Special & Rare On A Stick

Reorganization at the University of Chicago Libraries

2012-01-23T09:22:00.002-06:00

Besides the Harvard Library reorganization there's another bit of shifting that's taking place at the University of Chicago. Here's the link to the story on what's happening at the U of C. This helps fill out the picture a little bit more on what's happening in research libraries today. Other stories are invited that might provide an even fuller picture. Is there a pattern emerging? The link to the organizational chart in the U of C story is illuminating and at least invites the question of balance between administrative and "front line" staff in the redeployment at Chicago.

...What it is ain't exactly clear...

2012-01-20T11:06:00.005-06:00

“All of Harvard Library staff have just effectively been fired” — A Twitter “tweet” from Harvard library staff member Abby Thompson during a recent “town hall” meeting at Harvard.

This morning I read an email message from a colleague in our Music library that contained a number of links to reports on a meeting at Harvard that may have implications for us here in the Twin Cities as well. One of those links led me to a blog (“Feral Librarian”) by Chris Bourg, Assistant University Librarian (AUL) for Public Services for the Stanford University Libraries which does a good job of summarizing all the other reports. Chris titled her blog entry “What’s happening at Harvard." Here's a good chunk of what she wrote:

The twitterspere (at least my corner of it) was all abuzz today about the Harvard Library Town Hall meetings (hashtag #hlth). Harvard Libraries have been in a “transition” for some time now, and it appears that the meetings today were intended to provide library staff with some updated information on the transition. Judging from the tweets, it was not particularly effective — more questions than answers apparently.

I have absolutely no insider knowledge at all, but as far as I can tell from trying to keep up with the tweets all day:

• An initial tweet claiming “All of Harvard Library staff have just effectively been fired” was re-tweeted often, as was a Google+ post written by a former Harvard University Library staff member.
• Later tweets clarified that no staff were laid off … today. Layoffs are imminent, however, and more details will be available next month.
• The layoffs will be in areas that are “Shared Services” — such as technical services, preservation, and access services; not collection development, research librarians, or special collections.
• Some jobs will be eliminated, some restructured, some new jobs created.
• For restructured and new jobs, internal candidates will be solicited first.
• All library staff are being encouraged to fill out employee profiles (with skills, interests and a CV/resume), which will factor into decisions about restructuring (and presumably who stays and who goes, and where the stayers go …). It looks like the deadline for completing profiles is only 1 month away, and workshops on how to do so are already full.
• The general sentiment on twitter is that the senior administrators at Harvard Libraries handled this very poorly — that the town hall meetings produced more questions than answers. Rather than serving to keep staff informed, they served primarily to created significant anxiety.
• Plenty of folks are worried that as Harvard goes, so go other academic libraries – in other words, if massive layoffs can happen at Harvard (with its huge endowments), then no academic library is safe.
• An official Harvard Library Transition Update was posted publicly on January 17. More official Harvard Library Transition stuff on the Harvard University News site.
• Excellent first-hand accounts and analyses from @mpeachy8 and @oodja.

I find this interesting on a couple of fronts. First, as in the case of the Wikipedia blackout, I think this gives us more than an inkling of the power social media plays in immediate communication and, because it is so immediate, to perhaps distort that communication in ways that heighten an event in terms of scope or impact. (Distort is maybe not the correct word; perhaps amplify or accentuate are better words to describe the phenomenon.) Folks in the news business (and other corporate endeavors) are hired to monitor social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook, so it should come as no surprise that this story of the Harvard meetings was picked up by the Harvard Crimson, the Boston Globe, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Library Journal. And once the news is picked up by these organizations and placed online experience shows that the story will pulse around the world, amplified along the way by other tweets, re-tweets, postings, and commentary.

My second interest in the story relates to how it may play out here within our university library system. The colleague who sent me the original email ended his note by saying “A cautionary tale to keep in mind as we embark on our own reorg.” Yes, we are in the midst of our own reorganization. To quote from our staff web site: “In August 2011, the Libraries launched an Organization Review process to assess the optimal organizational structure to support strategic directions and goals.... This process comes in the context of a period of reduced resources and critical position vacancies resulting from a University Retirement Incentive Option program.” The initial word is that our unit, Archives and Special Collections, will not be impacted much (if at all) by the redeployment. But other units will. The principles that will guide our organizational design work are these (again from the staff web site):

Efforts to define the Libraries’ organization should aspire to:
1. Support the development of robust services and operations outlined in the Libraries’ Strategic Plan. This will be accomplished in large measure through the coalescing of expertise, resources, and leadership in areas of future focus.

2. Sustain foundational operations of enduring value, preserving and extending gains of efficiency and effectiveness achieved in current processes.

3. Balance capacity demands in supporting foundational and strategic functions through prioritization based on:
a. Alignment with the University’s priorities -- are we providing the services that strongly support the institution’s mission and directions?;
b. Value to Libraries’ user populations -- a relative measure of impact+benefit/cost;
c. Trends -- where is the value proposition going moving forward; and
d. Opportunity potential -- ventures that hold promise for gaining institutional competitive advantage, achieving excellence, expanding access, and controlling or reducing costs.

4. Invest in staff training and development, providing ample opportunities for professional growth into functional areas of new or expanded interest.

5. Prepare for strengthened commitments to collaborative models, where there is clear opportunity to achieve levels of integration, scale, and economy not otherwise possible.

If you can make your way through the “administrative speak” the plan takes its cue from the libraries’ strategic directions and goals statement, with emphasis on such actions as “coalescing expertise;” maintaining (and perhaps) growing efficient and effective operations; cost/benefit analysis relative to priorities, trends, and potential; developing staff; and collaborating wherever and whenever possible.

So, I’m drawn again to Bob Dylan’s lyrics, this time from the last stanza of “The Times They Are A-Changin'”

The line it is drawn | The curse it is cast | The slow one now | Will later be fast | As the present now | Will later be past | The order is | Rapidly fadin' | And the first one now | Will later be last | For the times they are a-changin'.

Where is the line? And what is the curse? Who are the slow and the fast, the first and the last? Is the line a “lean and mean” staff, “just in time” delivery of service, or “doing more with less?” Is the curse financial pressure, a changing technological landscape, or an invasion into library-land of MBA bred financial types and for-profit vendors? Are the slow the labor unions (e.g. look what happened with Wisconsin and collective bargaining) and the fast capitalist entrepreneurs or bleeding edge library administrators? Like the Harvard meetings, maybe my post is more questions than answers. I find all of this maybe a bit more than unsettling, even though I sit in the relative security of a continuous appointment and endowed curatorship in special collections. Or maybe I'm just echoing another lyric:

Paranoia strikes deep | Into your life it will creep | It starts when you're always afraid | You step out of line, the man come and take you away

We better stop, hey, what's that sound | Everybody look what's going down

Something's Happening Here...

2012-01-19T08:59:00.004-06:00

A bit longer post than usual on some things rumbling through my mind.

“Do you still think you are about collecting books and journals? If so, you are so toast.” — Roy Tennant, Senior Program Officer, OCLC Research

Lately, I’ve been seeing a lot of comments like this. Roy is a respected voice in the library profession; the quote comes from a longer posting in his blog, Digital Libraries, and points to a number of changes currently rumbling their way through the library and information professional terrain. The landscape is shifting, somewhere on the order of an upper level Richter scale disturbance. It is an interesting, and for some, frightening time to be a librarian. According to Roy we are in a time of “the long night for libraries…beset from all sides, both programmatically and financially” trying to get into the requirements of a “new program” that puts content our users want “when and where and how they want it” and in “a place they want to be.” And all of this is happening in an environment of staff change, retirements, and retooling, “to inculcate in them [library staff] the motivation they require, the perspective they need, and the skills they should have."

At the same time, January 18th, Wikipedia went dark. If you ventured to the English version of the Wikipedia site on that day you were greeted by a stylistically blacked out page with the message “Imagine a World Without Free Knowledge. For over a decade, we have spent millions of hours building the largest encyclopedia in human history. Right now, the U.S. Congress is considering legislation that could fatally damage the free and open Internet. For 24 hours, to raise awareness, we are blacking out Wikipedia. Learn more.” Clicking on the “Learn more” link led one to a page that advocated Wikipedia’s positions on the two bills currently in the United States Congress, the “Stop Online Piracy Act” (SOPA) in the House of Representatives and the “Protect Intellectual Property Act” (PIPA) in the Senate. The action of a blackout is itself interesting to contemplate given that Wikipedia is a communal activity, created by “tens of thousands of volunteers from all over the world.” According to one of the pages still accessible on the site

Over the course of the past 72 hours, over 1800 Wikipedians have joined together to discuss proposed actions that the community might wish to take against SOPA and PIPA. This is by far the largest level of participation in a community discussion ever seen on Wikipedia, which illustrates the level of concern that Wikipedians feel about this proposed legislation. The overwhelming majority of participants support community action to encourage greater public action in response to these two bills. Of the proposals considered by Wikipedians, those that would result in a "blackout" of the English Wikipedia, in concert with similar blackouts on other websites opposed to SOPA and PIPA, received the strongest support.

And so, with the blessing of the Wikipedia Foundation, the blackout took effect at 11pm Central Time on January 17th. At this point I find myself humming the words of a Buffalo Springfield tune: “There's something happening here / What it is ain't exactly clear…”

In another article entitled “The Troubled Future of the 19th-Century Book” from The Chronicle of Higher Education Andrew M. Stauffer, an associate professor of English and director of the Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship at the University of Virginia, writes

In most cases, pre-1800 books have been moved to special collections, and, under the 1998 copyright law, post-1923 materials remain in copyright and thus on the shelves for circulation. But academic libraries are now increasingly reconfiguring access to public-domain texts via online repositories such as Google Books and the HathiTrust Digital Library. As a result, library policy makers are anticipating the withdrawal of less-used print collections of books that are not rare in favor of digital surrogates. Large portions of 19th-century print materials will fall into that category….

Of course librarians have always "weeded" the stacks; it's part of the process of maintaining a healthy library system. But we are now facing a much larger and more sudden transformation. The movement of circulating collections to off-site storage has become standard practice at many academic research libraries. One gets the impression that librarians are deliberately encouraging trends already in place, getting users accustomed to digital formats, and effectively ensuring the reduced call for and access to the physical objects they hold.

In other words, the books are going to disappear from the regular library shelves and end up either in special collections or an off-site storage site. The first signs of such a move are already here. We’ve moved much of our own materials, mostly uncataloged but with some level of intellectual control or inventory, to off-site storage. Big Ten library directors are discussing and acting on other strategies such as a central repository for single copies of long periodical runs and other materials. In a recent newsletter for the Big Ten (otherwise known as the CIC—Committee on Institutional Cooperation—because it includes the Big Ten schools plus the University of Chicago) I read

Launched in July of 2011 with ten participating CIC libraries, the CIC Shared Print Storage initiative is progressing on schedule. The program’s first host site, Indiana University, has already secured over 70,000 journal volumes published by Elsevier, Wiley and Springer, and is testing a call and response process with a few CIC schools to fill in missing volumes and add titles to which IU does not subscribe. It is expected that the shared collection at IU will exceed 100,000 volumes by the end of 2012, and 250,000 by July of 2016.

Given such numbers I have to make an educated guess that a quarter million volumes representing duplicates of those titles held at Indiana will disappear from the other Big Ten library collections. If you’re here in Minneapolis and you want to see a volume represented in this collection a “call and response” will get it to you in the not too distant future (we hope).

I post all of the above here because these rumblings are causing me to ask, like the Buffalo Springfield song, “what’s going on here?” I’m happy to get a lot of our material online, available to researchers who will never have the chance to travel to Minneapolis and see the real McCoy. The difference, at least for the material under my care, is that we’re not going to get rid of the originals. They’ll stay here, safe and sound, in case someone wants to inspect them in person. We’re about the business of access and preservation.

Stauffer ends his article in The Chronicle (in another happy and ironic twist, available to me online) with these words:

The books on the shelves carry plenty of information lost in the process of digitization, no matter how lovingly a particular copy is rendered for the screen. There are vitally significant variations in the stacks: editions, printings, issues, bindings, illustrations, paper type, size, marginalia, advertisements, and other customizations in apparently identical copies. Such evidence is necessary for us to understand what books were, how they functioned, how they were produced and consumed across time, and what they meant to past cultures and other readers.

Moreover, in the case of Google Books and HathiTrust, the emphasis has been on quantity over quality. If our academic research libraries replace large swaths of 19th-century artifacts with hastily executed scans, they will be trading away irreplaceable legacies and gutting disciplines that rely on the evidence of the past, especially history, bibliography, textual criticism, and the history of the book. They will also be putting the real world of the historical book ever farther out of reach of students, even as they are ostensibly providing access to it via surrogates. In such a future, 19th-century books as things of paper and ink will be truly forgotten.

Humanities scholars have a vested interest in lobbying for the retention of the printed record in the general collections of academic research libraries. Such collections are places for discovery and the foundation of entire disciplines. This archive of the history of the making and consumption of books cannot be replaced by single-copy scans; and new scholars of the historical record cannot be trained on simulations.

Such projected deaccessioning raises larger definitional questions that should engage us all: What are academic research libraries for? To what extent is the university invested with the stewardship of the past? How will the humanities change in a digital age? What was a book?

Such, then, are my ponderings, prodded on by the writings and musings of others in the profession. “What was a book?” Will it come to that in the not so distant future? And am I really toast, as Roy Tennant suggests, because it is my job as a special collections and rare books curator to think about collecting books and periodicals? I don’t think so. I think I’m here to stay (albeit in a slightly modified form). And, besides, I like toast!

Yet, to quote a few stanzas from a Bob Dylan tune, “the times, they are a changin.”

Come gather 'round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You'll be drenched to the bone
If your time to you
Is worth savin'
Then you better start swimmin'
Or you'll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin'….

Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don't stand in the doorway
Don't block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There's a battle outside
And it is ragin'
It'll soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin'.

Where, in the end, does all this (and more) lead me? I need to retool. I need to stay fresh. I need to be active and informed. But I cannot forget the past, nor leave it to the digital dustbin of easy access devoid of historical context. There has to be some middle way between the extremes of a wholesale destruction of important (if sometimes irrelevant—for the present) texts and an ethereal information cloud beyond our care, control, and institutional boundaries. “Libraries,” Tennant writes, “are a societal good, even in these days of what seems like ubiquitous access to digital information. Access to information is not ubiquitous, nor equal, nor (still) as easy as it can or should be.”

Libraries are a societal good. The question, perhaps, is how good? And it seems, in part, that we’ve ventured over this ground before; it has a familiar ring to it. Anyone conversant with Nicholson Baker’s argument in his book Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper recognizes the seismic fault lines: libraries, enamored by the new technology (as it was back in the day) of microfilming, used this tool to manage collections, discarding original materials once they were filmed. This, along with other library programs, resulted in the loss of a part of our cultural heritage. Librarians and professional organizations responded to Baker’s arguments with some of their own, framed in terms of preservation and access strategies. (See here for a sample of reviews and responses.) Digital tools have supplanted microfilm in our professional (and cultural) practices (and arguments) over preservation, access, and intellectual property.

Something’s happening here....

Eugene J. McCarthy on UMedia Archive

2012-01-14T14:13:00.003-06:00

We've been busy over the last months adding more material to the UMedia Archive, the University of Minnesota Libraries system for the delivery and management of digital objects and rich media. The collection we've probably worked on the most is the Eugene J. McCarthy Collection which includes audio and image files related to Senator McCarthy's campaigns for President of the United States in 1968, 1972, and 1976 along with other personal appearances and speaking engagements. Thanks to the great work of our intern (and later, volunteer) Anjanette Schussler we now have over 1,000 items posted in this collection. Much of this material relates to McCarthy's 1968 campaign but other items from his Senate career have surfaced as well including photographs with Presidents Kennedy and Johnson and legislative colleague Hubert Humphrey. We hope you'll enjoy this rich vein of images.

Hide and Seek - Portlandia on IFC

2012-01-07T10:18:00.001-06:00

One of my sons sent this along to me from YouTube featuring the city of Portland, Oregon and the "Sherlock Homies." Enjoy!

January 6

2012-01-07T09:54:00.002-06:00

A New Year's resolution: time to get back into the blog game. So here's something I wrote for another audience yesterday to kick off the new year.

“Holmes was certainly not a difficult man to live with. He was quiet in his ways, and his habits were regular. It was rare for him to be up after ten at night, and he had invariably breakfasted and gone out before I rose in the morning. Sometimes he spent his day at the chemical laboratory, sometimes in the dissecting-rooms, and occasionally in long walks, which appeared to take him into the lowest portions of the City.” — Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet

Today marks the traditional date that most (but not all) folks of a Sherlockian bent celebrate as the birthday of the world’s greatest consulting detective, Mr. Sherlock Holmes. The rationale, or deduction of this date as that of Holmes birth comes from a close reading of the adventures in which Shakespeare’s play Twelfth Night is the most quoted by Holmes (and thus January 6, Epiphany, as the date). This argument was made by the late William S. Baring-Gould, who also posited that Holmes acted professionally as a youth and toured with a repertory company that specialized in Shakespeare’s work. If the name Baring-Gould sounds familiar it is because William was the grandson of the Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould, writer of the hymns “Onward, Christian Soldiers” and “Now the Day is Over.” However, the younger Baring-Gould’s arguments on Twelfth Night and that it was Holmes’ favorite have been challenged by later Sherlockians, notably Marvin Kaye who stated that Holmes quoted from Henry IV or Henry V at least twice, and possibly three times. “There is also a case for Hamlet,” Kaye continues, “which may have been alluded to three times as well.” Sherlockians love a good argument and so another source for the January 6th date comes into view with the late Christopher Morley, editor for The Saturday Review of Literature and founder of the literary society devoted to Holmes, the Baker Street Irregulars. Students of the stories point to sources found in notes for an article in the Baker Street Miscellanea implicating Morley in which he “was quoted as having chosen the January 6 date, variously, because an astrological reading had indicated it as Holmes birthday; because it coincided with the publishing date of the first issue of The Saturday Review for 1934, for which he was writing a column; and because it was the birthday of one of Mr. Morley’s brothers.” So, however the date came to be fixed, we have a general agreement by most people that Holmes was born on this date.

