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« September 2009 |
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| November 2009 »
October 2009 Archives
This week, the Tufts Libraries hosted a disaster recovery workshop with Gregor Trinkaus-Randall of the Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners. It sounds boring, but trust me, sometimes workshops are like playing with crafts in kindergarten. We hosed down piles of old books, records, and newspapers, and then did our best to rescue the (very valuable, of course!) damp materials. There's nothing like destruction in a good cause.
Check out our gallery of photos from the event to see librarians and archivists having fun with water and electricity. Here's a teaser:
Read more...
 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.
(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.
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
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.
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