Showing posts with label Archives. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Archives. Show all posts

Wednesday, March 1, 2023

Lost Letters by Mary, Queen of Scots

 

Euan Ward, "Lost Letters by Mary, Queen of Scots, Uncovered by Amateur Code Breakers,"  New York Times, Feb. 8, 2023.  https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/08/world/europe/mary-queen-of-scots-letters.html

Deep in the archives of France’s national library, an assortment of coded letters listed as Italian texts lay untouched for more than 400 years. But when three code breakers — a German pianist, an Israeli computer scientist and a Japanese physicist — stumbled upon them, they discovered something remarkable.

They were, they found, not Italian texts at all.

Instead, they were part of the secret prison correspondence of Mary, Queen of Scots, whose tragic life and tangled role in the lethal dynastic and religious politics of 16th-century Europe have long fascinated writers and historians. One leading biographer of Mary described the discovery as the most significant in the study of her life for more than a century.

“We found treasure lying in plain sight,” said George Lasry, the Israeli computer scientist who led the yearlong project, which was released to the public on Wednesday, the 436th anniversary of Mary’s death.

COMMENT
A classic tale of finding hidden treasure, with the twist that a library cataloging error made the letters invisible. 

 

Tuesday, January 3, 2023

Democracy's Data

 Dan Bouk. Democracy's Data the Hidden Stories in the U.S. Census and How to Read Them.  Ferrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022.

I had read about this conference and seen it mentioned in many places as I began studying the 1940 Census.  In the context of later controversies, particularly over a question about income, this conference was frequently invoked to justify the census's decisions, to show that they had been made by expert, responsible men.  Yet for the first couple of years of my research, I found no detailed records from the conference.  I dug through file after file, box after box in the National Archives, to no avail.  I did not think I would ever discover what actually happened in that room.  Then, in what would be my final trip to that archives, in the summer of 2019, I was working my way through Director Austin's papers, and there it was, the summary minutes of the meeting, one that (although it was not a complete transcript) would allow me to reconstruct, more or less, how the Question Men built the data's frame.   pp. 33-39

One day in the National Archives, I stumbled upon  a silence in Price's paper itself.  Working through a box of bureau records, I found a folder titled "Negro Enumeration of 1920" containing a typed reply to a scholar who had, in 1922, made a reasoned case for a significant undercount of African Americans.  This surprised me.  I had never heard of serious scientific estimates of such undercounting before Price, and Price's paper hadn't said anything about Black researchers who had previously uncovered this.  Price's paper hadn't prepared me for Kelly Miller. 131

 


COMMENT

Imagine the astonishment and joy at finding the missing document after years of searching!  One thing that stands out in this story is, the meeting was well known, and known to be important.  It just wasn't well documented. 

The second story illustrates the way that information errors propagate through time.  Price's paper is frequently cited as the first research about undercounting Black people in the census.  It turned out that Miller, a Black mathematician, had already detected Census undercounts and explored the underlying causes, but since Price hadn't cited Miller's research that scholarship had been neglected. 



Thursday, October 6, 2022

The Disinformation Machine

 Nancy McLean. The Disinformation Machine. Orion Magazine, 2022.  https://orionmagazine.org/article/koch-network-climate-change-misinformation


In 2013, James Buchanan died at the age of 93, and I was able to gain access to his unprocessed archive at George Mason University (GMU), his last institutional home. In his records going back to the 1940s, I found my developing understanding of all this confirmed—in a way that had me again and again reminding myself to breathe. Just one example: in his private office, I found a pile of documents stacked on a chair that exposed how Charles Koch and some of his most trusted operatives—GMU economics faculty, the dean of the law school, the president and provost, and a politically appointed Board of Visitors presided over by Ed Meese III, Ronald Reagan’s long-time ally—had collaborated to establish a basecamp for a political project at a public university, just across the Potomac from Washington, D.C.