The year of Holmes birth is another matter and opens up another field for debate. I’ll let Wikipedia summarize the issue:

An estimate of Holmes's age in the story "His Last Bow" places his birth in 1854; the story is set in August 1914 and he is described as being 60 years of age….However, an argument for a later birth date is posited by author Laurie R. King, based on two of Conan Doyle's stories: A Study in Scarlet and "The Gloria Scott" Adventure. Certain details in "The Gloria Scott" Adventure indicate Holmes finished his second and final year at university in either 1880 or 1885. Watson's own account of his wounding in the Second Afghan War and subsequent return to England in A Study in Scarlet place his moving in with Holmes in either early 1881 or 1882. Together, these suggest Holmes left university in 1880; if he began university at the age of 17, his birth year would likely be 1861.

Isn’t this fun? Add to this another fiction that fans of the detective engage in, namely that Holmes (and Watson) were real people and that Holmes is still alive, retired to the Sussex Downs and keeping bees (they don’t say anything about Watson). This would make Holmes either 151 or 158 years of age. Their arguments for such a state of being are two: that an obituary has never been published in the newspaper of record (The Times) and that an earlier edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica (I think it was the 14th edition) lists Holmes in the index as a real person. What better authorities than The Times or Britannica? Quite remarkable!

With Morley’s founding of the Baker Street Irregulars in 1934 Holmes birthday became the focus for an annual gathering in New York. These early gatherings of the Irregulars took place at a hotel in midtown Manhattan or at a speakeasy known to Morley and his cronies. The evening was full of eating and drinking, the presentation of a paper or two on some aspect of the tales, and perhaps some musical numbers. These dinners started small, about thirty or forty gathering for the evening, and have now expanded to a couple hundred souls. Next week the Irregulars will once again gather in New York. I am not an Irregular, but have been invited to many of their dinners as a guest. This year I’m taking a pass on the festivities but hope to rejoin them in a year or two.

Happy Birthday Mr. Holmes!

Happy Thanksgiving to All

2011-11-23T08:12:00.002-06:00

I've been away from this blog for a while but hope to come back to it during this holiday season, especially with the appearance of the new Sherlock Holmes movie in December. But while I haven't been writing much here of late I have been busy on our U Media Archive website adding more content. There are now 745 postings for the Sherlock Holmes Collections and over a thousand for the Eugene J. McCarthy Collection. Much of the McCarthy material has been added through the most excellent work of Anjanette Schussler. My thanks to her for all she has done and continues to do.

Some of what I hope to post here in the near future comes from some other great work done by another volunteer, Lucy Brusic. Lucy has been working through a lot of the John Bennett Shaw ephemera and has found some remarkable pieces. I plan on highlighting some of these finds in future postings.

Finally, I want to alert you to the next session of our ongoing program "First Fridays in Andersen Library" on December 2nd. I'll be presenting material from the Sherlock Holmes Collections, focusing on some of our most important collectors/donors. It should be a fun session and I hope you have the chance to join us.

In the meantime, I wish you all the best during this Thanksgiving season!

The Adventure of the Socially Incorrect Surveillance

2011-03-21T12:25:00.002-05:00

Another recording has been uploaded from the Sherlock Holmes Collections to the U Media Archive. This one is a humorous Sherlockian production with script written by Art Schroeder and produced by Randy Getz. The players in the production included Bill Cochran (Dr. Watson); Randy Getz (Narrator); Ed Moorman (Col. Moran); Mary Schroeder (Sherlock Holmes); Gordon Speck (Mrs. Hudson); Debbie Tinsley (Inspector Lestrade); Michelle Bettis, Carrie Schroeder, Mary Schroeder (Hoe Tones); and Art Schroeder (Hoe's Spokesman).

According to the tape label "This episode was recorded from a live broadcast at 'The Game Is Afloat' convention, 9 October 1993, St. Charles, Missouri and was a production of "the Victorian Broadcasting System." The production runs to just under twenty minutes.

Our thanks to Bill Cochran for his assistance and Mary Schroeder for permission to post this work.

1994 Sixtieth Anniversary Baker Street Irregulars Cocktail Party

2011-03-17T08:20:00.003-05:00

A happy St. Patrick's Day to you all! I started the day with a bowl of green oatmeal (compliments of my wife, who has a good sense of humor). We'll see what the rest of the day brings.

Among the Sherlockian world I'm not sure how the day is celebrated, but we might think of lifting a glass to the Doyle and Foley clans who produced Sir Arthur. Although Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh his father, Charles Altamont Doyle, was born in England of Irish descent, and his mother, born Mary Foley, was Irish. So there is cause for celebration.

There was also cause for celebration on January 8, 1994 when the Baker Street Irregulars gathered as part of their 60th anniversary weekend. Those festivities were captured in another recording from the Sherlock Holmes Collections that has been added to the U Media Archive. The occasion was the Baker Street Irregular's Saturday-afternoon cocktail party at 24 Fifth Avenue in New York. The agenda included Jon Lellenberg and Clint Gould's "March of Time" report on the history of the BSI, a performance by Paul Singleton and Philip Brogdon of an excerpt from Jeremy Paul's play "The Secret of Sherlock Holmes", poetic reports by Al Rosenblatt and Marilyn McKay on the events of the previous evening, the award of an Irregular Shilling and Investiture to Catherine Cooke ("The Book of Life"), the usual fast-and-furious auction for the Dr. John H. Watson Fund, and a warm tribute to Tom Stix delivered by Bob Thomalen.

The recording is presented in two parts on U Media. The first part runs to about 45 minutes; the second part runs to about 40 minutes. Following the second part on the same tape is another recording from an unidentified location: a short talk by Robert Brodie on Dr. John H. Watson's Finances. (This talk may be found at the time-point 32:23 in the clip.)

However you celebrate St. Patrick, enjoy the day and stay safe. And enjoy these little glimpses into the life and times of the Baker Street Irregulars.

This Is Your Life, Moriarty

2011-03-16T08:58:00.003-05:00

A humorous birthday greeting tape apparently done by or for "The Brothers Three Moriarty" is the latest addition from the Sherlock Holmes Collections to the U Media Archive. The recording is a composite of a number of greetings from the following: Moriarty's Estate Agent -- Thom Utecht; Fourth Grade Teacher -- Gordon Speck; Swiss Banker -- Graham Sudbury; Geology Professor -- Peter Blau; Family Cook -- Jennie Paton; Moriarty's Mom -- Allen Mackler; and Math Master -- Peter Crupe. A note with the tape indicates the following individuals provided the voices: Thom Utecht, C. Bryan Gassner, Peter Blau, Martin Gassner, and Joyce Simpson. The recording dates from 1993 and runs just over sixteen minutes.

Jim Hawkins, in a tribute to John Bennett Shaw, noted this about the Moriarty scion society and Shaw's connection with it: "His home-made stationery showed Holmes, with deerstalker and pipe and magnifying-glass in hand, poring over a map of New Mexico with the town of Moriarty in view. Moriarty, the town, was important to Shaw's local scion, The Brothers Three of Moriarty. Their annual trek to that pitiable village was called the Happy-Birthday-You-Bastard-Moriarity."

The New York Times, in an article on the centenary appearance of Holmes, reported the following about Shaw and the Brothers Three: "From Sante Fe, N.M., came John Bennett Shaw, secretary of the Irregulars, who said he has the country's biggest collector of Sherlockiana (12,000 books). His club in New Mexico is called the Brothers Three Moriarity.

'The club is named after the three Moriarty brothers in the Holmes stories,' Mr. Shaw said, pointing to his pin. 'Our club insignia is three J's - all three were named James - with the middle one being a crooked J because Professor Moriarty was the crooked brother.'"

Cuneiform Inscriptions on U Media

2011-03-15T08:42:00.003-05:00

The University of Minnesota owns nineteen artifacts inscribed in cuneiform, the script of ancient Mesopotamia. This collection comprises sixteen clay tablets, two clay cones, and one inscribed and sealed clay tag. These documents include sixteen administrative records from various cities of Sumer in the Ur III period (late 3rd millennium BCE), and three short royal inscriptions from the cities of Isin and Uruk in the early Old Babylonian period (early 2nd millennium BCE). Most of the texts were published in 1961 by Tom B. Jones, then professor of ancient history at the University of Minnesota, and John W. Snyder (Sumerian Economic Texts from the Third Ur Dynasty; a catalogue and discussion of documents from various collections. University of Minnesota Press.) They are now made available on the U Media Archive in new editions, including transliterations, translations, and photographs.

This collection has been available on our unit web site for some time but we thought it was time to migrate the text and images to the U Media Archive. The original site was designed by Matthew James Buell, Mark Gill and professor Eva von Dassow as part of The Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) at the University of Minnesota. Professor von Dassow was responsible for the new text editions, Buell designed and programmed the web site, and Gill researched the history of this collection and the career of Edgar J. Banks. Ahn Na Brodie from the Libraries' digital services photographed the inscriptions. Marcel Sigrist also assisted on the text editions.

Gill made the following observations about Banks. "Edgar James Banks was the dealer who sold the University many, if not most, of its cuneiform tablets. He was very active in the first few decades of the twentieth century, and is responsible for most of the small cuneiform collections at universities, seminaries, and museums around the country. Banks led an interesting life, a summary of which can be found in the excellent article, "The Forgotten Indiana Jones," by Dr. Ewa Wasilewska. Dr. Wasilewska is writing a biography of Edgar Banks, and we are very grateful to her for her advice and help in identifying Banks' handwriting. Banks himself wrote several books, and one of them, Bismya or The Lost City of Adab, has been made available online by the University of Chicago Library. As a final note, at least one of the two cones in the collection was purchased from Banks, but we have been unable to determine which one; also, it seems likely that Banks was the source of some of the uncredited tablets."

Mrs. Kate Koon Bovey donated at least one of the tablets, but we don't have enough information to credit her with the donation of any specific tablet.

The most recent addition to our collection is the donation of a three-sided sealed clay label from the Ur III period, UM 19, donated by Karen Moynihan in August 2001.

The digitization of this collection is part of a worldwide effort to provide cuneiform-inscribed texts on the internet. This effort is spearheaded by the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (CDLI), a joint project of the University of California at Los Angeles and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science.

"These Days in San Diego"

2011-03-15T08:29:00.003-05:00

On December 9, 1996 the public radio station in San Diego, KPBS, featured Sherlock Holmes as a part of its daily program "These Days in San Diego." This is the newest addition of audio files from the Sherlock Holmes Collections to the U Media Archive. Our thanks to KPBS for permission to mount this recording.

The program, hosted by Dan Erwine, featured two guests. Willis G. Frick joined Erwine in the studio and Bruce Southworth joined the conversation by telephone from Minnesota. Many of us know Mr. Frick through his web site Sherlocktron's Holmepage. Bruce Southworth is a Baker Street Irregular and member of the Norwegian Explorers of Minnesota.

The tape of this broadcast was a gift to the Holmes Collections from Bruce Southworth. The file runs to about 47 minutes.

When Mr. Rogers Went to Washington

2011-03-11T14:37:00.003-06:00

I just had a most amazing and wonderful post show up in my reader. I want to share it with you. It deserves to be shared again and again and again. Some of you may think it corny or trite. I beg to differ. This is a man speaking from the depth of his soul. And what he has to say is worth taking to heart.

The first clip is of Fred Rogers, aka Mr. Rogers, testifying at a Senate hearing in 1969 for support of public broadcasting. The second clip is his acceptance speech at the 1997 Daytime Emmy awards.

Click here to get to the link from the New York Times.

Oh that there were more Fred Rogers in the world!

1994 Sixtieth Anniversary Baker Street Irregulars Dinner

2011-03-10T12:11:00.004-06:00

Two tapes, broken into four parts for the U Media Archive because of their length, have been uploaded from the Sherlock Holmes Collections. They are recordings of the 1994 Sixtieth Anniversary dinner of the Baker Street Irregulars (BSI) held on January 7th. The head of the BSI at the time was Tom Stix.

The first part includes the toast by Bill Schweickert to The Woman, Theresa Thomalen, during the pre-dinner cocktail party; the Sherlock Holmes prayer delivered by Dr. Ben Wood; a greeting read by Richard Shull from "the sage of Sante Fe," John Bennett Shaw; a greeting from the Sherlock Holmes Society of London by Geoffrey Stavert; a letter from Her Majesty's Government via Ambassador Sir Robin Renwick read by Richard Shull; expressions of thanks from Mr. Stix to those who assisted with the celebration; a reading of Elmer Davis's "BSI Constitution and Buy Laws" by Richard Miller; and a toast to Dr. Watson's Second Wife by Robert Katz.

The second part includes the continuation of the toast to Dr. Watson's Second Wife by Robert Katz; the "stand upon the terrace" obituaries read by Michael McClure; the Musgrave Ritual read by Kathryn White and David Stuart Davies; a toast to Mrs. Hudson by Ruthann Stetak; a toast to "The Game's afoot" by Ed Van der Flaes; a toast to "the second most dangerous man in London" by Steve Doyle; a toast to the Sherlockian spouse by Michael Kean; and Don Pollock on the demise of the Baker Street Miscellanea.

The third part includes the continuation of Don Pollock's presentation on the demise of the Baker Street Miscellanea; Bruce Montgomery's melodic tribute to his grand-aunt Clara and to his father, James; George Fletcher's anecdotal history of The Baker Street Journal; and a joint presentation by Susan Rice and Mickey Fromkin of some of the better Irregular poetry.

The final part includes comments by Tom Stix, Steve Rothman's discussion of the very early meetings of the BSI, and reminiscences of the annual dinners of the 1950s by David Weiss (who had been attending the annual dinners for more than 40 years). Irregular Shillings and Investitures were given to Peter J. Crupe ("The Noble Bachelor"), Mickey Fromkin ("The Missing Three-Quarter"), Ruthann Stetak ("The Camberwell Poisoning Case"), Geoffrey Stavert ("The Shingle of Southsea"), Bill Vande Water ("An Enlarged Photograph"), Don Izban ("Market Street"), Tom Joyce ("A Yellow-Backed Novel"), Hirotaka Ueda ("Japanese Armor"), Thomas Utecht ("Arthur Charpentier"), Francine Swift ("The Wigmore Street Post Office"), and Bruce Montgomery ("The Red Circle"). Eleanor O'Connor was awarded the Queen Victoria Medal in recognition of her many years of assistance to the BSI at the annual dinners, and Don Redmond (who was nearly ready to publish a new index to the Baker Street Journal updated through 1993) received the BSI's Two-Shilling Award. Bill Schweickert's own poetic birthday tribute to the Master, "A Long Evening With Holmes," ended the festivities.

William Gillette as Sherlock Holmes

2011-03-10T12:05:00.002-06:00

A brief but interesting recording of William Gillette is now on the U Media Archive from the Sherlock Holmes Collections. In this brief clip of about nine minutes Gillette is reenacting a scene from his play Sherlock Holmes. Based on his voice I would say that this was made late in his career.

The Sherlock Holmes Cult

2011-03-08T12:34:00.003-06:00

A recording of a number of Twin Cities Sherlockians commenting on the world of Sherlock Holmes has been added to the U Media Archive. The file begins with Ronald Hubbs providing some background to the world of Holmes. This is followed by Paul Verret's account of his attendance at a dinner of the Baker Street Irregulars in New York. Austin McLean, curator of Special Collections, acts as moderator. The recording concludes with E. W. McDiarmid describing (with the assistance of slides) treasures from the Holmes Collections.

It is not certain where this event took place but a label on the tape indicates a date of April 7, 1982. Perhaps it was a joint event between the Norwegian Explorers and the University Libraries. We'll have to dig into the archives of the Explorers to see if anything turns up.

The recording is just over 58 minutes in length.

Jack Key: Keeping the Holmes Fires Burning

2011-03-04T14:01:00.003-06:00

On July 8, 1981 Jack Key, Librarian at the Mayo Clinic and Mayo Foundation made a presentation for the Mayo Foundation History of Medicine Society at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. We have just uploaded a copy of Mr. Key's talk from the Sherlock Holmes Collections to the U Media Archive.

The full title of Mr. Key's talk was "Keeping the Holmes Fires Burning and Dr. Philip S. Hench's Contributions." At the conclusion of his talk the Fox Movietone interview of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was shown and comments offered by E. W. McDiarmid and Bryce Crawford. Also in the audience was Andrew Malec, at the time the Doyle bibliographer for Special Collections and Rare Books at the University of Minnesota Libraries. Some of the audio quality is poor, especially the comments at the end which were not picked up well by the recording equipment. The recording is just over 51 minutes in length.

Other materials related to Mr. Key's interest in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes may be found in the Jack Key Collection, an archival component of the Sherlock Holmes Collections.

Steve Staruch and Bruce Southworth on WCAL

2011-03-02T12:26:00.002-06:00

An interview with Sherlockian Bruce Southworth on Sherlock Holmes is one of the latest entries from the Sherlock Holmes Collections to the U Media Archive. The recording dates from January 6, 1992 (another interview on Holmes' birthday) and is interspersed with some musical pieces.

Bruce Southworth is an invested member of the Baker Street Irregulars (as Victor Hatherley) and has been a member of both the Norwegian Explorers and Friends of the Sherlock Holmes Collections. Steve Staruch, the host of the program, can now be heard on Classical Minnesota Public Radio. Previously he hosted a number of programs on WCAL, including a weeknight program of sacred and contemplative music. An accomplished musician, Staruch is a violist with the Lyra Baroque Orchestra and his own group, the WolfGang. He was a tenor in the Dale Warland Singers for seven seasons and also sang in the Oregon Bach Festival.

WCAL operated on the campus of St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota until its purchase by Minnesota Public Radio. Our sincere thanks to Gary S. De Krey, professor of History and Archivist at St. Olaf for permission to post this interesting interview.

Frederic Dorr Steele

2011-03-02T12:06:00.004-06:00

All of the Frederic Dorr Steele images that were part of our internal grant/scanning program have now been uploaded to the U Media Archive. Along with many of the Sherlockian drawings are other Steele pieces not widely viewed before including Christmas and dinner cards, caricatures, self-portraits, and landscapes/seascapes from Monhegan Island.

Additional information on Steele may be found in the excellent exhibit catalogs from the Holmes Collections: The Other Master -- Frederic Dorr Steele and The Frederic Dorr Steele Memorial Collection, both prepared by our local expert on Steele, Andrew Malec.

