As we mentioned in a previous post, we love LiveFriday at the Ashmolean and were delighted to be invited to do a special display of our lantern slides for the latest event, which just happened to co-incide with the Being Human Festival week.

We were asked to produce ‘Christmassy’ images, so we chose ‘Snow and Camels’ as our theme. ‘Snow’ gave us an opportunity to show off some of the beautiful images from the Plant Science Library held at the Radcliffe Science Library. The PSL lantern slide collection is fascinating from an anthropological and archaeological perspective – the teaching collection of images of agriculture and forestry from the late 19th century illustrate the social, political and physical realities of european and colonial life, as well as capturing landscapes and environments at a point of change.

These images also show that what we see when we look at a picture is affected by our cultural, educational and contextual gaze – two viewers will look at the same photograph and take different information from it. In the context of the Ashmolean exhibition, this image is cheerful, snowy and Christmassy…

The photograph was taken by E. A. Smythies, and its caption shows that he saw something very different:

“Ash bent by snow, Sihlwald, Switzerland. Note effect spruce behind. Late snowfall May 24, 1908″.

Smythies, who became a pioneer in forestry studies (and a groundbreaking philatelist), took this image as part of his research into forestry management for his Oxford University diploma.

By contrast, here is one of our ‘camel’ images from Harris Manchester College’s lantern slide collection:

This is from a Victorian travel lecture called ‘Holy Land’. This image is number 30 in the series and is entitled ‘Camels on the March’. The idea of a Victorian travel lecture brings us on to our next Being Human Festival event – more on that in the next post…

Sally Crawford

FSU’s campus during Thanksgiving is usually pretty quiet – students and staff are visiting their families over the break, or maybe traveling for the annual FSU vs. UF game, or others might be holed up in their dorm room and getting an early start on studying for finals. However, at FSCW, Thanksgiving week was bustling with events, which included presentations, band drills, a dance, and culminated with Florida State’s original rivalry – the annual Odd-Even basketball game. Festivities surrounding Thanksgiving became so enormously popular that college officials designated the entire week as Homecoming in 1926.

The first event, a tradition that started in 1913, was the Color Rush. At the beginning of the week, selected students would race around the school and “capture” buildings by affixing ribbons in their class colors to the highest point (and later on, the front doors, due to safety concerns). Odd class colors were red, white, and purple, and the Even classes adopted green and gold.

The fountain at Westcott was designated “Forever Odd,” because it was gift from the 1915 and 1917 classes. Similarly, the entrance arch was declared “Forever Even,” and was gifted by the classes of 1916 and 1918. The Color Rush began at the morning bell, and traditionally Dr. Ralph Bellamy would start the race not with a whistle, but his shotgun – ready, set, BOOM!

Many of the events revolved around the intense rivalry between the Odds and Evens, the groupings of the odd and even graduating classes. Each side developed their own songs, cheers, and even had their own honorary societies – Spirogira (Odd) and Esteren (Even). Elaborate student productions, called demonstrations, were held by each group, complete with costumes, musical numbers, and dancing.

Nothing was more popular than the Odds vs. Evens basketball game. This event, one of the few times that women at the school could participate in athletic competition (as FSCW officials did not think competitive sports were ladylike), became so popular that in 1924 Katherine Montgomery added a volleyball game to the day’s activities. Thanksgiving activities culminated with a dinner on Thursday night. Admission to the dinner cost about $1 for students, and was an elaborate feast that was enjoyed by all.

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

We here at FSU Special Collections & Archives wish everyone a safe and happy Thanksgiving holiday. We will be closed Thursday, November 27 and Friday, November 28. We resume our normal operating hours on December 1.

Last week we were able to show off some of the beautiful lantern slide images digitized by the HEIR project. The ‘Being Human: Festival of the Humanities‘ was running all week, and as part of the celebrations we wanted to allow the public to see a sample of our Victorian and Edwardian photographs, featuring images from collections at the Institute of Archaeology, Harris Manchester College, and the Department for the History of Art.

We particularly wanted to be able to project these evocative photographs onto as large a space as possible, so that they would have maximum impact. We wanted the people in the pictures to be near life-sized, so that modern viewers could really have the sense of being part of the picture: part of the past in the present.

The Ashmolean Museum provided a wonderful space for us in the atrium. Setting up was simple, with the help of Lucie from the Ashmolean Public Engagement team:

Checking the images:

Putting up our information board with QR code link to the image catalogue on our blog:

We had good feedback from the display: thanks to everyone who let us know how much they enjoyed the image sequence.

Sally

Did you know that military pension files may contain valuable details about family history? While military veterans who applied for benefits had to provide evidence of service, widows or heirs had to provide evidence of their relationship to soldiers. As a result, some military pension files in the National Archives contain very interesting, and sometimes surprising items.

For example, this beautiful Fraktur illustrating a family record was found within the file documenting the military service of Peter Hunt, who served during the American Revolutionary War.

From the Revolutionary War Pension and Bounty Land Warrant Application File of Peter Hunt. National Archives Identifier 300092

We know from his pension application that Peter Hunt was born on Sept 28, 1757, in Dover, Dutchess County, New York. He married Hannah Benson on September 15, 1779, in Dutchess County.

On October 8, 1832, Peter Hunt made an application for pension while a resident of Kortright, Delaware County, New York, and was issued pension in 1833. According to Peter’s declaration to obtain pension, he enlisted in the United States Army in 1776 as a private commanded by Captain Childs and served in his Company of Infantry. Soon after, he enlisted into a Company of Artillery commanded by Capt. Andrew Moody in a regiment of the New York Continental line.

Peter first enlisted as volunteer in the militia in 1775 … [ Read all ]

We mark the 50th anniversary of the passing of the 100th Mayor of New York City with a look at his 1948 lampooning by City Hall reporters.

The hijinks and revelry of the Inner Circle Club’s annual show in 1948, A Streetcar Framed O’Dwyer, gave little hint of the great scandal—and the enduring gangland mystery—that was soon to envelop its title character.

The “Inner Circle” is the fraternity of city hall reporters who famously gave us Rudy Giuliani in a dress. For over a hundred years now—their predecessor organization, “the Amen Corner,” dates back to 1898—they have put on an annual revue skewering the latest unfortunate in the mayor’s office, and other leading political figures. “A Streetcar” refers to A Streetcar Named Desire, the groundbreaking Tennessee Williams play headlined by Marlon Brando that was setting Broadway on fire at the time. O’Dwyer was Mayor William O’Dwyer, the 100^th mayor in the city’s history, though as alluded to here he was too ill to attend the festivities, still recovering from what was thought to be a heart attack.

O’Dwyer (1890-1964) seemed to be a great American success story. Born in County Mayo, Ireland, arriving in the Bronx nearly penniless after dropping out of a seminary in Salamanca, in Spain, he worked as a grocery errand boy, a hod carrier on construction sites (including the Woolworth Building), a stoker of ship furnaces, and then as a beat cop along the Brooklyn waterfront. He went to law school at night to earn his degree, built a private practice, and—as the Inner Circle show mentions—served the public as a Kings County judge, and then Brooklyn district attorney.

