Category Archives: ARB Library

Posts related to the archives and rare books category

Mapathon @ UCLibraries

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On Nov 4th, The Red Cross will hold a Missing Maps Mapathon at UC Libraries in 475 Langsam from 10 am to 2 pm.  The information collected from a Mapathon helps the Red Cross identify the best locations to bring in emergency supplies, where to house emergency operations and what local resources they can collaborate with in emergency response efforts.  In order to participate, you do not need extensive mapping experience.  The maps are creating using the Open Street Map platform and you can learn quickly by watching a training video.

If you are interested to participate, please register here – https://goo.gl/forms/Ln4LdEKcFNc7CUTt2 and watch the training video.

Please contact Amy Koshoffer – ASKGIS@UC.EDU if you have questions about the event.

More information in the attached flyer. GIS_LC_20171011_MissingMapsFlyer

Digital Archivist Eira Tansey to Give Keynote Address at Digital Preservation Forum Wednesday

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Eira Tansey

Eira Tansey

Eira Tansey, digital archivist/records manager in the Archives and Rare Books Library, will deliver a keynote address at the Digital Library Federation’s (DLF) Digital Preservation Forum from 4-5 pm on Wednesday, Oct. 25. DLF keynotes feature speakers doing work around contemporary issues in librarianship and cultural heritage (see 2016’s speakers). Eira’s talk, titled “The Necessary Knowledge,” will focus on the connections between record keeping and environmental protection, using Pittsburgh’s environmental history – where DLF is taking place – as a backdrop.

Logistical details:

Wednesday, October 25, 4-5 pm. This is the opening keynote for National Digital Stewardship Alliance’s Digital Preservation 2017: “Preservation is Political,” which is hosted by the Digital Library Federation and taking place in Pittsburgh.

Live stream link: https://forum2017.diglib.org/livestream-recordings/

Speaker page: https://forum2017.diglib.org/speakers/eira-tansey/

Eira Tansey is the digital archivist and records manager at the University of Cincinnati’s Archives and Rare Books Library. She has previously written about Cincinnati’s public libraries, the visibility and compensation of archivist’s labor and the effects of climate change on archival practice. She is currently collaborating on a Society of American Archivists foundation grant to develop a comprehensive data set of American archives locations in order to aid future spatial analysis of the field, and researching environmental regulatory record keeping.

The National Digital Stewardship Alliance, hosted by the Digital Library Federation, is a consortium of more than 220 partnering organizations, including universities, professional associations, businesses, government agencies and nonprofit organizations, all committed to the long-term preservation of digital information. Members work together to preserve access to our national digital heritage.

 

A Closer Look At An Edition of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

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By:  Savannah Gulick, ARB Student Assistant

Huck Finn Cover PageIn my Honors seminar, “The Culture of Books and Reading,” we were asked to choose a rare book from the holdings of the Archives & Rare Books Library to analyze and write about, and the book I chose was The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (a personal favorite of mine).  Our first task was to analyze the physical features of our chosen books. Prior to this class, I really never cared to thoroughly look over a book; rather, I would just dive right in to the story. It truly is surprising how much you can learn from just examining a book. What I found about my book, just by looking, was that it is a limited edition (only 1500 copies produced), published in 1942 by The Limited Editions Club.  The book is hardcover and bound in a typical library buckram that is colored mustard yellow.  Considering it was issued in 1942, the printing is very clean and still in good condition on sturdy, white pages.  This limited edition contains 45 illustrations done by the Americana artist Thomas Hart Benton and they’re beautiful, fitting right in with the theme of Twain’s novel.  Overall, the book contains 396 pages and is still in good condition. Continue reading →

Developing Future Access to Cincinnati’s Third Protestant Memorial Church Collection

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By:  Alia Wegner, ARB 2017-2018 Intern

Third German Protestant Church

The Third German Protestant Church located at 829 Walnut Street, photo taken in the 1920s.

