Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Today was the last day of my internship.

I spent most of it working on a fun project--someone from England emailed us to offer more information about some images shot by Cushman in London in the 1960s, and I worked on verifying the information using Google and Google Earth. I'm particularly interested in London because I spent a semester there as an undergraduate in 2005. I loved seeing how the photographs taken by Cushman compared to more recent images. This was one of my favorite comparisons. In 1961, Cushman took these pictures of St. John's church in Smith Square that had been ruined by bombing and was not yet repaired:

The original can be found on the Indiana University Cushman site, here.

If you look carefully in the image above, you can see weeds growing through the church steps. The original can be found on the Indiana University Cushman site, here.

The church has since been restored as a concert hall. Here is an image of the church from Google Earth:


Since the trees are kind of in the way in that picture, here is another recent photograph of the building: http://www.essential-architecture.com/IMAGES/St_Johns_Concert_Hall.jpg

And here is the website for the church/concert hall: http://www.sjss.org.uk/

I also worked on some permission-to-publish forms.

Monday, April 26, 2010

I worked on more permission to publish forms today. One of the most interesting ones was for someone working for a Supreme Court Justice.

Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Today I worked on permission to publish forms for Cushman images and sent another patron information on the publication fees for Counts images. One of the permission to publish forms I worked on was one for some photographs of San Francisco taken by Cushman. This wasn't one of the images requested, but it was also taken in San Francisco at the same time as some of those that were on the form, and I enjoyed it:


You can find the original image on the Indiana University Cushman site, here.

Wednesday, April 14, 2010

I spent most of the day pulling and scanning sports negatives for the ongoing sports exhibit project. I also entered some more items into the accessions database.

Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Brad was out sick, so I didn't get to go back to the off-site storage facility today.

Instead, I worked on filling an order for images of the Forest Quad dorm. The requester had selected particular images, so I just had to pull the negatives and scan them. Once the images were scanned, Dina placed them on a website where the patron could download them.

I then entered some more items from the memorabilia cabinet into the accessions database.

Monday, April 12, 2010

Today we went to an off-site storage facility to prepare some of the films belonging to the University Archives for transfer to the ALF (the Auxiliary Library Facility). The off-site storage facility is actually in a converted bowling alley:


It's a very strange space. It's also used by Indiana University's Elizabeth Sage Historic Costume Collection, so there are mannequins strewn around the hallway leading to the film storage room. Some of them are whole, but there was also a garbage can full of arms and hands near the door. The room in which the films are stored is similar to a warehouse--a very large and open space filled with rows and rows of films in cases.

I worked on going through some of the films from WTIU, the Indiana University television station. Brad called the films I was going through "quads," although he wasn't sure why they were called that. After some Googling I thought maybe they were quadruplex videotape, but I'm not sure about that.

In any case, they were very large reels of film in cases, and I spent the day going through them and creating a list of the films. I looked at the labels on the cases and copied down any information about the content of the video and its date of creation. I then stuck a barcode next to this information on the sheet and an identical barcode on the case.

Most of the films I went through were on "Microcomputers," but there were also a significant number on "English Composition" and other miscellaneous topics. Most of them were from the 1970s.

Brad was also going through films, and he ran across some very odd labels. My favorite was the one that was apparently of an earthworm dissection.

Wednesday, April 7, 2010

I found out today that someone interested in Tad Shideler had left a comment on my blog last week, so I responded to that person with the information we have about him. Hopefully they will be able to assist us in locating living relatives of Shideler who might have photographs of him.

We also worked on gathering some information on a particular person for a visitor who is coming in at the end of the week. We pulled the clippings files, reference files, and photographs related to this person, and we printed out copies of some of the related finding aids.

We also located some negatives of the men's swimming team in the 1960s for an alum, and I scanned these images.

***

One of the most interesting requests we dealt with today allowed us to use the "Pering Letter." The requester needed an image of the first Bloomington courthouse, and the only image we have of it is a watercolor included in an interesting letter written by Cornelius Pering in Bloomington, Indiana to S. Edwards, Esq. in Somerset, England on August 27th, 1833. The letter is long and detailed--a double-spaced transcript of the letter runs to 19 pages--with lots of fascinating information about the United States in 1833 and Pering's impressions of it.

Near the beginning of the letter, Pering writes of the United States, "The more I see and know of its government, customs, manners and people, the more am I convinced that it will one day be (if it is not at present) the most powerful, the most prosperous, and the most happy community in the World. Some parts of it, it is true, particularly here in the West, look rude and uncivilized to those accustomed to the splendour of European cities; but if we do not see the magnificence, we look in vain for the sights of wretchedness, the squalid misery, and hopeless destitution which every where excite the commiserations of the sympathetic... Sixteen years ago the spot on which I am now writing was Indian Hunting Ground, an almost pathless Wilderness, an illimitable Forest, now the frontier settlements are four hundred miles west of this place."

Later parts of the letter include more detailed information, but those were some of his general first impressions.

