(Warning: In linking to and quoting from our collection of books from 19th-century London, this post references terminology and attitudes around people with disabilities which we do not consider acceptable any longer. The words are still there, however. Be warned.)
One of my favorite new blogs is NARAtions the blog of the United States National Archives. One thing I love about this blog is that they ask readers for help answering some of the tough questions we all face. For example, their most recent post asks how to efficiently transcribe NARA's billions of pages of handwritten documents.
I'd like to take a page from their book (but not a handwritten page!) and ask you all for help. We are going to start the process of redesigning the user interface of the Tufts Digital Library to make it more useful and user-friendly for our users. Question: What features do you like to see to help you browse digital collections?
Universal design and accessibility have been huge concerns of mine. We've come a long way since 1861, when Henry Mayhew wrote in his London Labour and the London Poor, in the chapter entitled " Of the Probable Means of Reformation: "The blind--the cripple--the maimed-- the very old--the very young--all have generally adopted a street-life, because they could do nothing else." It's a lot less likely than it was 150 years ago for people with disabilities to be cast off from society as they were in Mayhew's London. The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), for example, has helped America integrate so those with and without disabilities can live and work alongside one another. In 1994, the Tufts Daily reports, the construction of the Tisch Library took the ADA into account to make a more accessible library for the entire university population. Still, it's not all unicorns and roses. As recently as 1996, another campus publication was complaining that the ADA made the campus less attractive with its requirements for accessibility. More importantly, the employment statistics for the United States population with disabilities are still dismal, and anything that lowers those artificial barriers to success is welcome.
One thing we can do while designing our new website is a focus on the principles of accessibility and universal design. This means not merely testing with adaptive technology and conforming to stable and emerging accessibility standards, but making sure the site provides a rich user experience for all users. Let's not have any more of the attitude we see in another volume of Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor, when he writes of "Of the Crippled Street Bird-Seller".
Ever wish there was organization that did everything from parties and dances to food drives and publications? Well, back in the day at Tufts there was.
In 1898, the 75 (!) women of Tufts College elected officers for a club to serve the intellectual and social needs of Tufts women - the All-Around Club. From 1903 on, every woman at Tufts or Jackson was considered a member of the club. The club organized receptions, dances, musical events, and faculty teas like the one pictured here.
The goal of the the club was "to promote unity and loyalty in the college; to further the social, intellectual, and athletic interests of the student body; and to encourage the personal responsibilities of its members." To that end, in addition to organizing social events, the club published Jackson College directories and guides, organized food drives, and provided a representative for the Student Council. But the late 1960s and early 1970s saw a rise in the number of new student organizations, and around that time the All-Around Club disappeared.
Not that the proliferation of clubs and organizations is a bad thing, but to the archivist's ears just having to track a single one-size-fits-all organization sound pretty good!
To learn more about the All-Around Club and see more pictures click here.
Since the students have returned and we’re well into the fall semester, I thought it would be a good time to share some of my favorite Tom Hart photographs from the Tufts Digital Library.
Tom Hart was a 1968 graduate (B.S. in Biology) who documented life at Tufts while he was and student and after graduation. Though our earliest student photographs are charming reminders of a bygone era, I also enjoy Tom Hart’s photographic perspective in capturing the Tufts campus in the 1960s and 70s.
Wren Hall dorm room, October 1966
Class on breakwater, Cape Cod, spring 1966
Gordon Dobey, David Gold, Oscar Porter, and Peter Wadler pushing a car that was stuck in snow on College Ave, illuminated by headlights, 1976
(Sorry this blog post is so late! We had a seven-hour power failure last week that derailed lots of inessentials.)
Last week, when Jen and I were fixing some special character problems in the digital library, we came across A Mapp of the County of Lincolne, with its divisions & Hundreds: or Wapontacks."Wapontacks"? Our prior experience told us this was surely a typo, so we enlarged the image to look closely. Sure enough, the map really did say "wapontacks"!
This led us straight to my second favorite reference book, The Oxford English Dictionary. (What's YOUR favorite reference book? Tell us in comments!) The OED told us "A subdivision of certain English shires, corresponding to the ‘hundred’ of other counties.". Huh. Curious, we read the etymology:
[a. ON. vápnatak, f. vápna genit. pl. of vápn WEAPON + tak act of taking (related to taka to TAKE). The late OE. wǽpenᵹetæc shows assimilation of form to native compounds like wǽpenᵹewrixle exchange of blows.
The recorded senses of the word in ON. are: (1) a vote of consent expressed by waving or brandishing weapons; (2) a vote or resolution of a deliberative assembly; (3) in Iceland, the breaking up of the session of the Althingi, when the members resumed their weapons that had been laid aside during the sittings. In English there is no trace of these senses, and the development of the actual sense can only be explained conjecturally. It is noteworthy that ‘wapentakes’, like ‘hundreds’, often received their names from some natural or artificial object (e.g. a barrow or a tree) which afforded a suitable rallying-place for open-air meetings. Assuming that in England wapentake originally meant the act of signifying assent at a public assembly, it seems not improbable that the men of the district whose place of meeting was (e.g.) at Osgod's Cross might be said to belong to ‘the wapentake of Osgod's Cross (Osgoldcross)’; the use of the word to denote a territorial division would thus be sufficiently accounted for.] Now that's just cool.
Try our Mapp of the West Ridinge of Yorke Shire: With its Wapontakes or Britannia: or a Geographical description of the Kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland, with the Isles and Territories thereto belonging for a small subset of our collection of documents dealing with wapentakes, wapontacks, wapontacks, and hundreds.
 October is National Archives Month!
It's a year for special celebration as the National Archives and Records Administration celebrations its 75th anniversary, and the Digital Collections and Archives pushes into its second decade. Here are some images from 1934 and 1999.
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This blog features news, features, and notions of the staff of Tufts University Digital collections and archives.
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