COMMENT

Uncataloged archival material provide evidence for how billionaires and right wing politicians created a political disinformation machine.  This well-funded torrent of science denial has become a serious problem for librarians.  It's alarming to realize just how much political power and money are stacked against our information literacy lectures. 


 

Saturday, December 18, 2021

A 21st-Century Emily Dickinson Finds a Home in the Archives

 Jennifer Schuessler, "A 21st-Century Emily Dickinson Finds a Home in the Archives", New York Times, December 10, 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/10/arts/television/emily-dickinson-archive-harvard.html


Now, a show that emerged from the archives is returning whence it came, for — as Dickinson might have put it — all Eternity.

The series, whose three-season run will come to an end on Dec. 24, is donating dozens of costumes, period furnishings and props to the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst, Mass., where they will be used to flesh out the sense of her daily life at the Dickinson homestead.

And in a twist, it is donating its production archive of scripts, costume and set designs, and paper props to Harvard University’s Houghton Library. Included in the haul: the show’s painstaking re-creations of Dickinson manuscripts, which will be housed alongside more than 1,000 of the Real Thing.
...

The donation to Harvard’s Houghton Library is the library’s first acquisition from a television show, according to Christine Jacobson, an assistant curator of modern books and manuscripts.
Jacobson first started following Smith on Twitter in 2018, after she got wind of the show when the production requested permission to reproduce a portrait owned by Harvard. They struck up a virtual friendship (bonding over a side passion for Russian literature), and last summer, when Smith asked if Houghton wanted materials from the show, she jumped.

 COMMENT

The show used archival materials for it's creation, and returns the fruits of that creative effort back to the library.   The library was able to aquire the materials due to a personal relationship between an astute librarian and the shows creators. 

Monday, December 6, 2021

A Refugee's Story, Through Animation

 Lisa Abend. "A Refugee's Story, Through Animation", New York Times, November 28, 2021, p.AR10.

Rather than relying, as in typical documentary style, on talking heads' descriptions, Rasmussen could put Amin visibly badk in his own '80's Kabul.

Achieving that kind of narrative authenticity required a precise attention to detail, Nicholls said.  Each element in every frame had to be accurate to the time and location: the brand of pot on the stove, the quality of a sunset, even the height of the street curb.  Some of the research was conducted by Rasmussen on scouting trips, but Nichools and her team also spent a lot of time combing archives and libraries.  "Finding pre-Taliban footage of Kabul was really difficult," the said.  "I read a lot of books by Russian spies."

COMMENT

Since libraries tend to collect formally published English language material, the missing information that is not in libraries has charactaristic patterns.   In this instance, a filmmaker is trying to represent Kabul, Afghanistan in the 1980's and found almost no relevant information. Pretty much nobody bothered to document pre-Taliban Kabul, so that it is a place that exists only in inaccurate memories. 

Sunday, August 15, 2021

The Invention of Wings

 Sue Monk Kidd, "The Invention of Wings," Penguin Books,  2014. 

Acknowledgements
...
The following institutions, which along with Historic Charleston Foundation and Drayton Hall, served as resources: The Charlesong Museum, the Charleston Library Society, the College of Charleston's Addlestone Library and the Avery Research Center, the Charleston County Public Library, the South Caroliniana Library, the Aiken-Rhett House Museum, the Nathanial Russel House Museum, the Charles Pinckney House, the Old Slave Mart, Magnolia Plantation and Gardens, Lowcountry Africana, Middleton Place and Boone Hall Plantation. [p. 371]
...

Jaqueline Coleburn, rare book cataloger at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., for her enormous assistance in providing me with a treasure trove of letters, newspapers, Anti-Slavery Convention proceedings and other documents related to Sarah and Angelina Grimke and early-nineteenth-century history. [p.371]



COMMENT

To write her historical novel, Kidd made use of a resources from a wide variety of cultural institutions including museums, historical societies and libraries.  She mentions one librarian by name who was especially helpful to locate historical materials that contribute to the historical accuracy of a fictionalized story. 

