Item Spotlight – “Female Education: Address Delivered at the Annual Examination of the Baylor University by Col. William P. Rogers” (The Texas Collection – Selections)

Posted on May 17, 2013 by Eric Ames

Female Education: Address Delivered at the Annual Examination of the Baylor University by Col. William P. Rogers. Image via the Baylor University Libraries Digital Collections, digitized from the original held by The Texas Collection, Baylor University, Waco, Texas.

Our item spotlight this time around focuses on an antebellum publication that addresses two controversial issues – one directly, one obliquely – from the point of view of a former U.S. Consul to Mexico, an early law professor at Baylor University and, eventually, a Civil War casualty.

William P. Rogers

William Peleg Rogers (1819-1863) was born in Georgia and grew up in Mississippi. Following an education that included both medical school and law school, Rogers was practicing law in Mississippi when he joined Company K of the First Missisippi Volunteer Infantry Regiment for a stint of service in the Mexican War. There, he earned the rank of Captain and distinguished himself in combat. After the war he was appointed U.S. Consult to Veracruz, Mexico; his wife refused to leave Texas, however, and after a brief stint in Mexico he returned to Texas in 1851 and settled at Washington-on-the-Brazos. He served as one of three professors in the law department at Baylor University before moving to Houston in 1859.

Rogers was a delegate to the Texas secession convention and signed the ordinance of secession on February 1, 1861. He accepted a commission as lieutenant colonel in the Second Texas Infantry and eventually was promoted to colonel in charge of the regiment. Rogers led his men into the thick of the battle of Corinth, Mississippi, where he was killed in action in front of Battery Robinett. His last words were reportedly, “Men, save yourselves or sell your lives as dearly as possible.” [1]

One other piece of information worth noting: Rogers was the first cousin of Margaret Lea Houston – husband of Sam.

The Address

In 1852, during Rogers’ residency in Washington-on-the-Brazos, his association with Baylor University led to an invitation from the Board of Trustees to “deliver an address on the important and interesting subject of Female Education, on the occasion of the Annual Examination of the Students of said University.” [2] Rogers accepted the invitation and on June 10, 1852 delivered the address in the “College Room” of the university.

The address can be broken down into three distinct sections: an opening wherein Rogers discusses the historic role of women’s education, especially as it pertains to “home living”; a defense of the idea of educating women in the institutions of the South, as opposed to sending them “abroad” to study in the North; and an examination of the specific subjects Rogers believes to be of great importance in the education of women. The language employed throughout the text reads like a transcription of his spoken address, with many parenthetical asides (in fact, at times the modern reader is overwhelmed with the number of partial thoughts, backtracks, and run-on sentences present) and a distinct feeling that Rogers is addressing a controversial topic to a group of people who are at least open to his ideas, if not outwardly friendly to them.

Rogers wastes no time laying out his basic premise, namely, that women should be afforded an educational experience on par with their male counterparts – if not always in subject, certainly in quality. While couching his argument in terms of women’s ability to influence world events through their historic roles as wives and mothers, Rogers shows a sensitivity to the idea that women, properly “instructed in the grand arcana of the human mind,” can do contribute even more fully to world events if given access to better education.

The following passage is particularly illustrative of Rogers’ thoughts on the matter:

“How important then is it that these queenly sovereigns of the
home circle, should be themselves properly instructed in the
grand arcana of the human mind. How important, that they
too should be subjected in early lite to a system of mental training,
having for its object the proper discipline of the mind to
habits of thought and reflection ; for it is only by such
training that the mind can be induced to emit those sparks
of delicate purity and beauty so peculiarly the characteristics of
the female mind—sparks of chaste moral refinement, that analyse [sic]
and expound with such care and distinguishing excellence
the great principles of our being and existence.”

Rogers’ advocating on behalf of women’s education is tied up in a secondary theme of his address, namely the improving condition of education in the Southern United States. While acknowledging that the old practice of sending “our sons and daughters abroad to be educated” made sense because of the “meagerness of our educational facilities,” he points to the fact that “[o]ur schools may now claim equality with the schools of the north,” so it makes sense to educate women, “at your own schools, among the people with whom she is to live, and over whom she is to exercise an enduring control. Around whose hearts and affections her influences are to cluster, as the sweet spell of music or poetry.”

Rogers is outwardly dismissive of the educational institutions of the North, as in this passage:

“It is true our institutions
of learning may not have such high sounding names,
nor are our buildings as spacious and lofty as theirs ; but for all
the purposes of education, of solid, substantial, practical education,
our schools are as good as theirs. They may put on
more of tinsel, mere filagree [sic] work, ornamental appendages and
the like, all of which may make woman appear better in that
society, the basis of which is humbuggery, and its principal
actors buffoons, and comic performers. But for all the great
purposes of existence, for all the grand and trying scenes in
which woman is’ to appear in her true and proper character, the
education which she can get here is as good, I believe better,
than that which she can obtain abroad.”

But Rogers evokes a more contentious issue among his leaders, albeit without naming it outright.

“Ours is a broad
and extensive country, stretching from the cold and stormy regions
of the north, almost to the tropics ; amid although governed
by the same laws of State, yet the great law of ‘public opinion
is essentially different in different portions of the country. Our
manners, habits, and modes of thought differ. And although
I regret to say it, yet all will concede that there is among the
people of the north a deep and settled hostility to an institution,
which with us is almost patriarchal, and one from which we can
never part until we cease to be an independent people. They,
on the contrary, will never surrender their opinions, and never
I fear cease to taunt us with their wild and maddened bigotry. It
is already an essential element in the opinions of their private
society. In its hideous deformity it has already entered their
pulpits, and they carry it with them to the halls of federal legislation.
Where it will stop, in what it will end, human sagacity
cannot foretell, but its threatenings [sic] are already sufficient to
teach us the duty of staying at home, the duty of self-dependence.”

