. If you would like to request a class session, please use this form. We are unable to host class visits from outside the Amherst College community.

As many institutions are doing at the moment, Florida State University is changing operations for a period to respond to coronavirus. What does that mean for Special Collections & Archives?

Until further notice, access to all FSU Libraries is limited to holders of FSU IDs and students from the joint FAMU/FSU College of Engineering. Community members or traveling scholars will be unable to visit our collections in person. However, our collections are still available even if you can’t come visit them in person. Please contact Special Collections at lib-specialcollections@fsu.edu for help in doing research in the archives while they are closed to the general public. Also, our online catalog, finding aid database and digital library remain open for remote use.

For our FSU campus community, our hours will reduce, as they normally do, during Spring Break. March 16-20, the Research Center Reading Room, Exhibit Room and Norwood Reading Room will be open from 10am to 4:30pm. The Heritage Museum will be closed and the Claude Pepper Library and Museum will be closed as well.

This is a very fluid and rapidly changing situation and we will do our best to provide updates if and when any of this information changes. Please check back with the FSU Libraries COVID-19 Updates and Resources webpage for the latest information. We ask everyone to be safe during this time.

The DLC recently completed processing and started loading materials from the League of Women Voters (LWV), Tallahassee Chapter Records materials held at the Claude Pepper Library into DigiNole. The materials in this first round of digitization with the collection include the newsletters of the Tallahassee chapter from 1962-2012 as well as Study and Action guides for the national LWV agenda from 1975-1999.

The records of the League of Women Voters, Tallahassee Chapter, are comprised primarily of administrative files, publications, and subject files and document 55 years of Tallahassee League activities including the organization of conventions and meetings, coordination of league activities, and the chapter’s relationship with the League of Women Voters of the United States.

Of particular interest is the story one can find in the newsletters regarding the fight for the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) in Florida. First appearing in the newsletters in 1972, it appears in every monthly newsletter throughout the 1980s including the big push to try to get it ratified before the amendment expired in 1982. The League often reminded its members that it was used to a long struggle, having been founded just before women received the right to vote in 1920 by women suffragists. Still, there is some discouragement to be found in the newsletters when, over and over again, the Florida Legislature failed to take up the ERA in any meaningful way.

This is just one of the many stories you’ll find in these materials which offer a unique look at women and politics in Tallahassee, Florida and the United States in some of our most volatile political decades. To get an idea of what you’ll find in the entire collection, please see the finding aid. To browse more of the materials digitized, please visit the collection at DigiNole: FSU’s digital repository.

It was a sitcom that was, by its own admission, about nothing; with an ensemble cast playing (let’s be honest) irredeemably self-absorbed jerks. But was it responsible for putting a polish back on the national reputation of The Big Apple? 

When Seinfeld debuted in 1989 the media trope for New York had descended from the glamour of Breakfast at Tiffany’s to The Big Rotten Apple: a dark and dirty dysfunctional dystopia. Guys and Dolls and On the Town had given way to Midnight Cowboy, Taxi Driver, Death Wish, and Escape From New York. Even The Odd Couple, the iconic ‘70’s sitcom set in New York, regularly had Oscar or Felix being mugged or otherwise pummeled by a city perceived as beyond control.1 In their 1978 Rolling Stones hit “Shattered” Mick Jagger and Keith Richards sung “Go ahead, bite the Big Apple, don’t mind the maggots.” Or as the guest of the January 4, 1998 On the Media episode John Podhoretz put it: there was “nobody in the country with a good word to say about New York.” 

During that segment of On the Media, Podhoretz, the New York Post Editorial Page Editor, joined host Brian Lehrer and Elizabeth Lesly Stevens of Business Week to discuss the Seinfeld phenomenon and what the show meant to the public image of New York City.

Podhoretz theorized that the show had “reinvented New York in the eyes of America from a city of danger and horror into what New York likes to think of itself as at its best, which is sort of an exciting, action-packed place full of glamorous eccentrics.”  He added that, with its visits to real New York places like actual bodegas and diners, no television program had ever been as much “about a specific setting as Seinfeld.”

And perhaps because of those specific New York settings and the eccentrics who inhabit them, America seemed to have fallen back in love with The Big Apple.

Is that theory, or just more yadda, yadda, yadda?