Sunday, March 28, 2021

A Fake? Or Biblical Gold?

 Jennifer Schuessler,  "A Fake? Or Biblical Gold?" New York Times March 28, 2021, p.AR8- AR9

     Dershowitz also traveled to the Berlin State Library to look at Shapira's papers.  There, scattered in a bound volume of jumbled invoices and notes, he found something he said no one had ever noted three handwritten sheets that appeared to show Shapira trying go decipher the fragments, with many question marks, marginal musings, crossed-out readings, and transcription errors.
     "It's amazing because it give you a window into Shapira's mind," Dershowitz said.  "If he forged them, or was part of a conspiracy, it makes no sense that he'd be sitting there trying to guess what the text is, and making mistakes while he did it."

COMMENT

Idan Dershowitz is a researcher trying to find evidence that a notorious forgery was actually genuine. The original documents have disappeared, but searching through the dusty boxes, he discovers evidence that at least suggests that if they were forged, Shapira was not the forger.  

Thursday, June 25, 2020

How to Dig Up Family History Online

J.D. Biersdorfer. "How to Dig Up Family History Online." New York Times. June 25, 2020, p. B7.

While not all government records may be free or digitized, the National Archives hosts a page of links from other genealogy sites where you can look for information.

... 
Libraries and historical/genealogical societies may also have books and periodicals that recorded the development of the area and the people who lived there, although you may have to visit in person to look at the original material has not been scanned. (Some libraries also offer free access to the commercial genealogy services.)

COMMENT 

     The article mentions online genealogy sites and the National Archives as places to start.  Libraries come in further down the list once you have done your background research online. They type of local history that genealogists seek can be hard to find. There is a period when newspapers were preserved on microfilm, and many of these have never been digitized. One-of-a-kind Special Collections materials are hidden treasure in dusty boxes.  If you get a chance to poke through them, you might find something fascinating. 

Saturday, March 7, 2020

Zara Steiner, 91, Historian Who Plumbed World War I

Neil Genzlinger, "Zara Steiner, 91, Historian Who Plumbed World War I," New York Times, March 6, 2020, p. B16.

     She went to Cornwall House in London, site of the British Foreign Office library and asked the librarian, C.H. Fine, if any archival material from staff officers existed.
     "He took me into a very dusty room and opened cabinets that had clearly not been cleaned for decades," she wrote.  "Out fell, along with bound volumes packets of papers tied up in pink ribbon, which dropped on to the floor as well as envelopes of pictures covered in dust.  "Oh dear," he said, "you had better have a look."
     "That, she added, "was how I began as a researcher."

 Comment

Hidden treasure in dusty boxes again.  Always the dust concealing the undiscovered gem.  These documents turned Dr. Steiner into an expert on what happened in England between WWI and WWII. The end of the  obituary quotes Dr. Steiner wondering how future historians will do their work in the age of Twitter and Facebook.  Without the dockets and minutes and paper trail, how will anyone ever discover what really happened.


Wednesday, August 28, 2019

A Dusty Artifact Shows the Reach of a Social Reformer

Hillary Howard, "A Dusty Artifact Show the Reach of a Social Reformer," New York Times, August 25, 2019, p. Y29.

     The trunk had sat in the library of a midtown Manhattan acting school for decades.
No one seems to have ever fully rifled through its contents save for a researcher her and there, said Whit Waterbury, an archivist and librarian at the Neighborhood Playhouse, the conservatory where Robert Duvall, Jeff Goldblum and Allison January trained.
...
     At first, he didn't think much of the dusty thing, with its fragile binding and fading yellow ribbon on the outside.  He set it aide to focus on documents more clearly related to the school and its founders... But then last spring, he actually flipped thorough its pages.  There was Eleanor Roosevelt's signature. And Amelia Earhart's. The journalist Jacob Riis wrote a nice note. So did Alfred E. Smith, a four term governor of New York.
...
     Last year, for its 125th anniversary, Henry Street Settlement introduced a permanent exhibition, which covers the history of the organization, and of the neighborhood it serves, at its headquarters.
      Officials there have plans to digitize the book and incorporate it into the exhibition. 