Rogers never uses the word “slavery” during this passage, but his audience would have known exactly what he was referring to when he referenced “an institution … from which we can never part until we cease to be an independent people.” As one might expect from a man who signed the Texas articles of secession, Rogers places the institution of slavery as a firm dividing line between North and South, a justification for an end to the practice of sending Southern children to Northern educational institutions.

Rogers goes on to suggest the kinds of subjects a woman’s education should include: History, Geography, the Classics, Mathematics and Latin are singled out as foundational building blocks for a full education. Rogers also questions the notion that a woman should only be educated superficially or to the highest level, that there is no room “in between,” for an education that provides an opportunity to expose women to a broad range of subjects.

“It is true, it is an old and favorite
adage, that a little learning is a dangerous thing ; but it is one
to which I can never subscribe. For the very persons who prate
so much about superficial knowledge, will, in the very next breath
tell you that knowledge is power. Now it is as absurd to contend
that all knowledge which is not complete, is therefore injurious,
as that any one who cannot attain to the highest degree of
knowledge in any particular science, would therefore do better
to learn nothing of it whatever—or that if we cannot keep pace
with all of the most recent discoveries and abstruse theories of
Chemistry, it would be better to forgot the simple principle that
heat expands.”

In other words, Rogers contends that exposing female students to a broad range of topics may not make them experts, but the very act of exposing them to it will make them better able to lead at home, at church, and in society at large.

The Physical Form

For being 163 years old, the piece is in very good condition. There are tears on the cover and evidence of damage from folded pages and minor tears, but the substance of the piece is remarkably intact. We can infer that the piece was in private hands after 1863 due to a discrepancy between the cover and the title page, specifically the title given for Rogers. On the cover, the typewritten text reads, “Captain William P. Rogers.” On the title page, however, someone has stricken the word “Captain” out and written “Col.” above it. This tells us that someone was reading (and updating) the piece after 1862, when Rogers was promoted to full colonel in the Second Texas.

This piece is a prime example of the importance of preserving the information found in physical items through digitization. While it has been kept in good physical condition and is currently housed in appropriate storage conditions at The Texas Collection, its fragile condition gives it a high potential for being damaged by repeated handling. Digitizing the piece and placing it online has given it a new usefulness through worldwide access, with the added benefit of reducing the number of requests to handle the physical item on-site.

You can read the entire Address on Female Education in the Texas Collection – Selections via the Digital Collections of Baylor University. For more information on this or other items held by The Texas Collection, contact them via email at txcoll@baylor.edu or visit http://www.baylor.edu/lib/texas.

SOURCES CONSULTED
[1] Rogers’ biographical information retrieved from T. Michael Parrish, “ROGERS, WILLIAM PELEG,” Handbook of Texas Online (http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fro64), accessed May 16, 2013. Published by the Texas State Historical Association.

[2] Quotes from Female Education: Address Delivered at the Annual Examination of the Baylor University by Col. William P. Rogers via the Baylor University Libraries Digital Collections (http://digitalcollections.baylor.edu/cdm/compoundobject/collection/tx-coll/id/13795), accessed May 16, 2013. Digitized from the original item held in the collections of The Texas Collection, Baylor University, Waco, TX.

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Baylor Faculty Members Secure Grant Funding for Digital Collections-Based Research Project

Posted on May 3, 2013 by Eric Ames

Professors William Weaver, PhD (left) and Greg Hamerly, PhD (right) secured grant funding to study the love letters of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning using computer algorithms. Their project will get underway this summer.

In a year filled with firsts for the Digital Projects Group, we’re excited to announce another. Two Baylor University faculty members – Dr. Greg Hamerly (Associate Professor, Computer Science) and Dr. William Weaver (Assistant Professor, Great Texts Program – Honors College) – shared the news with this week that they had received a URC grant for a joint project entitled “Critical Soliloquies: A Project of Electronic Discovery in the Browning Love Letters.” This project is the first-known research project based on items from one of our Digital Collections to receive grant funding, and it all centers on one of our most well-received collections.

The project is an ambitious blend of rhetorical evaluation and computer science, a combination that is a perfect fit for the digitized Victorian-era letters available via the Browning Letters Project. Dr. Weaver shared the abstract from the proposal, which describes the research project thusly:

For over a century, from their first publication in 1899, the love letters of Victorian poets Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning have won the hearts of readers. A near complete record of the poets’ courtship from 1845 to 1846, these letters include a substantial body of literary criticism. This criticism includes their assessments of each other’s works in progress and the works of major contemporary figures like Carlyle, Tennyson, and George Sand, not to mention numerous minor artists of the Victorian era. It would be possible and interesting, using transcribed editions of the letters, to excerpt and collect these critical writings.

This interdisciplinary project, between literary studies and computer science, attempts something more ambitious. Building on Baylor Library’s recent digitization of the 574 letters (published on Valentine’s Day 2012), we will create a database of critical and non-critical writing from the letters. Using tools for text classification, we will then test whether a computer can make reliable discriminations between the two classes of text. Such a tool could be extended to discover “critical soliloquies” (Elizabeth Barrett’s term) in this and other Victorian archives.

If using computer-based tools to analyze 19th century missives sounds like the ultimate steampunk/sci-fi fan fiction, you wouldn’t be too far from the truth. And no pair of researchers is better suited to tackle the task than professors Weaver and Hamerly, two men with great skill and expertise in two very different – but strangely complementary – areas of interest.

The Origins of Our Involvement

Weaver and Hamerly approached us about a year ago with the idea of using one of our digitized collections to perform computer-based evaluation of materials that were written by hand or set in type before the advent of computers. After a meeting with myself and Darryl Stuhr, Assistant Director for Digital Projects, we enthusiastically agreed to provide access to any digital assets that the professors might need to carry out their work.

For us, it was a natural fit between the wealth of information to be found in archival materials and the power and accuracy of evaluation performed by computers. And once the Browning Letters Project went online in February 2012, the opportunity to analyze the love story of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning proved too good to pass up.

