Archives and Special Collections were recently gifted two photographs (gift of Gordon and Karen Clark, class of 1951), circa 1885, detailing the interior of a Kappa Alpha fraternity house. Showing Herbert J. Brown’s (class of 1885) dormitory room, the decor includes a stand complete with sheet music, a desk overflowing with textbooks, handheld fans, an oil lamp, and several portrait photographs adorning the walls. – JGD
Last week, the Chapin Library and Williams College Archives & Special Collections welcomed Visiting Assistant Professor Llerena Searle’s Anthropology class, “Financial Lives”, concerned with aspects of finance and investment.
The collections of the Chapin Library and College Archives hold many examples of ancient and modern coinage, bills, ledgers, and other financial accounts, as well as books and broadsides dealing with currency and financial issues. Students carefully examined materials ranging from a coin from the reign of Roman Emperor Tiberius to the 1747/8 account book of Fort Massachusetts, a United States 1785 ten-dollar gold coin, George Washington’s manuscript account of his (losing) investments in Revolutionary War loan certificates, American money of the colonial period, and currency issued by the Confederate States of America during the Civil War. – JGD/SKB/WGH
“I just recall a man making the rounds of the fraternities and quickly drawing many of the members,” recollects Dick Debevoise, Class of 1946. We know no more than this about how and why George Pal came to Williams to draw student caricatures in 1946.
Happily two of Pal’s drawings survived and were gifted last year to the Williams College Archives. Mr. Debevoise’s portrait was received as one item within the larger donation of the Debevoise Family Papers. Several months later, the drawing of Stanton Tefft (left), Class of 1947, came as a single piece, the generous gift of his widow, Marie Elaine Tefft.
Pal’s caricatures are fascinating in the manner in which they capture aspects of the sitter. Mr. Tefft, for instance, was known as the drummer for the college’s V-12 (Navy College Training Program) Swing Band. The exuberance with which he is portrayed reflects the enthusiasm he brought later to his law career and his many varied life interests.
Pal, as it turns out, was not known for his caricatures (as artistic and entertaining as ours may be). He is, however, legendary for the science fiction films he directed and produced at Paramount. He won Academy Awards for special effects work on “The War of the Worlds” (1953) and “The Time Machine” (1960), among others. Before these live-action films—and at the time he was drawing the caricatures—he was a pioneer of stop-action animation. His Puppetoons—a term he coined from a combination of “puppet” and “cartoon”—used wooden puppets and stop-action photography to create a style of animation that Americans had never before seen.
The caricatures are only a small part of the visual holdings in the College Archives. Our collections include photographic prints, early photographic processes (daguerreotypes, ambrotypes and tintypes), lithographic and woodcut prints, drawings and paintings depicting college life and our region. You can find a small sampling of the Archives’ image collections by visiting the Williams Memory Project. – SKB
Shown is George Pal’s 1946 pastel and chalk caricature of Stanton Tefft, Class of 1947 (accession # 2012.112)
Selections from the Heritage Collection formed by Paul Breman (1931–2008) are on view on the first floor of Sawyer Library through February 3rd. Dutch-born and educated, Paul Breman was known among black poets as “that crazy white boy who takes us seriously”.
Breman’s collection encompasses in depth the poetry of black Africa and of the diaspora of black Africans into the Caribbean and the United States. It also includes a wide selection of plays, fiction, and other prose literature, and is further enriched with Breman’s substantial library of reference books and studies of black literature, music, and culture. Altogether, some 4,000 books, pamphlets, broadsides, and recordings, and another 4,000 pieces of manuscript and ephemera, comprise this latest major addition to the Chapin Library’s collections.
Three of the books on display are representative of Breman’s own works studying and promoting black literature. Another two volumes are examples of the amazing 400 anthologies of black-authored poetry Breman collected.
The Heritage Collection is also replete with more than 1,000 graphics by black artists that accompany the literary compositions. Nothing, though, breathes life into the collection better than do the readings by over a hundred poets for whom Breman found commercial recordings, private tapes, or conducted reading sessions himself.
Paul Breman’s distinguished collection came to the Chapin Library in 2012 through the generosity of his widow, Jill Norman, and the advice of her friend Darra Goldstein, Willcox B. and Harriet M. Adsit Professor of Russian at Williams College. News stories about this donation may be found on the Williams website, in the Williams Magazine, and in the Williams Record, while the collection itself may be consulted by appointment in the Chapin Library at the Southworth Schoolhouse. – RLV
Addendum, February 4th: The display from the Breman Collection in Sawyer Library has been extended during Black History Month.
Before this year comes to a close, we would like to take note of three important bicentenaries in 2012, each of which could be celebrated with items in the Chapin Library.