Dr. Alvin Rodin, Lord Gore-Booth, and Dame Jean Conan Doyle

2011-03-02T12:02:00.004-06:00

Another tape recording has been added to the U Media Archive from the Sherlock Holmes Collections. This is a short clip, just over eight minutes, of an off-air recording from the BBC of a report by Oliver Scott on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Included are telephone interviews with Dr. Alvin Rodin; Lord Gore-Booth, former president of the Sherlock Holmes Society of London; and Dame Jean Conan Doyle. The audio quality for this portion of the recording is not good. Following the report by Oliver Scott is a separate recording of Dame Jean Conan Doyle with her observations on the interview and report. It is not known who made this second recording of Dame Jean.

News-Maker Lunch: Don Shelby, Pj Doyle, E. W. McDiarmid

2011-02-24T10:37:00.003-06:00

Another new audio tape from the Sherlock Holmes Collections has been added to the U Media Archive. This tape dates from October 28, 1987 and is a partial recording of a "News-Maker Lunch" presumably held in Minneapolis and moderated by Don Shelby with comments by Pj Doyle and E. W. McDiarmid. A focus of the commentary was around the recent publication of A Baker Street Dozen: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Thirteen Favorite Sherlock Holmes Stories which was edited by Doyle and McDiarmid.

We don't know who organized the "News-Maker" lunches so I may contact Don Shelby to see if he has any additional information about these events. If anyone else might know about this series I'd be interested in finding out more.

The recording is just under a half-hour in length, perfect for a lunch-time event.

Opening of ACD Research Room in Portsmouth

2011-02-23T10:33:00.004-06:00

I received the following from the good folks in Portsmouth. I'm very pleased to share this news.

*****
It's the opening of the Arthur Conan Doyle Research Room, my dear Watson

Whether it's an original Sherlock Holmes manuscript, a poster advertising a Sherlock Holmes play at Richmond Hippodrome in 1912 or even a Sherlock Holmes pipe, sleuths can now explore one of the finest collections relating to Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes in the world.

The Arthur Conan Doyle Collection, Richard Lancelyn Green Bequest was donated to Portsmouth by the writer and collector Richard Lancelyn Green's family following his death in 2004.

A leading Sherlock Holmes specialist and Arthur Conan Doyle Scholar, Richard Lancelyn Green's collection spans over 40,000 items, archives and artefacts relating to Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes, collected over 40 years.

The Arthur Conan Doyle Research Room will give students and fans easier access to books, pictures, letters and other other treasures.

Located at the central library, the room was officially opened today (21 February) by author Andrew Lycett.

Cllr Lee Hunt, member for culture, leisure and sport said: "The Arthur Conan Doyle research room is a fitting venue to explore one of the finest collections relating to Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes in the world."

"It's a fantastic resource for schools, colleges and local universities covering many different aspects of the curriculum.

We hope the room will contribute to the development of the central library as a Portsmouth literary centre that celebrate the literary wealth of Portsmouth."

For more information contact Fiona-Jane Brown, Conan Doyle projects officer on 023 9283 4727.

*****

The following events are planned to mark the opening of the new Arthur Conan Doyle Research Room

Monday 21 February
11am - Official opening
2pm – Talk on the birth of Sherlock Holmes by Tony Pointon

Tuesday 22 February
All day – Cryptic crossword workshop with Tim Moorey

Wednesday 23 February
7.30pm – Decoding Sherlock

Thursday 24 February
2pm – Turning the tables by Paul Cissell
7.30pm – Turning the tables: the secrets of Victorian mediumship revealed

Friday 25 February
All day – Code breaking, the war time enigma with Bletchley Park Museum

Saturday 26 February
7.30pm – Sherlock Holmes film night

Another Little Mystery

2011-02-17T14:11:00.003-06:00

Another curious recording has found its was from the Sherlock Holmes Collections to the U Media Archive. It is short, just under three minutes, and with an unidentified male voice reading Vincent Starrett's poem "221B". There are three different readings in this short recording, the first ending with the bark of a dog (which might make you jump if you're not expecting it; or smile if you are). The voice does not appear to be that of E. W. McDiarmid (who is heard on the other side of this tape). Perhaps it was another Norwegian Explorer, or Starrett himself?? We don't know. Any ideas? Does the voice sound familiar to anyone of an older generation?

The only other idea I have is that it may, indeed, be McDiarmid but that there was some fault with his recording equipment. I haven't played with the pitch in the recording. But there's something about the reading that says to me that this isn't the case, that it is someone else reading the poem. But who?

E. W. McDiarmid: The Cult of Sherlock Holmes

2011-02-16T11:45:00.005-06:00

There are a number of recordings or talks that I've come across in the Sherlock Holmes Collections with the title "The Cult of Sherlock Holmes." It must have been a title that was "in the air" for a while or that caught people's fancy. It works as a title, but I don't think I've seen anything come out recently using "cult" and Sherlock together. Its maybe just as well. Cult has taken on a bit of a nasty connotation.

But there's nothing nasty about a new recording I've mounted from the Holmes Collections on the U Media Archive. In fact I think it has a certain innocence and sweetness to it, in part because it was a recording I believe was not really meant to be heard. Its a practice piece by a prominent Sherlockian.

I remember when I was much younger, learning to play the trombone (and later the tuba) that people really didn't want to hear me practice. Of course, when you're practicing the tuba where can you go where people can't hear you. (In my case I practiced in the basement and the whole house reverberated with my om pa pas.)

In this case the practitioner was E. W. McDiarmid. In this recording he's preparing a talk to students at Breck School the following day on the cult of Sherlock Holmes. As Dr. McDiarmid mentions towards the beginning of the tape, following this lecture the students would be visiting the Holmes Collections at the University of Minnesota. There's no date on the tape, so we don't know when this was made. But its a sweet moment to hear the voice once again of a former University Librarian and founding member of the Norwegian Explorers.

(photo credit of McDiarmid: Marlin Levison, Minneapolis Star Tribune)

More on The Informal Club

2011-02-15T09:20:00.002-06:00

Both Andrew Malec and George Hubbs provided me with some more information on The Informal Club mentioned in a previous post. According to Mr. Hubbs "The Informal Club, founded in 1894, was a by invitation only group of men and women in St. Paul who met periodically for learned lectures and discussions (of course Sherlock Holmes meshed very well with this description)." Mr. Hubbs father, Ronald, was a member and his son was asked to deliver a talk entitled "The Influence of Sherlock Holmes on Society."

Mr. Malec pointed me to a book, History of St. Paul and Vicinity: A Chronicle of Progress and a Narrative Account of the Industries, Institutions and People of the City and its Tributary Territory by Henry A. Castle, Volume II, Illustrated (Chicago and New York: The Lewis Publishing Company, 1912). An online version of this book is available here (although the text has some typographical problems due to how it was entered). If you search for "Informal Club" in the full-text version you'll find an lengthy discussion on the history of the club. A Google Books version of volume one is available here.

R. Dixon Smith -- Jeremy Brett and David Burke: An Adventure in Fidelity

2011-02-15T08:18:00.003-06:00

We have a bit of a mystery with a new recording we've recently uploaded from the Sherlock Holmes Collections to the U Media Archive. It is an incomplete recording of a talk given by R. Dixon Smith on the various actors who have portrayed Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. There are a number of puzzles associated with this clip. First, we do not know when or were this particular talk was given. We know, from the opening remarks, that it was probably given in conjunction with some gathering of the Norwegian Explorers and that it happened after 1976. Second, the recording is incomplete; we do not know why the second part of the lecture was not recorded.

As for Mr. Smith, we have more information. Indeed, a number of his works are found in our catalog including Lost in the Rentharpian Hills: spanning the decades with Carl Jacobi (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, c1985); Jeremy Brett and David Burke: an adventure in canonical fidelity (Minneapolis: Special Collections & Rare Books, University of Minnesota Libraries, 1986) and (Cambridge, England: Rupert Books, 1998); Remembering Jeremy Brett, (with Michael Cox) (Cambridge, England: Rupert Books, 1997); and Ronald Colman: gentleman of the cinema (Jefferson, N.C. ; London: McFarland, 2002). From the biographical sketch given in the Norwegian Explorers conference proceedings from 1993 ("Rogues, Rascals, and Ruffians") we find this: "R. Dixon Smith attended the University of Connecticut, where he received his BA and MA degrees. He has lectured on early cinema at numerous colleges and universities....He has been a member of the Norwegian Explorers since 1975." At some later time Mr. Smith established Rupert Books in Cambridge, but this establishment is, alas, no longer with us.

Mysteries aside, what we have is an interesting portion of a talk given by someone very knowledgeable on Holmes and cinema. If, by chance, we find the remaining portion of this talk, we'll put them together in a single file.

Charlie Boone Interview with Don Shelby and Derham Groves on U Media

2011-02-14T14:55:00.004-06:00

Another new recording has been added to the U Media Archive from the Sherlock Holmes Collections. This audio file is an interview by Charlie Boone of Don Shelby, at the time a reporter for WCCO television and Derham Groves, then an architectural graduate student at the University of Minnesota, on Sherlock Holmes. The interview, on WCCO AM radio, was made just prior to the 1984 conference on Holmes hosted by the University of Minnesota. Both Shelby and Groves were participants at the conference. This was an off-air recording and the sound quality at times is not the best, but its fun to hear Don and Derham together on the air. The clip lasts about eighteen minutes. Our thanks to WCCO radio for allowing us to use this recording on the U Media site.

George Hubbs at the Informal Club

2011-02-11T14:22:00.002-06:00

A new recording has been added from the Sherlock Holmes Collections to the U Media Archive. This is a recording of a talk given by George Hubbs at the Informal Club. Mr. Hubbs was the founder and first president of the Friends of the Sherlock Holmes Collections at the University of Minnesota. The tape includes an introduction by E. W. McDiarmid (apparently after the recording was made), commentary by professor Bryce Crawford (founding member of the Norwegian Explorers), and a question and answer period at the end. The length of this audio file is just short of forty-two minutes. The recording was made on January 6 (Holmes' birthday), 1986.

We have no idea who or what the Informal Club was, but have written to George Hubbs asking us if he can supply us with some additional information and context for his talk. We'll report back anything we hear.

J. Randolph Cox on U Media

2011-02-10T08:53:00.004-06:00

A new recording from the Sherlock Holmes Collections has been added to the Libraries' U Media Archive. The audio file features J. Randolph Cox, former documents and reference librarian at St. Olaf College and Editor of the Dime Novel Round-Up. Randy is also a member of the Baker Street Irregulars, having been invested with the title "The Conk-Singleton Forgery Case" in 1967. As Randy recalls the event, "the talk was scheduled during the daily chapel period at St. Olaf. When a talk was not strictly religious in nature it was given the designation of a mini-convocation.'" Randy joined the faculty of St. Olaf in 1962. The convocation talk was broadcast on the public radio station in Northfield, WCAL. (WCAL was later sold by the college to Minnesota Public Radio, much to the displeasure of loyal listeners.) Radio wars aside, this is a delightful talk by a long-time Sherlockian. Enjoy!

McCarthy Images on U Media

2011-02-10T08:37:00.003-06:00

Over one hundred new images from the Eugene J. McCarthy collection have been added to the U Media Archive. This represents a small fraction of the photographs documenting the 1968 U. S. presidential candidacy of Senator McCarthy. Other images will be added to the collection over time. Much of the work of scanning and metadata creation is being done by our intern, Anjanette Schussler as a part of her studies with the Library Information Technology program at Minneapolis Community and Technical College. Many of the images were taken by McCarthy's campaign staff with others taken by photographers for national media outlets and local newspapers. Combined with the audio files mention in my previous post these resources provide a rich window into the work of a major presidential campaign during a turbulent time in our country's history and should be of great interest and use to anyone studying this period and its activities.

Eugene McCarthy Audio Files on U Media

2011-02-08T22:00:00.003-06:00

One of the many enjoyable partnerships I've been involved with was with Tim Pugmire at Minnesota Public Radio as Tim was working on a documentary of the 1968 United States presidential campaign of Senator Eugene J. McCarthy of Minnesota. We're fortunate to be the home for Senator McCarthy's presidential campaign records. Part of that massive collection includes hundreds of audio tapes made during the campaign and oral history interviews with many of the people involved in the campaign.

A sample of these audio tapes has been mounted on the U Media Archive web site. Most of the fifty-seven recordings currently on the site were digitized by Tim and his colleagues at MPR during the production phase of the documentary and digital copies were provided to the U of M Libraries. We've added a few more recordings since then and plan on adding more.

Some of the significant recordings include: the announcement by McCarthy of his candidacy for president; a campaign song by Peter, Paul and Mary; and the debate between McCarthy and fellow Democratic candidate Senator Robert F. Kennedy. Many of the recordings are speeches McCarthy made on the campaign trail. There's plenty to discover, and we'll be adding more.

Paul Parker and Jim Shannon: An Evening with Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson

2011-02-07T13:51:00.003-06:00

A new audio recording from the Sherlock Holmes Collections has been uploaded to the U Media Archive. The recording dates from May 13, 1987 of a presentation by Paul Parker and Jim Shannon for the "Spring Hill" series of presentations at the Spring Hill Conference Center in Wayzata, Minnesota on the topic "An Evening with Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson." The presentation included the showing of the Fox Movietone filmed interview from 1928 of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle which is less formal in its presentation than another recording of Doyle on the subjects of Holmes and Spiritualism. (See http://purl.umn.edu/62183 for this other recording.) The first half of the Parker/Shannon presentation discusses Conan Doyle; the second half discusses Holmes and Watson. The recording runs to about 74 minutes.

Norwegian Explorers 40th Anniversary / Annual Meeting

2011-02-04T14:19:00.005-06:00

Two more tapes have been uploaded from the Sherlock Holmes Collections to the U Media Archive. These are recordings of the proceedings of the fortieth anniversary gathering and annual meeting of the Norwegian Explorers of Minnesota, a local Sherlockian literary society. The first tape runs to just over 57 minutes and the second tape runs to about an hour.

The meeting begins with a note that E. W. McDiarmid, while not present (having just received a pacemaker and recuperating), was there very much in spirit. The Canonical toasts were given (including one by Explorer founder Bryce Crawford and another by Raymond Shove). The audio quality is not the best, given the position of different speakers in the room (especially for the toasts), but we've tried to compensate a bit in the recording levels on these softer passages.

Pj Doyle was the master (or mistress) of ceremonies. On a registration form for the event (found in the archives of the Norwegian Explorers) the evening was billed as "The Norwegian Explorers Annual Dinner and Holiday Celebration." It was held at the Campus Club at the University of Minnesota on December 8, 1988. In addition to the toasts the evening included: two Sherlockian songs (Aunt Clara being one of them), sung by Bill Teeple, with some audience participation; the business meeting and election of officers for the Explorers; "The Victorian Christmas Tradition" by Linda Reed; "The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle," a talk by Pj Doyle; and a dramatic presentation based on a script by Edith Meiser of "The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle" (including audience participation). A good time, it seems, was had by all.

KUOM Sherlock Holmes on U Media

2011-02-04T14:12:00.007-06:00

Another file has been uploaded from the Sherlock Holmes Collections to the U Media Archive. This one is a radio program, hosted by Steve Benson, on KUOM (the University's radio station) about Sherlock Holmes. The guests for the program included Austin McLean, curator of Special Collections & Rare Books at the University of Minnesota; Bruce Southworth, board member of the local Sherlockian group, The Norwegian Explorers; Alan Shorter, the director of the Children's Theatre Company production of "Sherlock Holmes and the Baker Street Irregulars"; and Julie Briskman, an actress at the Children's Theatre Company, who plays the role of Mrs. Hudson. The program was broadcast on February 14, 1989 and runs to about 50 minutes. Enjoy!

The Speckled Band

2011-02-04T11:37:00.003-06:00

The amount of material from the Sherlock Holmes Collections on the U Media Archive site continues to grow. We now have, at the end of this week, over 400 items from the Collections uploaded for viewing and listening.

One of the latest additions to the site is a recording of a production of a radio drama, from a script by Edith Meiser, of the Sherlock Holmes story "The Adventure of the Speckled Band." The radio drama was performed at the University of Minnesota with Don Shelby as Holmes, Dave Moore as Doctor John Watson, Colleen Needles as Helen Stoner, and Tom Hanneman as Dr. Grimesby Roylott. The production is introduced by E. W. McDiarmid, former University Librarian and member of the Norwegian Explorers with comments by Edith Meiser, who attended the performance. The performance is from July 13, 1983 and lasts about 53 minutes. Enjoy!

U Media -- MPR's "Take Out" from 1987

2011-02-03T16:04:00.006-06:00

Another new audio file has been added to the U Media Archive from the Sherlock Holmes Collections. This is an off-air recording of an interview that took place as part of a Minnesota Public Radio (MPR) program called "Take Out." The host for this program was Beth Friend. In this particular excerpt the interviewees are three Sherlockians -- E. W. McDiarmid from the University of Minnesota; Pj Doyle, local editor and writer; and by telephone from Sante Fe, New Mexico, John Bennett Shaw, premiere Sherlockian collector. MPR was very kind to grant permission for the mounting of this excerpt on the U Media Archive. Its a thrill to hear all three, but I'm especially drawn to the two who are no longer with us, but who had such an impact on the Sherlockian landscape -- McDiarmid and Shaw. The date of the program is September 14, 1987 and it runs to just under a half hour. Take a trip back in time and enjoy the ride!

Michael Harrison on U Media, part 3

2011-02-03T12:49:00.003-06:00

The third and final installment of Michael Harrison's talks at the University of Dubuque in 1984 is now up on the U Media Archive site. I'll have to do some more research into the program for this conference to get the exact order of Harrision's talks, but it appears, from the introduction in this recording, given by John Bennett Shaw, that this was the first of the three presentations. It is entitled "Holmes Then." Enjoy!

Michael Harrison on U Media, part 2

2011-02-03T12:38:00.003-06:00

I've located the other two recordings of Michael Harrison's talks given at the University of Dubuque, Iowa for "A Sherlockian Seminar," August 17-19, 1984 and am mounting them on the U Media Archive site. All three talks were recorded and edited by Allen Mackler and made available to interested parties. One of my predecessors in the department had the foresight to request copies -- Allen was living on the East coast at the time -- which I located in a part of the Holmes Collections dealing with what, at that time, was called the Hench/Shaw Collection. The first tape that we uploaded, and which was mentioned earlier in this blog, was Harrison's presentation "The Gaslight Era." This second recording is of Harrison's presentation entitled "The London of Sherlock Holmes." Enjoy!