What’s Next?

Dr. Weaver informs us that the first step is to assign students the task of creating a database and begin assigning annotations to the letters. He hopes to see this phase one of the project get underway in June. Successive steps would include the creation of the computer algorithms and processes for analyzing the data input by the students in phase one.

This cross-departmental, multi-discipline approach is the kind of research being conducted at universities across the country, where experts in several fields find new ways to play off each others’ strengths in pursuit of a new, shared goal. In this case, it is the quest to see if a computer can match a human’s critical analysis and evaluation of the written word. Will the machine find these distinctions between the “critical and non-critical writing,” or will it prove to elude even our most up-to-date technology? Will computer science open new doors in the rhetorical examination of our analogue past? And can the application of computing power make it easier for our scholars to delve deeper into the minds (and hearts) of two of Western culture’s greatest creators?

Stay tuned to this blog for updates!

For more information on Dr. Weaver’s work in the Baylor Great Texts program, visit his website. For more information on Dr. Hamerly and his work in Computer Science research, visit this website.  

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In A Time Of Uncertainty, The Pursuit of Permanence Reinforced

Posted on April 18, 2013 by Eric Ames

The aftermath of an explosion at a fertilizer plant in West, Texas, April 17, 2013. (Photo via BusinessInsider.com)

At the time of this writing, the campus of Baylor University is quiet, subdued under a twin burden thanks to the dismal weather (due to a cold front/rainstorm combo) and an event that occurred just twenty short miles up the road in West. As reports roll in documenting the destruction – physical, emotional, communal – wrought by an explosion at a fertilizer plant on the north side of town, the Baylor community is responding with a prayer vigil, offers of donations of materials and financial gifts, and the use of our collective expertise in helping the citizens of West find new hope in the rubble of last night’s wreckage.

As we try to come to grips with the scope of devastation, it comes at a time when the national mood is already unsettled due to the bombings at the Boston Marathon on Monday. Add into the mix the fact that this, the third week in April, has seen traumatic national events in the past two decades (the Columbine High School massacre, the Oklahoma City bombing and the Branch Davidian standoff, chiefly) and you have a general sense of discomfort, a time of unwanted reflection on the darker side of human nature.

All of this may seen like a strange topic for a blog post focused on digital collections, but it reinforces an absolutely inarguable point: life is uncertain. We can build legal structures, steel-studded concrete walls, social norms and inner rationalizations to protect us from the things beyond our control, but they can only take us so far. For all of us will face an event in our lives that we cannot control, that is beyond our power to influence. And in the midst of that uncertainty, it helps to have reminders that our daily work to preserve the documented history of our campus, our community, our world is one way we can provide the tumultuous present with a concrete anchor to the past.

“The Preservers of History”

Chiseled into the stonework of the façade of Pat Neff Hall, Baylor’s main administration building, is a quote from former Baylor president (and two-term Texas governor) Pat Morris Neff. It reads, “The preservers of history are as heroic as its makers,” and I believe this sums up our role in the Digital Projects Group in a simple, profound way that paragraphs of explanatory text cannot. We are the preservers of history, yes, by the nature of our work to digitize physical history and preserve its digital surrogate for access by the future. But more important than simply scanning and archiving data, we are preserving the stories contained within those documents and we are ensuring that those stories will be accessible and available to people many years from now. On days like today, it seems particularly important to preserve the stories happening all around us, even if they aren’t as newsworthy as an explosion, a natural disaster, or a terrorist attack.

This is not a responsibility we take lightly, of course. For every artifact, archival resource, photograph, map or other item that comes through our doors, we know we are handling the “real stuff” of history and it is our job to take that one unique thing and give it a new life, a greater usefulness in the realm of academic scholarship and worldwide access. In a sense, we serve not so much as the preservers of history but as its spokesmen, the professional communicators tasked with taking something out of its phase box, Mylar sleeve or acid-free folder and putting it on an international stage via the Internet so its unique story can reach people on our campus, on our continent, on the other side of the world.

The Way of All Flesh (and Data)

We are given only a short time on this Earth to do the work we were created to do. There will come a time when the words of this blog will be seen as a record of what one group of people thought was important in the early decades of the 21st century. They will read of a fertilizer plant explosion in a small, Czech community in central Texas and want to know more about how it spurred a library staff member at Baylor University to write about its relation to digital preservation.

To those future researchers –and to my 2013 contemporaries reading this post today – I can only say that as this week’s unexpected events have unfolded on the East coast and a half-hour drive from my front door, it drives home to me the frailty of life, the knowledge that the things we create today are not promised to exist tomorrow, and that the challenge for our field is to try to find some permanence in the world, to promise our grandchildren’s grandchildren that they will have access to the world we are living in today. And, more importantly than all of this, that they will have access to our stories.

If you would like to assist the people of West in their recovery and rebuilding efforts, please visit Baylor’s “Response for the City of West” web age or contact the Central Texas Red Cross. Photo from REUTERS photographer Mike Stone via Business Insider (www.businessinsider.com)    

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A Dispatch From the Ivory Tower: An MST/DPG Graduate Course Update

Posted on April 12, 2013 by Eric Ames

Bright-eyed, busy-tailed, scanner-friendly: the students of MST 5327: Technology and Outreach in Museums

Long-time readers of our blog may remember this post, wherein we unveiled a new venture for the Digital Projects Group: implementing, hosting and teaching a graduate course on technology and outreach for museums, archives and libraries. We’re now heading into the final three weeks of the course, and we thought an update was in order.

The students of MST 5327: Technology and Outreach in Museums have come a long way from the group of fifteen technology neophytes that started class in January. On their initial surveys, I found a wide range of attitudes regarding technology, but most admitted they were somewhere on the “afraid of it, don’t trust it” end of the spectrum. Several brought significant experience with technology with them into the course, and all expressed an interest in enhancing technological skills that they felt would be critical to their success in the museum field.