O!Dwyer Button, ca. 1948

(Museum of the City of New York/Museum of City of New York)

As DA, he succeeded in sending no fewer than seven members of the notorious “Murder, Inc.” gang of mob assassins-for-hire up to “the Dance Hall,” the electric chair at Sing Sing, including Louis “Lepke” Buchalter—to this day, the only mob boss ever executed for his crimes in the United States. This success won him the nomination of the “regular Democratic party”—Tammany Hall—to run for mayor against incumbent Fiorello La Guardia in the 1941 race.

O’Dwyer lost narrowly. But during World War II, he was decorated for his outstanding work administering relief to occupied Italy, and returning to the city a hero, was elected mayor by a landslide in 1945, after “The Little Flower” chose not to run again.

Mayor O’Dwyer at the 1946 March of Dimes Campaign

(Acme/NYPR Archives)

 By 1948, “Bill-O,” as he was nicknamed, was still a highly popular mayor, despite the many municipal problems referred to in the show: postwar inflation, a severe housing shortage, a shortage of coal (caused in part by dockyard strikes in the winter of 1947-48), the forced neglect of the city’s infrastructure during the war years, and of course the usual scramble to balance the budget. O’Dwyer was generally credited with at least doing his best to ameliorate these problems, many of which were out of his control, and his efforts would land him on the cover of Time magazine on June 7, 1948, a few months after the show.

“New York,” Time would kvell, “is the biggest, richest city the world has ever seen. Its wealth is incalculable…It is the world’s greatest port, the world’s greatest tourist attraction, the world’s greatest manufacturing city and the world’s greatest marketplace…New York is the fountain-spout of U.S. culture, the intellectual gateway to England and Europe.” It was a city that “prizes confidence and rewards brilliance,” where mica in the concrete literally made the streets sparkle at night, and where the women “shop like stalking tigresses, dress like lady spies, and walk with a provocative air.”

La plus ça change…but this was hardly an exaggeration. New York in 1948 was at the zenith of what many regard as its golden age. It had emerged from World War II as the only great world city both unbloodied and unbowed. It had become, in a sense, the world’s political capital when the United Nations moved in, and was already the de facto world capital of art, architecture, literature, medical research, finance, advertising, philanthropy, and that befuddling new medium, television.

It was still the country’s—and the world’s—greatest manufacturing center, with over one million workers toiling in 40,000 factories. It was the capital of both retail and wholesale, where one-fifth of all of the nation’s wholesale transactions took place. Forty percent of everything imported to America came through its waterfront, and it housed the headquarters of 135 Fortune 500 companies.

It was also a city where every year many thousands of individuals with little but their hopes and dreams—displaced, black agricultural workers from the South; Puerto Ricans with little English looking for jobs; traumatized refugees from war-torn Europe—came to try to find a place for themselves. New Yorkers sympathized with Mayor O’Dwyer’s attempts to run this turbulent colossus, as well as with his health problems, and his anguish over the death in 1946 of his wife (and close political advisor) of 30 years, Catherine Whelan O’Dwyer, after a long battle with cancer and Parkinson’s disease.

Bill-O briefly announced that he would not run for re-election in 1949, then decided to do so after all. He again won easily, in a three-man race. By this time, too, he had re-married, to a society woman and the most sought-after fashion model in the country, Sloan Simpson. Sloan, 26 years his junior, added a splash of glamour to his administration, and was herself featured on the cover of Life magazine, in a 1950 spread—foreshadowing Jackie Kennedy—that showed her adding art and culture to Gracie Mansion.

Then, it all came crashing down. There had always been something that seemed faintly fraudulent, or contrived, about Bill O’Dwyer —and despite his bluff exterior, he felt overwhelmed by the job. Throughout his tenure, he made crucial transfers of power to unelected individuals, particularly the already powerful Robert Moses. These abdications of public authority would have dire results for the city over the long run.

Only eight months into his second term, O’Dwyer announced that he was resigning for reasons of health, and accepting a State Department offer to become ambassador to Mexico. The O”Dwyers were given a tickertape parade by a grateful city, and at first they thrived in Mexico City. Plunging into Mexican life and culture at all levels, they were well-liked in turn.

In 1951, though, Bill-O returned to New York to answer questions from “the Kefauver Committee,” a special Senate investigative committee headed by Sen. Estes Kefauver (D-TN), to root out the influence of organized crime in American life. It was the first government investigation ever broadcast on the new medium of television, and it held Americans—particularly New Yorkers, who owned far and away the largest number of television sets in the nation—spellbound. O’Dwyer, suffering from the flu and sweating profusely under the hot camera lights, came off as evasive and dissembling.

Frank Costello

(New York Daily News/Getty)

Worse still, he could not come up with persuasive answers for his wartime meetings with Frank Costello, a leading mob figure of the time, often called “the Prime Minister of the Underworld.” The mafia, enriched by its immense Prohibition earnings, had taken a prominent role in New York politics by this time, particularly in Tammany Hall, which still controlled the local Democratic Party; and it seems likely that O’Dwyer was soliciting Costello’s support for mayor.

Still worse allegations would soon tarnish the former mayor’s reputation, especially during his time as district attorney of Brooklyn. The key witness who had helped send so many Murder, Inc., figures to their deaths was their former colleague, Abe “Kid Twist” Reles, who was thought to have killed at least 60 individuals himself, at the behest of various mob bosses. Turned “squealer” to save himself, Reles was carefully sequestered away behind a bolted steel door, in a wing of Coney Island’s Half Moon Hotel, along with three other mob snitches and a 17-man, ’round-the-clock police guard. (This bastion was immediately dubbed “Rats’ Suite” by reporters.)

Coney Island’s Half Moon Hotel, housing the “Rats’Suite”

(Mac Gramlich/Getty)

 Despite such precautions, Reles ended up plunging out of a ninth-story window at the Half Moon, sometime in the early morning hours of November 12, 1941. Attempts to make this seem like an escape attempt or some sort of “prank” appeared obviously faked, but with America’s abrupt entrance into the war a few weeks later the case remained unresolved.

Later evidence, though, came to closely link William O’Dwyer with William McCormack (1890-1965), a ruthless businessman who had long held almost complete control over New York Harbor. McCormack, a son of “famine Irish” immigrants, had worked his way up from a humble dock carter to the “Mr. Big” of the waterfront. Keeping a low profile, he wielded his absolute power over the docks through the corrupt International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA), and particularly the mob muscle behind this union. While the testimony of Reles had solved dozens of mob killings all over the country, he was due next to testify against Albert Anastasia, the vicious gangster in charge of enforcing McCormack’s will on the docks—a struggle depicted in the film On the Waterfront (1954), also starring Marlon Brando.

McCormack managed to evade indictment by the Waterfront Crime Commission, despite a Pulitzer-Prize winning series about the rackets there by the New York Sun, as well as other exposés. Fearing that he would not be as fortunate, O’Dwyer stayed on in Mexico City for years after his ambassadorship ended. He was divorced by Sloan Simpson, who would become entangled in a number of scandalous affairs and—perhaps more scandalously—actually learned how to bullfight in full matador regalia, her lessons detailed in a smirking Collier’s magazine.

