A reproduction of a circa 17th-century alembic
with an “ostrich”-necked cucubert, clay luting, various
receiving flasks, charcoal furnace, bellows, tongs, and poker
The 45th issue of Museum Notes gives a brief history of the oldest known distillation apparatus as illustrated by various reproductions found in the Oesper Collections.
Click here for all other issues of Notes from the Oesper Collections and to explore the Jensen-Thomas Apparatus Collection.
Closeup of part of the Ch scale for the circa 1960 Hemmi 257 chemical slide rule.
Issue 44 gives a glimpse of two classic chemical slide rules found in the Oesper Collections, one dating from 1814 and the other from 1960.
Click here for all other issues of Notes from the Oesper Collections and to explore the Jensen-Thomas Apparatus Collection.
A circa 1930 American-made “Comptometer”
hand-cranked mechanical calculator.
Issue 43 gives a brief overview of some of the desktop and hand-held calculators used by chemists over the years and currently on display in the hallway outside of the Oesper Collections in Rieveschl Hall.
Click here for all other issues of Notes from the Oesper Collections and to explore the Jensen-Thomas Apparatus Collection.
The circa 1920 Zeiss butter refractometer recently acquired by the Oesper Collections.
Issue 42 describes a new addition to the museum’s refractometer collection – a circa 1920 Zeiss butter refractometer – and its historical importance as a means for rapidly differentiating between pure butter and margarine.
Click here for all other issues of Notes from the Oesper Collections and to explore the Jensen-Thomas Apparatus Collection.
After working through some storage limitations on the Digital Resource Commons, the UCL Digital Lab is pleased to publish several recently digitized items.
In July 2016 the Eaton family donated two jewels from their family archive: the first thesis ever written at the University of Cincinnati in 1820 by John Hough James and a letter from President Thomas Jefferson, to whom James had written for additional source material on Poland.
About three years ago, UC Libraries published a digitized collection of historical ledgers from the Hamilton County Morgue, documenting the circumstances of death for thousands of Cincinnatians. Somehow during this process, one of the volumes was missed. We have just published volume 11 of the Morgue Records, 1910-1911.
While most issues of News Record from the 1960’s and 70’s have been digitized over the past five years, we were missing seven volumes from the 1970’s. The UCL Digital Lab is pleased to publish the complete run from the 1970’s, each issue has been OCR’ed and full-text indexed.
We have recently published a digitized collection of 116 UC commencement programs, from 1878 to 1973. While most years only include the official program, some contain invitations to commencement-related events and even the text from commencement addresses. These programs have been OCR’ed and full-text indexed to make it easier to search for UC alumni.
The Preservation Lab has been publishing treatment reports and photographic documentation that are a record of conservation treatments conducted in the lab on special collections items held either by the University of Cincinnati Libraries or the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County. The reports offer detailed bibliographic information and technical information on the construction of the materials. Several new reports have been added to both the UC Libraries and Public Library collections.
The UCL Digital Lab has been busy over the past several months digitizing new content and collections. While we are still curating some of that content, we wanted to share a few things in the meantime.
Ambrose Bierce
The collection of the letters of Ambrose Bierce to Myles Walsh consists of the correspondence to Elizabeth (Lily) Walsh and Myles Walsh from 1895-1911. Myles Walsh’s sister, Lily, was a protege of Bierce and during her illness–and after her death in 1895–in young adulthood, the two men began writing to each other.
The Archives and Rare Books Library created an online exhibition last year. The letters have now been added to the DRC as searchable PDFs.
We digitized several books and reports relating to UC. All are now available in the Digital Resource Commons. A complete list is presented below, in chronological order.
I know what you’re thinking: Indian botany, where did that come from? UC Libraries has a fantastic collection, some of our items are rare and unique. Occasionally these rare and unique items are requested through Interlibrary Loan. Unfortunately, frequently, due to their rarity and condition, we are not always able to fulfill the requests. We’ve embarked upon an effort to, when possible, digitized this content and make it available to the work in digital form.
The first example of this is Some Wild Flowers of Kasmir by Emilia F. Noel. UC’s copy of this 1903 botanical exploration of Kashmir includes many penciled in annotations, believed to be in Noel’s own hand.
As we are able to publish more collections, we’ll make announcements here!
The Varian E-4 EPR instrument as it appeared while still in use in Dr. Bobst’s laboratory.
Issue 41 describes a new addition to the instrument collection on the mezzanine of the chemistry-biology library. Dating from the early 1970s, this desktop Varian E-4 Electron Paramagnetic Resonance (EPR) Spectrometer was donated by Dr. Albert Bobst of the UC Chemistry Department.
Click here for all other issues of Notes from The Oesper Collections and to explore the Jensen-Thomas Apparatus Collection.
By Eira Tansey, Digital Archivist/Records Manager
A constant challenge for digital archivists is identifying potentially sensitive material within born-digital archives. This content may be information that fits a known pattern (for example, a 3-2-4 number that likely indicates the presence of a social security number), or sensitive keywords that indicate the presence of a larger body of sensitive information (for example, the keywords “evaluation” and “candidate” in close proximity to each other may indicate the presence of an evaluation form for a possible job applicant).
Digital archivists use a number of tools to screen for potentially sensitive information. When this information is found, depending on the type of information, institutional policy, legal restrictions, and ethical issues, archivists may redact the information, destroy it, or limit access to it (either by user, or according to a certain period of time). Continue reading
Congratulations to Dr. Nan Niu and his research team!
Recently Dr. Nan Niu traveled to Beijing, China to attend the RE16 conference- Requirements Engineering16 http://re16.org/downloads/RE16%20program.pdf. He took with him high hopes for the requirements engineering research paper he and his team submitted together with Linda Newman, Head of Repositories and Digital Collections and Amy Koshoffer, Science Informationist. For the beginning of this story and more on the models created using Scholar@UC use cases, see the blog entry “Scholar@UC Goes to Class” (https://libapps.libraries.uc.edu/liblog/2016/01/scholaruc-goes-to-class/).
Dr. Niu has made all the research materials supporting this work available through Scholar@UC https://scholar.uc.edu/works/documents/wm117q084. Dr. Niu is making brilliant use of Scholar@UC as a teaching tool, a research subject, data preservation tool and an open data/access model. Again congratulations to Dr. Niu and the whole team!!
By Eira Tansey, Digital Archivist/Records Manager
When archivists first make contact with a large group of records, they often perform some form of appraisal. You might think of appraisal as being the calling card of the much-loved PBS television show Antiques Roadshow, in which average people realize that Great Aunt Milly’s painting is a valued masterpiece – or a total dud.
Unlike appraisers, when archivists appraise something they generally aren’t assigning a monetary value, but seeking to articulate the value of the records and the information they contain. The Society of American Archivists defines (http://www2.archivists.org/glossary/terms/a/appraisal#.V2hA1jXERmM) appraisal as:
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