The first few weeks of class focused on lectures and background information on the idea of technology in museums. Topics covered included the types of technology utilized by museums (from exhibit display to collections databases), the theory behind the use of technology in museums, and the promise and perils of using technology to engage visitors. Lively discussions on technology’s ability to both enhance and derail the visitor experience were held each week, and students were encouraged to seek out examples of how museums are using high- and low-tech solutions to visitor engagement.

From the beginning of the course, students were introduced to the use of several free, Web-based tools that will aid in their development as museum professionals. Services like Evernote, Google Drive, Prezi and WordPress were all introduced very early on in the course, giving the students a chance to explore how museums of any size can take advantage of free (or almost-free) software solutions to make their museums run smoother. The course blog (available for all to read here) became a place for students to respond to focused readings, begin conversations among their colleagues, and post reactions to current events in the museological field. All of these techniques are expected to give them a firm footing on some of the developments in Web-based tools available to them upon their graduation in the coming weeks and months.

After a full session of training and orientation to the scanners and software of the Riley Digitization Center, the students were assigned into teams and turned loose to explore the materials gathered for the course. Focused on the general theme of World War I, the teams were each given a specific focal point and told to curate items for a digital collection that explored one of three themes:

Team Churchill: the impact of the war on religion

Team Foch: the impact of the war on popular culture

Team Pershing: the impact of the war on Waco as embodied by the U.S. military

Each team was given access to a number of archival collections drawn from special collections on campus, and they spent several sessions poring over the assorted archival papers, piles of sheet music, and 1917-1918 Waco newspapers looking for materials to support their theses. Scanning commenced in the following weeks, as did the addition of materials into a special digital collection that will be made available to the public at the close of the semester.

A guest lecture on the always-engaging topic of copyright was delivered by Billie Peterson-Lugo, the Baylor Libraries’ resident expert. Billie’s presentation introduced the students to the challenges of presenting archival materials that go beyond the year 1923 – when materials are considered to be in the public domain – and how to make decisions that place materials into categories of risk (low, medium and high) with regard to copyright status. The students’ eyes were opened to the inherent difficulties of working with the overlapping, byzantine layers of federal and state copyright standards, but they did learn the simplest answer regarding copyright questions: “It depends.”

Spring break and a trip to the Texas Association of Museums’ annual conference in Beaumont took two weeks out of the mid-semester, and a two-week discussion of the basics of marketing in the year 2013 were added into the mix as well. Students discussed the nature of public relations in the Twitter era, why the basics of marketing still matter, and how to keep people’s attention in a world where advertising messages are plastered on almost every conceivable surface.

And now, as the teams complete their scanning and metadata entry, the semester is coming to a rapid close as they prepare for their final presentations. These professional presentations (which are open to the public) will be held on May 1 at 1:00 in the Armstrong Browning Library’s theater, followed by a reception in the Cox Reception Hall. The presentations will focus on each team’s marketing/outreach plan they created to promote their digital collections to a specific target audience. I will also provide an overview of the course, the items digitized by the students, and what this course has meant in terms of their development as burgeoning museum professionals.

When we started the discussions about this course more than a year ago, Dean of University Libraries Pattie Orr was excited, supportive and encouraging of a new opportunity to train Baylor University graduate students for service in a field that impacts the lives and spirits of millions of Americans each year. From an instructor’s viewpoint, I can say that the energy, skills, passion and drive exhibited by these students this semester have been a joy to behold, and if their performance in this course is any indication of the future state of American museums, we are all in terrific hands.

In closing, I encourage anyone in the Waco area to stop by the final presentations on May 1st. It will be an excellent opportunity to see new scholarship, excited young professionals, and a beautiful special collection library all at once.

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“And On Your Right Is One Of Only Five Cruse Large-Format Scanners In Texas”: Tips From the Tour-Guiding Trenches

Posted on March 28, 2013 by Eric Ames

If this picture were a movie title, it would be The Men Who Stare at George W. Truett: Former U.S. Rep. Chet Edwards receives a demo from Eric Ames and Darryl Stuhr during a tour of the RDC.

Since opening our doors in October 2008, the Riley Digitization Center has hosted dozens of groups for tours, demos, information sessions, mingling, and general collegial carousing. Baylor presidents, regents, library fellows, donors, academics, provosts from other universities, students (graduate and undergraduate), former congressmen, football players – the list is almost endless.

Over the course of five years we’ve learned a great deal about what makes for a good tour, from knowing your audience to staging the scene and providing informative handouts. Below, we’ve outlined some tips for other digitization and archival colleagues who might find yourselves hosting a get-together.

Tip One: Know Your Audience

What’s true for marketing is true for tours: know whom you’ll be addressing before they arrive. That means going beyond the basics (how many? are they affiliated with a particular group? any special interests?) and into advanced work like inquiring after any special considerations regarding physical access, past giving habits or other philanthropic work, hobbies, political affiliations, even whether they recently went on a trip somewhere special (that happens to relate to items from one of your collections!).

If you suspect the tour may lead to a possible gift or other collaboration, be sure to do some research into what kinds of parameters they may have set on past contributions. For example, if you suspect a potential donor may be interested in providing funds to support an ongoing project, be sure to have plenty of examples from that collection available for perusal and schedule some time for in-depth conversation as part of the tour. It also pays to have someone available on your tour team with expertise in your visitor’s interest area. This person can serve as a confidante or intermediary during the tour and help guide conversations toward ways they can help support the project.

Tip Two: Set the Stage

What do selling a house, putting on a theatrical production and providing a tour of a digitization center have in common? They all require attention to appropriate staging. Odds are, your visitors have never been in a place like this before, so it’s up to you to make them feel comfortable and welcome in a situation that may be far outside their comfort zones.