Bill-O did not return to New York until 1960. Now 70 years old and again largely penniless, he was dependent upon the aid of his much younger brother, Paul O’Dwyer, the longtime liberal icon of city politics, who would defend his older brother’s reputation for the rest of his life. The details of just who killed Abe Reles—and on whose orders—remain the greatest unsolved mystery in mob history.

The Inner Circle show recorded above only foreshadows these tumultuous events in occasional throwaway lines. The songs are largely satirical adaptations of popular show tunes of the time, or traditional New York favorites. The acting, at that time, was still all done by the reporters themselves, whether in drag, “native” dress, or anything else. (NB: This is a long show, so we have included the timings of each segment in square brackets. See the complete listing here.)

The opening act’s title, “The First Fifty Years are the Hardest,” and its first number, “In Old New York” [5:01] ,refer to the fact that 1948 marked the 50^th anniversary of New York’s “consolidation” into one great city. Prior to 1898 New York City consisted of just Manhattan and parts of the Bronx. On January 1, 1898, they were joined by the city of Brooklyn, by what would become the borough of Queens, and by Staten Island—the last, typically, unmentioned in the song.

The song includes many references to contemporary fads, events, and minor scandals. The “orange drink” mentioned refers to the proliferation of “tropical drinks,” the health craze of the time that gave us all those “Gray’s Papaya” stands. The “ALP,” is the “American Labor Party,” a city third-party at the time, started by unions and liberals disgusted by Tammany Hall’s influence over local Democrats. And the mention of “cops making book” refers to the then recent discovery that the police were wire-tapping phones in a popular bar near Ebbets Field…not to catch illegal bookmakers, but to ensure they were making their full pay-offs to the cops. Ironically, this humorous scandal would eventually burgeon into something much bigger, producing witnesses that would help bring down the O’Dwyer administration.

Grover Whalen “appears” in the next skit [8:31]. Whalen was a former Tammany police commissioner and the city’s longtime “official greeter.” Always dapper, with a small moustache and a fresh carnation in his lapel, Whalen had presided over the enthralling 1939-40 World’s Fair, and would now coordinate celebrations of the 50^th anniversary of the five-borough city. This would culminate in a grand parade down Fifth Avenue…one that almost became a disaster when horses pulling an antique stagecoach bearing Mayor O’Dwyer and other dignitaries bolted away from their driver, nearly running down other marchers and wrecking the coach before an alert policeman managed to restrain the animals.

Joe Louis knocked down by Joe Walcott, December 1, 1947

(Keystone/Getty)

The next song, “Nearly” [11:31], includes several other topical subjects. It first alludes to the imminent doubling of the nickel subway fare, which had been five cents since the underground’s opening in 1904. (The subway, which had reached an all-time record of over 2 billion rides in 1947, would not introduce tokens until 1953.) It also mentions “Jersey Joe” Walcott, a veteran heavyweight from Merchantville, New Jersey who had just lost a split decision to champ Joe Louis that many observers felt he deserved to win. (Walcott would eventually win the title, at the age of 37, in 1951.) The World Series of 1947 had been one of the most exciting and closely fought of all time, with the Yankees (of course) prevailing over Jackie Robinson’s Brooklyn Dodgers. (Curiously, in reviewing all the events of 1947, Robinson’s breaking of the color line doesn’t seem to have interested the reporters.) Gypsy Rose Lee was the famous, and famously erudite, stripper of the time. And the coal shortage, caused in part by waterfront strikes, would in retrospect be seen as one more sign of William McCormack flexing his muscles.

“Long Island’s Winter Wonderland,” sung to the 1934 hit “Walking in a Winter Wonderland,” refers to a blizzard that left the perpetual New York punching bag, the Long Island Rail Road (LIRR)—then still a privately owned subsidiary of the Pennsylvania Railroad—all but incapacitated, and thousands of commuters stranded or even forced to sleep overnight in the stalled trains (“I’ve Been Sleeping on the Railroad”). The surprise “Great Blizzard of 1947” began Christmas night and dropped more than two feet of snow on Central Park over the next 24 hours. It caused a total of 77 deaths throughout the Northeast, and brought the metropolitan area to a standstill. It also provoked another New York perennial, as you can hear: bitter complaints over unshoveled streets. The line “ ’88 was just a flurry,” refers to the even more disruptive “Great Blizzard of 1888,” which killed some 400 people, including 200 in New York City alone.

Act III of the show, “The Iron Curtain” [34:00], moves into the emerging presidential politics of the 1948 election. The skit includes “Red Mike” Quill, the pugnacious head of the city’s Transit Workers’ Union (TWU), and a former city councilman for the American Labor Party (ALP). The Inner Circle expected him to have the TWU back a third-party effort in 1948, to be headed by Henry “Hank” Wallace.

Wallace, a brilliant agronomist and secretary of agriculture under President Franklin Roosevelt, had been dumped as Roosevelt’s vice-president in 1944 because of his far-left leanings and replaced by Harry Truman. After serving for a time as Truman’s secretary of commerce, Wallace had broken with the administration over the Cold War, and in the 1948 election would in fact try to lead the more liberal factions of the Democratic Party into his new Progressive party. Wallace’s vice-presidential nominee would be Glen Taylor (D-ID), the eccentric, guitar-strumming Senator known as “The Singing Cowboy,” who famously rode his horse up the Capitol steps when he first arrived in Washington in 1944.

Wallace was thought to have a chance to draw millions of liberal votes away from President Truman (sneered at earlier in the show as “the Alf Landon of the Democratic party,” Landon having lost all but two states as the Republicans’ presidential candidate in 1936). This was not an unfounded prediction: Leo Isacson, also “appearing” here, was about to score an upset win in a special congressional election in the Bronx as an ALP candidate and Wallace supporter, joining the famous East Harlem radical Vito Marcantonio in Congress. The humorous skit includes both congressmen asking banker J.P. Morgan for funds, and setting up shop across from the staunchly pro-establishment Union League Club.

But much like the Inner Circle, most liberals considered Wallace to be—albeit unwittingly—a dupe of the Soviet Union and Josef Stalin, presented here (in a singing role) as his “boss” [36:54]. Quill would break with his old Communist associates, and all the major unions and liberal organizations would rally around Truman over Wallace, who would receive just 2.37 percent of the popular vote—about 1.1 million votes in all, two-thirds of them from New York—and no electoral votes. Wallace would soon renounce his Cold War stance, and apologize to Truman for his run.

Making a cameo appearance here is the (long deceased) Tammany mayor, Robert Van Wyck [40:26], the first to preside over greater New York. (He was defeated for re-election after taking a massive stock payoff from an ice company.) On hand as well are some of New York’s borough leaders from 1948, including Ed Flynn, the liberal, well-read “Boss of the Bronx,” who had become a power in the national Democratic party; John Cashmore, Brooklyn Borough President, whose ineptitude would eventually aid the Dodgers in slipping out of town; and James J. Lyons, the Bronx Borough President, whose backing would prove crucial to Moses’ efforts to build the Cross Bronx Expressway.