One of my internship projects this year is developing a digitization plan for the Cincinnati German Third Protestant Memorial Church Collection (Accession number GA-09-03).  Acquired a decade ago, the Third German Protestant Memorial Church was formerly known as the Third German Protestant Memorial Church of Cincinnati, the German and Evangelical Lutheran and Reformed Church, and the North German Lutheran Church.   This collection spans 1814 to 1982 and includes records of births, marriages, deaths, confirmations, along with financial records and a few photographs.  For the most part, it has been used by family historians but once it is digitized and available as a global resource, the records can be used by urban historians, religious scholars, ethnicity and immigration researchers, and many others, as well as providing excellent primary resources in teaching.

The collection forms an important part of the University of Cincinnati’s German-Americana holdings but poses some challenges for digitization. The TPMC collection is composed primarily of handwritten German documents that need to be transcribed as well as scanned.  Since transcribing foreign language documents adds an additional layer of processing, it is important to get a clear sense of the extent and composition of the collection. One of my first tasks in this project was creating a collection overview. Continue reading →

The Don Heinrich Tolzmann German-Americana Collection

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By:  Kevin Rigsbee, ARB and History Department Intern

Tolzmann German Americana Turnfest PostcardThe University of Cincinnati Archives and Rare Books Library recently received the papers of Don Heinrich Tolzmann, a retired Senior Librarian at UC and the former director of German-American Studies.  He has served as president of the Society for German-American Studies and during his tenure of office, he helped commemorate the 1983 German-American Tricentennial to mark the establishment of the first German-American settlement at Germantown, Pennsylvania Tolzmann also led the 1987 campaign to establish October 6th as German-American Day in the United States.  He has also served on the boards of international and national organizations, including the Deutsches Auswandererhaus in Bremerhaven and the Friends of the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C. and he is currently president of the German-American Citizens League of Greater Cincinnati,

Dr. Tolzmann created the German-Americana Collection (also known as the Fick Collection because the initial bulk of the collection came from the library of noted Cincinnati educator and poet H.H. Fick) when he was on the University of Cincinnati Libraries faculty and built it into a world-renowned resource for research and teaching. This extensive collection contains materials from the nineteenth century to the present day, and ranges from periodicals and newspapers to personal letters, census records, and spelling books and almanacs. Continue reading →

AP Trust Recap

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By:  Eira Tansey

University of Maryland mascot

University of Maryland’s mascot in front of the McKeldin Library

Preservation has always been central to the mission of research libraries, which are charged with preserving knowledge, in all its forms, for use. Digital material faces different preservation challenges than analog materials. Rapid changes in file formats, software and hardware mean that digital content created according to today’s best standards risks being unusable or degraded in the future.

At the University of Cincinnati Libraries, we have significant born-digital and digitized content. Much of this can be found in Scholar@UC, UCL Digital Collections, and Luna. Digital preservation refers to the various preservation measures undertaken to ensure long-term use and access of digital materials for enduring sustainable preservation. Archivists and librarians must make many key digital preservation decisions, such as whether to migrate old file formats to new ones, determining how and where to store files, and scheduling file integrity checks. Digital preservation is more than just backups, but storing extra copies of content is a critical component of a digital preservation strategy. To mitigate against complete loss, it is important to store extra copies in different locations. According to the National Digital Stewardship Alliance, increasingly enhanced levels of digital preservation emphasize greater geographic distribution of copies. Continue reading →