As much as possible, arrange your work area to provide plenty of room for people to move about comfortably, and be sure to do the little things like tiding up a workstation or vacuuming the floors. Be sure doors are unlocked (unless they’re keeping a restricted area off-limits for the tour) and replace any burned-out light bulbs. Wash windows, water the plants – the usual things we do right before an in-law or realtor comes calling.

When it’s time to choose physical items to display, look for eye-catching examples that are safe to be handled by staff as well as visitors. Visitors love to hold items you’re digitizing, so only put things out for display that won’t be negatively impacted if someone asks to hold them. It also pays to have a “show-stopper” piece to display at some point during the tour. Superlatives like, “oldest,” “biggest,” “only one in the world” and “rarest” are always attention-grabbers and can revive flagging interest (if the tour has been going on a for awhile) or seal the deal when it comes time to make “the ask.”

Tip Three: Practice Makes Perfect

Maybe you only give one tour a year. Maybe you’re brushing the dog and currying the pony once a week. Either way, it pays to practice what you’ll be presenting to your visitors in advance. Our team has done the standard “nickel tour” of the RDC so many times we can probably do it in our sleep, but we always try to get together beforehand and discuss anything that might be new, different or challenging about that day’s tour. High-level visitors – a major donor, the Board of Regents, the Boss (our dean, not Bruce Springsteen) – warrant more practice time, of course, but even if you can only carve out five minutes to get together beforehand, it will pay off.

Tip Four: The Little Things That Thrill

After you’ve done your groundwork, staged your office and practiced the spiel, true success on a tour can come down to the use of some “small touches” that really speak to your audience. Some of the things we’ve seen make a big impact include:

-       Creating a sign to welcome the group by name. Nothing excites a tour group quite the same as a sign that says, “Welcome to the Riley Digitization Center, Cat Fancy Magazine Subscribers of Central Texas!”

-       Wear a tie (or a coat, or a jacket, or all three). Even if your usual workaday attire involves an ironic t-shirt and black Converse tennis shoes, take the time to spruce yourself up for a tour. They’ll notice if the team is all wearing their Sunday best – and, alternately, they’ll notice the one guy that didn’t get the memo, so don’t be “that guy.”

-       Have a sense of humor. I can think of only a couple of tours where the visitors and subject matter were so serious that a joke or two would have felt out of place. Most people love a good laugh, even if it’s at a corny “because we’re a Baptist university we save these files ‘forever and ever, amen’” kind of joke. Often, you’ll find a group has its own corporate sense of humor, and tapping into it can lead to a bond that would be missed otherwise.

-       Wear your nametag. Even if there’s only one of you. People need reminders.

-       Be flexible. Some people get really hung up/excited about one particular piece of equipment or want to know more about one project at the expense of spending more time looking at something else. This is okay. In fact, it can be helpful to explore those interests further, as it may lead to gifts, loans or other support.

-       Prepare your handouts. Flyers, posters, trinkets, whatever: people love a takeaway, and if it happens to provide them with the URL for your digital collections or your Facebook page, all the better.

-       Have a good anecdote or fact ready at all times. Know the stories hiding in your collections and be ready to tell them when one of your visitors uses a key word that can serve as a segue. For instance, any time someone says the words “my grandfather went to Baylor,” I can take them to a computer, open the Baylor University Lariat collection and do a keyword search for their grandfather’s name, and more often than not, he’ll be there.

***

These are just a few things to keep in mind the next time someone takes time out of their schedules to come learn more about what you do. Remember: you’re doing them a favor, but they’re doing you one, too. Anyone who walks in your door could turn into your next major donor, advocate or employee, so give them plenty of reasons to remember their visit fondly.

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The Brazos River: Impacting Life in Waco, Scholarship at Baylor

Posted on March 14, 2013 by Eric Ames

In support of our colleagues at The Texas Collection and their upcoming event, The Brazos River and the Baylor Achives, we’re reposting a link from last year that shows the awesome power of the Brazos River in flood stage from 1908. We encourage you all to attend this excellent event next week, and don’t forget to check out The Texas Collection’s web site for more information!

Hidden In Plain Sight: A Springtime Brazos Flood, 1908
(Originally posted July 26, 2012)

The Brazos River at flood stage, 1908
(Click to enlarge)

For residents of early twentieth-century Waco, the Brazos River was a study in contrasts. It provided a reliable source of potable water for myriad daily uses, but its temperamental nature made it prone to violent floods that damaged property and took lives. The Brazos could be both savior and destroyer, a source of community pride – embodied in the suspension bridge built across it in the 1870s that still stands today – and of widespread destruction.

This panoramic view of the Brazos in flood stage was captured on May 24th, 1908. It is actually a series of five individual photos that were printed and pasted together onto a cardboard backing to create the appearance of a single, panoramic photograph. That approach accounts for the somewhat distorted and disjointed nature of the image when viewed as a whole. But owing to the technology available at the time, it is an effective way to capture a stunning view: the Brazos River at a flood stage level of 36 ft. 8 in. – the “highest ever recorded” according to a note written on the print.

Notes on the print also reveal the image was captured by a photographer from The Kodak Place who mounted the steps to the top of the Crow Brothers Tower to capture the scene. The Crow Brothers were long-time Waco launderers who had taken up residence in the former courthouse at 2nd and Franklin Avenue.

The scene captured by our anonymous photographer on May 24th is one of great devastation. The focal point of the photo is the river itself: a shining path stretching the entire length of the scene, it is easy to note how the Brazos has surmounted its banks and intruded into the city itself, especially east Waco along Elm Street. This low-lying region of the city contained a mix of industrial and residential buildings in 1908, much as it does today. Wacoans unlucky enough to find their dwellings on this side of the river repeatedly bore the brunt of the destruction left behind after one of the Brazos’ many floods.

A closer look at the various bridges across the river give some context for just how high the river had risen on this particular date. First up (from left to right in the photo) is the “iron” bridge (today’s Washington Street bridge), built less than a decade prior to the date of this photograph.