“Mink Me Tonight” [46:55] refers to one of the few “non-scandals” of the time, or rather one created by much of the New York press, which fecklessly reported the story of an erroneous state investigation claiming that a woman with major assets, including a mink coat, and running a bookie operation out of a hotel, had been granted monthly welfare checks. Both The New Yorker and the old daily PM—which was distinguished, and ultimately doomed, for its refusal to accept ads, in order to maintain its editorial independence—had thoroughly debunked the story, proving that the woman no longer had any assets or income, no longer lived in a hotel, and was in fact a destitute single mother with one daughter. The mink in question was a crumbling, “mangy” garment officially estimated by a fur dealer to have a value of $300.

None of these facts, of course, kept most of the New York press from cheerfully asserting here that welfare recipients were all cheating the system—nor would further, bogus reports ever deter it in the years to come. The only redeeming aspect to this number was its tune, lifted from the lovely old waltz “Meet Me Tonight in Dreamland,” written in 1903 to commemorate the opening of the Dreamland amusement park in Coney Island.

“Bungle, Bungle” [49:33] is adapted from the 1947 Broadway hit “Civilization (Bongo, Bongo, Bongo),” from the musical Angel in the Wings—notable mostly because it was introduced by the late, great Elaine Stritch, making her first big splash on the Great White Way. The various Tammany “braves” are probably dressed as Indians—their own, constant conceit; Tammany was named for a semi-mythical Indian chief, “St. Tammamend”—or perhaps African tribesmen. They are determined to hunt the Republican elephant in the upcoming presidential election, although they are convinced their “Head cheese,” Harry Truman, is a “lightweight.” They worry over more defections from the Democratic party by the “Dixiecrats”—the States’ Rights Democratic Party—which would indeed secede from the Democrats’ national party, and win over 1.1 million votes, 2.4 percent of the vote, and 39 electoral votes behind presidential candidate Strom Thurmond.

The rest of the show includes various unhappy Democrats, including Wallace, former secretary of the interior Harold Ickes, and James Petrillo [59:47]. Petrillo was the publicity-hungry head of the American Federation of Musicians who had instated a recording ban that would last almost the entire year. He was also a sometimes accompanist to both President Truman, who played piano, and his daughter, Margaret Truman, whose nascent singing career would involve the president in any number of scraps. Truman seems to call to Petrillo for help. At the same time, he goes through the leading contenders for the Republican nomination—New York governor Thomas Dewey, former Minnesota governor Harold Stassen, General Douglas MacArthur, California governor and future Chief Justice Earl Warren, and Republican Speaker of the House Joseph Martin (R-MA). He hopes they will instead nominate Robert Taft, the prominent conservative senator from Ohio, who was considered too far to the right to win.

There are jokes about what a mistake it was for Peter Minuit to—legendarily—buy Manhattan from the Indians for $24, and references to meat shortages. There is a rather ugly jest suggesting that Americans are going hungry because their food is being shipped to Europeans under the Marshall Plan, and another, even uglier jibe at Truman, during a Jefferson-Jackson Day Dinner—a big Democratic gathering at the time—paying worshipful reverence to “Washington—Booker T. Washington” as the founder of his country. The reference to Booker T. Washington (1856-1915), the former slave who had worked his way up to become a university president and leading advocate for civil rights, is an echo of Dixiecrat charges that the Truman administration’s cautious moves forward in civil rights was “pandering” to black Americans.

(Truman was perhaps fortunate in their restraint. Two years earlier, a similar “send-up” of Branch Rickey’s breaking the color line in white baseball by signing Jackie Robinson had triggered a full-out, black-face, minstrely “sketch” by New York’s sportswriters in a similar revue. Neither they, nor the Inner Circle, of course, included any black reporters in their organizations.)

Truman is seen as “going back to Missouri” with the help of the new chairman of the Democratic National Convention, his advisor, J. Howard McGrath, who is also satirized as an incompetent. His replacement is sure to be Thomas Dewey, the governor of New York, whose defeat by FDR in the 1944 election was attributed partly to his remarkable stiffness. But now, he sings, “I’ll be different…I’ll be human, not like I used to be” [1:22:56].

The skits are followed by set speeches from Vincent I. Impellitteri [1:26:44] and from Dewey [1:32:58], in which both men would demonstrate the limitations of their political abilities. Impellitteri, a Sicilian immigrant, had been picked to run for the old office of President of the City Council in 1945, though at the time he was only a clerk to a State Supreme Court justice and a former assistant district attorney in the Bronx. But with O’Dwyer running for mayor, and Lazarus Joseph, a Shomer Shabbos Jew from the Lower East Side, running for comptroller, this was Tammany’s idea of a perfectly balanced ticket: Irish-Italian-Jewish; Brooklyn-the Bronx-Manhattan.

As you can hear, Impellitteri was a less than dynamic speaker, but with O’Dwyer’s sudden resignation, he succeeded to the mayoralty under the city charter of the time. Running in a special election on the “Experience Party” line in 1950, he surprised everyone by winning in his own right, in another, three-man field. More scandals loomed, though, including the widely held belief that Impellitteri was a close associate of the Lucchese crime family, and in 1953 he was defeated for re-election in the Democratic primary by Robert F. Wagner. He went on to a long career on the criminal court bench.

Thomas Dewey’s ponderous speech on the Cold War—not to mention his rather spooky laugh—gives one a perspective into the chilly public persona that ultimately held back a supremely capable public servant. Bizarrely, Dewey here seems to imply that the United States is the only place where people could “poke fun at their government,” thereby ignoring most of Europe, Canada, and other democracies around the world.

A highly successful, three-term governor of New York, and a champion of civil liberties and racial equality, following his career as a gang-busting, public attorney, Dewey would win the Republican nomination again in 1948. Despite all the best prognostications of the assembled city hall reporters here, he lost the general election in a stunning upset—to Harry Truman, who somehow managed to survive the defection of both his party’s right and left wings.

“I know them all,” Truman liked to say about the press corps in general, “and there’s not a one of them has enough sense to pound sand down a rathole.”

The newest Merging Time exhibit is now on display in the City of Vancouver Archives’ gallery. Since its initial showing at the Archives three years ago, this annual photography exhibit has become an attraction for both historians and photographers alike. This year, the exhibit features 16 new digital interpretations of our scanned archival photographs.

The creators of this year’s Merging Time show: Langara’s Professional Photo-Imaging Class of 2015.

Every year, students in Darren Bernaerdt’s Principles of Imaging Processing course (PHOTO 1248) are assigned to visit the Archives to find historical photographs of Vancouver. After determining the exact location and perspective of each selected photograph, they travel to the original site to replicate the photographs with a digital SLR camera. This year’s students chose a selection of street scenes of downtown Vancouver from the 1890s to 1940s.

Archival photograph selected by Michelle MacDonald for the Merging Time assignment. Granville Street looking north from Robson Street, 1900s. Reference code: AM54-S4-: Str P32.

It goes without saying that the historical scenes are very difficult to replicate. More often than not, the original images were photographed from vantage points that are no longer accessible due to relocation of sidewalks or the construction of new buildings that obstruct views.

