Robert Bridges scrapbooks volume three
Just a brief reminder to get your ballot in and a preview of sorts of coming attractions.
By coincidence (or is it?) some recently cataloged scrapbooks from the Pacific Northwest Collection have provided a window into the frequently rough and tumble world of early twentieth century Seattle politics.
Stay tuned for some of these stories, the possible appearance of yet another new blogger, as well as the return of a familiar voice.
Apologies. Amidst all the hubbub and tears over the past week, we completely neglected to announce that the Special Collections Division will be operating on a reduced public service schedule during the long interim. The reading room will be open Monday-Friday, from 1:00-4:45 pm through September 29, 2009. More details about hours are available on the UW Libraries Web site.
One of the things that I miss about living in the Yakima Valley is the smell of hops. I grew up in an agricultural area in California; for me, there is nothing as wonderful as being out in a grove of fruit trees or a crop field. So if you haven’t ever smelled hops, visit a brewery or go explore Toppenish. If you drive out into the hop-vine fields, be sure to roll your windows up to keep the dust out, but do stop, get out, and indulge in the fragrance.
Here is an excerpt from Hop Culture by Ezra Meeker (1830-1928) about growing hops in Puyallup:
“If ever there was a cause for anxiety the hop-growers of Washington Territory have it when harvest time approaches. Most of the picking is done by Indians, many of whom come long distances, some of them three hundred miles in their canoes, bringing with them their dogs and their cats, their chickens and thumpery as through they had come to ’stay all summer.’ The question of questions with the hop-growers, will enough come? if [sic]so, will they arrive in time? “
Come see the book for yourself. It has beautiful illustrations and diagrams.
The sad news of the Oregon Historical Society’s Research Library has been generating much buzz in the blogosphere (archives and otherwise) — for a representative example, go here. Must we really join Facebook now to show our support?
It will be interesting to see if this kind of social pressure is effective.
Gaylord Brothers Archival 2009 catalog
I was finding myself mesmerized by the cover of the 2009 Gaylord Archival catalog earlier this morning (the digital thumbnail does not do it justice).
If “food porn” can have its own Flickr group, etc., etc., why not archives?
That picture just makes me want to go out and encapsulate something.
Not a good idea.
We are about to embark on the unknown. Next week we will launch a project to begin to create catalog records for the Pacific Northwest Collection’s scrapbook collection. The momentum for this project really began when local hero, Mark Carlson, was able to convert the data from the html table listing the (mainly uncataloged) scrapbooks on the current Special Collections Web site into MARC format.
Next week, new iSchool volunteer for Special Collections, Mahrya Carncross, will begin to take these very basic (and sometimes problematic records) and start the painstaking (but fun?) process of turning all of them (approximately 170) into acceptable minimal level records to be loaded into WorldCat. As time allows, we hope that she also will be able to fully catalog selected scrapbooks as well. (I’ll try to explain the distinction some other time to all of you non-catalogers out there). Which means you shouldn’t be running into stuff like this:
040 WAU ǂc WAU
090 ǂb
049 WAUW
1102 Salmon
24510Salmon scrapbook, ǂf 1914.
300 1 ǂf volume
5202 Clippings and menus about salmon.
506 Open to all users.
540 Some restrictions may exist on duplication, quotation, or publication. Contact the repository for details.
655 0Scrapbooks.
9451 ǂl scsbf ǂt 7 ǂs – ǂy In process record; contact repository for up-to-date information
I know I’m intrigued! We hope to be able to share some of our sure-to-be-exciting discoveries in the scrapbook collection in the coming months.
P.S. The image above does not come from the Pacific Northwest Collection (and it could depict an Atlantic salmon for all I know). Just a shout out to our friends back East. It is a digital image of a cigarette card in the George Arents Collection, New York Public Library from the always useful and easy-to-search NYPL Digital Gallery. Full info here.
Image credit: The Salmon, Arents cigarette cards 869, NYPL Digital Gallery Image ID 1570301
As recently reported in the New York Times, recordings of the American poet, Theodore Roethke, reading selected works are among the latest additions to The Poetry Archive. This project to make historic recordings of poetry read by their authors freely available to the public was initiated by U.K. Poet Laureate Andrew Motion in 2005. With the cooperation of the Poetry Foundation, the collection has expanded its scope to include American authors.
The Special Collections Division holds many materials relating to Roethke (who was a member of the University of Washington faculty from 1947-1963), including his papers. The Roethke papers are described in a rather complicated finding aid, which you can begin to work your way through here. Although the collection contains many photographs, this image is from our nearby neighbor, the Museum of History and Industry. It shows Roethke (right) with Seattle-born musician and composer, Armand Russell in an undisclosed location. Russell, who trained at the University of Washington, played double bass with the Seattle Symphony and several other orchestras, before joining the faculty of the University of Hawaii in 1961.
Image credit: Armand Russell and Theodore Roethke, Seattle, 1955. Seattle Post-Intelligencer Collection, Museum of History & Industry, Seattle, Image No. 1986.5.41028.
I don’t wish to frighten small children, but I just wanted to let you know that the Pacific Northwest Collection of the Special Collections Division is still the only place you will find a copy of this hot biography in the University of Washington Libraries.
I confess. The current image on this blog’s banner is not technically from the Pacific Northwest Collection, but it does come from the Special Collections Division. It is part of a digitized image of the cover of a souvenir menu celebrating the 1940 golden anniversary of the legendary Seattle department store, Frederick & Nelson. That store, alas, closed its doors for good in 1992 (although the downtown Seattle building remains as the Nordstrom flagship location), but its memories linger on in the Special Collections Division.
You can can find this particular menu and 739 other ones in the Historical Menu Collection (PH Coll 617) by perusing the online finding aid. A limited selection of images of other menus from this collection also is available through the Special Collections portion of the UW Libraries Digital Collections site.
In a perfect world, you also would find a corresponding record for the collection in the libraries’ online catalog, but there’s another one to add to the cataloger’s to-do list.
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