Category Archives: Libraries

Thursday notes

12 Thursday Sep 2013

Posted by in Genealogy, Historiography, Libraries

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It has been a long week; the semester at the college where I work is now in full swing. My favorites are the ones just out high school who have zero idea of what is going on around them or what they should do. I see many shades of myself at that age in them.

I just got back from a professional development event at The Center for Jewish History in the city. It was about how archivists and librarians can use modern research methods in their own scholarship and in the services they provide to others. One of my things for this academic year is to think holistically in all my endeavors. I want my volunteering with the Park Service to incorporate research into the book I am writing. Likewise, the geneaology will help me learn more about both digital storage and retrieval systems, along with what I have been learning abut my family history. I am thinking about joining a genealogy society to better learn the in-and-outs of the field. I know a reasonable amount about census and military records already, but I want to become more knowledgable about their provenance and the hows and whys of their usage over time. The online genealogy services are great. It is a wonderful time to be doing such research, and I have no desire to go back. Still, we lose a little something just looking at, say, an old birth certificate online, divorced from its context in a county courthouse where it sat for decades. The accessibility is a huge plus, but a little of the magic is gone on the computer screen.

Speaking of genealogy, I scored a major coup yesterday when an aunt mailed me a set of old family trees written out by her uncle decades ago. I spent a good part of last night comparing his and my work, and was glad to see that we matched almost exactly. Looking at the pencil marks he made all those years ago, I could not help but be impressed by his diligence. He managed to go back 4-5 generations in some cases. It was humbling to think of how he did it. We don’t give the people of the past as much credit as they deserve.

The Library Lawn

16 Sunday Jun 2013

Posted by in Governors Island, Libraries

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Governors Island Library Lawn, 16 June 2013

Governors Island Library Lawn, 16 June 2013

I did my first interpretive tour of the season at Governors Island this morning. It always feels good to have the first one of the year under one’s belt. Heading to Castle Williams for my shift after lunch, I happened upon something new to the island this season: an outdoor library. Being a librarian myself, I of course had to check it out. The Library Lawn, it turns out, is a coordinated effort of the Uni Project. All three library systems in New York City–New York Public, Queensborough, and Brooklyn Public–are participating in the summer-long effort. People can get library cards, enjoy programming, and other activities. As you can see from the picture above, people are enjoying this pretty cool endeavor. Note Castle Williams and New York Harbor in the upper left hand corner.

The only negative of being in Cooperstown last weekend was that I missed the demolition of Building 877. Everyone was talking about it this week. A friend of mine woke early last Sunday and rode her bike to Red Hook to watch from Brooklyn. Here is some footage I found on Youtube. Enjoy.

If Stonewall and Ulysses had internet…

16 Tuesday Oct 2012

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I’m not sure what to make of this, but…

The Library of Congress announced Tuesday that it will launch [a] blog [of] diaries, letters and other writings pulled from its collection. It will chronicle the sacrifices and accomplishments of both North and South to accompany a major new exhibit, “The Civil War in America.”

The idea is for historical figures to “blog” the Civil War in their own voices through their own correspondence from the period. This will either be really good or really cheesy. I’m looking forward to seeing what they do with this. The potential is certainly there; the LOC holds a significant amount of source material to pull from to say the least. November 12 is the opening date for the exhibit and website.

(image/American Treasure’s Gallery, Andreas Praefcke)

 

 

From the trenches of the National Archives

12 Friday Oct 2012

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Organizing and cataloging archive and library holdings is a time consuming and laborious task. This is something that is lost on many people when they sit down and read a history book. Those primary sources used by researchers didn’t catalog, file and box themselves. The National Archives recently created this video honoring 295 volunteers who each donated at least 100 hours to the NA. All told these individuals contributed over 42,000 hours to various projects.

Remembering the Emancipation Proclamation

23 Sunday Sep 2012

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Today was a special day. The wife and I went to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture to see President Abraham Lincoln’s handwritten draft of the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. Lincoln released the document 150 years ago yesterday, 22 September 1862, five days after the fighting ended at Antietam.

The Schomburg, part of the New York Public Library, is located between 135th/136th Streets and Lenox Avenue. The weather today could not be beat and there many people out enjoying the day.

After a short film narrated by Morgan Freeman one enters the library’s museum space on the second floor.

The exhibit was just the right size, small with a focus on the proclamation itself. There was some signage such as this that put emancipation into context, before the war, during Reconstruction, through the Civil Rights Movement, and today. A nice touch were portions of a draft of a speech given by Martin Luther King Jr. to the New York Civil War Centennial Commission’s Emancipation Proclamation Observance on September 12, 1962. It is not a coincidence, as some have made it out to be, that the Civil War centennial and Civil Rights movement overlapped. Less than a year after commemorating the president’s proclamation, King spoke at the Lincoln Memorial during the March on Washington.

Abraham Lincoln’s handwritten Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation

Lincoln donated the above document to the U.S. Sanitary Commission in 1864 to be raffled off for the Union war effort. It is now owned by the New York State Library. Thankfully it was not lost in the Great Capitol Fire in Albany in 1911.

Also on display was this is an original copy of the proclamation, owned by the National Archives. Because flash photography was not permitted some of the images from our cellphones are grainy. The Emancipation Proclamation was written by Lincoln the Lawyer and does not contain the literary flourishes one finds in the Gettysburg Address and Second Inaugural.

The security guards told us they were getting big crowds for the four day event held at the uptown library. It is always good seeing parents bringing children to such events. The proclamation will travel to seven other New York cities this fall. I cannot tell you how special it was to witness this.