Digital composite by Michelle MacDonald, 1900s/2014. Granville Street looking north from Robson Street, incorporating City of Vancouver Archives image AM54-S4-: Str P32.

Nonetheless, the obstacles are overcome by using digital imaging techniques. Students edit the photos on the computer by skewing, distorting, and twisting the images to replicate the focal length and angle of the original archival photograph. Students then mask and retouch the old and new photographs, merging past and present elements into a seamless digital composite, contrasting old and new.

Archival photograph selected by Warin Rychkun for the Merging Time assignment. View of Pender Street east of Cambie Street, showing the Sun Tower, 1927s. Reference code: AM54-S4-: Str N164.

Upon viewing these photographs, one notices immediately the buildings and structures that still stand today. Looking closer, the photographs reveal elements that no longer exist. Formal attire, street cars, horse drawn carriages, and old fashioned street fixtures are things of the past, but these heritage buildings provide us with anchors to that era. These photographs bring to life what Vancouver used to be, and remind us of the city’s rich heritage, history and growth.

Digital composite by Warin Rychkun, 1927/2014. View of Pender Street east of Cambie Street, showing the Sun Tower, incorporating City of Vancouver Archives image AM54-S4-: Str N164.

Merging Time will be on display weekdays from 9 AM to 5 PM at the City of Vancouver Archives’ gallery until February 27^th, 2015.

Beginning in the late 1960s, after attending Yale on the G.I. Bill and struggling with a career as a playwright, Dr. Hugh Morgan Hill developed the idiosyncratic storytelling persona of Brother Blue. Usually dressed head to toe in blue, with blue-tinted glasses, and covered in hand-drawn blue butterflies, Hill was a transfixing figure on the streets of Boston.  One could frequently hear him re-telling Shakespeare’s plays, his own personal stories, and folk tales from Africa and Asia to any passer by that would listen. 

In this audio, from WNYC’s 1979 storytelling festival, listen to Hill distill the essence of Macbeth in 20 minutes, all the while employing a steady drum beat and interstitial blues harmonica riffs. When the three witches tell Macbeth that he is destined to be king, Brother Blue’s Macbeth explains, “That must be jive, cause King Duncan is alive!” 

On behalf of the members of the Public Interest Declassification Board, I would like to congratulate Miriam Nisbet on the eve of her retirement from Federal  service.  Throughout her Federal career, she served with distinction as a tireless advocate for transparency and access to government records.  We first met Ms. Nisbet in her role as the first Director of the Office of Government Information Services (OGIS).  We were impressed with her vision of OGIS as the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) ombudsman to provide mediation services to resolve disputes between FOIA requesters and Executive branch agencies.  Those familiar with open government and transparency advocacy regard Ms. Nisbet as a trusted advocate for the proper administration of FOIA, as Archivist of the United States, David Ferriero noted in his announcement Ms. Nisbet’s retirement.

I want to thank Ms. Nisbet personally for her support of our work to develop recommendations to modernize and transform the security classification system.  Many similar challenges exist that impede the declassification process and the administration of the FOIA at agencies, and we are grateful to Ms. Nisbet and the staff at OGIS for recognizing that limiting secrecy to the minimum necessary for the national security assists both the agencies and the public in their efforts to access and manage government information.

The members join me in thanking her for her wise counsel and her work to increase transparency and access to government records.  We wish her all the best in her retirement.

Just yesterday in the Archives Reading Room a student was looking over an artist book from our collection that caught my eye.  It is accurate to say that any book that comes in its very own egg casing typically does catch my eye.

The book is Evolve/Unroll by book artist Sara Press, published in 2012 by her imprint Deeply Game Publications.

The publisher’s website describes Evolve/Unroll: “a snake that unrolls out of a felt egg, considers a recent evolutionary theory…Snake Detection Theory…which proposes that humans and certain other primates developed our excellent vision and intelligence due largely to co-evolution with snakes.”

Perhaps needless to say, the egg book got me curious about Sara Press’s other publications, four of which we own in the Archives & Special Collections.

20 Short Poems by Zoologists, published in 2005, is a collection of found poems discovered in the texts and field guides of zoologists’ and contains four letterpress illustrations of primates’ hands and feet.

Of 20 Short Poems by Zoologists, Deeply Game Publications writes “these excerpts of unintentionally poetic language are delicious both linguistically and in the unbelievable-yet true bizarreness of the creatures described.  The volume celebrates the poesy and affection inherent in the supposedly objective scientific eye.”

Reared from a Cub: A Selection of Incidents Involving Captive Wildcats is precisely what it sounds like.  This work includes hundreds of excerpts from news articles describing attacks by wildcats on their captors, be it zookeepers or pet owners.

From the publisher’s website: “This is an examination of humans’ persistence in trying to make decorations and pets out of big cats — creatures that persist in being wild.”

“This volume has a clear Plexiglas cover, reminiscent of display habitats in zoos. The text is printed on semitransparent vellum paper, and appears layered, cage-like, over images of the animals. The silk-screened ink drawings feature wild cats in ambiguous settings. Their illustrative presentation refers to their comfortable place in our decorative visual culture, while currents of scarlet color running through the ink suggest otherwise.”

The Sensitive and Vegetable Souls: A Bestiary, published in 2001, is the earliest Sara Press work we have in the Archives & Special Collections.  This is an edition of 30 with each volume containing unique ephemera and hand annotations.

“This Bestiary is a genealogical palimpsest from a parallel universe, with the construction of an antique tintype album. Twenty C-print photographs depicting “beasts”, set in die-cut windows, are bound into a corkskin cover, with a sterling silver closure sculpted especially for the project.” “Biographies of the beasts and their intergenerational history are annotated by fountain pen, typewriter, and silkscreen, and elaborated with inserted ephemera.”

Come check out Sara Press and other artists’ books in the Archives & Special Collections.

All quotes in this post are lifted from Sara Press’s Deeply Game Publications website.

I should apologise for how quiet this space has been lately! The beginning of the academic year has been particularly busy here in the Archives. We’ve been out in classrooms, delivering new archive workshops for primary schools. Over the next week or two, I’ll be giving an update on the sessions, the histories revealed, the collections used, as well as posting resources that may be of use to educators out there.

With the centenary of the First World War, schools across the country have been doing amazing projects: digging trenches in the playing field, rehearsing remembrance day plays, and going on field study trips to museums and war memorials to develop their understanding. We’ve been bringing archives into classrooms to investigate what life was like in 1914… how did the war affect men? women? conscientious objectors? children (from P.E. class to school dinners)?

Students practise military style drills in P.E. class C1914
Lilian Flora Best Archive Collection

Keep tuned into this space, but in the meantime, head over to London Metropolitan Archives’ First World War blog, ‘Emergency! London 1914’. We are this week’s guest blogger, opening up the archives to reveal the impact of the First World War on women teachers.

[This is the fourth in a short series on our 2014 OCLC Research Library Partnership meeting, Libraries and Research: Supporting Change/Changing Support. You can read the first, second, and third posts and also refer to the event webpage that contains links to slides, videos, photos, and a Storify summary.]