Allen Mackler on U Media

2011-02-01T11:13:00.003-06:00

Another audio resource has been added to the Sherlock Holmes Collections on the U Media Archive. This is a delightful production by the late Allen Mackler on "Sherlock Holmes and Music." We don't know exactly when Allen produced this tape, but it bears his mark in production, resources, and knowledge of the Holmesian canon. Included in the audio file are rare recordings that no doubt came from Allen's own collection along with his commentary. You may recall, from earlier postings on this blog about Allen, that prior to his coming to Minnesota he worked at public radio station WETA in Washington, DC. At the station he hosted programs focusing on the broadcast of rare recordings of classical music. Allen's first interest, as his obituary noted, was in classical music. Here, in this recording, you have the opportunity to hear Allen talk about perhaps his two greatest interests: music and Sherlock Holmes. If you want to hear it right away follow this link to the entry in the U Media Archive and click on the "play audio" button.

Michael Harrison on U Media

2011-01-31T11:47:00.005-06:00

A new audio file has been added to the Sherlock Holmes materials found on the U Media Archive. This is a recording of a talk given by Michael Harrison at the University of Dubuque, Iowa for "A Sherlockian Seminar," August 17-19, 1984.

J. Randolph Cox, writing in the Winter 1984 issue of Baker Street Miscellanea, made this observation:

"Among the several lecturers was the noted British author and Sherlockian scholar Michael Harrison, making his first visit ever to the United States. Everywhere in sight throughout the proceedings, he spoke three times in all, and the subject matter of his remarks -- "Sherlock Holmes Then", "The Gaslight Era", and "The London of Sherlock Holmes" -- was treated by him in entertaining "stream of consciousness" fashion. As is the case with his Sherlockian writings, there was an engrossing immediacy to his presentations, bonused in this instance with erudite digressions and with a low-key sense of humor that sat well with the audience. In the estimation of this attendee, at least, his appearances were the high points of the workshop."

If we come across recordings of Harrison's other two talks at this seminar we'll be sure to add them to the U Media Archive.

Ronald Knox

2011-01-31T11:25:00.004-06:00

Many are aware of the debate on whether or not the beginning of "The Great Game" among Sherlockians began with Ronald Knox's presentation in 1911 (and later publication in 1912). It is quite possible that Messrs Lellenberg and Sveum came across the following in their research, but I add it here all the same in the belief that part of the evidence should be the praxis of the Sherlockian community in how they refer to "the Game." This from J. Randolph Cox in Baker Stree Miscellanea, no. 40 (Winter 1984), page 25 (for which Mr. Lellenberg was a contributing editor):

From the start the meetings [of the Baker Street Irregulars] featured the presentation of "scholarly" papers, focusing on presumed inaccuracies and inconsistencies in the Holmes Canon. As students versed in the history of the sodality are aware, the earliest of these were intended as spoofs of the so-called "higher criticism" as applied to the Bible (the first such, Ronald Knox's 1912 "Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes", established the pattern), and later as gentle jokes at the expense of other examples of academic excess. Over the years, the whimsy has become so refined, and the satire so subtle, that the nonsense is often indistinguishable from the models. Which may be why more than a few of the movement's detractors, oblivious to the leg-pulling, have been academics themselves.

Some, in arguing against the Knox thesis, may say that the praxis is in error, that it is unorthodox or heretical. Such may be the case. Or perhaps might makes right.

U Media Addition to Sherlock Holmes

2011-01-28T15:53:00.003-06:00

The U Media Archive at the University of Minnesota Libraries as been updated with more Sherlock Holmes material. There are now digital files for 113 illustrations (primarily by Frederic Dorr Steele), 109 buttons, 67 lapel pins, 39 slipcases, 1 pipe, and 1 tie tack. There are also three new audio files including a short clip featuring Richard Lancelyn Green, an interview of Edith Meiser by John Bennett Shaw, and a campus radio program featuring Dr. Bryce Crawford, Pj Doyle, and Andrew Malec.

Thanks For A Very Nice Profile

2011-01-18T13:14:00.004-06:00

Jennifer Howard wrote a very nice profile that just appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Thanks, Jennifer!

January 16, 2011

At U. of Minnesota Libraries, a Curator Beckons Holmes, Sweet Holmes

By Jennifer Howard

If you ever catch Timothy J. Johnson in a deerstalker hat, it's more likely to be blaze orange than the subdued houndstooth associated with Sherlock Holmes. The game Mr. Johnson stalks really is deer, not London's criminal element. As the recently appointed E.W. McDiarmid curator of the Sherlock Holmes Collections at the University of Minnesota Libraries, though, the native Minnesotan has developed a close bond with the fictional London detective and his world.

Mr. Johnson has charge of what he describes as the world's largest collection of material related to Holmes and his creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The archive includes the 1887 Beeton's Christmas Annual, which contained the first Holmes story to appear in print ("A Study in Scarlet"); 31 copies still exist worldwide, and Minnesota holds four of them. The collection also features many letters from Doyle to various correspondents as well as original artwork and sketches done by Frederic Dorr Steele, who illustrated Holmes stories for Collier's Weekly. And it contains the correspondence of John Bennett Shaw, a collector of Sherlockiana with close ties to the organization of Holmes enthusiasts known as the Baker Street Irregulars.

Before being named the Holmes Collections' curator, Mr. Johnson, 53, was already the Twin Cities campus library's curator of special collections and rare books, and he continues to oversee those areas. "When you have Holmes and Watson waiting for you and you have all the other stuff besides," he says, "it's not too hard to get up in the morning."

The Holmes Collections officially date back to 1974, when the university bought a private collector's set of first editions. Mr. Johnson credits E.W. McDiarmid, who had been university librarian, with inspiring the purchase. McDiarmid had been part of a group of Holmes-loving faculty members who began meeting in the late 1940s, calling themselves the Norwegian Explorers of Minnesota.

In 1978 the Minnesota's Holmes holdings got a big boost when the university received a large collection of rare Holmes and Doyle material from the estate of a doctor at the Mayo Clinic. "That got everybody in the Sherlockian world's attention," Mr. Johnson says. "It included a lot of very rare first editions, some original artwork, some manuscript material. That kind of put us on the map in terms of Sherlock Holmes collections." Subsequent gifts and purchases have continued to expand the collections.

Mr. Johnson describes himself as being "gradually and enjoyably pulled into the world of Sherlock Holmes." He read the Doyle stories as a kid and grew up watching matinee broadcasts of the movies that starred Basil Rathbone as the hawk-nosed sleuth. In the 1980s, when PBS broadcast its Holmes adaptations starring Jeremy Brett, Mr. Johnson recorded them with his VCR so he could watch them again and again.

An undergraduate history major, he got his graduate degree at the University of Minnesota's library school. He worked as a reference and instructional-services librarian at Barat College, in Illinois, and moonlighted as a medical librarian at a local hospital.

"That almost changed my career because I really liked medical librarianship, and it also happened to be the hospital the Chicago Bears used," Mr. Johnson says. "I bumped into a lot of Chicago Bears there." He wanted to get back to his native state, however, and jumped at the chance to return when the special-collections and rare-books job at Minnesota opened up in 1998.

A good part of Mr. Johnson's work at Minnesota has involved cultivating potential donors as well as tending the rare materials in his charge. He spent 10 years helping to raise money to establish the curatorship named after McDiarmid. A large bequest from another longtime member of the Norwegian Explorers put the fund-raising campaign over the top and allowed the university to endow the position that Mr. Johnson now holds.

Scholarly interest in Holmes comes in waves and is once again on the rise, Mr. Johnson says. He is working to set up a visiting scholars' program, and he'd like to see the collections continue to expand. The library has been keeping an eye on the work of writers who create parodies or pastiches of, or homages to, Doyle's creation. The Minnesota writer Larry Millet, for example, has written a series of Holmes adventures that bring the great detective to the Midwest in the 1890s.

The library has begun the long process of putting the Holmes Collections online. Mr. Johnson would love to add more original Doyle papers and publications, but "it's going to be harder to find that material," he says. "There are a few of the Holmes stories that are floating around in manuscript form that might be available, but you're talking at least six figures to purchase those."

If there's a Sherlockian holy grail, it's manuscript pages from The Hound of the Baskervilles. "That's the one manuscript that Doyle treated a little differently," Mr. Johnson says. The author gave that manuscript to his American publisher, "who basically took it apart and used the individual pages as advertising. They were put on card stock and put in store windows announcing Doyle's new story."

The New York Public Library owns one complete chapter of the manuscript, while Minnesota's collection has four pages, Mr. Johnson says. "If I could get my hands on a few more pages, that would be delightful."

Sherlock Holmes on U Media

2010-12-30T19:22:00.004-06:00

I've talked about the U Media site at the University of Minnesota Libraries in the past (although I can't remember whether or not its been mentioned in this blog). In any event, I thought I'd let you know, before the year is out, that we've started to populate this site with images of items from the Sherlock Holmes Collections.

We started out by uploading a few audio files (two featuring John Bennett Shaw and one featuring Sir Arthur Conan Doyle). We then added a few three-dimensional items (a license plate and pipe). From there we went on to add some things we'd scanned for researchers including a few Strand Magazine covers and some features from the Vincent Starrett copy of the Beeton's Christmas Annual. Next, while we were processing some of John Bennett Shaw's materials we thought we'd scan some of the spines and covers of boxes he used to house this material. During collection processing we tend to discard boxes and slipcovers like Shaw used (in favor of archival boxes) but we didn't want to lose the charm and flavor of John's handiwork on the containers. We've lumped this under the general heading of "ephemera" although there might be another term for this type of material.

Now, just this evening, I finished uploading scans of some of the buttons from Shaw's collection. This is just the tip of the iceberg, but since I'm working at home for a few days while the University is closed over the holiday break I thought I'd put my time to good use and so scanned a bunch of buttons and pins and loaded those images on the laptop before I left the office last week. I'll work on uploading the lapel pin images over the next few days, so keep watching the site.

The other thing I finished a day or so ago was all the metadata for the 250 or so scans we did earlier of artwork from Frederic Dorr Steele. The spreadsheet with all that data was sent on to the good folks in the Digital Library Services department and is now in the que for uploading. I don't know whether or not the images and data will be up before the grand gathering of the Baker Street Irregulars in New York next week, but if not they should be up sometime in early January.

I encourage you to explore the whole U Media site (I'm also in the process of finishing metadata for some 19th century Paris postcards). There are some amazing materials here to discover. In the meantime, if you're interested in seeing all the Sherlockian material I've put up so far just click on this link or use the search box on the U Media site and enter the term "Sherlock Holmes" to get at the material.

Happy New Year from the Sherlock Holmes Collections!

The enduring appeal of Sherlock Holmes | Minnesota Public Radio News

2010-12-09T12:41:00.002-06:00

The enduring appeal of Sherlock Holmes | Minnesota Public Radio News
Just did a little exploring on the web and noticed the MPR story we did back in April with Kerri Miller on her "Midmorning" show. Enjoy!

The Future of the Printed, Paper, Hardcopy Book and Libraries

2010-12-04T11:01:00.004-06:00

Its a quiet, snowy Saturday morning. I'm here at work staffing our Saturday shift along with two students, and the couple of researchers we have in the reading room. Not a lot is going on. So I thought I'd spend a little bit of time reflecting on a question one of my students asked me the other night in class. It was a direct, straightforward question: where do I stand on the future of libraries? Are they going to be around twenty years from now?

The question was asked within the context of an interesting discussion we were having on digital preservation (appropriate because the class I teach at St. Catherine's MLIS program is on preservation and conservation and this was the topic of the evening). The student who asked the question said that it was a topic of conversation during her Thanksgiving dinner (which was interesting in itself, I thought; I don't remember what we talked about around our Thanksgiving table. My Thanksgiving was spent, in large part, adoring and holding my new granddaughter and keeping an eye on whatever football game was on the tube). I gave, I thought, a pretty convincing answer. (At least one of my students gave me a thumbs up when I finished, so I must have said something sensible.) But since all of that took place in an oral context, I thought I'd try to put my answer down in writing and maybe expand on it a bit (with maybe a little more data to back up my thoughts). This won't necessarily be a "deep" answer to the question, but it will at least get some of my thoughts into written form.

The simple answer to the direct question is "yes." Libraries are going to be around twenty years from now. They will look and operate differently from today's libraries, but there will still be a place where people can go to get information; receive advice, direction, and counsel on resources; and check out materials for their own use. Not everything will be available digitally. There will still be a need for people to hold or touch or smell an item in person because the thing they are interested in has something beyond informational value. It will have artifactual value or evidential value or some other type of value beyond what can be ascertained from words or symbols on a screen. It is for this reason, among others, that I work in the area of special collections and rare books. People will always have a need to see the things that I care for, that I arrange and describe, and that I place -- as a digital surrogate -- on the Web for them to see. There are just some things that don't come through or translate in a digital environment. And there are some things, too ephemeral, that will not be worth the time or effort to digitize. But people will still want to see them and for us to keep them.

The flip side of this bias I have for the rare and the special is a bias toward the generic side (or maybe the "dark" side) of libraryland. More and more libraries will look more and more like each other in terms of the general types of materials they have available to patrons in digital formats. The only limiting factor will be how much money a library has to pay for licenses or other types of subscriptions or access. Every library (and individual) will have access to things like Google Books (at the present time they have something like 15 million books in their hopper) or some basic indexes and abstracts covering general/popular literature, along with some more specialized (yet general) indexes and abstracts for scholarly materials. I'd venture to say (although here I might be on a bit of slippery ground) that there's not much difference between my working library (the University of Minnesota), my public library (Hennepin County), and my teaching library (University of St. Catherine) in terms of access to these types of materials. A comparison, for example, between the resources available in the Electronic Library for Minnesota and any of the libraries I just mentioned will probably not show much difference for general type resources. What this means, in the long run, is that libraries will lose their local color and flavor unless some part of them is engaged in collecting local materials (and in making sure that these local materials are made accessible and not hidden away in some basement room or closet). A corollary to this, found more in research libraries, is the continued development and expansion of "collections of distinction." These may, indeed, be digitized but will also act as "research magnets that attract researchers and scholars from around the world."

Finally (since we're in the last half hour of Saturday business and soon it will be time to close up shop) a couple of words about books -- paper and electronic. E-books are grabbing people's attention. Not long ago Amazon announced that it was selling more e-books that traditionally printed books. That's well and good for Amazon. But I'll stick with paper, thank you. I don't have to plug it in or recharge it. Its the original random access device. Paper books are renewable resources. It takes a coal or nuclear power plant to fuel an e-book. Last time I checked, neither of these were renewable resources. I can keep my paper book in less than ideal environments and not worry that its going to short out or explode if it gets wet. It bends. It won't crack (unless I'm really brutal in my handling). I could go on, but you get the idea. I like technology. I use technology (for this blog among other things). But when it comes to "paper" or "plastic" in the checkout line, I'll stick with paper.

Time to check in with the troops and make sure our readers get out the door. I'm sure I'll still be welcoming readers to the library well into the future.

Information Overload Syndrome - IOS

2010-11-15T13:12:00.003-06:00

Just came across this humorous video. I saw it while reading this article. Check it out (if you dare -- and if you don't want to be overloaded...)

"Sherlock" on PBS

2010-11-09T09:02:00.003-06:00

A delightful new series just concluded on PBS. "Sherlock" -- a retelling (or mashup) of some of Conan Doyle's classics tales -- ended on Sunday night, but I'm planning on revisiting the web site for a few more looks at each episode. We've also purchased a DVD copy for the Holmes Collections.

The web site also offers a number of special features including interviews with Benedict Cumberbatch (Sherlock) and co-creators Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat. You can also check out the Twitter stream that occurred during viewing. The tag is #sherlock_pbs.

The Cottingley Fairies Mystery

2010-11-09T08:53:00.002-06:00

An obituary in Saturday's New York Times that mentions Arthur Conan Doyle's involvement with this photographic hoax: "Were there really fairies at the bottom of the garden, or was it merely a childhood prank gone strangely and lastingly awry? That, for six decades, was the central question behind the Cottingley fairies mystery, the story of two English schoolgirls who claimed to have taken five pictures of fairy folk in the 1910s and afterward...."

YouTube Video on Parts of a Book

2010-10-14T14:27:00.003-05:00

Another useful little video on parts of the book.

A YouTube Video on Book Production

2010-10-14T10:45:00.001-05:00

An older video, but one of interest on book production.

NY Times Review

2010-08-16T08:32:00.001-05:00

An interesting review in the Times of: THE BOOK IN THE RENAISSANCE. By Andrew Pettegree. Illustrated. 421 pp. Yale University Press. $40

Elmer L. Andersen Research Scholars Program

2010-08-11T08:28:00.000-05:00

Announcing the Elmer L. Andersen Research Scholars Program

The Elmer L. Andersen Research Scholars Program supports scholarly research projects using materials from the Libraries' rare and special collections. Named for former governor and University of Minnesota regent Elmer L. Andersen, the new program honors the Governor's passion for collecting and for expanding the use of the collections. The Research Scholars program is available to scholars including faculty, graduate, postgraduate, and independent researchers using the collections in the Department of Archives and Special Collections. This program is not available to currently enrolled University of Minnesota graduate or undergraduate students.

The program will provide annual support for up to two research projects that require use of one or more of the collections. Awards range from $500 to $2,000 and provide funds for travel, housing and other research related costs. The final research product (e.g., journal article, documentary film) must acknowledge the Libraries' support and be deposited with the University Libraries.

Applications should include the following:

Cover letter that provides a detailed project description, placing the project in the context of its larger field of study and describing the anticipated result of the project (e.g. journal article, book, edited volume, etc.). The narrative should articulate the anticipated use of the University Libraries collections with reference to specific collections to be used and their relevance to the project.
The applicant's curriculum vitae.
Two letters of recommendation.

Application deadline: September 30, 2010
Award announcement: November 1, 2010
Research must be completed: December 30, 2011

Send application to:
Director of Archives and Special Collections
University of Minnesota Libraries
305 Elmer L. Andersen Library
222 21st Avenue South
Minneapolis, MN 55455

About the collections:
The University of Minnesota Libraries Archives and Special Collections contain diverse holdings from clay tablets to documentation of the history of information technology, from children's literature to University records, from the literary and performing arts to gay and lesbian culture. Complete description of the collecting areas at special.lib.umn.edu.

Allen in Minnesota

2010-08-09T10:31:00.006-05:00

Guides Mackler and Shields are masters at finding these sights, and those who join them are the beneficiaries. We were told that Morley was fond of strolling around the top of the Woolworth Building in order to find inspiration for his columns. From this perch, he could see the Brooklyn Bridge, the sun glistening off the Manhattan mountains, St. Paul’s churchyard, and Vesey Street. Therefore, we approached the lobby of the Woolworth Building with great anticipation.