COMMENT

   Once again, the tale of hidden treasure in dusty archives,   The word "dust" covering the potential on unnoticed texts, in this case, a guestbook for Henry Street Settlement signed by many notable people and demonstrating the historic importance of the organization.   One person is quoted as saying, "The trunk was something out of Narnia."   Whoever put it in the trunk must have had a sense that it was worth keeping, but since it was in the box they could never have imagined how it would raise that spooky sense of touching history for people in the future.

     Now the guestbook will be digitized, which is to say, it will become an online representation of official history.  Digitization is an odd paradox.  The electronic version will be easier for more people to see, but it won't inspire comparisons with Narnia.  It's inevitable that some of the magic will be lost in translation. Digitization also means selecting the most interesting artifact out of the box, but better access for this single object paradoxically makes it less likely that someone will find something amazing and wonderful than sorting through paper objects stored in a dusty box.

Tuesday, August 20, 2019

Life Goes On


Thessaly La Force, "Life Goes On" (Notes on the Culture), T: The New York Time Style Magazine, August 18, 2019 p. 98-
     Unbeknownst to [Judy] Chicago, Mary Ross Taylor, one of the administrators who then ran Chicago’s feminist nonprofit, Through the Flower, which had raised funds for the work’s completion and later it’s resuscitated tour, wrote to the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art asking if it would be interested in acquiring the research material relating to the piece ["The Dinner Party"].  They declined, finding the material of no interest. Today, Chicago’s archives are stored across three libraries: the Schlesinger Library of the History of Women in America, which is part of Harvard University; the National Museum of Women in the Arts; and Penn State University.  She is also working with these institutions to build a digital portal of her complete oeuvre, which she plans to unveil later this year.

COMMENT

     It always makes a good story when a library turns down material that turns out to be historically important.

Wednesday, July 17, 2019

Selling Treasure Chest of Black History

Julie Bosman, "Selling Treasure Chest of Black History: The Auction of Ebony and Jet Magazines' Photo Archive Has Scholars Worried," New York Times, July 17, 2019, p. B4-5.

     "It keeps me up at night, thinking about the future of this archive," said Tiffany M. Gill, associate professor of Africana studies and history and the University of Delaware.  "You can't really tell the story of black life in the 20th century without these images from the Johnson archive.  So it's important that whatever happens in this auction, that these images are preserved and made available to scholars, art lovers and everyday folks."
      Several museums have expressed interest, and the obvious candidates are the Schomburg Center from Research in Black Culture, part of the New York Public Library; The National Museum of African-American History and Culture in Washington, and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.
     Another possibility that is feared by scholars: A private collector buys the archive and stashes it away. 

COMMENT

    The photo archives from Jet and Ebony document a cultural history of African Americans in the U.S., but the like many other print periodicals, these once-popular magazines are victims of the Internet.  The photographic archives are set to be auctioned to whomever can pay for them.  That is likely to be one of the world's billionaires, but it's impossible to say whether they will be friend or foe to the interests of scholars.  On the other hand, if a library or museum buys them it will open up a whole new world of images; if a private buyer gets them they may be off-limits.

      Libraries, in other words, are a kind of public space in more ways than one.  It's not just the physical space but the information space where things like these photographs can be made accessible to the public.  One frequent library story is about finding hidden treasure in dusty boxes.  These photos no doubt contain such treasure if anyone is ever allowed to go looking for it.