The first is the two hundredth anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens. Born in Portsmouth, England, on 7 February 1812, Dickens became a tremendously successful writer, popular then and now on both sides of the Atlantic. The Chapin Library has an extensive collection of Dickens’ works in first editions, including some of his novels as issued in monthly parts – a device which put the works within reach of less pecunious readers while making money for the author through advertising. A year ago in this feature, we marked the Christmas season by illustrating a page from Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (1843).
The second bicentenary is that of Edward Lear, born in London on 12 May 1812. Lear is probably best known today as a nonsense poet, inventor of limericks and creator of the Owl and the Pussycat who “went to sea / In a beautiful pea-green boat”. But he was also a serious artist, painter of vivid landscapes from his visits to Greece and Egypt, India and Ceylon (Sri Lanka). And he contributed illustrations of birds to works by the noted ornithologist John Gould. His picture of a Great Horned Owl, or Eagle Owl, for Gould’s Birds of Europe (1832), seems to have a cheeky expression.
Finally, 2012 is the two hundredth anniversary of the first publication of Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Children’s and Household Tales) by the brothers Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm. Grimm’s Fairy Tales have long been an integral part of Western culture: a new edition of selections from the Grimms’ tales appeared this year, as retold by Philip Pullman. The Chapin Library has a copy of the first selection translated into English, published in 1823–26 and illustrated by George Cruikshank.
The staffs of the Chapin Library and College Archives wish all of our readers happy holidays and a splendid New Year. – WGH
Shown, top to bottom, is the cover of the first part of David Copperfield by Charles Dickens (1849), the Eagle Owl by Edward Lear for Gould’s Birds of Europe, and the title-page, with illustration by Cruikshank, for the Grimms’ German Popular Stories.
Throughout her career, Pauline Baynes (1922–2008) was known for pictures of fantastic beasts, from dragons and mermaids to ghouls and goblins. For the Chapin Library’s contribution to Halloween Screamings, we present three original gouache paintings by Baynes for an unpublished series, Mythical Creatures: St. George and the dragon, Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwock, and the giant spider Shelob from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. These may be seen in the flat exhibition case on the first floor of Sawyer Library, near the Access Services desk and the new books display, from today through Sunday, November 4th.
Pauline Baynes, the original illustrator of the seven ‘Narnia’ books by C.S. Lewis and of writings by J.R.R. Tolkien, also produced thousands of images for books by other authors. Her archive of original art and her personal collection of books were received by Williams in 2009 and may be seen at the Chapin Library. – WGH
Shown is a fourth painting in the same series, of the dragon Chrysophylax from Tolkien’s story Farmer Giles of Ham. (Art copyright © the Williams College Oxford Programme; all rights reserved.)
Today is the Day of Digital Archives!
The Intersections of Oral Traditions and Digital Archives. (Happy Day of Digital Archives, Oct 12 2012)
Older ways of representing information, especially in the everyday library setting, are often rule-based, linear, and resistant to change. Digital repositories/ digital archives, in contrast, provide alternatives to linear, monolithic descriptions for sharing knowledge.
Digital repositories, with their array of metadata schemas are elusive like the spoken word. While the backend of repositories, like the structure of language, preserves and exports in a standardized form (usually METS XML), digital collections similar to oral cultures are mediated and exhibited in a wide variety of ways. Although direction is maintained, both traditions allow for multiple visits, varied connections, and a lot of variation within limits.
Perhaps the digital archive, as a repository, is the culmination of archival theory itself: collections connected in an interoperable and emergent manner. Digital archives, as archival theory has long promoted itself as the vestibule of different kinds of exchanges, scholarship, and uses. The material is free from the linear and isolating confines of the academy; instead the material is presented in a distributed and interrelated manner. JD
In my social circle, there are those who lament the ubiquitous presence of popular culture, the lack of physicality in the electronic book, and the missing discipline and linear hierarchy offered by Wikipedia. My information-professional colleagues offer discipline-specific, but similar protests: a fear of new metadata schemas, which disrupt centralized cataloging and dismay over the potential lack of unity with digital collections.
I offer a different hypothesis, as a former student of anthropology who often reflects on the cultural aspects of digital archives development, Walter J. Ong’s research is informative. He notes that oral cyclic thought is characteristic of primary oral cultures, whereas linear thought depends on writing. Although unreasonable to some, I posit that humans’ oldest form of communication and one of the newest forms of technologies are fundamentally the same. Oral tradition and digital object description share the following:
In the information discipline, specifically libraries, we still rely on a linear fixed bibliographic record (MARC and a small step forward with RDA) and are only beginning to experiment with the potential of the multiple fluencies of digital repositories. This type of cataloging lacks the ability to reflect how current information users search for knowledge. MARC, although “machine-readable,” is an extension of the card catalog and is simultaneously an ill-fitted way to describe digital collections. RDA, in contrast, is preparation for linked data approach for cataloging. Unfortunately, RDA still relies on legacy standards designed for the card catalog world, such as creating uniform titles for grouping items, highly structured format descriptions, and emphasis on textual “citation-like” notes fields. Legacy practices (the afore mentioned) ignore the reality of the digital world, where identity is rarely expressed in a static or textual manner. Using persistent identifiers as part of the metadata like Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI) works much better.