And now, onward to the final session of the meeting, which focused appropriately enough on changes in libraries, which include new roles and and preparing to support future service demands. They are engaging in new alliances and are restructuring themselves to prepare for change in accordance with their strategic plans.

[Paul-Jervis Heath, Lynn Silipigni Connaway, and Jim Michalko]

Lynn Silipigni Connaway (Senior Research Scientist, OCLC Research) [link to video] shared the results of several studies that identify the importance of user-centered assessment and evaluation. Lynn has been working actively in this area since 2003, looking at not only researchers but also future researchers (students!). In interviews on virtual reference, focusing on perspective users, Lynn and her team found that students use Google and Wikipedia but also rely on human resources — other students, advisers, graduate students and faculty. In looking through years of data, interviewees tend to use generic terms like “database” and refer to specific tools and sources only when they are further along in their career — this doesn’t mean they don’t use them, rather, they get used to using more sophisticated terminology as they go along. No surprise, convenience trumps everything; researchers at all levels are eager to optimize their time so many “satisfice” if the assignment or task doesn’t warrant extra time spent. From my perspective, one of the most interesting findings from Lynn’s studies relates to students’ somewhat furtive use of Wikipedia, which she calls the Learning Black Market (students look up something in Google, find sources in Wikipedia, copy and paste the citation into their paper!). Others use Facebook to get help. Some interesting demographic differences — more established researchers use Twitter, and use of Wikipedia declines as researchers get more experience. In regards to the library, engagement around new issues (like data management) causes researchers to think anew about ways the library might be useful. Although researchers of all stripes will reach out to humans for help, librarians rank low on that list. Given all of these challenges, there are opportunities for librarians and library services — be engaging and be where researchers are, both physically and virtually. We should always assess what we are doing — keep doing what’s working, cut or reinvent what is not. Lynne’s presentation provides plenty of links and references for you to check out.

Paul-Jervis Heath (Head of Innovation & Chief Designer, University of Cambridge) [link to video] spoke from the  perspective of a designer, not a librarian (he has worked on smart homes, for example). He shared findings from recent work with the Cambridge University libraries. Because of disruption, libraries face a perfect storm of change in teaching, funding, and scholarly communications. User expectations are formed by consumer technology. While we look for teachable moments, Google and tech companies do not — they try to create intuitive experiences. Despite all the changes, libraries don’t need to sit on the sidelines, they can be engaged players. Design research is important and distinguished from market research in that it doesn’t measure how people think but how they act. From observation studies, we can see that students want to study together in groups, even if they are doing their own thing. The library needs to be optimized for that. Another technique employed, asking students to use diaries to document their days. Many students prefer the convenience of studying in their room but what propels them to the library is the desire to be with others in order to focus. At Cambridge, students have a unique geographic triangle defined by where they live, the department where they go to class, and the market they prefer to shop in. Perceptions about how far something (like the library) is outside of the triangle are relative. Depending on how far your triangle points are, life can be easy or hard. Students are not necessarily up on technology so don’t make assumptions. It turns out that books (the regular, paper kind) are great for studying! But students use ebooks to augment their paper texts, or will use when all paper books are gone. Shadowing (with permission) is another technique which allows you to immerse yourself in a researcher’s life and understand their mental models. Academics wear lot of different hats, play different roles within the university and are too pressed for time to learn new systems. It’s up to the library to create efficiencies and make life easier for researchers. Paul closed by emphasizing six strategic themes: transition from physical to digital; library spaces; sustainable classic library services; supporting research and scholarly communications; making special collections more available; and creating touchpoints that will bring people back to the library seamlessly.

Jim Michalko (Vice President, OCLC Research Library Partnership) [link to video] talked about his recent work looking at library organizational structures and restructuring. (Jim will be blogging about this work soon, so I won’t give more than a few highlights.) For years, libraries have been making choices about what to do and how to do it, and libraries have been reorganizing themselves to get this (new) work done. Jim gathered feedback from 65 institutions in the OCLC Research Library Partnership and conducted interviews with a subset of those, in order to find out if structure indeed follows strategy. Do new structures represent markets or adjacent strategies (in business speak)? We see libraries developing capacities in customer relationship management and we see this reflected in user-focused activities. Almost all institutions interviewed were undertaking restructuring based on a changes external to the library, such as new constituencies and expectations. Organizations are orienting themselves to be more user centered, and to align themselves with a new direction taken by the university. We see many libraries bringing in skill sets beyond those normally found in the library package. Many institutions charged a senior position with helping to run a portion of a regional or national service. Other similarities: all had a lot of communication about restructuring. Almost all also related to a space plan.

This session was followed by a discussion session and I invite you to watch it, and also to watch this lovely summary of our meeting delivered by colleague Titia van der Werf (less than 7 minutes long and worth watching!):

If you attended the meeting or were part of the remote viewing audience for all or part of it, or if you watched any of the videos, I hope you will leave some comments with your reactions. Thanks for reading!

[This is the third in a short series on our 2014 OCLC Research Library Partnership meeting, Libraries and Research: Supporting Change/Changing Support. You can read the first and second posts and also refer to the event webpage that contains links to slides, videos, photos, and a Storify summary.]

[Driek Heesakkers, Paolo Manghi, Micah Altman, Paul Wouters, and John Scally]

As if changes in research are not enough, changes are also coming at the university level and at the national level. The new imperatives of higher education around Open Access, Open Data and Research Assessment are impacting the roles of libraries in managing and providing access to e-research outputs, in helping define the university’s data management policies, and demonstrating value in terms of research impact. This session explored these issues and more!

John MacColl (University Librarian at University of St Andrews) [link to video] opened the session, speaking briefly about the UK context to illustrate how libraries are taking up new roles within academia. John presented this terse analysis of the landscape (and I thank him for providing notes!):

• Professionally, we live increasingly in an inside-out environment. But our academic colleagues still require certification and fixity, and their reputation is based on a necessarily conservative world view (tied up with traditional modes of publishing and tenure)
• Business models are in transition. The first phase of transition was from publisher print to publisher digital. We are now in a phase which he terms as deconstructive, based on a reassessment of the values of scholarly publishing, driven by the high cost of journals.
• There are several reasons for this: among the main ones are the high costs of publisher content, and our responsibility as librarians for the sustainability of the scholarly record; another is the emergence of public accountability arguments – the public has paid for this scholarship, they have the right to access outputs.
• What these three new areas of research library activity have in common is the intervention of research funders into the administration of research within universities, although the specifics vary considerably in different nations.

John Scally (Director of Library and University Collections, University of Edinburgh) [link to video] added to the conversation, speaking about the role of the research library in research data management (RDM) at the University of Edinburgh. From John’s perspective, the library is a natural place for RDM work to happen because the library has been in the business of managing and curating stuff for a long time and services are at the core of the library. Naturally, making content available in different ways is a core responsibility of the library. Starting research data conversations around policy and regulatory compliance is difficult — it’s easier to frame as a problem around storage, discovery and reuse of data. At Edinburgh they tried to frame discussions around how can we help, how can you be more competitive, do better research? If a researcher comes to the web page about data management plans (say at midnight, the night before a grant proposal is due) that webpage should do something useful at the time of need, not direct researchers to come to the library during the day. Key takeaways: Blend RDM into core services, not a side business. Make sure everyone knows who is leading. Make sure the money is there, and you know who is responsible. Institutional policy is a baby step along the way, implementation is most important. RDM and open access are ways of testing (and stressing) your systems and procedures – don’t ignore fissures and gaps. An interesting correlation between RDM and the open access repository – since RDM has been implemented at Edinburgh, deposits of papers have increased.