1TV Tropes. (2019). The Big Rotten Apple – TV Tropes. [online] Available at: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheBigRottenApple [Accessed 4 Nov. 2019].

https://www.wnyc.org/story/goodbye-jerry-seinfeld-signs-off-nader-vs-microsoft-letters-to-the-editor/

On Thursday, March 12, 2020, officials from several Intelligence Community (IC) agencies and three offices within the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) will join in two public panels at NARA’s William G. McGowan Theater, 700 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW, Washington, DC 20408. Panelists will discuss issues concerning the recent past, current state, and future prospects of declassification review.

From 10:00 a.m. to 11:30 a.m., senior NARA leadership and agency experts will host a moderated discussion to celebrate the first decade and future activities of The National Declassification Center (NDC). Due to building access restrictions, registration to attend is required before midnight EDT March 10, 2020. For those unable to attend this event in person at McGowan Theater, live streaming of the NDC panel will be available on NARA’s YouTube Channel.

Established on December 30, 2009, by the Archivist of the United States David S. Ferriero under Executive Order 13526, the NDC coordinates interagency declassification processes to promote the public release of historically significant records, while appropriately safeguarding national security.

Since 2015, the NDC’s Indexing on Demand (IOD) program encourages the public to participate in the prioritization of specific record entries for final declassification processing.  Each year, the NDC website lists classified records eligible for request through the IOD program so that the public may identify those of the greatest interest. This offers one mechanism for prioritizing the review of Government records that come up for declassification review every year in increasingly large volumes, which the panelists will discuss with regard to the future of the NDC.

From 1:30 p.m. to 3:30 p.m., NDC officials will join a panel with representatives of NARA’s Office of Government Information Services (OGIS), and Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO), as well as from several IC agencies to discuss using the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to request records from the IC. As with the morning panel, registration to attend the event in person is required before midnight EDT March 10, 2020, and NARA will live stream this multi-agency forum on YouTube.

Established under the OPEN Government Act of 2007, OGIS reviews FOIA policies, procedures, and compliance across the Federal Government, and mediates FOIA disputes between Federal agencies and requesters. As with the Mandatory Declassification Review (MDR) process—which under Executive Order 13526, ISOO supports through the Interagency Security Classification Appeals Panel (ISCAP)—the staggering increase in electronic National Security Information continues to impede FOIA review.

Solutions like the NDC’s IOD program represent an earnest step toward the more proactive and thematic prioritization that the Public Interest Declassification Board (PIDB) has consistently recommended in successive reports since 2007 (for links, see the previous entry here at Transforming Classification). The public panels next Thursday offer a welcome forum for considering ways of implementing these recommendations to improve current declassification processes across the Federal Government.

IC and NARA panelists will accept questions from the audience at both morning and afternoon events.

In February 2020, NARA took occupancy of new archival storage space for congressional records on the third floor of the Government Publishing Office’s (GPO) Building A, located on North Capitol Street in Washington, DC. The Center for Legislative Archives, the custodial unit responsible for the permanent, official records of the U.S. House of Representative, U.S. Senate, and legislative branch commissions, then began the move of records stored in temporary storage spaces at the Washington National Records Center (WNRC) into the new GPO spaces. These accomplishments marked the culmination of a multi-year effort by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) to create additional storage space for the records of Congress.

Photograph of the GPO Building on North Capitol Street, courtesy of the U.S. Government Publishing office

The Center’s total volume of textual holdings is currently over 183,000 cubic feet, and in 2014 its available storage space in Archives I was essentially full. WNRC offered temporary storage space to allow the Center to continue to accession new House and Senate records, and the Clerk of the House and Secretary of the Senate, the official record keepers for the House and Senate respectively, encouraged NARA to locate additional records storage space in Washington, DC for House and Senate records. NARA identified suitable space in the GPO Building, where the Office of the Federal Register and the Office of Government Information, had relocated its offices.

In 2015, NARA’s Office of Business Support worked with a contract architectural and design firm to provide drawings and cost estimates to convert the GPO space into archival storage space. Congress appropriated funds for the project in the FY 2016 Omnibus Appropriations Act, and GPO awarded a construction contract for the project in late 2017. In December 2019, construction was completed and environment testing of the spaces was conducted to demonstrate that the temperature and relative humidity readings met NARA standards for archival storage spaces. 

In progress construction in GPO building. Photograph by the National Archives

February 2020 marked the beginning of the move of the records in temporary storage into the GPO spaces and the direct transfer of new accessions of records from the House and Senate into the new spaces. With 50,000 cubic feet of unclassified records storage space now available, NARA has provided ample space for the anticipated growth of House and Senate records and preserved these valuable records for future use by the broad array of researchers who use congressional records, including cultural and political historians, political scientists, genealogists, legal and constitutional scholars, journalists, and documentary filmmakers.