Washington street / “iron” bridge

Next is the suspension bridge, a sight familiar to residents of Waco since the 1870s. Although its facade was covered with stucco and “updated” in the 1970s as part of the American bicentennial celebration, its iconic towers and unsupported span are instantly recognizable. Also visible in this photo are ads on the bridge’s downtown side for the Miller-Cross Company and the Sanger Bros. dry goods and clothing store.

The suspension bridge

Finally, this view of two railroad trestles a bit further down the river shows two important links in the city’s commercial viability being seriously threatened by critically high water levels.

Railroad trestles

The photo below – of another Brazos River flood, this one in December 1913 – gives us a closer look at flood waters lapping the bottom of a railroad trestle as dozens of spectators risk being swept away for a chance at a first-hand perspective. Water levels for this flood were nearly identical to those from the 1908 flood pictured in the panorama above.

Spectators line a railroad trestle to view the flooded Brazos River, 1913

While nature’s destructive power is the central player in this panorama, it also bristles with small details about a prosperous Texas town at the dawn of the twentieth century. Scanning the image, we see the names of local businesses on buildings, signs and fences, including:

  • The Morning Star Lunch Room
  • Pippin & Fuston, Horses and Mules
  • T.J. Cunningham
  • Louis Lipshitz (A family name associated with a present-day business located on Elm Avenue)
  • Riverside Livery Stable
  • D. June Machinery Co.
  • Industrial Cotton Oil Co.

Advertisements for Miller High Life beer, Lawrence Barrett and Mild Havana Cigars and the National Biscuit Company (now known as Nabisco) can also be spotted in the image.

Lastly, in the center foreground of the image is a single railcar sitting on a siding. It bears the name “Missouri Kansas and Texas,” the well-known “Katy” railroad with a major presence in Waco for decades.

An M-K-T boxcar on siding

While the obvious occasion of this series of photos was the record-breaking flood, the wealth of detail available to modern viewers helps us construct a better mental image of what Waco looked like on a late spring day during one of its most productive decades. And though the Brazos would continue to flood until engineers built a series of dams decades later, the people of Waco continued to rebuild after each one, proving their tenacity in the face of great difficulty.

We hope you’ve enjoyed this closer look at another of the panoramic treasures from the holdings of the Texas Collection. There are dozens of large format photos in the collection, with more being digitized and added online regularly, so be sure and check out http://digitalcollections.baylor.edu for more great photos.

Images enhanced for online presentation. Digitized from original prints housed in the photographic holdings of the Texas Collection. Visit The Texas Collection online at http://www.baylor.edu/lib/texas for more priceless Texana.

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A Club for Every Interest: The 1906 “Round-Up”

Posted on March 7, 2013 by Eric Ames

One of the great joys of my job as Curator of Digital Collections is the opportunity I get to go in-depth with the materials we host as part of the Baylor University Libraries Digital Collections. They are drawn from every special collection library on campus, and they are filled with hidden treasures both revelatory and mundane – glimpses of a time long past, a name forgotten, or an event as contemporary as last week.

While working to enhance the metadata for the Baylor University Annuals (The Round Up) Collection, I came across some interesting photos of student groups in the 1906 edition. Baylor has a long history of student groups both high-minded (the Philomathesian Society, the Erisophian Society, the Mission Band) and decidedly irreverent (the NoZe Brotherhood), but the clubs found in this volume run the gamut from the temporary to the absurd. And what better time to showcase them than the week before our students go on Spring Break, a time of relaxation and revelry where anything can happen – and anyone can form a group that may find its way to the pages of the campus yearbook!

The West Texas Club from the 1906 “Round-Up.” Click to enlarge. (Image via the Baylor University Libraries Digital Collections, courtesy The Texas Collection)

West Texas Club

Embracing their home region’s stereotypical mode of dress (and even throwing in a six-shooter or two for good measure), the West Texas Club was a co-ed celebration of all this Western. While this group was only a generation or so removed from the “closing of the West” that took place over the last decade of the 19th century, they certainly helped keep its spirit alive.

The “10 Club” from the 1906 “Round-Up.” Click to enlarge. (Image via the Baylor University Libraries Digital Collections, courtesy The Texas Collection.)

“10 Club”

As straight-forward as it gets, this club of 10 Baylor men is a dapper assembly.

The Gethere Club from the 1906 “Round-Up.” Click to enlarge. (Image via the Baylor University Libraries Digital Collections, courtesy The Texas Collection.)

Gethere Club

One of the more interesting elements of the clubs of the early 20th century is their willingness to coin new words or adopt unique spellings for their group’s name. This co-ed group created a portmanteau of the phrase “get there” and became the Gethere Club. This approach is not without its perils, however: on the page preceding this image, the club is listed as the “Gethera Club,” an equally made-up but less logical moniker that proves sometimes a unique spelling is more trouble than it’s worth. They do receive bonus points, however, for disguising the male group members in this photo as “bon bons” to be delivered to Georgia Burleson (G.B.) Hall.

The Fat Men’s Club from the 1906 “Round-Up.” Click to enlarge. (Image via the Baylor University Libraries Digital Collections, courtesy The Texas Collection)

Fat Men’s Club

“Strive above all things to become fat and handsome.” Advice most college students – men and women alike – would be hesitant to embrace on campus nowadays, but a credo thought important enough to justify the creation of a group dedicated to celebrating the more full-figured among the student body of 1906.

The T.A.F. Club from the 1906 “Round-Up.” Click to enlarge. (Image via the Baylor University Libraries Digital Collections, courtesy The Texas Collection)

T.A.F. Club

Another in the long line of unexplained acronym-based clubs, the girls of T.A.F. get the award for Best Use of a Prop Ladder in a Group Photo.