May found him in Chicago celebrating Christopher Morley’s one-hundredth birthday at a Morley symposium with members of The Hounds of the Baskerville (sic) and Hugo’s Companions. Allen spoke on Morley’s devotion to New York. By the end of the year Allen had been elected membership director of the Norwegian Explorers and was editing their newsletter, Explorations. The following February Allen presented an evening program on “Sherlock Holmes and Music” at the Hennepin County Government Center in Minneapolis.

Allen continued to edit and write for Explorations along with other Sherlockian publications. He deepened his Minnesota roots while still being an active member of the Irregulars and other societies. In 1993 Allen was part of the planning and program for the Norwegian Explorers’ conference “Sherlock Holmes’ Rogues, Rascals, and Ruffians” held in Minneapolis. Two years later he became president of the Explorers, serving for two years. At the end of his term it was reported that “[a]ll members of the Norwegian Explorers would like to thank Allen for his efforts and leadership, and we all look forward to his continued involvement.” A note in The Moriarty Principle indicates another of Allen’s endeavors at this time. “He founded the scion, ‘The Fowl Fanciers,’ in Minnesota in 1990 with the blessing of John Bennett Shaw. He is an expert on the violinist Pablo Sarasate . . . and classical music.” Food, music, Morley, and Holmes--life was good.

On the cusp of the millennium Allen continued to be active with the Irregulars. He was also a member of an exclusive group, the Sherlockians By Invitation Only Society (SBIOS). I’m not sure when he may have been invited, but it is clear from their 1999 report that Allen was in New York for the annual BSI weekend (my first time at this august gathering) and then headed to London “for the Sherlock Holmes January 16th birthday party sponsored by the Sherlock Holmes Society of London held in the distinguished House of Commons Meeting Room, Parliament.” I’m sure Allen traveled to London many times. Roger Johnson, editor of The District Messenger (the newsletter of the Sherlock Holmes Society of London) noted a final visit. “The last time we met him in England Jean and I were able to direct him to a nice gasogene for his collection.” That gasogene now sits in the sitting room adjacent to this exhibit.

In The Hound of the Baskervilles, at the first meeting of Holmes and James Mortimer, Holmes remarked “You are an enthusiast in your line of thought, I perceive…” Allen was an enthusiast and a good friend to many. Enjoy a few fruits of that enthusiasm and friendship.

Allen the author

2010-08-09T10:22:00.002-05:00

These series of posts relate to one of our current Sherlock Holmes exhibits, "Through The Eyes of an Enthusiast -- The Allen Mackler Collection," on display through August 29 in the T. R. Anderson Gallery in Wilson Library at the University of Minnesota. The text comes from the accompanying exhibit booklet.

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Allen continued writing and reviewing. Baker Street Miscellanea seemed a favorite venue for his pen. In 1986 he appraised Robert Goldsborough’s Murder in E Minor and John Lescroart’s Son of Holmes. “In the case of the two volumes under discussion, we can almost say, as Sherlock Holmes did to Watson about the nature of his violin-playing, ‘Oh, that’s all right,’ replete with an equally merry laugh.” A year later Allen reported on the fourth Quinquennial Sherlock Holmes Alimentary Festival at the Culinary Institute of America (“the true CIA”) in “A Study in Sumptuousness.” “Holmes once said of Watson that the latter never recognized his merits as housekeeper. Be that as it may, the merits of all responsible for making this weekend what it was were well applauded.” This was followed by a brief report of quotations by the actor Jeremy Brett under the title “Is Jeremy Brett’s Interpretation of Sherlock Holmes Changing?” and a review, in 1990, of The Standard Doyle Company: Christopher Morley on Sherlock Holmes, edited by Steven Rothman. “Morley wrote about Holmes in so many different ways and contexts that even Sherlockians well up on their ‘kinspritship’ (or maybe it should be kinsprits well up on their writings about the Writings) will find many things new to them, or at any rate refreshing.” A year later Allen was back at the CIA and offered “A Reichenbach Repast.”

Over the course of the years during which I have been privileged to attend the irregular celebrations given in honor of Mr. Sherlock Holmes at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York, it has been a source of never ending wonder as to how each succeeding event can possibly be better than that which came before. But, happily, such is the case; and no exception to the rule can be invoked in regard to the most recent in the ongoing series, held on May 4 of this year.

Allen was present on the pages of the Baker Street Journal as well. Perhaps the most interesting (and humorous) experience, reported by his co-investigator Sheldon Wesson, involved an event from “The Adventure of the Red Circle.”

The very crux of The Adventure of the Red Circle — the signaling by means of a candle waved across a window — has been subjected to the most rigorous scientific scrutiny. The results of that exercise, by Allen Mackler, scientist, and Sheldon Wesson, laboratory assistant, are described below. The starting point was the lengthy marginal note in Baring-Gould’s Annotated Sherlock Holmes. S. F. Blake is quoted therein as reporting that the full message — ATTENTA ATTENTA ATTENTA PERICOLO PERI — would require 477 waves of the candle across the window and would take about 4 3/4 minutes to deliver.

Those figures have proved to be incorrect. The message requires 384 passes, not 477. We surmise that Mr. Blake may have counted two PERICOLOs, thus accounting for the difference of 93 counts, whereas the Canon describes only one. We determined, too, that sufficient pauses must be allowed between letters and words to promote comprehension: three “beats” between letters, six between words.

The Mackler — Wesson experiments (replicated in part at a meeting of the Red Circle of Washington, D.C.) showed the effects of three different speeds upon the intelligibility of the message….

Based on their close reading of the Canon, the authors concluded: “Factoring in all of these conditions yields a total elapsed time of 7 minutes and 14 seconds — which we now adopt as ‘official.’ We forebear from comment on the questions of language variations raised in Baring-Gould: i.e., the language employed in the signals, Italian, English, or Italian in the English alphabet. This consideration could affect our total elapsed time by at most a few seconds.”

More on the Mackler Exhibit

2010-08-09T10:13:00.002-05:00

These series of posts relate to one of our current Sherlock Holmes exhibits, "Through The Eyes of an Enthusiast -- The Allen Mackler Collection," on display through August 29 in the T. R. Anderson Gallery in Wilson Library at the University of Minnesota. The text comes from the accompanying exhibit booklet. Photographs are from the booklet and also of the exhibit. This photograph is of Allen's library in his home.

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In 1982 Allen was writing more about food in another article for BSM entitled “Knowledge of Gastronomy - Immense,” a report on the Third Quinquennial Sherlock Holmes Alimentary Festival held at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York. His account covered the full weekend, complete with side trips to local bookstores and museums, and a running commentary on the various foods encountered (and enjoyed) along the way. “The weekend was something I would not have missed for worlds, for it was definitely not one of those unwelcome social summonses which call upon a man either to be bored or to lie. And unlike the experience of the hapless John Scott Eccles, all our meals, indeed, were well prepared and well served.”

Allen’s involvement with various Sherlockian societies continued. In early April 1984 Allen attended “the first public meeting of the Clients of Sherlock Holmes” held at the Faculty Club of the University of Pennsylvania. Here Allen’s love of classical music came to the fore. The event, reported in the BSJ, noted that “[a]fter dinner, Allan Mackler presented a comprehensive talk on music in the Canon, and played extremely rare recordings of Sarasate, Norman-Neruda, Paganini, and others, just as Holmes had heard them.” In early December 1985 Allen was again with the Red Circle of Washington, displaying both his culinary interests and knowledge of the Canon. “‘We still have the feathers, legs, crop, and so on,’ was the call to table for The Red Circle’s ‘Blue Carbuncle Dinner’ at the Piccadilly Restaurant . . . The menu, carefully selected by Allen Mackler, featured mock turtle soup, shrimp in cream with lettuce, roast goose, and plum pudding with brandy sauce . . . . Sheldon Wesson’s ‘Sherlockian IQ Test’ produced four winners: Allen Mackler, Marina Stajic, Melissa Ennis, and Jim Smith.” It was one of many quizzes won by Allen.

Spirits of Sherlock Holmes

2010-08-09T10:00:00.003-05:00

OK, so it took me a bit longer to get back to posting here. Immediately after the wedding I dove into preparations for our triennial conference, "The Spirits of Sherlock Holmes." And that's what I've been up to since Thursday.

It was a delightful weekend, full of excellent papers and good-spirited fun. Jon Lellenberg has a few observations on his blog. If you're interested in Baker Street Irregular history, I invite you to follow Jon's new initiative.

As a recap, here was the conference schedule:

Friday Aug. 6
1:30 pm “221B”; A Study in Starrett - Ray Betzner, BSI
2:30 pm The Current State of Affairs - Tim Johnson, Catherine Cooke, Neil McCaw, Peggy Perdue
3:30 pm Stranded on the Shelves: A Leaf through The Saturday Review - Steven Rothman, BSI
5 pm - Friends of the Sherlock Holmes Collections Meeting

Saturday Aug. 7
9:00 am Vintage and Spirited -Gideon Hill, MD, BSI
10:00 am Future Directions - Catherine Cooke, BSI, ASH; Tim Johnson; Neil McCaw and Peggy Perdue
11:00 am The Curious Case of Holmes in Silent Cinema- Russell Merritt , BSI
12 noon - Lunch
1:30 pm The Great Game: A Debate Covering the Founding of Sherlockian Scholarship - Jon Lellenberg BSI and Richard Sveum, BSI
2:30 pm Sherlock Holmes and the Spirit of Detective Fiction - Les Klinger, BSI
3:30 pm Boys and Girls Together - Evelyn Herzog, BSI , ASH
4:45 pm A Visit to the 221B’s Sitting Room—Wilson Library - Paul Martin, BSI and Jon Lellenberg, BSI
7:00 pm Banquet, Rewriting History…Again - Brad Keefauver, BSI, ASH

Sunday Aug. 8
9:30 am Guy de Maupassant’s “Le Horla” and the Haunting of Sherlock Holmes - Tim Reich
10:30 am Haunting Libraries in Search of a Guaranteed Medium - S. E. Dahlinger, BSI, ASH
11:30 am “The Giant Rat of Sumatra” - The Red-Throated League of the Norwegian Explorers
12:30 pm - Closing Remarks

I know there will be more reaction to the conference. I'll try to pick up some of those threads and post them here.

More on Holmes Exhibits Coming

2010-08-04T20:23:00.003-05:00

My apologies for not posting more about our current Holmes exhibits, but I was delightfully delayed by my son's wedding last weekend. It was the most marvelous and beautiful wedding, with a great gathering of family and friends.

I'll get back to posting more on Holmes later tonight or early tomorrow, but for the moment this proud papa is still basking in the glow. Here's a picture from the weekend.

Allen Mackler on Collecting

2010-07-24T18:44:00.006-05:00

The impecunious collector...is always at the mercy of the factor of price, no matter what his field of interest. But in almost every field, not even a ready supply of cash will necessarily flush out a desired item, especially if it happens to be one never intended to serve as a collectible and is therefore not generally available to the public at large. Take for example the area of record collecting, in which I indulge myself in a small way. Here the affluent Sherlockian can with relative ease accumulate just about everything ever released commercially, and even perhaps lay his hands on what are referred to in the trade as "bootleg" items. But it requires considerable perseverance and no small amount of good fortune, rather than a prodigious bank account, to add to one's holdings certain legitimate recordings of more than marginal interest not likely to appear on the market under any circumstances, let alone for the delectation of avid collectors.

For Allen, it was his good fortune "to acquire for my own collection a full run of the series of Sherlock Holmes radio broadcasts featuring Carleton Hobbs as Holmes and Norman Shelley as Watson."

Through The Eyes of an Enthusiast, Part 2

2010-07-22T21:08:00.011-05:00

These series of posts relate to one of our current Sherlock Holmes exhibits, "Through The Eyes of an Enthusiast -- The Allen Mackler Collection," on display through August 29 in the T. R. Anderson Gallery in Wilson Library at the University of Minnesota. The text comes from the accompanying exhibit booklet. Photographs are from the booklet and also of the exhibit.

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The first hint of Allen that I find in the literature is from a 1975 article that appeared in Baker Street Miscellanea (BSM), "Carina: An Identification." In this piece we are pointed to another interest of Allen's -- classical music. As his obituary noted, "his first interest was in classical music. Recognizing that his talent at the piano wouldn't be adequate to achieve the goal he envisioned, he became the host of programs at Public Broadcasting Station WETA in Washington, DC focusing on the broadcast of rare recordings of classical music." Allen's article on Carina begins:

"It will be recalled in the account Watson recorded under the title of The Adventure of the Retired Colourman -- dated summer, 1898 -- that Sherlock Holmes invites the good doctor to hear Carina sing at Albert Hall. This reference has always troubled me because no mention of a singer with that name is made in Grove's Dictionary or any other musical reference work which I have consulted."

Allen goes on to solve the mystery and ends his piece with a poetic salute to musicians in the Sherlockian Canon.

The next time we see Allen, again on the pages of the BSM, is in a review of Rosenblatt and Sonnenschmidt's book Dining with Sherlock Holmes: A Baker Street Cookbook. Here is a different pointer to another of Allen's abiding interests: good food. He wrote:

"...when Holmes states that Mrs. Hudson's idea of breakfast is as good as a Scotchwoman's, he implies that not only will it be hearty, but that it will be sensible and maybe even utilitarian as well. All of this and much more about the gastronomic Holmes and about cooking and dining in Victorian Britain is explicated in the delightful, authoritative, and above all hunger-provoking commentary which appears before each group of recipes."

Case 1: The Great Illustrators
1. F. D. Steele illustration for The Hound of the Baskervilles, Limited Editions Club
2. F. D. Steele illustration for 1939 film, The Hound of the Baskervilles
3. S. Paget illustration for The Strand Magazine, No. 8, "all afternoon...stalls"
4. Charles Schulz cartoon strip, 12/30/93

Sherlock Holmes and Allen Mackler

2010-07-21T09:20:00.005-05:00

At the moment there are three Sherlock Holmes exhibits on display in the University of Minnesota Libraries, all built around the theme for our August 6-8 conference, "The Spirits of Sherlock Holmes." My posts over the next days will talk about each one, taking text from the exhibit booklets and a few pictures I've taken of each exhibit.

I'll start with the exhibit that has been open since June "The Spirits of Sherlock Holmes: Through The Eyes of an Enthusiast -- The Allen Mackler Collection." This exhibit will be open through August 29th.

I met Allen Mackler for the first time in January 1998. I was about to make a public presentation, a part of the interview process for the position I eventually obtained -- Curator of Special Collections & Rare Books at the University of Minnesota. Allen was seated in the front row. He was there because of his love of nineteenth century literature and his enthusiasm for Sherlock Holmes. The presentation was a bit unnerving, in part because it was the middle of the afternoon, I had just returned from the Middle East (still suffering from jet lag), and because Allen fell asleep during my talk. (I don’t think he would mind me telling the story.) It was, I found out, part of his charm. From that time onwards our paths crossed, often at Holmesian gatherings, or else during his wanderings through the library. Occasionally, he sought my advice on a specific book repair or to point out a particular volume (or to talk about the best place to find a hamburger). More than once we traveled to New York together, to attend the annual gathering of the Baker Street Irregulars. There was always something interesting that drew Allen’s attention (and which drew our attention to Allen).

Allen’s interests in Sherlock Holmes and Victorian literature are apparent in this exhibit. We are delighted to share a bit of his life through the contents of these cases and in the replica of the sitting room from that most famous London address, 221B Baker Street, found in the adjacent room. A separate booklet describes the sitting room and its fascination with Sherlockians.

We lost Allen five years ago, on December 29, 2005. His presence lives on through his collection, the sitting room, and his generous spirit. It also lives on through his writings and past reports of his activities within the Holmesian world.

Sherlock Holmes at the U

2010-07-20T18:46:00.001-05:00

The Spirits of Sherlock Holmes

What: The Spirits of Sherlock Holmes
When: June 1 - August 29
Where: Wilson Library, T.R. Anderson Gallery
When: July 12 - October 15
Where: Elmer L. Andersen Library, Exhibit Gallery
Free and open to the public.

The Sherlock Holmes Collections present two exhibits in conjunction with its triennial conference. The Andersen Library exhibit will explore the many meanings of the word "spirits" and how they relate to Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle, and the Victorian Era. The concurrent exhibit in the T. R. Anderson Gallery will highlight items from the collection of the late Allen Mackler, whose replica of the sitting room at 221B Baker Street is on permanent display adjacent to the exhibit gallery.

Cyberwar

2010-06-29T15:53:00.002-05:00

I teach a course on preservation and conservation in St. Catherine University's MLIS program. We spend a part of the semester talking about disaster plans and emergency preparedness. This new post on the ACRLog is something I'll need to keep in mind as I tweak my syllabus for the coming fall.

So, two somewhat "downer" posts today about the digital world: blogs being swept away and now the need in preparing for cyberwar. I think this does need serious attention. I'm beginning to feel in my bones that our next Pearl Harbor -- 9/11 -- will be such an attack. I probably need to amass more actual data (something Sherlock Holmes would have done) before making any kind of pronouncement. But think about it for just a moment. What could you do (or not do) in the course of a day if everything was "down." What kind of disruptions would we face. I'm not losing sleep over the issue, but it causes a quiver when contemplated.

Blogs Deleted: Something to Worry About in a 2.0 world?

2010-06-29T09:53:00.005-05:00

I came across this story in my daily reading, a post by David Brauer on MinnPost. What especially caught my eye were the last two paragraphs that read thus:

The Strib, to its great credit, makes its archives free back to May 2007. But Kersten's blog posts are no longer there, and don't appear findable from the paid archives, either. I know it takes precious staff time and a bit of server space to migrate information to a new platform, but deleting any content — especially original content that roiled the news scene — is just bad policy.

I know some Kersten foes will relish the thought that her ideas have become less available, but I think that's shortsighted. For good or ill, she's a part of the Strib's intellectual history, and that should not be sent down the memory hole. I hope some library can at least grab the full blog archives.

*****

Something else to think about in our brave new world of digital archiving?