Here is an image of the letter:


One of the most fascinating features of the letter is the watercolor views of Bloomington and other locations in the United States in the center. You can also see that the paper has been written on both horizontally and vertically in order to include as much information in as small a space as possible (an approach Brad indicated was necessitated by the high cost of sending mail to England from the United States at the time). This certainly conserves space, but it makes the letter a bit difficult to read. You can see a close-up of some of the writing here:


And here is a close-up of the watercolors in the center of the letter (clicking on the image will allow you to see a slightly bigger version):


The image at the top includes the first courthouse. Pering writes that "The upper view is in the center of this town, the middle building is the Court House where all the judicial business is transacted. On the left of it is the jail; on the right the Clerk's office and County Library. The white weather-boarded house on the right forms the angle of the street."

The center image includes the first buildings of Indiana University. Pering writes that "The New College is the center picture, which is not yet finished in the interior, the building on the left is the one at present occupied. It will remind you more of Mr. Rister's Factory than the princely halls of Oxford and Cambridge, but I have no doubt as good scholars will be turned out from that humble Edifice as from the more celebrated seats of learning in England. The President and Professors are men of great talent and would do honor to any University in the World... the admission fees are only $15 a year, which it is expected, will be soon altogether dispensed with, as the College is richly endowed by the State."

The whole transcript looks really interesting... I'm hoping to get a chance to read through the whole thing this weekend.

Tuesday, April 6, 2010

Today, we continued trying to locate living relatives of Thaddeus "Tad" R. Shideler. The Social Security Death Index indicated that a Tad Shideler had died in June 1966 in Winston-Salem in Forsyth county in North Carolina. The Social Security Death Index gave a slightly different birth date than the registrar's records, but we thought it was likely to be the same person.

We then searched the white pages of North Carolina online and located one person named Shideler in the state. We sent him an email with some of the information we had on Tad Shideler and asked him whether he was related to this athlete.

***

We also received and worked on filling a request for some images by Will Counts. This request was a little unusual in that it included some images the requester already had which he or she thought might have been taken by Will Counts. Since the requester wasn't sure, they asked us whether we could determine whether or not they were Counts images.

***

Another interesting request we dealt with was related to the renovation of the Forest Quad residence hall. The hall was originally built in 1966, and the university is hoping to have images of other significant events at the university during that year on the walls of the building. We looked through the 1966 and 1967 yearbooks and alumni magazines to find such events and milestones. Some of the things we suggested included other university buildings which were constructed and performers and politicians who visited campus during that year.

Wednesday, March 31, 2010

This morning, we tried to identify the living descendants of Thaddeus (Tad) Shideler, a track and field athlete from Indiana University who competed in the 1904 Olympics, so we could try to get a better photograph of him than the one we had for the sports exhibit.

We began by calling the registrar, who told us that Shideler has only attended Indiana University during the spring semester of 1904. We also learned that he attended Indianapolis Manual Training High School and died on June 2, 1966. We then called the Alumni Association to try to learn about his descendants, but there was no one there.

We checked the alumni magazines from 1966 in the hope of finding an obituary for Shideler, but we only found a brief death notice that again gave his death date as June 2, 1966 and seemed to indicate that he had died in Indianapolis. We checked the microfilm of the Indianapolis News and the Indianapolis Star at the Herman B. Wells Library for an obituary for Shideler, but didn't find anything.

We tried searching for Shideler in some newspaper databases and with Google, and, while we didn't find any obituaries in the databases, we did find a different date for Shideler's death on several websites--June 22, 1966. We also found him on the Phi Gamma Delta website. We checked issues of the Indianapolis News and the Indianapolis Star again around the new death date, but still didn't find an obituary. We also contacted the national headquarters of Phi Gamma Delta, but they didn't have any information on Tad Shideler. They did, however, have some information on another man named Shideler who was a member of this fraternity. We hoped he might be related to the Shideler we were looking for, but this was as far as we got today.

***

We also received another email from someone in Ireland identifying two more of the Cushman photographs.

One of them was this one, which the person identified as Baldoyle Racecourse, which as since been torn down and redeveloped. We confirmed his identification with Google Earth and a few websites.

This person also identified the general location of this image, which we confirmed using Google Earth. It's near the intersection of Ravenswell Road and Harbour Road in County Wicklow, Ireland.

Here is the image of Baldoyle Racecourse in 1961 (it's since been demolished and mostly built over):


Here you can see a screenshot of the same location in Google Earth. If you look carefully, you can see the outline of the lower left corner of the racetrack and the outline of those two white buildings inside the track:



And here is the image of the area near the intersection of Ravenswell Road and Harbour Road in County Wicklow, Ireland in 1961:


And here is a screenshot from Google Earth showing the Ravenswell Road and Harbour Road area today:

Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Today we spent most of the day preparing permission to publish forms. One of the forms we prepared was again for some of Will Counts's images of the desegregation of the high school in Little Rock. They're definitely popular images. We also located an image of an Indiana University assistant coach for someone, as well as an image of a track and field athlete from Indiana University who was in the Olympics in 1904. However, the only image we had of this athlete was a scan from a yearbook photo, which isn't very good quality. Since this image will be used in one of the sports exhibits, we're hoping to find a better one. Tomorrow we will try to identify any living descendants of the athlete so we can contact them to find out it they might have photographs of him which we could scan.