The Banana Club from the 1906 “Round-Up.” Click to enlarge. (Image via the Baylor University Libraries Digital Collections, courtesy The Texas Collection)

Banana Club

Bananas are inherently funny. For decades they have served as comedic props, from the use of their peels as implements to inflict a fall or the absurdity of placing a banana in one’s ear while pretending it’s perfectly normal, the comedically inclined among us have long embraced them to make people laugh. However, these gentlemen took their appreciation of the peel-able fruit to a new level when they formed a club devoted to the object of “increas[ing] the banana trade.” Their password – “Give me a banana” – is absurd simplicity at its finest.

***

As you’re perusing our campus yearbooks in your own research, keep an eye out for any interesting, unique, or downright bizarre clubs and shoot us an email with your favorites!

The 1906 Round-Up is available online via the Baylor University Libraries Digital Collections, digitized from the original held by The Texas Collection, Baylor University, Waco, Texas. For more information on materials available at The Texas Collection, visit www.baylor.edu/lib/texas or email them at txcoll@baylor.edu.

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Collection Spotlight: The Keston Digital Archive

Posted on February 28, 2013 by Eric Ames

Baylor University is a long way from Kirov, Russia and the halls of the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, but one digital archive unites these seemingly disparate places through the common bond of The Keston Collection.

The Keston Digital Archive currently houses more than 1,800 items related to the subject of religious persecution carried out under Communist regimes. It includes photographs, books, correspondence, petitions and more, with a majority of the items presented untranslated from their original Russian language. These items are drawn from the larger collection housed at the Keston Center for Religion, Politics & Society, a division of the Baylor University Libraries. Currently, all users can access the metadata for all records, with image access available only on-campus or via a virtual scholar request. (Read through to the end of this post to find out how to make a virtual scholar request.)

The Collection’s Early Years

According to its website, the Keston Institute was “founded in 1969 under the title of Centre for the Study of Religion and Communism, [and ]has specialised in the study of all religions and all forms of religious expression in Communist and formerly Communist countries.” The institute’s archive was housed at Oxford until 2007, when it was donated to Baylor and became the centerpiece of the Keston Center.

The Keston Institute bills itself as the “voice of the voiceless,” and focuses its efforts on educating and advocating on behalf of those whose religions are controlled, outlawed or otherwise restricted under Communist regimes. Over the past four decades, the Institute collected thousands of documents and photographs which were included in the donation to Baylor.

Baylor’s Involvement

Since 2007, Baylor has been home to the Keston Center for Religion, Politics & Society, the official archival repository of the Keston archives. The center’s mission is “To promote research and encourage the study of religion in communist, post-communist, and other totalitarian societies and the relationship between religion and Marxism.” Toward that goal, archivist Larisa Seago and director Kathy Hillman are working to digitize, via the Digital Projects Group, materials that can be of use to scholars around the world.

Using a graduate student to scan materials in the Riley Digitization Center and the expertise of Seago (a native Russian speaker) to add metadata and context, the digital archive has grown to include materials of great interest to researchers investigating the impact of state intervention in the private religious lives of its citizens.

Connect with the Collection

To view the metadata for materials available, visit the Keston Digital Archive. Once there, you’ll see examples of materials from categories such as:

Posters

Poster celebrating Yuri Gagarin’s flight into space; he announces he didn’t see God during his time in “Heaven”

Photographs

Kiev Museum of Scientific Atheism

Prints

Anti-religious brochure, 1938

You can also access a selection of Soviet posters found in this collection via our Flickr collection.

For access to materials from locations other than the Baylor University campus, or to make a virtual scholar request, please contact Larisa Seago at Larisa_Seago@baylor.edu.

If you are interested in more information on the Keston Digital Archive, please contact us at digitalcollectionsinfo@baylor.edu. And if you are utilizing its unique resources in your research, we’d love to hear from you. Your work could even be featured in a future blog post!

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English Street Art, Full Text Searching and Raising the Dead

Posted on February 7, 2013 by Eric Ames

“Crane” by Banksy, available at http://www.banksy.co.uk

“I mean, they say you die twice. One time when you stop breathing and a second time, a bit later on, when somebody says your name for the last time.”

This quote, attributed to anonymous and ubiquitous English street artist Banksy, is a surprisingly profound viewpoint on memory and mortality, and it got me to thinking: if that’s true, then couldn’t full-text searching serve as a means of “resurrecting” the dead?

Stick with me here.

Wherever possible, we run optical character recognition (OCR) on the materials we’re digitizing and adding to our digital collections. The process involves a piece of software scanning the text in an image and looking for patterns that match letters and groups of letters that it “recognizes” as words. Those patterns are then matched against a dictionary in the software’s database, and where a match is found, it is embedded into the image as a layer of machine-readable text. It’s the way we’re able to provide full-text searching for our materials, and with our current software solutions we’re able to achieve almost 100% accuracy in some cases.

Running OCR on items with printed text is de rigueur for most digital collections. It’s almost mandatory if you want your collections to show up in Google, Bing or other search engines, as the more “harvestable” data you have in your collections, the better chance those engines will ingest it and make it available for people searching for a particular word or phrase.

We’re seeing lots of activity on our collections related to what I would call genealogist/family history searches. Often, it’s someone looking for information on a relative who attended Baylor at some point in the past. They will enter a simple search string in Google – James A. Smith Baylor University 1918 – and the results will almost always bring them to an item in our digital collections. Now, no one in our office sat down and typed James A. Smith’s name into the metadata for the 1918 Round Up, for example, so the researcher was only able to find it because the OCR’d text generated a hit via the search engine.

Pattie Orr, Dean of University Libraries and VP for Information Technology, has often remarked that she’s seen potential donors and friends of the library get truly excited when she demos our system to them by typing in a family member’s name and seeing what comes up. They are often overjoyed at the opportunity to read about a favorite grandfather’s exploits in a debate club, or to see photos of their aunt posing with her sorority sisters. Dean Orr notes that this kind of connection often serves to create informed advocates for the work we’re doing, as they are able to show and tell others about the treasures they’ve discovered in our collections.