Monday, July 15, 2019

Vivian Perlis Dies at 91

Anthony Tommasini, "Vivian Perlis Dies at 91: Oral History Project Captured Music's Giants," New York Times, (Obituaries) July 15, 2019, p. B7
     Ms. Perlis came to run the project accidentally, after taking a job as a research librarian at the Yale School of Music in 1967.  She had become involved there with the library's extensive Charles Ives collection and one day she made a visit to New York City to pick up some additional materials donated by Julian Myrick, who had been a pattern with Ives in an insurance business.
     Thinking that he might have some recollections to share, Ms. Perlis brought along a portable tape recorder
...
     She became a harpist with the New Haven Symphony while working the library job at Yale that led to her founding the oral history project.
     For years Ms. Perlis essentially had to secure funding for the project on her own. The Yale School of Music provided office space and work-study students to assist with the endless task of transcribing interviews. But she often felt "like and orphan," she said, as she labored in her basement headquarters.
...
From the start Ms. Perlis buttressed the collection with existing recorded interviews acquired from radio stations and historians, building it into one of the most extensive oral history archives in America. 
COMMENT

     This obituary makes me happy and sad at the same time.  In the 1960's Ms. Perlis wanted to do a Ph.D in musicology but Columbia University refused to give her the flexibility to take care of her kids.  Instead she became a pink-collar academic librarian and  got to do the project of her dreams collecting oral history from famous musicians, albeit with no professional recognition and almost no institutional support. The the library gave her space in the basement with no air conditioning while PhD musicologists derided her collection as "pipsqueak stuff."  I can only imagine how much her librarian colleagues must have resented her getting to spend time on her pet project that nobody cared about.  Until somebody did care, that is. 

    This tale is all too familiar in the world of academic libraries.  Administration actively discourages librarians from "niche" work that seems out of line with organizational priorities.  Yet that often turns out to produce the most unique and most valuable collections.  In this case the librarian built a collection worthy of an obituary in the New York Times.  I will bet the the people who tried to shut her down never accomplished anything even half as notable. 

     

Sunday, March 31, 2019

Genevive Oswald [Obituary]

Marina Harss, "Genevivie Oswald, Innovative and Eclectic Dance Archivist, Dies at 97," New York Times, March 31, 2019, p. 25.

      In 1944, armed with a fresh undergraduate degree in music, Me. Oswald came to New York to study singing. At first she supported herself with a job selling train tickets at the old Penn Station, but before long she was working at the New York Public Library.
     Ms Oswald began by cataloging the 375 dance-related books and three dozen boxes of dance programs and clippings then held in the music division at the library's main building on 42nd Street.
     She became curator when the dance collection was formally established in 1947, presiding over a room on the library's ground floor.  In 1965 the dance collection moved into a new branch of the library at Lincoln Center.  This year it celebrates there 75th anniversary of the beginning of that tiny collection, which had grown to more than 41,000 books, 26,000 films, 2,700 prints and many other things.
.....
     Sometimes those records become a vital  link to a tradition in peril.  As the dance historian Lynn Matluck Brooks described in a 2011 essay for Dance Chronicle about Ms. Oswald, recordings made of the Classical Khmer Ballet of Cambodia at there Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1971 later became teaching tools for Cambodian dance teachers who had survived the massacres of the Khmer Rouge. The regime had attempted to obliterate all traces of Khmer culture, including dance.


COMMENT
     An obituary for a New York Public Library archivist shows how the methodical, longitudinal work of librarians and archivists can have a profound impact on community.  A small archival collection started 75 years ago has become one of the world's major dance archives through years of collecting and preservation.  It strikes me that it would be difficult to sell this kind of specialized project to contemporary library administrators who would no doubt find it too expensive, too specialized, too space-intensive and insufficiently "cutting edge" (i.e. technological). Yet I've used this collection myself to write about dance for  Catalyst magazine  in Salt Lake City, Utah.

     The deep cultural importance of the dance archive is captured in the story of how the collection facilitated cultural restoration in Cambodia after a horrific genocide.  It's hard to overstate how important it must have been for survivors to know that these dances had survived. It's an extreme instance of how library collections can serve to support community resilience by preserving a record of how things were before the disaster.