When in Harlem, go to Sylvia’s

Book now.

05 Wednesday Sep 2012

Posted by in Civil War sesquicentennial, Libraries

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The sesquicentennial events of the Maryland Campaign are now underway. I know that the interpretive ranger staff at Antietam, among other places, has been preparing for months. I would love to be in Maryland for anniversary weekend but alas that will not be feasible. Still, the campaign had obvious consequences for the country and there are many events marking the occasion accordingly. The culmination of the military campaign was of course Lincoln’s release of the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation on September 22, 1862. It had slipped under my radar but thankfully the Hayfoot noticed that the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture is having a four-day-only exhibit to mark the occasion. The First Step to Freedom will be showing in the Harlem library’s exhibit hall from September 21-24. There have been several excellent exhibition marking the proclamation over the past year but this one is special: it includes the last surviving draft of the document written in President’s Lincoln hand. The exhibition is free but tickets are required. We just booked ours a few minutes ago.

Try to make this one if you can. And Sylvia’s is just down the street. What are you doing for the sesquicentennial?

(image/President Lincoln writing the Proclamation of Freedom, David Gilmour Blythe)

Checking out a museum, literally

13 Monday Aug 2012

Posted by in Libraries, Museums

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I have been a librarian for fifteen years now. In fact I received  my Masters in Library Science fifteen years ago this week. I graduated in August 1997, interviewed at the public library in New York in September, and moved to to the city that October. The profession has changed more in the past decade and a half than at any time in its history. I still struggle  to grasp some of these changes, particularly  the rapidly changing information technology that is now part and parcel of the profession. If you told me in the late 90s that someday I would be able to check out and download a book to something called an ereader–from the comfort of my living room–I may or may not have believed it. It is a fascinating field in which I learn something every day. Libraries in New Jersey have embarked on a project to make it easier for people to visit area museums, even museums outside the Garden State. They are buying memberships to cultural institutions and making admission available to patrons for checkout.

(Image/William Merritt Chase’s The Tamborine Girl, Montclair Art Museum)

Connecting the dots via art

29 Friday Jun 2012

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The Hayfoot and I returned from Gettysburg this afternoon. The last few years we have visited the week prior to the battle anniversary and it is always a special and meaningful experience. I intend to write more about it in the days and weeks to come. I intentionally left my laptop at home and have quite a bit in my inbox to catch up on as you might imagine. One thing that caught my eye was this lesson plan contest from the people at The Civil War in Art initiative. Yes, summer is now in full swing but teachers might find this an interesting and informative project to work on in preparation for to upcoming school year. For those unfamiliar with the website, The Civil War in Art: Teaching & Learning through Chicago Collections is a collaborative effort of various cultural institutions in the Windy City focusing on art and the Civil war. The Terra Foundation for American Art sponsored the project beginning in 2010 and has put a great deal of thought into the undertaking. Some of Chicago’s leading cultural institutions are taking part. Using paintings, photography, sculpture, and other media in the classroom is an extraordinarily helpful way to teach and learn history, and the The Civil War in Art has a great deal of material already on its website that will help teachers of all grade levels. Their website is quite thought-provoking and worth checking out for general readers as well. The deadline is August 15, 2012.

(image/Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter, Alexander Gardener)

A reading copy

22 Tuesday May 2012

Posted by in Libraries, Media and Web 2.0

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This past Saturday I was at the public library doing some preliminary research for a longterm project I am about to undertake. I was taking notes from a regimental history published in the early years of the twentieth century. (Aside: Though many were indeed released by honest to goodness publishing houses, these tomes are the essence of vanity publications; read any one and you would swear that particular regiment saved the Union single-handedly and that its colonel was the bravest, most noble individual ever to put on his country’s uniform.) I was taking copious notes and decided that if I were to for on this project properly I would need my own copy. At about 7:00 pm that night I ordered it from Amazon. It was a print-on-demand title, offered in this case from BookPrep. It is a so called reading copy, a fresh printing of a rare book to be used for highlighting and writing in the margins.  Sure enough, the book says on the back flap that it was printed on Saturday May 19. The next day, of course, was Sunday. Well, today is Tuesday and because of my Amazon Prime my book was waiting for me at the front door. So, I ordered the title late on Saturday; it was printed that day and shipped free via two day air. Here it is next to me on my desk as I write this. I tell the story not to flog the products and services of any organization, but to demonstrate how quickly things can be disseminated in today’s world. Incredible.

(image of rare books/F.O. Morris)

The Roosevelt Ride

05 Saturday May 2012

Posted by in Libraries, National Park Service

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Hyde Park, Summer 2011

Last summer I posted about our day trip to Hyde Park. The best way to do this if you are going from the city is to take the 8:45 from Grand Central to Poughkeepsie and get the Roosevelt Ride to the Library and Presidential Museum.  As of May 1 the free shuttle service is again up and running for the 2012 season. When we were there last year there was a fair amount of renovation taking place, which I assume is funded by the stimulus money funneled into the economy over the past few years. The Hayfoot and I will probably skip this year, having gone each of the last two. We will probably go back in 2013 when the changes are complete. Still, there is much to see and if you have never been we highly recommend. The site gets about 100,000 visitors a year, many of whom are “leaf chasers,” folks who visit the Hudson Valley each fall to witness the fall foliage. The Roosevelts and their generation have receded into history and every year there are fewer and fewer visitors who have that viseceral attachment to FDR that so many people had even into the 1970s and 80s . I spoke to one of the rangers about this very thing. This is one of the special places in 20th century American–world–history. Ed Rothstein of the New York Times filed this report from his trip earlier this week.

Summer’s almost here.