Tonight at the Library

2010-06-17T15:23:00.000-05:00

Celebration of Elmer L. Andersen's 101st Birthday

What: Ten Years of Archives and Special Collections
in Elmer L. Andersen Library
When: Thursday, June 17, 2010 • 5:30-7:30 p.m.
Where: Elmer L. Andersen Library
Free and open to the public

On the occasion of Andersen's 101st birthday, join us to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the building named in his honor. Explore "Below the Surface," a new exhibit that uncovers unexpected themes and untold stories from the rich archives and special collections held in the caverns below. Learn more about the building and how archival materials are found, processed, and made available for research.

Tim Johnson, Special Collections, Rare Books, and Manuscripts, University of Minnesota Libraries, and Pat Coleman, Minnesota Historical Society, will discuss the impact of Andersen's legacy.

A Gem from Gordon S. Wood

2010-06-11T21:26:00.007-05:00

I'm just a few chapters into Gordon Wood's The Purpose of the Past: Reflections on the Uses of History (New York: Penguin Press, 2008) and came across this little gem that I want to save.

History does not teach lots of little lessons. Insofar as it teaches any lessons, it teaches only one big one: that nothing ever works out quite the way its managers intended or expected. History is like experience and old age: wisdom is what one learns from it. (p. 71, emphasis mine)

I'm not sure what the implications of such a statement might be for those of us in libraryland, in this 2.0 world, but I think Wood gives us something here that we need to grasp and ponder.

Web 2.0 on a cloudy, wet Saturday

2010-06-05T09:55:00.003-05:00

I'm sitting here doing a Saturday shift at the library (which may be a topic for another post, but I'll hold off on that for the moment) and the current conditions are forcing me to think again about working in a Web 2.0 universe, including my stuff that's found in the "cloud." I have to confess, at the moment, I'm not impressed. Maybe I'm just having a bad day, but I've run up against some of these problems before, so I don't think this is a "one off" situation. Some of this might not be "2.0" problems; some of it may be other infrastructure issues. In any event, let me elaborate (or maybe "vent" is more appropriate).

First, there's the issue of wireless connectivity. The way we're set up here for Saturday operations involves, for at least one staff member, a wireless connection. On Saturdays we position one of our staff in the library atrium (at the moment that's me) to meet researchers and visitors and direct them as needed. When I set up this morning I could not log on to our regular staff wireless connection. I don't know why. The signal strength was excellent. I was using the correct user name and password. But time and again I could not get on. Not satisfied, I tried connecting through our "guest" wireless connection and got in no problem. There may be a limit on bandwidth, but at least I could get into the system. But then things continued to be "clunky."

Once connected through wireless I then logged on to our chat system. We use Meebo. This is the way that our staff communicates with each other throughout the building. Its especially important on a Saturday, when we have limited staff. Here, again, I felt like I was hitting a wall. For whatever reason (maybe the wireless connection) I was disconnected and then reconnected with the chat server. For the last 45 minutes it seems to have stabilized, but it was frustrating at the beginning.

OK, now that I was connected through chat it was time to try and get some work done. Often during these Saturday sessions I'll work on my Holmes and Doyle bibliography. I use Refworks for this work and up until the last week or so I've been happy with this arrangement. But things are getting clunky here, too. And it doesn't seem to matter whether I'm working through a wireless connection or through my regular network connection. Things have gotten very slow. Maybe its because of the size of my database (over 9,000 citations). I don't know. But what I do know is that this "cloud" arrangement is making me have second thoughts about continuing with Refworks. Some examples of my frustration:

If I want to back up my database (which I do every week or so) I am now consistently getting timed out from my connection. In the last few days I tried to backup my material, was continuously getting timed out, and finally gave up. I'm going to try again later today, hoping that network/server traffic might be lower. We'll see.

The same holds true when I try to export my data. I do this as another means of backup and because Refworks doesn't offer the ability to create subject bibliographies. So I export all of my Refworks data into an EndNote library (where I can create subject bibliographies; I have the program loaded on my laptop, so don't use the web version.) But again, I'm constantly getting timed out from my connection. After three tries the other day I was finally able to get my data from Refworks and save it as a text file to my desktop and then import it into EndNote. I'm now at the point where I'm seriously considering dumping the Refworks project and doing all my work in EndNote. (That may create some other difficulties, but at least I won't be dependent on access to the "cloud" in order to get my hands on my stuff.) I logged off from Refworks and my try it again later. But it has been really slow of late, regardless of how I'm connected.

So what am I left with on a rainy Saturday morning? A wireless system that is fritzy and won't let me log in on my regular staff account. A chat system that sputtered at the beginning but seems to have settled down. A citation manager system that doesn't perform the way I'd like it to, and now a blog post that is having trouble autosaving itself as I draft this little missive. Maybe it is a connectivity problem (although at the moment my system tells me that the wireless signal is "excellent.")

I don't know, and there's no one I can ask on a Saturday morning. When I called the help line for the wireless system earlier this morning I got a voice message telling me that the office was closed. Signs of the times? Is this what the world will look like as budget restrictions cause us to cut back on services, like a Saturday help desk for IT issues? Maybe its all an infrastructure issue--budgets, staff, connectivity, the cloud?

What I'm left with is a Saturday that's proving to be less than totally productive. Maybe I'll pull out a book and do some reading. There are no infrastructure or connectivity issues there. Just the simple joy of turning pages. Maybe that's the best way to spend a rainy morning.

EQS / Enhancing Quality Staff (VERY LONG POST)

2010-05-11T14:59:00.007-05:00

As hinted at earlier, I was involved today (as keynote speaker and session presenter) at EQS: Enhancing Quality Staff. This was the 18th symposium for library paraprofessionals and support staff presented by the University of Minnesota Libraries. My keynote address was entitled "My Life As A Book" and my session (which followed shortly after the keynote) was called "Sherlock Holmes and the Media."

As I mentioned (and promised) during my keynote, the complete text of my address, along with an audio version (for those who'd like to listen rather than read) is being posted here. This may be the longest post I've put up on my blog; I think it will be of interest. This morning I tried to stay away from my notes/outline as much as possible, with the result that it was more spontaneous than the audio file you'll hear here. But the audio file reflects the complete text (I passed over some things this morning in the interest of time), so you'll get the full (if a bit more wooden) flavor of the talk. The audio runs about 30 minutes.

I'd be interested in your feedback to this talk. Please feel free to send along comments.

Here, then, is this morning's EQS keynote address in text form. Click here if you'd like the audio version.

My Life as a Book:

A Few Miscellaneous Ramblings on Books and Technology by a Sometime Bookman

Keynote Talk For

Enhancing Quality Staff in Changing Times

The 18th symposium for library paraprofessionals and support staff

presented by the University of Minnesota Libraries

May 11, 2010

My charge for today is simple, based, I assume, on comments received from past EQS events: "we need to talk more about books." So I'm going to talk about books. But my charge has a little wrinkle in it, based on another comment: "we need to weave in technology into your talk." So I'm going to talk about books and technology--first books, then technology.

To do this I'm going to get personal and maybe a little politically incorrect. Please forgive me in advance if some of what I say is offensive or troublesome. Books are sometimes offensive or troublesome, so I'm going to follow their lead. What you're going to get in the next twenty minutes or so is part autobiography, part vignette, part preaching (to the choir), part questioning and pondering. Maybe by the end we'll have made it from Point A to Point B. We'll see.

I was asked if I needed any equipment (i.e. technology) for my talk. Technology is, in some ways, a crutch. It gets in the way. I need the technology of a microphone so that you all can hear me. But even here, in the old days, that wasn't the case. Folks back when had a better set of lungs and vocal cords. I could do it, but I'll spare you and rely on the mike. The only other crutch I need are a few note cards, to remember quotes and keep me on track. If I was a better storyteller I wouldn't need the cards. They get in the way. Another crutch and signs of a poor memory (or one not exercised enough).

Speaking of crutches, let us begin.

Chapter One
Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol opens with these words: "There is no doubt that Marley was dead. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate." The same holds true here. "There is no doubt that Johnson didn't like to read. He'd rather play outside then spend time with a book. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate." Its true. I didn't like to read, although I was surrounded by books. My father was a pastor; his study was lined with books. My maternal grandfather, whom I visited on summer vacations in Wadena, had a front porch with shelves lined with the evocative yellow covers of year after year of National Geographic. On a rainy day or "nap time" after lunch you might find me there. Otherwise I was across the street in the playground. I wasn't a reader; I was a nibbler.

Things didn't change much as I got older. One sports season lead to another. If there weren't sports, there was camping or fishing. I read enough in school to get by (or, rather, to get the "A" on my report card that entitled me to a free hamburger at McDonalds).

Maybe I'm not being totally fair, or honest. Books were a part of my life. But it seemed like they just hummed away in the background. My focus wasn't on the books. There was one big book that seemed to underpin everything in our family, one that included these lines: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God…." And then there were those weekly trips from the classroom to the school library where I was drawn to books (with, it seems, lots of pictures) by C. B. Colby, or the Hardy Boys mysteries. Or the TAB book orders that came, like Christmas presents, just at the right time. Or the Weekly Reader magazine distributed in class. Or the ever-present National Geographic, or Life magazine. So, books and periodicals gave me pleasure (or something to do when the weather was poor). Later there were other books--the Boy Scout handbook or confirmation texts--that gave me instruction. But I really didn't want to read. It wasn't my "thing." Snapping the ball, or throwing out a runner at second base, or gliding into the corner with a fade-away jumper--those were my things.

A quick aside. There is a very significant landmark from this time. Sometime between the fourth and sixth grades--I can't remember exactly when--I was appointed a student library assistant. I have no memory of how that happened. It may have been as simple as being asked and saying yes. In any event, at the end of the year I was given two books as a thank-you gift from the school librarian: Johnny Tremain, by Esther Forbes; and The Red Badge of Courage, by Stephen Crane. Both are still a cherished part of my library.

Things--in terms of books and reading--didn't get any better in high school. By then I was living in Colorado, so skiing and backpacking and rock climbing (along with basketball and baseball…and later, girls) occupied a lot of my time. McDonalds was still giving out free hamburgers for As on report cards. I ate my share. My grades were good. I was a member of the National Honor Society. I was on my way to college, maybe with a basketball scholarship. Who needed books?

Chapter Two
College was, to some extent, one huge, long "whop up the side of my head." Now books took on a different meaning. They were in my face. I had to buy them. Lots of them. And I had to read them. Lots of them. I ignored them at my peril. In my first year something happened. It was a sea-change. I was playing basketball, but I found that I liked to read, too. It was quite amazing. All of a sudden I was gathering favorite authors and their works around me. I was arguing with books. I was devouring books. Books were my friends. I was making up for all that lost time as a kid and in high school. I hadn't read the "classics." I was behind the times. (I still am.) CB radios were all the rage at the time and my "handle" was "Bookworm." (Later on my family would give me a print of that famous painting by Carl Spitzweg, Der Bücherwurm (1850); it hangs on the wall in our family room today.)

Who and what caught my attention? Top of the list were the Inklings: C. S. Lewis; his brother, Warren; J.R. R. Tolkien and his son, Christopher; Charles Williams, Nevill Coghill and others; Winston Churchill; John LeCarré; Len Deighton; Annie Dillard (Her Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is a book I've revisited again and again, as is Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.) By my third year I'd given up basketball for reading and writing. I had no regrets--I'd been playing basketball since the fourth grade; I was worn out, my knee was hurt, and it was time for something different-- although our team went on to win a national championship (the first of five) the following year. One of my prized possessions from those last two years was a gift book from an English professor of mine: How To Read a Book, by Mortimer Adler.

Do you begin to sense something here? That college--for those of us who didn't quite get it in high school--is an amazing and creative time of discovery? Here's where the power begins, where the transformation begins, where the change begins. Maybe, like water flowing over rocks, the transformation began much earlier. Maybe all those earlier days with the Weekly Reader, Tab books, the Hardy Boys, Johnny Tremain, and The Red Badge of Courage were coming to fruition. "The Word became flesh and dwelt among us…." This is heady stuff! And we, as staff, are in the midst of it! We can see--and be a part of--enormous, earth-shattering, mind blowing change and transformation. Do you get it? Can I get an "Amen?" Not everyone who comes to the desk asking for help is a meathead. Or to quote one of my favorite authors:

All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.
From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king.

Chapter Three
There's not enough time to talk more about books; I need to squeeze in a little technology. But before leaving the books (we'll be back in the end), let me ask a few questions: who are the authors and what are the books that seem to gather around you? Do you have some literary traditions? (For example, every year between Thanksgiving and New Years I spend those days reading from works by the Inklings.) What book or books have changed your life? Do you identify with certain characters in certain books? (In terms of my own makeup and character I'm probably a little bit Bernard Samson [Len Deighton], a little bit George Smiley [John LeCarré], a little bit Barliman Butterbur [J. R. R. Tolkien], a little bit Elwin Ransom [C. S. Lewis], a little bit.…)

On to technology. If books, for me, have enormous transformative powers then technology represents an invitation to tinker and play and capture and unleash. And in the world that you and I inhabit, that means tinkering and playing and capturing and unleashing the power of word and image and sound and putting such things into the hands of those who need (or want) them. It means linking the power of technology with that transformative, creative tidal wave that is a college student's life.

Technology, in my experience, began with my Dad's radio, record player, and Wollensak reel-to-reel tape recorder. When President Kennedy was assassinated, and the television coverage was wall-to-wall, my Dad took out his Wollensak recorder, plugged in the microphone, and recorded the proceedings off-the-air. Later on, I watched my Dad put together a stereo amplifier and pre-amp. I wasn't afraid to tinker, and made my own radio and my own recordings. Family moments--sometimes with a hidden mike--made it on to a reel of tape. When my Dad had to attend a meeting, I'd record the baseball game from the radio so he could listen to it later. Later still, I had my own stereo and recorders and turntables and speakers. In high school I learned how to program in BASIC, using a telephone, an acoustic coupler, and a teletype machine that saved my program on paper tape. My final project was a program that allowed you to play eighteen holes of golf and was based on the then-popular 3M game "Thinking Man's Golf." In college I worked for three years in the "Instructional Media" department of the library. Here I had the chance to set up sound systems, run all kinds of audio/visual equipment, learn some basics about theater lighting and sound support, and studio audio recording. None of this technological tinkering and playing had anything to do with books, but it had a lot to do with history. (It also had a lot to do with time-shifting and convenience and capturing and playing and experimentation and creative thinking).

Books and technology met (or collided) in library school. We were still working with punched cards, but eight-inch floppies also made an appearance. The coolest thing was being trained to do Dialog searches. Remember all those blue pages? It was all about precision and recall. What was your search strategy? Did you work it out on paper before spending those expensive minutes online? If you were really good, and maybe had access as a library graduate assistant, you might be allowed to enter some of the other technological holy of holies, guarded as they were by their acronyms: OCLC and RLIN.

At the same time there was another holy of holies that I came in contact with during grad school, that reverential place on the fourth floor of Wilson Library on the West Bank Campus of the University of Minnesota where only the truly elect were allowed: Special Collections & Rare Books, and the James Ford Bell Library. I visited it just a few times, as part of a class. For me, it was a place of mystery and wonder, a sacred preserve. And I wasn't always sure I was welcomed there (something I've tried to change since coming back into that sacred space).

Technology continued to rumble by as I entered the professional world. I installed a computer lab in the small college library that was my place of first employment (and became "technical support" for all the questions and problems that followed). I processed ILL requests and did some (very little) cataloging on OCLC. I instructed doctors on how to do their own DIALOG searches (and ran searches for those who were too busy or too timid). Using a simple and free flat-file program (PCFile) I created databases for photo and archival collections. I migrated, in the land of competitive word-processing, from WordStar to MultiMate to WordPerfect to Word, my own literary landscape littered with now unusable versions of papers and indexes and journals and theses and bibliographies and books and journal articles. My own archive includes floppies of every size, zip disks, CDs, flash drives and every piece of hardware I've owned since my first PC clone. What am I going to do with all that stuff? All my earlier tinkering and playing and capturing and unleashing is, to some extent, held captive by obsolete technologies. Do I keep migrating to new platforms and new applications? Have I got the time and money to do that? These are the kinds of questions that technology raises for me, on a personal level. And it reflects and older, earlier time, one that was dependent on localized machines and storage.

Chapter Four
Where do I find myself now? The short answer: in a bit of a tug of war, and in a computing cloud. On the one hand, I know, and have experienced, the power of the book, in all its glory: its art, its binding, its paper, its words, its structure, its provenance--the many stories of individual lives that are bound up with the work, as producer and reader and steward. On the other hand, I know, and have experienced, the power of technology, maybe not in all its glory (because it seems to be a moving target), but in the way it has transformed my work and being. (As I'm writing this, I'm chatting with someone in Russia about a book in our collection.) Or, another example: a researcher from Hungary can contact me about an article she read on a Walter Library web site about the architectural details of the library--in this case, printers devices found on the lintels above the many doors--and I can go over to Walter, take pictures of those architectural features with my cell phone camera, upload them to my computer, and e-mail her the pictures for use in a presentation. It is a wonder to me to be able to do such a thing. These two forces pull at me every day. And rather than pull me apart, I want to combine them in a new and amazing way. I don't know, exactly, how to do this. But I think it’s a thing that you and I wrestle with every day. I said earlier that technology is, in some ways, a crutch. It gets in the way. But it is also a powerful tool. If my leg is injured I can't walk and get around without a crutch or a cane. And I want to move around.

Now, there are a few bits of the new technology that I'm not crazy about, or don't have the time and energy to learn, and therefore don't use. It’s a matter of priorities. I don't tweet. To me, tweeting is like burping or sneezing or wheezing or breaking wind. I was taught that it was not polite to tweet in public. I'm not a part of social media sites. I'm not much into gaming. I don't do much with online image generators.

But there's actually much more of the new stuff, thanks in part to the "23 Things on a Stick" program that was offered by Minnesota's multitype library systems, that I use and enjoy. Some of these get used more than others, but here's a brief rundown:
• I have a blog, "Special & Rare On A Stick." When we're done here today, you'll find a text version of this talk on my blog.
• I use Google Reader and have RSS feeds set up for the things that matter to me.
• I've got both Flickr and Picasa accounts for uploading and sharing my photographs.
• I've put up a few of my PowerPoint presentations on Slideshare.
• I use the staff wiki and have edited entries on Wikipedia.
• Want to know what I'm reading? Look at my blog or my Shelfari site.
• I have a Meebo account and a chat window on my unit web site.
• I tag using del.icio.us.
• I'm on Facebook and Gather and LinkedIn.
• I'm on YouTube, I watch YouTube, I use YouTube in classes.
• I subscribe and listen to podcasts.
• I create and edit web pages.
• I use RefWorks and EndNote to create bibliographies.
• I use online reference sources and indexes.
• I search online book prices and dealer catalogs.