    The obituary describes the problems of preserving the ephemeral art of dance which depends on years of specialized training and disappears into the moment.  Gegi Oswald said that she was "collecting around the absence of the dance itself."[1]   Perhaps in a way, that is not so different from other library and archival collecting where the historical moment recedes into memory leaving only traces behind.

    I have long thought that libraries should give all librarians at least a little money and space to collect their own obsessions.  Who knows what one person might be seeing that everyone else has missed?

[1]See, An Effort to Save the Masterpieces of Modern Dance

 
   

.  
       

Saturday, March 2, 2019

The Other Mozart

Kylee Ehmann, "The Other Mozart," (Entertainment Picks), Feb. 23-27, 2019). Salt Lake City Weekly, Feb. 21, 2019, p. 16.

Contained within an opulent dress that covers the entire stage and balancing a towering hairstyle, Milo recreates Nannerl's isolation world, in which her genius was devalued because of her gender.  "Most female composers from the past have been forgotten, their music lost or gathering dust in libraries," Milo says.  "We will never know what could have been, and this is our loss."

COMMENT

    Again, the dusty library.  Sylvia Milo (playwright, actor and producer of a one-woman show about the older sister of Wolfgang Amadeus), cites metaphorical library dust to say that music by women composers is not being performed, but the dust also offers a bit of hope. The article says, "we know she continued to create music, though none of it survives."  Imagine the excitement if someone actually were to discover Nannerl's music in some dusty library.

  Lost manuscripts by W.A. Mozart still turn up occasionally. In 2014, a lost manuscript of Mozart's Sonata in A Major turned up at the National Szechenyi Library in Budapest, Hungary. In 2008 librarians in Nantes, France found a Mozart manuscript while they were cataloging the archives.  There really are some treasures hidden away gathering dust!



 

Thursday, February 7, 2019

One Elf's Path

Jenifer Schuessler, "One Elf's Path: Turning Satire Into a Legacy, New York Times, p. C1.
     Now [David] Sedaris has sold his archive to the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale, where his manuscripts, drafts, notebooks and other scraps will be part of the library's rich holdings relating to social satire from the likes of Gary Trudeau Saul Steinberg, David Rakoff and Mark Twain.
     The more than 150 volumes of Sedaris's complete diaries will be off limits during his lifetime. (A second volume of excerpts is in the works.) But the archive contains some three dozen other handmade books from his prefame years that hint at their visual and tactile richness.
      Timothy G. Young, curator of modern books and manuscripts at the Beinecke, said the archive showed the years of exploration it took Sedaris to become an "overnight" sensation. 

COMMENT 

     Before I started to collect library stories I did not realize how newsworthy archival acquisition can be.  If I were not reading through the limited perspective of librarianship, I would have read this article as primarily a biographical story about the writer David Sedaris and  his career as a humorist.  In library terms, though, the story is about archiving, and the newspaper article itself becomes part of the biographical archive. 

  The particular collection includes juvenilia.  Apparently as a second grader Sedaris was already showing the talent that would lead to his future career.  Between 1984 and 1990, he made unpublished art books for his friends.  He didn't get famous until he  broadcast "The SantaLand Diaries" in 1992.

   Fame, in other words, is what specifically attracted the archivists since the Beinecke is collecting around a theme of social satire.  It's not always obvious how or where to place limits on what libraries collect.   How do you know now what will be valuable to the future?   In different ways, journalists, librarians, and authors are all engaged in a process of  creating a historical  narrative.  The "manuscripts, drafts, notebooks, and other scraps" that were said in this collection would just be  debris in dusty boxes unless  someone thinks they are  interesting enough to put them into a story. 
     