Which leads me to this final thought: as more and more genealogists, researchers, faculty members and casual historians are accessing our materials, they are going to be encountering the names, faces and stories of people who may have died centuries ago. Many of them passed from this earth so long ago that no one living today has ever said their name aloud. So any time a great-great-great granddaughter finds her antecedent’s name in our collection and says it aloud for the first time, it could very well be the first time anyone has done so in decades.

That simple act of saying a name can truly serve as a resurrection – not of a body, but of a story, an identity, a history. And we are more than happy to serve as a the avenue for something so important.

Bonus Content

Just for fun, here are some of my favorite names I’ve run across during my work with our collections. Feel like “resurrecting” one of your favorites? Just say it out loud!

Carlyne Trautwein

Odo Surratt

Hettie Clegg

W.M.W. Splawn

L. Blum Wootters

Wilby T. Gooch

Cloantha Copass

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Gather ‘Round and Download the Tale: A Primer for Digital Storytelling in Archives

Posted on January 31, 2013 by Eric Ames

Storytelling, the analogue / shiny-shirt-wearing version
From the Frances G. Spencer Collection of American Popular Sheet Music

The storytelling urge is an ingrained part of human behavior spanning back to our earliest conversant days, when “This plant bad, that plant good” wasn’t just helpful advice for staying alive, it could also pass for a rollicking tale around a campfire.

Among the myriad ways we’ve progressed here in the 21st century is in our ability to tell stories in new ways using archival subject material. Digitized copies of 19th century letters, transcriptions of 17th century diaries, cassette tapes from the 1970s migrated to MP3: these are the tools a digital storyteller can utilize to bring the stories of the past to a new generation of listeners.

But at the heart of that process still lie some basic steps that a curator, scholar or blogger can use to bring the materials to their greatest impact.

  • Evaluate the materials: It may seem simplistic, but taking a good look at the source materials is often the most important part of any storytelling arc. Where possible, sort materials into an order that makes sense for the narrative; chronological is the most likely candidate, but you could also sort by thematic elements or format types as well.

 

  • Look for unifying themes: If your project encompasses something larger than a single life (where you’re telling the story of one principle character, for example), it can be helpful to look for unifying themes in your materials. Good starting points include a place (geographic), an idea, a repeating theme (freedom from oppression, interpretation of race in popular culture) and the like.

 

  • Gather your contextual materials: Often, we are unable to tell a full story by pulling only from the archival materials at our disposal. So it is important to gather contextual materials – secondary sources, other collections’ contents, new scholarship, etc. – to help augment the records on hand. Researchers also love seeing lists of these reference materials at the end of a blog post or contextual resource page, so include them as a guide for further investigation.

 

  • Compile the text: Now that you’ve gathered your materials, it’s time to sit down and actually write your narrative. My best advice for this part of the process? Nulla dies sine linea, or “No day without a line,” attributed to Pliny. That means not getting sidelined by writer’s block; just sit down, start typing, and see what flows. You’ll surprise yourself almost every time.

 

  • Evaluate: Don’t be afraid to take a good look at what you’ve written, and don’t forget to look back at resources you created in the past to see where they can be updated and revised for the better.

 

Toeing the Line

One challenge to overcome when writing the story to be told from archival collections is how to present enough information without editorializing or leading your readers/researchers/scholars to conclusions. As a collections professional, it is your job to present as much relevant information as possible without editorializing. Wherever possible, try to present facts in a neutral voice and present facts as plainly as you are able. Avoid the temptation to infer, guess, speculate or otherwise draw conclusions from the evidence; leave that kind of thing for your researchers and subject scholars.

That’s not to say you can’t have your own opinion, of course. Blogs are a great way to expound upon your own opinions about the collection without injecting it into the contextual research presented as part of your digital archive. So fire up a WordPress or Blogger account and flex your extemporizing muscles. After all, you’re likely the one person in the world who’s spent the most time with this particular collection of materials, shouldn’t you have a chance to give your two cents?

Where Does It End?

Just as our friend David Licata and the crew working on the upcoming documentary A Life’s Work know all too well, there are some stories that are difficult to tell simply because they have no definite end. How do we tell the story of the Black Gospel Music Restoration Project with any sense of finality? When do we stop recounting the information touched on in our Baylor University Libraries Athletics Archive? These are just two of the collections that could conceivably branch into innumerable storylines with no distinct ends, a potential problem of great concern to researchers and casual users who need the structure provided by a definitive beginning, middle and end to a story.

This is where the epilogue or “to be continued” approach can be very handy. If you’re wrangling with a subject that has no definite endpoint, include a note at the end of your contextual statement that indicates the collection in question is an ongoing project and updates will be added as they are needed. In other cases, it may be helpful to set an arbitrary cut-off date for your contextual research and simply note that, while more information is available for this collection, it is far from settled or even to a point that it can be presented in its proper context, and that an update will take place when the time is right.

A Worthwhile Yarn

The wonderful thing about digital storytelling is that it gives archival collections professionals a chance to open their resources up to a worldwide audience, something that was impossible only a few short decades ago. For truly unique or rare items, this could mean exposing someone a continent away to the treasure stored safely in your neatly ordered stacks, all without the need to undertake expensive travel. As stewards of these materials held in the public trust, it is our duty and our privilege to acquire, preserve, present and promote the materials in our care for use by researchers and interested parties the world over. Anything less would be a disservice to our stated mission of connecting people with ideas.

As you’re sitting down to tell the stories hidden in your archives, take a moment to appreciate the opportunity you have to do something truly impactful and unique in this world. While it certainly takes a great deal of work to get it done, there’s no substitute for the satisfaction of knowing you’ve used your talents to keep a story alive for a new generation of listeners.

And if all else fails, remember this: we can tell all these stories without getting campfire smoke on our materials. Now that’s a story worth telling.

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