March 13, 2020 will be the last day to view the current exhibit in the Special Collections & Archives Exhibit room,  “A Century of Mystery and Intrigue”.

Our new exhibit, “Earth Day 50”, will be opening in April to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the first Earth Day: April 22, 1970. “Earth Day 50” is a collaborative effort between FSU Sustainable Campus and Special Collections & Archives. The goal of the exhibit is to illustrate the role that prominent figures in FSU and Florida history have played in the environmental movement and highlight environmental activism here at Florida State University in the past 50 years.

Keep an eye out for more information about the opening of the new exhibit, as well as events and activities in celebration of Earth Day on campus.

In 1998, reporter Charles Bowden sounded like a world weary Raymond Chandler character destined to be played in film by Humphrey Bogart. But the crimes he covered happened a half century later and were, unfortunately, all too real. He believed they were too real and too grisly for his newspaper’s readers to deal with. He made it his job to show those Americans the desperate underbelly of their country they willfully ignored.

Bowden considered himself a reporter; he hated the term journalist.1 And he never intended to be a crime reporter —he expected to write fluffy features for the Tucson Citizen just long enough to earn the money to buy a new racing bike. Then came the day when everyone else in the newsroom was out on assignment and it fell to him to cover the murder of a child. As he told Ryan Kohls in 2012,  “I wasn’t there very long until I had to go write about child murders, and it changed me. I didn’t leave. I spent three years there because I was learning so much.”2

He learned so well that in 1984 he found himself a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing.3 But as unexpectedly as his crime reporting career began, it ended of his own volition –as he explained in  “Torch Song: At the peripheries of violence and desire”, a 1998 essay in Harper’s Magazine.4 

It was that essay that led to a 1998 segment of On the Media where Bowden had a StoryCorps-style conversation with Jack Dew, then a journalist new to the crime beat for the New Britain Herald. There they discussed the emotional toll of the job. Bowden told Dew that once he started reporting on crime in Tucson he “went nuts…It became my life.” He found the only way to do the job correctly is, “…to be the cop and the robber, the killer and the victim. It guts you and there is no way to protect yourself. It’s a toxin.”

Bowden became a bit of a typewriter vigilante, hoping to, as he told Dew and OTM listeners, “give the victims their day in the court of public opinion.” But in trying to use the newspaper as a mirror to show the Citizen’s readers a reflection of their society he found himself becoming a bit of a crime “gourmet” or “antique collector,” scouring crime logs at police stations looking for the perfect victim he could sell in a 20,000-word feature without anyone saying the person in any way deserved the gruesome crime committed against them.

As he later told Kohls, “I got trapped in it because most people won’t cover sex crimes, most people can’t get people to talk. I was hired to be a fluff writer and I discovered that almost anyone would tell me anything.”5

Bowden’s work not only earned him his Pulitzer Prize nomination, but his many later books documenting life on both sides of the Mexico-United States border earned him a Lannan Literary Award for Non Fiction.6 He and his vivid suffer-no-fools style can also be heard in this 2010 segment of The Takeaway talking about murders of journalists in Mexico and the policies he believed led to the lawlessness in the border city of Juarez. 

In a 2010 interview he described his style of reporting on border issues to Meredith Blake of The New Yorker: “The way I was trained up, reporters went toward the story, just as firemen rush toward the fire. It is a duty. As it happens, I am a coward and would rather write about a bird or a tree. But, I don’t know how to be aware of such a slaughter and not report it.”7

Bowden died in 2014.8 After working for several New England newspapers, Jack Dew went to law school and now practices law.9

1 Lengel, Kerry. “Tucson aruthor Charles Bowden on ‘Murder City’”, The Arizona Republic, 2010, April 9. Accessed December 19, 2019.

2Kohls, Ryan. “Charles Bowden.” Whatiwannaknow.com, 7 December 2012. Accessed December 19, 2019. 

3The Pulitzer Prizes. “Finalist: Charles Bowden of Tucson (AZ) Citizen”, pulitzer.org. Accessed December 19, 2019. 

4Bowden, Charles. “Torch Song: At the peripheries of violence and desire”, Harpers, 1998, August, 43-54.