Revealing the Cincinnati Irish

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By:  Kevin Grace

Mollie Gilmartin Death CertificateIn 1866, dozens of Cincinnatians, many of them veterans of the Civil War, helped launch an unsuccessful Irish invasion of Canada.  After capture by British and Canadian forces, these Cincinnati Irish were repatriated and they came home.  In 1894, a young Irish immigrant by the name of Mary “Mollie” Gilmartin, living in Cincinnati’s West End, was killed by a man who had stalked her from County Sligo.  Mollie was buried without a grave marker and then forgotten for almost a century.  In 1908, a little girl from the Avondale neighborhood wrote her Christmas letter to Santa Claus.  Elainae, the six-year-old of a wealthy family asked for a doll and for an Irish maid.  And in the 1920s, Ireland’s political leader Éamon de Valera came to Cincinnati to raise money for his emerging independent country.  The Cincinnati Irish had deep pockets with an abiding connection to their heritage.  These are all fairly disparate stories that touch upon just one of the ethnic groups that shaped Cincinnati then, but what meaning is to be found in them now?  How are commonalities with other groups, other eras, and other places discovered and studied? Continue reading →

Environmental Records and Regulation

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By:  Eira Tansey

Burning Barge on the Ohio River

Strode, William, “Burning Barge on the Ohio River”, 1972, Environmental Protection Agency: DOCUMERICA. Image source: https://catalog.archives.gov/id/543983

The relationship between local, state, and federal environmental protection has always been complicated – both by accident and by design. When the earliest environmental protections began, they typically started at the local and state levels, often following some kind of environmental disaster – and thus, environmental protections developed unevenly. By the time, the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was created in 1970, the decentralization of environmental policy was deliberately embedded in the original organization of the agency: much of EPA’s enforcement and regulatory duties are delegated to state environmental agencies.

Water issues have been roiling the Midwest, with significant attention paid to the Flint lead crisis and the construction of the Dakota Access pipeline. Ohio’s water issues may not be in the headlines as much, but the risks are worth paying attention to. Ohio is often described as a “water-rich” state with Lake Erie to the north, and the Ohio River to the south. Although we may be water-rich, this water is often quite contaminated. The Ohio River is consistently ranked as the most polluted river in the United States, and UC researchers have conducted studies of pollutants from Ohio River-sourced drinking water supplies connected with past manufacture of Teflon. Both Lake Erie and the Ohio River routinely experience harmful algae blooms, which are often connected to runoff from agricultural activities – and much harder to regulate. In addition, Cincinnati is under a federal consent decree due to the overflow from infrastructure deficiencies with the local sewer system.  Continue reading →

Beginning Nov. 12 UC I.D. Required to Enter Blegen after 5pm

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blegen hoursBeginning Sunday, Nov. 12, a valid UC I.D. is required to enter Blegen Library, home of the Archives and Rare Books Library, John Miller Burnam Classics Library, the Albino Gorno Memorial Music (CCM) Library and the Classics Department, after 5pm.

Public Access: doors to 400 level will be unlocked:

Monday-Friday: 8am-5pm

Saturday: 10am-5pm

Sunday: 1pm-5pm

UC Community Access: doors to the 400 level will be locked and accessible with a UC I.D:

Monday-Thursday: 7:30am-11pm

Friday: 7:30am-6pm

Saturday: 9:30am-6pm

Sunday: 12:30pm-11pm

Individual library hours vary, so check each libraries hours online at https://www.libraries.uc.edu/about/hours.html

 

Caring for Cincinnati’s Children: The Cincinnati House of Refuge and Beyond

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The Cinicnnati House of Refuge in 1856

The House of Refuge from the 1856 Annual Report of the House of Refuge

Last year, I wrote a short history of the Cincinnati House of Refuge for a website that is currently under development by some UC Librarians which will make the data from ARB’s digitized Cincinnati House of Refuge records more easily searchable.   While conducting research on the history of the House of Refuge, I became intrigued with how Cincinnati dealt with children whose parents for one reason or another were unable to care for them in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  The Cincinnati House of Refuge was designed as a facility for juvenile delinquents, but over time it also came to house children who had nowhere else to go.  This fall I am beginning a research quest to piece together why this happened, and when and what alternatives to the House of Refuge were established.  I will be writing a series of blog posts on what I find.  This first one, though, will provide some background on Cincinnati’s House of Refuge. Continue reading →