Information users seek and use different non-linear ways of access, such as, multiple exchanges, translations, links, multiple objects, and commentary. Patrons of digital technologies are fluent in various means of “information languages” and their research needs are similar. For example, they do not necessarily need to be forced to search in a monolithic system.
The range of metadata schemas like VRA Core, MODS, Darwin Core, etcetera, with a standardized data schema on the backend, represent a shared identity of an object. The identity is less about the object itself; instead, the importance lies in the relationships between objects. Arguably, this is they way humans naturally think and search, which stands in sharp contrast to the highly structured nature of linear descriptions. Indeed, more aligned with textual dominance, older static schemas and descriptions are not ideal for digital collection building and do not reflect the way we think, lacking different kinds of uses and scholarship opportunities.
Digital archives/ repositories provide direct access to the primary object, as part of an interrelated “knowledge constellation.” This results in immediate use in classrooms, Web sites, museum exhibitions, blog posts, and e-publications. One might argue that this form of of-the-moment access lacks the central authority and is untraditional. Although true, this criticism only reveals a partial picture. Similar to griots or other keepers of oral histories, the stories or digital objects in a digital repository are accessed and passed along in different forms. In other words, they are repurposed as bounded aggregations of a whole and they are shared. By forging semantic links in repositories, it keeps those links active and dynamic, allowing for new scholarship and forging new connections. Recently, digital archivists and other information professionals have been discussing the social graph, which shows social relationships on the web based on Facebook and Twitter. The linked data element of an institutional repository might produce a similar graph. Interestingly, what these graphs and the constellation of data behind them dynamically demonstrate is not so different from our human ancestors’ shared stories and their networks of knowledge. – JGD
The annual public reading by actors from the Williamstown Theatre Festival of the Declaration of Independence of July 1776, the British reply to the Declaration of September 1776, King George III’s speech to Parliament of October 1776, and the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution will take place on Wednesday, July 4th, at 1:30 p.m. outside the Williams College Museum of Art. Heather Lind (HBO’s Boardwalk Empire) and Finn Wittrock (Broadway’s Death of a Salesman), both currently featured in the Williamstown Theatre Festival’s world premiere production of The Blue Deep, will read the Declaration of Independence and Preamble, while the British reply and the King’s speech will be read by comedian and WTF favorite Lewis Black, reprising his appearance from last year.
The Chapin Library’s collection of the Founding Documents of the United States is on display at the Williams College Museum of Art until the completion of the Stetson-Sawyer project in 2014. On July 4th, the Museum galleries will be open from 11:00 to 3:00. – WGH
Update: A video of this year’s July 4th event may be seen on YouTube. The readings were introduced by Robert Volz, Custodian of the Chapin Library.
With support of a gracious donor, a wonderful scrapbook collection of news clippings, photographs, sports ephemera, and awards relating to Michael Reily (class of 1964) was reformatted by Williams Archives and Special Collections into digital form for preservation and access.
Please browse the Reily Scrapbook here.
While at Williams, Reily established himself as one of the best line-men ever to play at Williams College. Named to the All-New England, All-East, and All-American teams, Reily also served as captain for the Williams football team. Abruptly and sadly, Reily died of cancer shortly following his graduation.
The digitized scrapbook created by Michael’s mother, Lelia Manning Reily, documents both the too short career of a brilliant athlete as well as campus life at Williams during the first half of the 1960s.
John Winfeld (class of 1964) writes of classmate Mike: “I often think of Mike Reily, not so much as a friend lost, but rather the embodiment of good and excellence in youth. He is an integral part of our days at Williams. His influence on my life, and on many of our lives persists.” – JGD
Reily Scrapbook, page 39
Williams alumni weekend brings many wonderful guests to the Archives. Nancy Clapp (class of 1987) was no exception, donating a wonderful collection of correspondence and photographs pertaining to her father, Charles Clapp II (class of 1945) and his Psi Upsilon fraternity brothers. Using a mail service in order to share their writings with their “delegation,” the correspondence encapsulates both the culture of war and memories of their beloved Williams College. In a September 2, 1945 letter, Clapp wrote about completion of his coursework while stationed in the Pacific: “Williams came through with my degree the other day.” (See letter below)
Archives and Special Collections hope to make this collection, along with other war-time materials digitally accessible later this year. -JGD