5 Kohls, op. cit.

6Lannan.Foundation. “Charles Bowden: 1996 Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction”, lannan.org. Accessed December 19, 2019.

7Blake, Meredith. “The Exchange: Charles Bowden on Juarez, ‘Murder City’”, newyorker.com, 2010, May 18. Accessed December 19, 2019.

8Yardley, William. “Charles Bowden, Author With Unblinking Eye on Southwest, Dies at 69”, The New York Times, 2014, September 4, B18. 

9Boies Schiller Flexner LLP. “Jack Dew”, bsfllp.com. Accessed December 19, 2019.  

On February 25, 2020, the Wilson Center commemorated the 80^th anniversary of the executions by Soviet intelligence forces of over 22,000 Polish prisoners in the Russian provinces of Smolensk, Kalinin, and Kharkiv in Ukraine. The prisoners represented a majority of Poland’s governing elite—military, police, and civil society leaders captured in 1939, when the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany invaded and divided Poland by secret diplomatic agreement. A long history of deception and denial about who killed the Polish patriots began in the spring of 1943, when Nazi troops—then invading Russia—discovered and verified the Soviet atrocity at mass graves in the Katyn Forest near Smolensk.

At the Wilson Center commemoration, the Polish History Professor Andrzej Nowak recounted how the Soviet Union falsified investigations to blame Nazi Germany for the Katyn Massacre—and that following the western alliance with the Soviet Union to defeat the Nazis, such distinguished leaders as President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill declined to acknowledge Soviet responsibility. In 1943, Prime Minister Churchill explained to a Polish diplomat that although it was obvious, the Allies would never admit Soviet responsibility, because that would compromise their cooperation in the war against the Nazis.

In 1951, as Cold War tensions increased between the United States and the Soviet Union, the U.S. House of Representatives established a Select Committee to investigate which nation perpetrated the Katyn massacre, and whether any American officials had covered up the relevant facts. Chaired by Rep. Ray J. Madden (IN), the Congressional investigation found the Soviet Union entirely responsible for the executions. The Madden Committee also concluded that if American officials had not deliberately prevented public disclosure of evidence regarding Soviet responsibility since 1942, contemporary U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union might have been different.

Ironically, hopes for an improvement in U.S.-Soviet relations after the death of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin (1878-1953) resulted in a return to the same official neglect of the Katyn records by U.S. officials that had prevailed during the alliance of the Second World War.  It was not until 2011 that Congressional Representatives Marcy Kaptur (OH) and Daniel Lipinski (IL) requested President Barack Obama to release all pertinent U.S. Government records, and the National Declassification Center (NDC) at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) led a multiagency project to identify and review records documenting the Katyn Forest Massacre.

Coordinated by the NDC, the Government-wide search included photographs and film, as well as the line-by-line review of documents, from the records of the Department of State, the War Department, the United States Army, the Office of Strategic Services, Congress, and the prosecution of war crimes committed in the Second World War. In September 2012, the NDC declassified and released over 1,000 new pages of previously unavailable materials for public access. NARA also provides online access to a selection of 100 scanned Records Relating to the Katyn Forest Massacre, and an online finding aid to a selection of the records.

As well as commemorating the sacrifice of Polish patriots, echoes from the Katyn Forest underscore the need to prioritize the review of historical records for timely public release, consistent with the mandate of the Public Interest Declassification Board (PIDB) since its establishment by Congress in 2000.  Subsequent PIDB recommendations have urged Federal agencies to prioritize historical records for public access and consideration by policymakers, see: Transforming the Security Classification System (2012); Transforming Classification Policy Forum (2009); and Improving Declassification (2007).

In Setting Priorities: An Essential Step in Transforming Declassification (2014), the Board recommended the implementation of a centralized approach to the declassification of historically significant records based on topics of the greatest public interest.  It would be useful now to evaluate the progress made on the declassification of Federal records relating to the specific topics recommended for review in that report.

By completing the special project to disclose the Katyn Forest records, the NDC demonstrated its ability to coordinate the identification and declassification of records across the Federal Government. Prioritizing historical records for declassification and improving these efforts remains crucial to overcoming the bad consequences of Government secrecy, which Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the sponsor of PIDB’s founding statute, argued can impede American democracy by “making it much harder to resolve key questions about our past and to chart our future actions.”

February is Black History month and for those interested in studying Black History at Florida State University, we thought we would highlight a few of our collection in Heritage & University Archives.