Friday, February 1, 2019

Lee Israel, a Writer Proudest of Her Literary Forgeries, Dies at 75

Margalit Fox, "Lee Israel, a Writer Proudest of Her Literary Forgeries, Dies at 75," New York Times,  Jan 27, 2015, [online].
     Of her body of forgeries, Ms. Israel wrote in her memoir, “I still consider the letters to be my best work.”
     By dealing in typed letters, Ms. Israel was obliged to copy only the signatures. This she did by tracing over the originals, first covertly in libraries and later in her Upper West Side apartment, originals in hand. For over time, after whispers among dealers about the authenticity of her wares made composing new letters too risky, Ms. Israel had begun stealing actual letters from archives — including the New York Public Library and the libraries of Columbia, Yale, Harvard and Princeton Universities — and leaving duplicates in their place.
     “She would go into these libraries and copy the letter in question, go back to her home and fake as best she could the stationery and fake the signature, and then she’d go back to the institution and make the switch,” David H. Lowenherz, a New York autograph dealer, said on Monday. “So she was actually not selling fakes: She was substituting the fakes and selling the originals.”
COMMENT

    Obviously, Lee Israel (1939-2014) shouldn't have been stealing library books, but her inspiration to crime was remarkably similar to the motivation of other researchers who love to poke around in the manuscript archives. In the movie Can You Ever Forgive Me (2018) Lee Israel (played by Melissa McCarthy who deserves an Oscar) is shown in a library doing research for a biography of Fanny Brice when a letter signed by Brice herself falls out of a book. As she gawks at the letter, McCarthy perfectly captures that sense of spooky connection with history that so many researchers describe.  She shows the letter to a buyer who has the same awestruck reaction.  The star-struck reaction leads Israel into a life of crime, in part because she is so deeply pleased that her own writing is good enough to be mistaken for the words of other more famous writers.

     I have heard librarians claim that that format doesn't matter as long as the information content is the same.  Israel's facsimiles had the same textual content as the letters she stole, but clearly they aren't the same.  It's not just the chemistry of the physical object [1].  The objects that Israel stole were valuable specifically because they have that spooky connection to history, an intangible thing that  is mentioned again and again as a transformational library experience. It seems that it even transformed the library experience of literary forger Lee Israel.

[1] Hidden Traces.
   

     

Monday, January 28, 2019

When Puccini Came, Saw and Conquered

Michael Cooper, "When Puccini Came, Saw and Conquered," New York Times, November 18, 2018, p. AR15-.

The Met Opera's archives contain a copy of the contact that brought Puccini back to New York in 1910 for the premier of "la Fanciulla del West." To promises of pay, expenses, and room and board, one more is added in handwriting: "cars." 

COMMENT

   This article is full of references to  historical documents-- letters, news reports and playbills that must have been found at a library or archive. However, the writer makes only direct reference to the research method in describing a handwritten note on a contract in the Metropolitan Opera archives. That single word "cars" is one of those spooky contacts with history because it affirms an impression of Puccini's personality.  It's clear that the writer  found the discovery of this hidden treasure so thrilling that he couldn't resist including it in the final article.

     The article also mentions that Puccini attended a shocking production of Richard Strauss' opera Salome based on the Oscar Wilde text. When we read about historical people getting all hot under the collar about some opera we think they were just being prudish and old-fashioned. I saw it at the Utah Opera a few years ago. It's really shocking.  Seriously.  Prudish people will not like it one bit. I am still surprised that Utah opera fans didn't riot.



Sunday, December 30, 2018

Armstrong's Life as He Saw It

Giovanni Russonello, "Armstrong's Life, as He Saw It: The Musician Kept an Archive of Materials to Document His Career.  Now the Collection has been Digitized," New York Times,  November18, 2018, p. AR1-.

     Behind his blistering trumpet solos, revolutionary vocal improvising and exuberant stage persona, how did Louis Armstrong see himself? What was it like to be the first pop virtuoso of the recorded era-- the man whose earliest releases set the tone for America's love affair with modern black music, and who went on to become one of history's most famous entertainers?
     Those questions aren't rhetorical.  There's actually a deep well of resources on hand to help answer them.  For his entire adult life, away from the spotlight, Armstrong amassed a huge trove of writings, recordings and artifacts. But until this month you would have had to travel far into central Queens to find them.  Now anyone can access them. Thanks to a $3 million grant from the Fund II Foundation-- run by Robert F. Smith, the wealthiest African-American-- the Louis Armstrong House Museum has digitized the entire collection he left behind and made it available to the public at collections.louisarmstronghouse.org

COMMENT

     Ricky Riccardo, the archivist at the Louis Armstrong House Museum, makes it sound like the famous musician Louis Armstrong had a bit of librarian in him: "Posterity drove him to write manuscripts and are tapes and catalog everything," he says adding that Armstrong wanted to be in control of his own story.