Driek Heesakkers (Project Manager at the University of Amsterdam Library) [link to video] told us about RDM at the University of Amsterdam and in the Netherlands. Netherlands differs from other landscapes, characterized as “bland” – not a lot of differences between institutions in terms of research outputs. A rather complicated array of institutions for humanities, social science, health science, etc, all trying to define their roles in RDM. For organizations who are mandated to capture data, it’s vital that they not just show up at the end of the process to scoop up data, but that they be embedding in the environment where the work is happening, where tools are being used.  Policy and infrastructure need to be rolled out together. Don’t reinvent the wheel – if there are commercial partners or cloud services that do the work well, that’s all for the good. What’s the role of the library? We are not in the lead with policy but we help to interpret and implement — similarly with technology. The big opportunity is in the support – if you have faculty liaisons, you should be using them for data support. Storage is boring but necessary. The market for commercial solutions is developing which is good news – he’d prefer to buy, not built, when appropriate. This is a time for action — we can’t be wary or cautious.

Switching gears away from RDM, Paul Wouters (Director of the Centre for Science and Technology Studies at the University of Leiden) [link to video] spoke about the role of libraries in research assessment. His organization combines fundamental research and services for institutions and individual researchers. With research becoming increasingly international and interdisciplinary, it’s vital that we develop methods of monitoring novel indicators. Some researchers have become, ironically and paradoxically, fond of assessment (may be tied up with the move towards the quantified self?). However, self assessment can be nerve wracking and may not return useful information. Managers may are also interested in individual assessment because it may help them give feedback.  Altmetrics do not correlate closely to citation metrics, and and can vary considerably across disciplines. It’s important to think about the meaning of various ways of measuring impact. As an example of other ways of measuring, Paul presented the ACUMEN (Academic Careers Understood through Measurement and Norms) project, which allows researchers to take the lead and tell a story given evidence from his or her portfolio. An ACUMEN profile includes a career narrative supported by expertise, outputs, and influence. Giving a stronger voice to researchers is more positive than researchers not being involved in or misunderstanding (and resenting) indicators.

Micah Altman (Director of Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Libraries) [link to video] discussed the importance of researcher identification and the need to uniquely identify researchers in order to manage the scholarly record and to support assessment. Micah spoke in part as a member of a group that OCLC Research colleague Karen Smith-Yoshimura led, the Registering Researchers Task Group working group (their report, Registering Researchers in Authority Files is now available). It explored motivations, state of the practice, observations and recommendations. The problem is that there is more stuff, more digital content, and more people (the average number of authors on journal articles have gone up, in some cases way up). To put it mildly, disambiguating names is not a small problem. A researcher may have one or more identifiers, which may not link to one another and may come from different sources. The task group looked at the problem not only from the perspective of the library, but also from the perspective of various stakeholders (publishers, universities, researchers, etc.). Approaches to managing name identifiers result in some very complicated (and not terribly efficient) workflows. Normalizing and regularizing this data has big potential payoffs in terms of reducing errors in analytics, and creating a broad range of new (and more accurate) measures. Fortunately, with a recognition of the benefits, interoperability between identifier systems is increasing, as is the practice of assigning identifiers to researcher. One of the missing pieces is not only identifying researchers but also their roles in a given piece of work (this is a project that Micah is working on with other collaborators). What are steps that libraries can take? Prepare to engage! Work across stakeholder communities; demand more than PDFs from publishers. And prepare for more (and different) types of measurement.

Paolo Manghi (Researcher at Institute of Information Science and Technologies “A. Faedo” (ISTI), Italian National Research Council) [link to video] talked about the data infrastructures that support access to the evolving scholarly record and the requirements needed for different data sources (repositories, CRIS systems, data archives, software archives, etc.) to interoperate. Paolo spoke as a researcher, but also as the technical manager of the EU funded OpenAIRE project. This project started in 2009 out of a strong open access push from the European Commission. The project initially collected metadata and information about access to research outputs. The scope was expanded to include not only articles but also other research outputs. The work is done by human input and also technical infrastructure. They rely on input from repositories, also use software developed elsewhere. Information is funneled via 32 national open access desks. They have developed numerous guidelines (for metadata, for data repositories, and for CRIS managers to export data to be compatible with OpenAIRE). The project fills three roles — a help desk for national agencies, a portal (linking publications to research data and information about researchers) and a repository for data and articles that are otherwise homeless (Zenodo). Collecting all this information into one place allows for some advanced processes like deduplication, identifying relationships, demonstrating productivity, compliance, and geographic distribution. OpenAIRE interacts with other repository networks, such as SHARE (US), and ANDS (Australia). The forthcoming Horizon 2020 framework will cause some significant challenges for researchers and service providers because it puts a larger emphasis on access for non-published outputs.

The session was followed by a panel discussion.

I’ll conclude tomorrow with a final posting, wrapping up this series.

[This is the second in a short series on our 2014 OCLC Research Library Partnership meeting, Libraries and Research: Supporting Change/Changing Support. You can read the first post and also refer to the event webpage contains links to slides, videos, photos, Storify summaries.]

[Anja Smit, Adam Farquhar, Antal van den Bosch, and Ricky Erway]

Anja Smit (University Librarian at Utrecht University) [link to video] chaired this session which focused on the ways in which libraries are or could be supporting eScholarship. In opening she shared a story that reflects how the library is really a creature of the larger institution. At Utrect the library engaged in scenario planning* and identified their future as being all about open access and online access to sources. When they brought faculty in to comment on their plans, they were told that they were “going too fast” and that they needed to slow down. Sometimes researchers request services and sometimes the library just acts to fill a void.  But innovation is not only starting but also stopping. The Utretch experience with VREs are an example of a well-reasoned library “push” of services – thought they would have 200 research groups actively using the VRE but only 25 took it up. Annotated books on the other hand is an example of “pull,” something requested by researchers. Dataverse (a network for storing data) started as a service in the library that was needed by faculty but ultimately moved to DANS due to scale and infrastructure issues.  The decision to discontinue local search was a “pull” decision, based on evidence that researchers were not using it. Ultimately, librarians need to be “embedded” in researcher workflows. If we don’t know what they are doing, we won’t be able to help them.

