The Way Back Machine is Magic, Finds St. John’s High School Yearbooks

From the Class of 1951, Saint  John’s High School, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The Internet Archive’s Way Back Machine allows you to search web pages that you thought no longer exist.  Case in point, the former Cambridge Public Library website from 2005 forward can be found here.

Even better, we can find links to incredible historical resources like this:  North Cambridge Catholic High School, previously known as St. John’s digitized and made available their yearbooks from 1940 to 2004.  When North Cambridge Catholic merged with Cristo Rey Boston High School, the website was taken down and the yearbooks were lost to the dustbin of internet history.  But thanks to the Way Back Machine, they’re readily and freely available from 1940 forward.  Not all the years have been digitized.  Despite the gaps, it’s a great resource.

 

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Cambridge Not Sure Women Should be Police Officers

Cambridge Chronicle 19 October 1918.

Cambridge had a long history of women doing police work as social workers under the auspices of the Social Services Center.  When in 1918, the city tried to pass an ordinance to hire and pay women police officers, the Cambridge City Council said no.  There was a lively discussion in which Councillor Apted argued for the city to pay for women already doing the work of police officers whereas Councillor Counihan declared it was an unnecessary expense.  Councillor Stratton asked for the Council on Public Safety to take up the matter, causing a delay in the city hiring women police officers.

It wouldn’t be until 1921 when Edith J. Taylor of 428 Broadway became the first women on the Cambridge Police force.    The brief history on Taylor’s career, written by the Cambridge Police Department, can be read here.

Edith J. Taylor, Cambridge’s first woman Police Officer.

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The Hip Archivist Backlash – It’s Not about Dusty Archives

Annemarie van Roessel, reference archivist at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, featured in the April 28, 2013 article, “Leaving Cloister of Dusty Offices, Young Archivists Meet Like Minds.”

Two weeks ago, the New York Times ran a great article on archivists working in New York City.  We were so excited that archivists made it on the front page of the New York Times website that we completely missed a perfectly valid point that former MIT Archivist Helen Samuels made in a  rejoinder the following week in a Letter to the Editor.  Samuels points out that archivists are rarely working in dusty archives but rather are working to manage the growing terabytes of data that they are now required to access, preserve, and make available to researchers.

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The History of Mother’s Day

 Ann Marie Reeves Jarvis organized several “Mothers Day Work Clubs” in the 1850s to improve the poor sanitation and health conditions in Appalachia.

Few people realize that Mother’s Day has its roots in 19th Century activism and feminism.

Mother’s Day began:

• In 1858, when Anna Jarvis, a young Appalachian homemaker, organized “Mother’s Work Days” to improve the sanitation and avert deaths from disease-bearing insects and seepage of polluted water.
• In 1872, when Boston poet, pacifist and women’s suffragist Julia Ward Howe established a special day for mothers –and for peace– not long after the bloody Franco-Prussian War.
• In 1905, when Anna Jarvis died. Her daughter, also named Anna, decided to memorialize her mother’s lifelong activism, and began a campaign that culminated in 1914 when Congress passed a Mother’s Day resolution.

Read more about the fascinating activist history of Mother’s Day at the National Women’s History Project.

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City Archivists Collect at the Marathon Bombing Memorial

A team of city workers and archivists were working Tuesday morning to preserve paper memorials in Copley Plaza.  Courtesy of the Boston  Globe.

This past Tuesday, Archivists from the City of Boston Archives – John McColgan and Marta Crilly – worked to pack up and permanently preserve materials documenting the Marathon bombing.   The materials will reside in the Boston City Archives.  Read the Boston Globe article here.

 

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Digital Archives Inspire New Designs

In honor of the newly completed renovations of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam’s famous national museum filled with Dutch Renaissance material objects and paintings – including a few by Vermeer and Rembrandt – the museum unveiled its digital archives of 125,000 works aptly named Rijksstudio.  To highlight the creative potential of the digital collection, Dutch designers at Studio Droog mined the archives for inspiration and created a new series of artwork.  Studio Droog took this pleated linen collar from 1615:

To this…

A minimal napkin holder for the dinner table.

Check out the other Studio Droog creations here and start your own Rijksstudio here.

What would you do with the Dutch wooden shoe, otherwise known as a sabot, in the Cambridge Room collection?

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The Geography of Job Loss and other amazing data

Click on the photo above to view job loss and gain between 2004 and 2011.  Courtesy of tipstrategies.com.

Statistical data can be used in such interesting ways.  Click on the link above to see a graphical representation of job gains and loss in the U.S. between 2004 and 2011.  Notice the red around New Orleans in 2005 just after Hurricane Katrina.  It takes about one minute to go through 7 years of economic growth and decline.  It’s surprising to see – especially in the Boston area.

There are a few other sources that aggregate data in such a way.  Check out data360.org and gapminder.org for more ways to easily visualize data and make comparisons.  Enjoy!

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Archivists Make the New York Times

“Archiving in the Digital Era,” a video from the New York Times, published April 29, 2013.

Today’s New York Times had a nice article and short video on archivists working in New York City, titled “Leaving Cloister of Dusty Offices, Young Archivists Meet Like Minds.”  The article focuses on the social aspect of NYC archivists and the video features archivists’ excitement around and challenge with the digital era.  Click the image above to watch the video and see Albert Einstein’s family tea set.

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Take the Preservation Week Quiz

Do you know what that machine is picture above?  If you do, then you must be a conservationist, an archivist, or really interested in preservation week, which is taking place between April 21 to 27.  Find out what the machine is by taking a preservation week quiz, created by the New York Academy of Medicine’s Gladys Brooks Book and Paper Conservation Lab.  Enjoy!

Preservation Week was created by the American Library Association in 2010 because some 630 million items in collecting institutions require immediate attention and care. Eighty percent of these institutions have no paid staff assigned responsibility for collections care; 22 percent have no collections care personnel at all. Some 2.6 billion items are not protected by an emergency plan. As natural disasters of recent years have taught us, these resources are in jeopardy should a disaster strike. Personal, family, and community collections are equally at risk.

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Library of Miniature Books

Neale Albert, collector of miniature books, adjusts his library in his dollhouse version of Cliveden House, a British mansion, stocked with miniature books from his collection.  Courtesy of the New York Times.

Yesterday’s New York Times had a lovely  little article on miniature book collectors, Redefining a Little Library, featuring collector Neale Albert and his 4,000-book collection.  Miniature books can be no larger than three inches and are printed and bound like regular books.  Many of Albert’s mini-books are stored in a dollhouse library in his apartment.  His favorites include an atlas of the British Empire contained a goatskin-bound globe the size of a softball and a book claiming to be Voltaire writings with a key embedded in its cover to open a tiny book of erotica hidden inside.

Stop by Bromer Booksellers at 607 Boylston Street in Boston if you’d like to peruse or perhaps start your own miniature book collection.  Bromer’s is on the Miniature Book Society‘s approved list of dealers.

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