The list could go on (Audacity, UMCal, iTunes, EAD…) but I'll spare you. The point is that technology has enriched my life, made me more productive, more creative, more expressive, and put me in touch with a lot more people. So where's the rub?

I don't know, except to say that technology has yet to demonstrate the ability to overpower me in the same way as a face-to-face encounter with beautifully printed page, a medieval manuscript, or a handwritten sheet.

Let me end with a story to give you a sense of what I mean by being overpowered. It was in the Spring of 2007. I was giving a tour of the Holmes Collections to a fifteen-year-old, her grandfather and two of her friends. Haley was her name. She lived and breathed Sherlock Holmes. She knew the stories inside and out. She knew the Sherlockian world, its players and its publications. I took them first to our suite and then to the reading room, where we have the miniature replica of the 221B London flat, some Sherlockian figurines, artwork, and reference books. Haley immediately gravitated to the figurines and, camera in hand (and having asked for permission, which was quickly granted) began to take pictures. She then discovered some of the Holmes reference books and coffee table books and, paging through them, told her friends about the significance of this or that item seen on the pages. From there we moved to the 221B miniature, at which point I was becoming more and more impressed with Haley’s knowledge of the stories, and more pictures were taken. I then showed her some of the artwork we’ve scanned for the Digital Collections Unit project on Frederic Dorr Steele (she knew about him and his Collier’s covers) before moving to a cart of material that I had brought up from the collection. It was at this point that the afternoon took a poignant turn and gave me an experience that I have never had before.

One of the first items I took from the cart was one of our copies of the Beeton’s Christmas Annual, the first time a Holmes story appeared in print (1887). Haley knew about the Beeton’s, but she’d never seen one before. She was overwhelmed, but recovered enough to take a few pictures. A few moments later it happened. I took out one of our leaves from The Hound of the Baskervilles manuscript and put it in front of her on the table. She was face-to-face with Doyle’s best-known story, her favorite story, written in his own hand. She started to cry. I got choked up, too, but in my Scandinavian way kept it inside. Her friends, Rebecca and Danielle, who had been teasing her, grew a bit quiet, while asking her “why are you crying?,” and had, I think, a realization that this was something special. From that moment, they all seemed to be “into” Sherlock, even Grandpa Jim. The tour continued down in the caverns. Along the way, Haley asked me about coming back to the collection (she has a standing invitation, as does her Grandpa and friends), how she could work here (come to the U as a student), and told me that she wanted my job. I encouraged her at every turn. Ninety minutes later the tour was at an end. On the way out the door she gave me a big hug and told me I was “her newest best friend.”

I want that feeling every day. I know it can't happen, but that's what I strive for. Books make it happen, and technology, too. You are a huge part of that story. I might have been on the front line that day in May, but it couldn't have happened without you. You help make days like that possible. You keep the lights on and the doors open. You set up the rooms and keep us secure. You answer the questions. You catalog and shelve and repair the books. You file and photograph, bring the mail, push the carts, input and upload. You pay the bills. You plan and meet and process and chat and much, much more. I cannot be who I am without you. We are in this together, just as the books and the technology are in it together.

So let me say "thank you" for all that you do. I do not say it enough. I should. We all should. And let me end where I began, with Charles Dickens and my namesake, who ends A Christmas Carol with these words: "And so, as Tiny Tim observed, God Bless Us, Every One!"

(My thanks to Eric Celeste for sharing his notes and thoughts with me from his talk at last year's EQS event, and for his encouragement as I prepared for this year's talk.)

Catching Up: National Library Week

2010-05-11T14:22:00.003-05:00

I think this is the last post in my "catching up" series. After that I'll be up-to-date. Maybe some of us just have way too much fun in our work. Or maybe I'm feeling especially fortunate. For whatever reason, it was a special treat for me to accept an invitation from the South-central Minnesota Inter-Library Exchange (SMILE) to be their guest speaker on April 15 for National Library Week. The chosen topic for the evening? What else, but Sherlock Holmes.

The theme for the evening was "Sleuthing @ Your Library with Sherlock Holmes" and the event was held in Meyer Hall at Bethany Lutheran College in Mankato. I arrived early to set up and had the chance to meet Orrin Ausen, the library director at Bethany who was setting up items for the silent auction. Meyer Hall is one of the newest buildings on a little gem of a campus. It was hard to stay indoors on such a beautiful day, but I held myself in check and explored more of the campus. After setting up I chatted with some of the guests. Maybe the biggest delight for me that evening was to reconnect with Dayle Zelenka, executive director of the Traverse des Sioux Library System and the director of SMILE, and his wife Gena. Dayle and I overlapped our careers for a few years together on the library staff at North Park in Chicago. I'd seen an earlier reference that Dayle was being considered for the position in Minnesota and it was a cause for celebration when I heard that he'd landed the position. I have to admit that Gena through me a little bit of a curve when she walked into the room and said "is that TJ?" I hadn't heard that nickname for a bit, and I have to admit to some confusion when "is that TJ?" came my way. (I'm actually very fond of the nickname, one generally used by my close friends from back in college or high school; at work in Chicago I was often called "Keeper.")

But enough about nicknames. Back to the evening, which went from a delightful dinner to the silent auction and then to my presentation. I had a chance to talk about the foundation of the "Norwegian Explorers" and the Holmes Collections at the University. Along the way I introduced the audience to the wider Sherlockian world, the Baker Street Irregulars, some of the actors who've portrayed Holmes, etc. By all accounts the evening was a success, and I'm glad I could do my little bit to help promote libraries and National Library Week. My thanks to Dayle and Orrin for arranging the evening, and my special thanks to Leslie Peterson, assistant to the Dean of the Library at Minnesota State University. Leslie was my initial contact and extremely helpful in all the details related to the evening and my appearance. I hope our paths cross again!

On the Road

2010-05-08T11:39:00.003-05:00

An interesting (maybe) little tidbit from everyday life that speaks to the power of today's technology.

At the moment my wife is driving from the Twin Cities to Chicago to pick up two of our kids from college/grad school. She just phoned from her cell (I didn't ask her whether she was driving or had pulled over; I hope she pulled over) asking me what the weather looked like on towards Madison, Milwaukee, and Chicago. I was working at the computer anyway, so I quick pulled up some animated radar reports and was able to give her a sense of what the conditions would be like as she drives farther to the southeast. I could have pulled up local weather reports for those cities as well (I may still do that and text them to her), but in any event it was nice to be able to give her some real-time information on what the roads and weather looked like ahead of her. Sure beats the old days when we'd phone the state patrol to get a sense of weather/road conditions. Maybe I'll check out the Wisconsin Dept. of Transportation as well and give her a heads up on any road construction she might come across.

In defense of libraries...

2010-05-08T10:54:00.005-05:00

Another posting that caught my eye as I catch up on stuff in my Google Reader, by Amy Goetzman on MinnPost. It touches on two items: a study that says that kids who grow up in homes, surrounded by books, have an academic advantage (maybe not so surprising); and the squabble the occurred after Neil Gaiman's appearance at the Stillwater, Minnesota public library.

And yet another one from MinnPost that says Agatha Christie's later novels suggest the onset of dementia (and that Christie may have been aware of that fact and placed clues to her condition within the text).

And congratulations to the Minnesota Daily being named the best college daily newspaper in America!

Datebooks and Diaries

2010-05-08T10:15:00.004-05:00

Here's an interesting article from Virginia Heffernan in the New York Times. It concerns datebooks and diaries and how these are disappearing in favor of electronic calendars like Apple's iCal, Google Calendar or other such systems. Here at work we used to have something called "Meeting Maker" and then morphed to something else called "UMCal" and rumor has it we may be moving at some time in the near future to Google Calendar (which makes sense since we seem to be transforming ourselves into the Northern Midwest campus of Google University; we're doing Google Books, we'll soon be doing Google Calendar and GMail; and before long--in my more cynical moments--I'm sure Google will be "doing" us.)

No more Google bashing for the moment. I use and like many of their products. I just have this sense that in some strange way we're selling our soul and losing our memory.

Which brings me back to datebooks and diaries and why I started this post in the first place. Notice the last few sentences of Heffernan's article: "But now that I’ve shelved my Filofax in favor of a calendar program that seems somehow to flatten existence, I realize that another year is passing without my building up the compact book of a year’s worth of Filofax pages that, every December, I used to wrap in a rubber band and put on a shelf, just as my new refills came in the mail. Nobody is grieving. Well, I’m grieving now, Baker. You never know what you’re going to miss." She is, in some ways, talking about an archive of her past. And what we need to realize, and confront, is that we still don't have (to my mind) a safe and secure way of archiving electronic calendars and diaries.

This fact has raised its ugly head more than once at work. I've wanted to go back and check some past event or confirm some meeting or conversation. But I can't do it. When the University moved from Meeting Maker to UMCal all that information was lost or disappeared into some black hole. If I go back in time on my UMCal all I see are lots of empty spaces on a vacant calendar. None of the Meeting Maker information was migrated to the new system. And what will happen when we make the transition from UMCal to Google Calendar? Will they migrate all of my UMCal information to the new system? I doubt it. I doubt it very much. So if I'm going to want to keep a record of my past (as UMCal defines it), I'm going to have to print off my calendar pages for each month and file them away as a paper archive. Its the only option I've got (besides, maybe, printing a second copy electronically in pdf and parking that copy on multiple hard drives).

Are we grieving the loss? Will this continuation of the poverty of the post-modern historical record come back to haunt us or those who come after us? How many disservices are we doing to future researchers? I think we're going to present them with a huge mess that will be difficult, if not impossible, to fathom. And we'll be poorer for it.

Catching Up: Midmorning with Kerri Miller

2010-05-07T15:58:00.004-05:00

On April 1st I had a real treat: I was a guest on Kerri Miller's "Midmorning" show on Minnesota Public Radio. (Follow the link to listen to the show; I was on the second hour, 10-11am). I'm a big fan of public radio. I listen to it when I get up in the morning and its the last thing I hear when going to bed at night. Unfortunately, I don't always get to hear Kerri's show because it falls in the middle of my work day. But I try to check her program web page as often as possible to see and hear her guests. On her program page pay special attention to the "Of Note" links on the sidebar. I'm always interested to see what she's reading as well as the "Talking Volumes" section. There's some great material here!

Earlier on I was contacted by Chris Dall, who helps produce "Midmorning," wondering if I'd be interested in joining the program on April 1st to talk about Sherlock Holmes, the Collections here at the University, and anything else Sherlockian that might come our way. The main guest for this segment of the show was David Grann, a staff writer at the New Yorker, who was going to be talking about his new book "The Devil and Sherlock Holmes." I jumped at the chance.

The timing was perfect. Only two nights earlier I'd watched an interview with David on the "Charlie Rose" show. I was ready to go out and buy the book and the invitation from Chris just sealed the deal. I had to admit, however, that I was a bit nervous, for a number of reasons. First, I'd come across David's writing earlier in the New Yorker, in a piece that also features as the lead chapter of the new book entitled "Mysterious Circumstances." When "Mysterious Circumstances" first appeared it was not received well by some members of the Sherlockian community; there were mixed reviews. Glen Miranker, a friend and devoted Sherlockian, wrote a very nice letter that appeared in a later issue of the New Yorker and Otto Penzler, another friend of the Collections, also complimented David on his writing. I was of a mixed mind. I'd had the chance to meet and correspond with Richard Lancelyn Green, the subject of David's piece, and was very saddened by Richard's death. I was looking forward to a long and interesting friendship with Richard, but we never made it past the acquaintance stage. I knew others, close friends of Richard's, had denounced the article. I didn't want to put on any airs, or presume to speak for the entire Sherlockian community, so I was a bit concerned about how to strike some kind of middle ground during my time on the radio. I was certain that Richard's death would come up in the conversation, but was not sure what approach I should take. I talked to a number of friends, both local and abroad, to get their input and advice. My thanks to all of them for helping me in this portion of my "prep" for the interview.

I was also nervous because this was going to be live, on the air. There were no opportunities for edits. I've not done a lot of interviews, but its probably safe to say that I've done more then many of my colleagues here, so this wasn't totally new territory. But I was remembering a previous interview I'd given, also on radio, where I'd made a mistake in the facts. It wasn't a major thing, and most listeners probably missed it, but I wanted to make sure that I was as prepared as I could be for the interview. So, in preparation, I re-read "Mysterious Circumstances" a number of times. I also re-checked other media accounts from the time of Richard's death as well as looking at old postings on various Holmes/Doyle discussion lists. I wanted to have a good sense of what people had said at the time and what, if any, reverberations were still out there.

Finally, I was a bit nervous because Minnesota Public Radio is a great radio operation. They do things at a high level of excellence and I didn't want to disappoint them. I have to admit that I was thrilled at the opportunity to see some of the behind the scenes operation, and really enjoyed the time in the control room before I went into the studio for my segment of the show.

In the end, I just had to be me. I think I come off all right in interviews, but you never quite know until you've finished. Just relax and enjoy the time. Those were the best words for me to remember as I entered the studio. Everything else would take care of itself. Good preparation can lead to a good frame of mind. You're sharp, alert, and ready to go.

I didn't have any reason to worry. It was a great time and a good conversation and Kerri put me totally at ease. It was very natural talking with her and David. The added bonus for me was the chance to talk more with Kerri after the show was over. We stayed in the studio for another ten to fifteen minutes talking more about Holmes, Doyle, and the U's collection. I hope she has the chance to come over here some time for a visit. I'd love to show her around. She may bring me back a couple of weeks before our conference for a chance to plug that event and talk more about Holmes. I'm looking forward to the chance. My thanks to Kerri, Chris, and the other folks at MPR for the invitation to talk about the Collections and about a great Sherlockian, Richard Lancelyn Green.

And don't forget to read David's book. I really do like his writing. I haven't yet read his "Lost City of Z" but will get to it shortly. At the moment I'm reading Christopher Andrew's authorized history of MI-5, "Defend the Realm."

Catching Up: Holmes Conference

2010-05-07T15:30:00.004-05:00

I guess its fair to say that I've been preoccupied with a few other things since my last post. I really don't know where the time has gone, but I think its probably a sign that I've been busy and having fun (and you can do both at the same time). So while there's a lot that's happened, I won't go over all the old ground, but I want to bring you up to date on a few things. I'll probably stretch these out over a number of posts, but I'll warn you right now that there's going to be a long post put up next Monday. It's the text of a talk I'm giving on Tuesday. But more on that later.

At the moment I'm listening to Jim Lehrer (from a YouTube posting) and something he said in terms of advice to aspiring writers caught my ear: "keep bottom on chair." My bottom hasn't been on the chair for some time and its time to put it firmly in place and get back to writing. (More on Jim Lehrer later as well).

For quite some time now I've been part of a group planning our next Sherlock Holmes conference here at the University. Since 1995 (or 1998, depending on how you want to count) we've been hosting a conference every three years on a theme related to Holmes, Doyle, and/or the Victorian era. This year's conference is being built around the theme "The Spirits of Sherlock Holmes." It will be held here at Andersen Library on August 6-8. A brochure on our web site will give you more information about the conference. If you're interested, I hope you'll register and join us in August.

There will be two exhibits mounted in conjunction with the conference. The first, in Wilson Library, will focus on Allen Mackler and his collection; Allen represented a number of aspects of "the spirits" of Sherlock Holmes. Allen was a long-time member of the Norwegian Explorers of Minnesota and a major supporter of the Holmes Collections. The exhibit will feature items from his collection as well as provide an opportunity for visitors to see Allen's reproduction of the 221B Baker Street sitting room that is on permanent exhibit. The second exhibit will open in mid July in Andersen Library and weave various elements from the theme of the conference into the various displays. There will be items from the Collections representing "spirit" in its alcoholic and dining guise; "spirit" in its enthusiasm of the collector; "spirit" represented through films and illustration; and "spirit" in its religious dimensions. Other "spirits" may be found there as well. Watch for more information and postings after the exhibits open.

At the conference itself I'll be concentrating on the "collaborative spirit" between libraries and collections. I'm very pleased that representatives from collections in Toronto, London, and Portsmouth will be present. I'm hoping to have representatives from Harvard and the Newberry Library as well. Together, we'll meet before the conference and having a working session over breakfast. Then, during the conference, we'll have a panel discussion. I'm hoping that both of these opportunities will prove fruitful and that stronger relationships will develop between the various collections and their staffs.

In my next posts I'll talk about Jim Lehrer and my talk next Tuesday. But the very next post will continue with Holmes and a talk I had on the radio with author David Grann and host Kerri Miller at Minnesota Public Radio.

Holmes on "Patrick Reusse & Co."

2010-01-13T14:02:00.002-06:00

The Holmes story continues. . . I had a fun time talking with Patrick Reusse and his pals on the radio this morning about the Holmes Collections. I'm not sure how many more interviews there might be, but its been a great run of exposure for the collections. I really do hope that Patrick and Company will take me up on the invitation to come and visit the library and collections. That would be a kick!

Holmes Continues

2010-01-12T10:09:00.004-06:00

What should I call it: a media outwash? a postprandial potation? Whatever it might be called, the goodwill, interest and exposure to our Sherlock Holmes Collections continues. Following the Fox 9 News interview we provided a number of tours of the library and collection and answered a number of questions about Holmes and how we acquired "all this stuff." Tomorrow I'll be on KSTP 1500 AM sometime around or after 8am and then at the end of the day I'll tour some Japanese VIPs from Keio University who have an interest in Holmes. They're here visiting our Clinical and Translational Science Institute.

And, for the moment, I'm off to sign new year's cards to our Friends of the Holmes Collections. Its always important to say "thank you" to Friends for their continued support. There is a lot we could not do without their help. Our Friends of the Libraries office staff and director of development help us remember to say thanks, lest we forget our manners. (It also gives us a chance, through the design of the card, to share something special with our Friends. This year its an illustration from the Kerlan Collection.)

Archives, Libraries and Popular Culture

2009-12-30T16:17:00.009-06:00

This is partly a "working post" for a class I'm teaching next week for adult learners. The first session is "Pop Culture in Archives and Special Collections." I want to play a few clips of how archives and special collection libraries (or libraries in general) are portrayed in the movies and television. So I'm using this as my clipboard to paste down a few links.