Ricky Erway (Senior Program Officer, OCLC Research) [link to video] gave her own story of push and pull — OCLC Research was asked by the Research Information Management Interest Group to “do something about digital humanities”. The larger question was, where can libraries make a unique contribution?  Ricky and colleague Jennifer Schaffner immersed themselves in the researchers’ perspective regarding processes, issues, and needs, and then tried to see where the library might fill gaps. Their paper [Does Every Research Library Need a Digital Humanities Center?] was written for library directors not already engaged with digital humanities. The answer to the question posed in the title of the paper is, “It depends.”  The report suggests that a constellation of engagement possibilities should be considered based on local needs. Start with what you are already offering and ensure that researchers are aware of those services. Scholars enthusiasm for metadata was a surprising finding — humanities researchers use and value metadata sources such as VIAF. (Colleague Karen Smith-Yoshimura has previously blogged about contributions to VIAF from the Syriac scholarly community and contributions from the Perseus Catalog.) A challenge for libraries is figuring out, when to support, when to collaborate, and when to lead. There is no one size fits all in digital humanities and libraries — not only is it the case that “changes in research are not evenly distributed,” but also every library has its own set of strengths and services which may be good matches for local needs.

Adam Farquhar (Head of Digital Scholarship at the British Library) [link to video] talked about what happens when large digital collections are brought together with scholars. Adam’s role, in brief is to get the British Library’s digital collections into the hands of scholars so they can create knowledge. Adam and his team have been trying to find ways to take advantage of the digital qualities of digital collections — up to now, most libraries have treated digital collections the same as print collections apart from delivery. This is a mistake, because there are unique aspects to large-scale digital collections and we should be leveraging them. The British Library has a cross-disciplinary team which is much needed for tackling the challenges at hand. Rather than highlighting the broad range of projects being undertaken at the BL, Adam chose instead to focus on a few small, illustrative examples. In the British Library Labs, developers are invited to sit alongside scholars and co-evolve projects and solutions. The BL Labs Competition is a challenge to encourage people to put forward interesting projects and needs. Winners of the 2014 competition included one from Australia (showing that there is global interest in the BL’s collections). One winner is the Victorian Meme Machine, which will pair Victorian jokes with likely images to illustrate what makes Victorian jokes funny. Another project extracted images from digitized books and put a million images on Flickr (where people go to look for images, not for books). These images have received 160 million views in the last year. These are impressive metrics especially when you consider that previously no one alive had looked any of those images. Now lots of people have and they have been used in a variety of ways, from an art piece at Burning Man, to serious research, to commercial use. Adam’s advice? Relax and take a chance on release of information into the public domain.

Antal van den Bosch (Professor at the Radboud University Nijmegen) [link to video] spoke from his perspective as a researcher. Scientists have long had the ability to shift from first gear (working at the chalkboard) to 5^th or 6^th gear (doing work on the Large Hadron Collider). Humanists have recently discovered that there is a 3^rd or 4^th gear and want to go there. In the humanities there is fast and slow scholarship. In his own field, linguistics and computer science, there is no data like more data. Large, rich corpuses are highly valued (and more common over time). One example is Twitter – in the Netherlands, seven million Tweets a day are generated and collected by his institute. Against this corpus, researchers can study the use of language at different times of day and use location metadata to identify use of regional dialect. Another example is the HiTiME (Historical Timeline Mining and Extraction) project which uses linked data in historical sources to enable the study of social movements in Europe. Within texts, markup of persons, locations, and events allow visualizations including timelines and social networks. Analysis of newspaper archives revealed both labor strikes that happened and those that didn’t. However, library technology was not up to the task of keeping up with the data so that findings were not repeatable, underscoring the need for version control and adequate technological underpinnings. Many times in these projects the software goes along with the data, so storing both data and code is important.  Most researchers are not sure where to put their research data and may be using cloud storage like GitHub. Advice and guidance are all well and good but what researchers really need is storage, and easy to use services (“an upload button, basically”). In the Netherlands and in Europe, there are long tail storage solutions for e-research data. Many organizations and institutions say “here, let me help you with that.” Libraries seem well situated to help with metadata, but researchers want full text search against very big data sets like Twitter or Google Books. Libraries should be asking themselves if they can host something that big. If libraries can’t offer collections like these, at scale, researchers may not be interested.  On the other hand in the humanities which has a “long tail of small topics,” there are many single researchers doing small research projects and here the library may be well positioned to help.

If you are interested in more details you can watch the discussion session that followed:

I’ll be back later to summarize the last two segments of the meeting.

*A few years ago, Jim and I attended one of the ARL 2030 Scenarios workshops. Since that time, I’ve been quite interested in the use of scenario planning as an approach for organizations like libraries that hope to build for resilience.

Libraries and Research: Supporting Change/Changing Support was a meeting on 11-12 June for members of the OCLC Research Library Partnership. The meeting focused on how the evolving nature of academic research practices and scholarship are placing new demands on research library services. Shifting attitudes toward data sharing, methodologies in eScholarship, and rethinking the very definition of scholarly discourse . . . . these are all areas that have deep implications for the library. But it is not only the research process that is changing; research universities are evolving in new directions, often becoming more outcome-oriented, changing to reflect the increased importance of impact assessment, and competing for funding. Libraries are taking on new roles and responsibilities to support change in research and in the academy. From our perch in OCLC Research, we can see that as libraries prepare to meet new demands and position themselves for the future, libraries themselves are changing, both in their organizational structure and in their alliances with other parts of the university and with external entities.

This meeting focused on three thematic areas: supporting change in research; supporting change at the university level; and changing support structures in the library.

Our meeting venue, close to the Centraal Station.

For the first time, and in response to an increasing number of active partners in Europe we held our Partnership meeting outside of the United States. Since we have a number of partners in the Netherlands, we opted to hold our meeting in Amsterdam. We were in a terrific venue, and the beautiful weather didn’t hurt.

Meeting attendees were greeted by Maria Heijne (Director of the University of Amsterdam Library and of the Library of Applied Sciences/Hogeschool of Amsterdam). [Link to video.] Maria highlighted the global perspective represented by those attending the meeting — which haled from the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Denmark, Italy, Germany, Australia, Japan, the US and Canada. The UofA library is a unique combination of library, special collections, and museum of archaeology. The offer a strong combination of services for the university and for the city of Amsterdam. Like so many libraries in the Partnership and beyond, the UofA library is preparing for a new facilities, and looking to shift effort from cataloging and other backroom functions to working more closely with researchers and other customers.

Maria Heijne, University of Amsterdam

Titia van der Werf (Senior Program Officer, OCLC Research) introduced the meeting and our themes [link to video], welcoming special guests from DANS, LIBER, RLUK and from OCLC EMEA Regional Council. The OCLC Research Library Partnership focuses on projects that have been defined as being of importance to partners. Examples of work in OCLC Research in support of the Partnership include looking at shifts in publication patterns and shifts in research (as highlighted in the Evolving Scholarly Record report), challenges in restructuring and redefining within the library (reflected in work done by my colleague Jim Michalko), and studying the behavior of researchers so we can understand evolving needs (reflected in our work synthesizing user and behavior studies). We also see interest and uptake in new ways of thinking about cataloging data, recasting metadata as identifiers (such as identifiers for people, subjects, or for works). As research changes, as universities change, so too do libraries need to change.

With that introduction to our meeting, I’ll close. Look for a short series of posts summarizing the remainder of the meeting, focusing on the three themes.

[The event webpage contains links to slides, videos, photos, Storify summaries]