Perhaps the most obvious place to look, and one of our more informative collections on the topic, is our Black Student Union collection. This collection contains items from previous organizational campaigns, financial information, and a very large scrapbook. This collection has received several additions in the past couple of years, adding to this information, and will continue to grow.

The Florida State University Historic Photograph Collection and the Florida Flambeau/FSView Photograph Collections are some of Heritage & University Archive’s best resources for a visual history of the university. Among the photographs are images of Maxwell Courtney, FSU’s first African American graduate, and the Black Players Guild.

Lastly, an important group of records for any research on campus history, are the Presidential Files. This is several different collections covering several of FSU’s Presidents and include topics related to almost every aspect of the university. An extremely important file on John Boardman is present in the Doak Campbell Administration Files detailing events surrounding Boardman’s expulsion from FSU after inviting three African American students to a Christmas Party on campus. The entire file has been digitized and is available on Diginole.

For any questions or reference help regarding these collections, you can email the Heritage & University Archivist, Sandra Varry at svarry@fsu.edu.

The Sunshine State Digital Network has a new local site. This page aims to highlight the “rich history and culture” of Florida through user-friendly search technology and pre-made collections. SSDN.DP.LA, the new local site, has many filters that make searching and sifting through content an easy and enjoyable experience. Some of these filters include contributing institution, date range, type of content, language, or more. Users can uncover content ranging from text, images, videos, audio clips, books, or more.

The new local site has 4 highlighted, curated searches for users to browse. Users can look through search results focused on the Caribbean, Civil and Human Rights, maps of the state of Florida and its local communities, and Florida’s environment. Users can access these pre-made searches straight from the homepage of the new local site.

Another unique feature to the new local SSDN site is the browse by partner tab. In the upper left hand corner of the SSDN.DP.LA page is an option to browse the content via the contributing institution. All 21 contributors are available to browse through. This browsing option makes it easy to access a specific contributor’s content or discover a new contributor whose content you have never accessed before.

Provocative since his group’s 1987 debut album, Yo! Bum Rush the Show, Public Enemy front man Chuck D. was always ready to push the envelope —from his controversial socially conscious lyrics to his willingness to challenge the music industry and his hip hop contemporaries.1 

In the Spring of 1999 Public Enemy was ready to shake up the music industry again by being the first major recording act to release an album for download over the Internet before it hit brick-and-mortar stores. At odds with its long time label Def Jam Records over releasing some new songs on the Internet without the label’s permission, Public Enemy teamed with Internet label Atomic Pop to release There’s a Poison Goin’ On… via download at least a month before it became available in stores.2 

On the Media guest host Rick Davis talked to Chuck D. in May 1999 about Public Enemy’s headfirst leap into the digital age. As always, Chuck D. delivered an interview full of insight into the music industry and bravado about “the biggest envelope I’ve pushed,” for what he termed “…the most important move for music [since] Dylan went electric in ‘65.”

Chuck D. told Davis that fans would be able to choose different prices for the album, starting at five dollars for the basic album, depending on what extras they wanted included with it. Noting the exorbitant expense of selling a profitable album by traditional means, he said, “If the highway is full you’ve got to take the side road to go where you’ve got to go, and this is what the Internet is. It’s the side road.”

Davis asked about other rap artists of the time like Sean “Puffy” Combs and Dr. Dre, who had supplanted Public Enemy as industry powers and best selling major label hip hop acts. Chuck D. provided a withering response about power: “I have all the power in the world. I’m a free man. It’s like I’m a black man in 1866. Whether you live in the house with the master and eat the best food you still can be a slave. I’m not a slave. More power means what? Who grants them more power or who takes the power. I’m the person who takes the power by fighting the power.”

He added, “I’m the leader in this format, so they all will follow. I’m Moses…They’re probably going to follow the road that I’ve set for them. Their future will probably prosper from the road I helped build. Just as they’ve prospered off the road I built before.”

It was four years before Apple introduced its iTunes Music Store, the first successful music download service that didn’t rely on pirated content3, but there was Public Enemy in 1999, pushing an entire industry into its future.  

1 Strauss Neil.  “Rap Revolutionaries Plan an Internet Release”, The New York Times, 1999, April 16, E5.

2 Erlewine, Stephen Thomas “Public Enemy: Biography & History”, allmusic.com. Accessed February 9, 2020.   

3 Pogue, David. “State of the Art; Online Piper, Payable By the Tune”, The New York Times, 2003, May 1, G1.