     Armstrong's single-focus collecting strategy is one that would be hard for librarians to follow yet it created an important archive well worth digitizing.  If a library had, say, a Louis Armstrong special collection it probably wouldn't get a $3 million budget. There is always a kind of guessing game about how to spend the budget, and librarians sometimes guess wrong. It's much easier to look backwards in time to know what turned out to be important.

    Still, the value of hyper-focused collections like this makes me wonder if libraries could create them deliberately.  If I were Queen,  I might give each librarian a "passion project" budget each year to spend on their own collection choices, whatever that happened to be. I think that the result would be worth the money.  A diversity of obsessions represented on the shelves would inevitably improve the "long tail" information resource for all library users everywhere [1].

     Digitization of this particular collection is a gift, but at the same time it's a little bit sad to think of the people who won't be making the pilgrimage into central Queens to stand in Armstrong's house and handle his  things.   Several library anecdotes [2] report a spooky sense of connection that comes from by handling objects from the past.  I have yet to find a story that relates a similarly powerful experience from viewing an online image.

[1] Brunvand, Amy. "Missing Information and the Long Tail: How Distributed Collection Development Assures the Continued Relevance of Libraries.Against the Grain 18, no. 4 (2013): 10.

[2] [[there.]] ;  Inside the List; etc...
 
 

   

Thursday, December 13, 2018

Inside the List

Tina Jordan, "Inside the List," New York Times Book Review, Oct. 7, 2018, p. 24.
     In the summer of 1994, not long after finishing her dissertation, [1] Deborah Harkness stumbled on a long-lost manuscript in the stacks of Oxford's centuries-old Bodleian Library. "It once belonged to Queen Elizabeth I's astrologer, the mathematician and alchemist John Dee [2]. It was called 'The Book of Soyga,' and he prized it above all of his other texts. I found it, hiding in plain sight, among the Bodley manuscripts," [3] she says. Harkness -- now a historian of science and medicine at the University of California -- wove the experience into her best-selling All Souls trilogy, a rich, sprawling historical fantasy about a vampire scientist, a history professor who discovers she's a witch and an enchanted manuscript a the Bodleian. 
 COMMENT

     On Oct. 7, 2018 Harkness' novel Time's Convert was #3 on the New York Times Print/Hardcover Fiction Bestseller List. Her inspiration was a manuscript that people knew about, but up until 1994 nobody knew of any extant copy.  I can only imagine the thrill!  Finding and and holding that piece of history inspired the invention of an  entire fictional world populated by supernatural characters. 


    The most exciting thing I ever found in the stacks was a set of uncatalogued Alta Avalanche Studies recording early experiments that led to modern avalanche control techniques.  It's not nearly as exciting as finding The Book of Soyga, but I still remember the astonishment and the prickle of recognition when I realized that I was holding piece of history. I have never felt anything like that spooky sense of touching history looking at a digital reproduction. I believe that a digitized copy of The Book of Soyga might have had equal utility for writing a PhD thesis, but I doubt it would have ever inspired a series of bestselling novels. 


[1] Deborah E. Harkness, “The Scientific Reformation: John Dee and the Restitution of Nature” (Unpublished PhD Thesis, University of California Davis, 1994).
[2] Deborah E. Harkness. John Dee's Conversations with Angels: Cabala, Alchemy, and the End of Nature. Cambridge University Press, 1999.
[3] The Bodley Manuscripts are a miscellaneous collection of manuscripts formed at Oxford University in 1761.