From "Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring" (2001). Gandalf reads Isildur's account of the ring of power. (1:04)

From "The Name of the Rose" (1986). Brother William of Baskerville discovers "one of the greatest libraries in all Christendom." (9:40)

From "The Name of the Rose" (1986). The scriptorium. (2:53)

From "Star Wars: Attack of the Clones" (2002). Chief Librarian of the Jedi Archives, Jacasta Nu, assists Obi Wan Kenobi with his research. (1:06)

Mr. Bean at the Library (1990). Mr. Bean works on a rare manuscript. (9:13)

From "The Music Man" (1962) --Marian the Librarian. (7:43)

From "All The President's Men" (1976). Woodward and Bernstein pay a visit to the Library of Congress. (1:31)

From "Angels and Demons" (2009). Symbologist Robert Langdon tracks a mystery in the Vatican Archives. (0:56)

From "Angels and Demons" (2009). Breaking out of the Vatican Archive. (1:14)

From "Ghostbusters" (1984). Psychic researchers encounter a library ghost. (1:27)

From "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" (2009). A scene from Hogwarts library. (0:53)

From "Desk Set" (1957). Librarians in the reference department of a television network. (1:12)

"The Librarian: Quest for the Spear" (2004). Interviewing for the position of librarian. (2:36)

Holmes, Studio 360, Fox 9, and The Movie

2009-12-30T14:04:00.005-06:00

The Holmes media blitz continues. And we couldn't be happier. The various reports have brought some great attention to the Holmes Collections. In the process, we've been able to introduce a few more folks to the world of Holmes (and gather in a few new supporting Friends in the process).

The latest reports took place last Sunday and Monday. On Sunday night the public radio program "Studio 360" took a look at the world of Holmes. If you missed the broadcast check out this link to hear the program. The blurb for my segment in the story reads "Where would you expect to find the world's largest Sherlock Holmes archive? Try nine stories below Minneapolis, in the rare book collection at the University of Minnesota. Sarah Lemanczyk descends for a visit." I had a great time with Sarah. She was actually the first reporter on the scene to cover the Collections in anticipation of the new movie release (more on that shortly). I was curious how she was going to use some of the effects we recorded (e.g. doors opening, foots going down steps, etc.) She did a great job. I have to admit that I'd forgotten that I told her the State Fair story, but so it goes. We had fun. I enjoyed the other pieces in the Holmes spread as well, especially the chance to hear from Susan Rice, Les Klinger, and David Stuart Davies.

On Monday morning I was a guest on the Fox 9 morning news program. I don't have a link to a clip as yet, but I'm hoping that the station will put one up soon. I'll let you know. Alix Kendall did a nice job with the interview, giving me a chance to show a few things from the collections. I was hesitant to bring any rare objects with me so stuck to some safer choices and duplicate items. The special moment for me was having Alix put on the deerstalker cap that once belonged to John Bennett Shaw. She looked very good with it on, but I think it might have flustered her a wee bit. It was one of those spur of the moment things that happens during an interview. I was talking about the cap, held it up and thought. . . I wonder if she'd mind. She was great! I didn't head into work that day (taking advantage of having the kids home from school), but apparently the phones were ringing off the hooks about seeing Sherlock at the U.

As for the movie. . . I really enjoyed it. I went the morning after Christmas with my daughter. We caught an early show (11 am) at the mall and didn't have to fight for seats. (It was a much different case by the time we emerged from the theater. By then the place was packed with post-holiday shoppers and there was a line for the next showing.) I generally rate movies by how many times I look at my watch. I didn't check the time once during "Sherlock Holmes." I thought it was a fun movie and, contrary to some of my more traditional Holmesians, thought the action was OK. I especially enjoyed Jude Law's portrayal of Watson. Law gave us a well-developed character, in many ways an equal of Holmes, with excellent banter between the two. It was not hard to believe that this man had seen military action or had the skills of a doctor. I also enjoyed the setting. This was a grimy, gritty London and one that had a richness and depth, almost another character in the movie. My complaint was with the use of Mary Morstan, the only real canonical glitch to my eyes. In the original stories Holmes would have known Mary from "The Sign of Four," but in the movie its as if they've just met. I don't know why this was done, but it detracted slightly from my enjoyment. I was pleased at how the physical and mental Holmes came together, as I was with how all of Holmes reasoning was tied together. And there was the set-up for a sequel. Will it indeed be Brad Pitt who plays Moriarty? I gave the movie two thumbs up, or 4 out of 5 stars. And I'm going to see it again (and get it on DVD).

There is one curious matter about the movie: Robert Downey Jr. received a Golden Globe nomination for best actor in a musical or comedy. "Sherlock Holmes" to my mind is neither a musical nor a comedy. So I'm not sure why his performance and nomination was shoe-horned into this particular category. But I'm glad he was nominated.

I may or may not get another post in before the New Year, but in case I don't--best wishes for the coming year!

More Holmes in the Star Trib

2009-12-21T09:37:00.003-06:00

Kudos to the Star Tribune for the great coverage of the Holmes Collections. The newspaper ran Jeff Baenen's AP story again over the weekend with front page coverage, above the fold, in the "Variety" section. My daughter started getting texts and FB comments from friends on Saturday morning about her "cool" dad in the paper and my son texted me mid-morning to say that the picture of me with Raggedy Ann and Andy (as Holmes and Watson) was "huge." So there were a lot of happy faces in the Johnson household on Saturday.

The jollity continued at a party Saturday night, causing me to run out and buy a few more papers. (By this time the "early Sunday" edition was out, and the "Variety" section was still there in all its glory.) I had a bit of fun at the Cub store in Apple Valley, where I picked up six more copies of the paper. The clerk told a friend and I that we were "insane" (either for buying multiple copies of the paper or for our dress--it was a PJ party and I was in sweats and a hoodie; my friend had been sporting a robe). After paying for the papers I looked back at the clerk and asked "aren't you curious as to why we're buying so many copies of the paper?" While asking the question, I pulled out the Variety section and held it next to my face. The woman behind me in line exclaimed "my God, its him!" So we had a nice laugh. The clerk then asked if I'd give her a signed copy, but I was already headed for the door.

It was great coverage for the Collections, but it struck me more than once during the weekend that none of this would be possible without the work of many of my colleagues, the ongoing support of the University and our Friends, and the many Friends and donors who have helped build this collection. It was (a continues to be) a humbling reminder of the importance of our collective work and what it means to be a steward of these materials for future generations.

So, in the spirit of the season, and echoing the words of my Dickensian namesake, "God Bless Us, Every One!" Best wishes for the Holiday season!

Holmes at the University of Minnesota

2009-12-17T16:11:00.004-06:00

We have a great relationship with the Libraries Communication office and the University Relations office. U Relations just posted two video stories about the Holmes Collections. The first piece gives you a nice overview and features appearances by Professor Gordon Hirsch from the English department and Dick Sveum, president of the Friends of the Sherlock Holmes Collections.

The second piece focuses on a few of the treasures from the Collections, notably the Beeton's Christmas Annual and a manuscript leaf from the Hound of the Baskervilles.

My sincere thanks to the folks from University Relations--Drew Swain, Ryan Mathre and Liz Giorgi--for all their help in promoting the Sherlock Holmes Collections at the University. And my thanks as well to Professor Hirsch, Dick Sveum and Marlo Welshons from the Libraries Communication office. We had a lot of fun with the interviews! I hope you enjoy them!

Follow-up on Holmes Story in the Strib

2009-12-17T13:13:00.003-06:00

I found it interesting that the Star Tribune decided to use photos from its own morgue instead of the photos provided by the AP for the Holmes story. I don't know what was behind that decision, but it did lead to an erroneous caption for one of the pictures. The caption reads: "Sherlockiana at the University of Minnesota's Wilson Library (emphasis mine) includes an 1887 copy of "A Study in Scarlet," an original draft page 24 from "The Hound of the Baskervilles," an ashtray from the Sherlock Holmes Pub in London and other items." The Holmes Collections moved out of Wilson Library in late 1999 and have resided in the Elmer L. Andersen Library ever since. Whoever does the Stribs captions didn't do their fact-checking. That, in turn, will lead people to Wilson library asking about the Holmes collections, at which point they'll be directed to Andersen Library (unless they want to see the permanent exhibit of the 221B sitting room that has resided on the 4th floor of Wilson since 2008).

At the same time, it was great to see an old picture of "Mac"--E. W. MacDiarmid in the stacks with the Holmes Collections (probably taken when the materials from the Hench Collection arrived in 1978, and probably taken when that part of the collection resided in Walter Library, on the East Bank campus). That was the first time that Mac's path crossed mine, when I was a graduate student in the Library School, taking classes on the 4th floor of Walter Library. Fond memories.

Sherlock Holmes: The Movie and the Collections

2009-12-17T12:45:00.003-06:00

Just thought I'd make a brief note of a couple of items that came out from the Associated Press the other day about our Sherlock Holmes Collections. Look here if you're interested in the print version of the story and here if you want to see another AP bit on YouTube. Since this was an AP report, the story appeared in any number of papers and other media sites. At least a few of those included the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Minneapolis StarTribune, and ABC News.

I had a lot of fun doing the interviews with the AP reporter, Jeff Baenen. I'm looking forward to a couple of other pieces hitting the airwaves/net soon: a couple of pieces from our own University Relations department, and from the public radio show "Studio 360."

And, of course, there's the movie. I'm looking forward to seeing it (although I haven't found anyone yet who can get me into a sneak preview--which I'd love to do). I've been checking the trailer for some time now, noting a few subtle changes in trailer and web site along the way. Bottom line--I think its going to be a lot of fun.

It was interesting--a great word here in the upper midwest--to see that the movie has received a Golden Globe nomination, although the category is a bit jarring--best actor for Robert Downey Jr. for a musical or comedy. I'm sure the characterization of the movie as musical or comedy will come as a bit of a shock to some of the Sherlockians/Holmesians out there, who would most likely think of Holmes in terms of drama. Anyway, we shall see (and soon, I hope)...

Live: Lorcan Dempsey--Discussion and Questions

2009-11-23T11:47:00.003-06:00

the presence of social networking and possible fruitful conversations that we might have with those in the marketing world, e.g. Best Buy, Pancheros, who are using social networking as part of their marketing plan
it is good to be on the landscape, to have a good tone with those in the social network
the importance of community stewardship, e.g. things that are pushed to Flickr
the resident/visitor scenario. more data about what people are doing will help to improve services. the trade-off between privacy and convenience.
transaction costs. learning requires the expenditure of work:) don't want to get caught in the quality and convenience trap
experiences of newspapers, travel agents, bookstores. alignment of revenue models and use models. libraries will depend more on shared consolidation services

Next speaker on Dec. 17th

Live: Lorcan Dempsey--Tentative Conclusions

2009-11-23T11:30:00.002-06:00

Current will move to emerging pattern

Books: a new balance?
Journals: move to consolidation?
Discovery layer: need one?
Institutional materials: disclose through discovery layer, but also...
Analytics: let traffic influence design of website

Disclose and syndicate

institutional collections: is someone responsible for search engine optimization?
holdings: syndicate (knowledge base, holdings,...)
services: Libx, widgets,...
SEO. Consistent url patterns across services, hackable urls, bookmarking buttons, etc.

This is about interoperability with the web

User and institutional leverage

expertise, reputation (provide bibliographic tools,...)
watch identity management: prepare for when manage context (usage) and claims. (affinity strings)
integration with other campus systems (course management,..)
'follow' and intervene? (Salesforce.com)

Usercentric mashups will continue to be important

Organizational

seek collaborative sourcing models
externalize infrastructure
focus on distinctive impact
place local in bigger contexts
track identity management and reputation enhacement
recognize that things have changed

Presentation end. Time for discussion and questions

Live: Lorcan Dempsey--emerging Pattern 2

2009-11-23T11:16:00.001-06:00

Mendeley: 100,000 users and 8 million research papers; manage profile; manage publications; "like itunes for research papers";

VIVO at Cornell: $12mil project funded by NIH

Reputation management, social networking

Discovery scenarios:

Relationship between consumer and library: direct--added value
Between library and flow: disclosure and syndication
Between many/indirect discovery: may involve identity, locate, resolution or other services at library

The "indirect discovery" scenarios; with the second and third scenarios the discover happens elsewhere

With the second scenario we want to disclose holdings and existence

Search engine optimization (SEO)

Example of indirect discovery: Google Scholar, Google Books

Syndication via iTunes

Syndication: bookmarking and rss; pushing stuff into their flow

We now have "an ecology of services"

What does it really mean to push stuff out onto the web?

Live: Lorcan Dempsey--Network Reconfigurations

2009-11-23T11:04:00.003-06:00

An "insta-mashup" i.e. Lorcan's experience with LinkedIn and the NYT; pulling stuff from NYT based on his LinkedIn profile; here's stuff you might be interested in.

Will probably see more like this

In the future, how much will we focus on "identity services" for the network that will, in turn, deliver information based on your profile.

Social services require identity

Realtime services require identity

movile services require identity.

They all want to know who you are, or who you claim to be.

Tweetdeck knows about Facebook identity. Lorcan's example, for this morning, where he went to Tweetdeck which in turn used his FB identity to authenticate his internet use with the hotel (ALoft/Minneapolis) in which he was staying

Importance of cloud computing when you're constantly changings devices; cloud and mobile are natural partners

network is the unit of attention
data aggregation
gravitational pull
networks effects
long tail

Multiscalar: personal, departmental, disciplinary, library, consortial, systemwide

bookmarking, researcher pages, deposit papers, research data

identity and federation lacking across scales

Choices: focus on distinctive local impact? Engagement? externalize infrastructure? Common requirements?

Live: Lorcan Dempsey--Collection Directions

2009-11-23T10:51:00.004-06:00

Stuff that comes from the outside in (old) and the stuff that comes from inside and wants to get pushed out (new)

Grid with two axes: stewardship; uniqueness

Low unique/High stewardship = newspapers, gov docs, cd & dvd, maps, scores; concentration of licensed material, small number of suppliers, 'professional services'; bought materials--move to licensed? concerns with space/usage
high unique/high stewarship = rare books, local/historical newspapers, archives, mss, these, dissertations; special to whom? distinctive?
high unique/low stewardship = ePrints, learning objects, courseware, e-portfolios, research data, prospectus, institutional website, tech reports; institutionally important, future 'special'
low unique/low stewardship = open source software, newsgroup archives, freely-accessible web resources; interest will grow

The outside in stuff: discover, deliver, disclose holdings, manage claims

The inside out stuff: disclose. Array alongside other institutions? Make sense as individual destinations?

Live: Lorcan Dempsey--Emerging Pattern

2009-11-23T10:39:00.002-06:00

Environments: back office/management; materials workflow; user environment; between Managment and end User Access

Workflow:

Bought/physical
Electronic/Licensed
Digital/Digitized
Special collections/Archives

Manage it-->Content-->Metadata-->Get It-->Find It

This results in a very complex environment, with legacy systems, etc.:

ILS, ERM, Repository, Special
MARC, A&I, XXX, DC, EAD
ILL/Circ, Link resolver, special
OPAC, MetaSearch,A-Z,NxtBen, Website

Website intergration that gives something wholistic/organic

U of Michigan's web site does quite a nice job of wrapping around all these services, etc.

Industry pattern that you can see emerging==end-user environment with integrated discover and the management environment that has integrated resource managment

When you put the network in there, it gets a little more complicated, but can still see this integrated environment

Live: Lorcan Dempsey--First Network Interlude

2009-11-23T10:26:00.003-06:00

Here's the first "interlude" in Lorcan's talk.

Attention switch

Then: resources scarce; attention abundant
Now: attention scarce; resources abundant
this flip is important because it tells us how people think about information

Workflow switch

Then: expect workflows to be built around my service
Now: Build services around workflows

Consumer switch

Then: More investment in business/eduction environments
Now: More investment in consumer environments

People are bringing more advanced expectations. Is this driven by the attention on the consumer? What, these days, do we really mean by "being available." If a piece is found, according to OCLC, in four research libraries, is it "available" or "effectively lost?"

"In an environment of scarce attention high transaction costs equals low/no availability."

Dave White's "Visitors and Residents" in terms of a presence on the web.

Live: Lorcan Dempsey--the Numbers

2009-11-23T10:12:00.003-06:00

Lorcan's comments (we may also link to the UMConnect Presentation at some point):

This is the 3rd time Lorcan's been here to present
Discoverability report done by the U Libraries was done very well
How people do things, discover things and deliver things
Disclosure to the network

Numbers:

4,316,022 WorldCat holdings
575,542 UM contributed records in MNCat
2,687,888 number of holdings attached to UM contributed records
683,258 number of items held by 5 or fewer institutions
1,603,701 number of items held by 25 or fewer institutions
311 languages represented in collection
233 countries of publication represented in collection
These are the stats/numbers as of July 2009
784,796 UM owned titles in HathiTrust as of October; 20% of UM holdings
12% of these titles in less than 25 libraries
retain the 12% as local asset; the stuff held by 25-100 libraries--shared research collection, regional consolidation; stuff held by more than 100 libraries--source print delivery with network provider?

Live: Lorcan Dempsey--Wendy Lougee Intro

2009-11-23T10:03:00.003-06:00

OK, I decided to "live blog" Lorcan's speech to the U Libraries. Wendy is now going through the opening and, interestingly, indicated that this talk is available not only through UMConnect to library staff unable to attend, but is being streamed to CIC colleagues as well. Given the collaborative nature of our endeavor, this is a great move to open up Lorcan's talk to a wider audience.

Wendy mentioned "Financing the Future" and wants to make sure everyone has read it. I'll come back later (if I don't have time now) and put in some other links. Here's a link from the staff wiki to today's event.

Lorcan's title slide: "discovery, delivery, disclosure"

Lorcan Dempsey on Campus

2009-11-23T08:47:00.003-06:00

Today marks the beginning of an interesting speaker series for the U of M Libraries. The series is described thus:

"The University Libraries have invited speakers to engage the Libraries staff in broad strategic themes that will shape the future of the University Libraries. These themes capture an arena of strategic importance to the University and to the Libraries. Through the process, we will explore directions and potential investments...."

Today's theme is "Discovery and Delivery" and the speaker is Lorcan Dempsey of OCLC. Here's the little blurb that accompanies today's theme and speaker:

The Libraries' classic roles in providing collections and information access have undergone fundamental changes in the context of new models of distributing content, new technologies and players in the discovery environment, and changing expectations for delivery among our users.

When "discovery happens elsewhere" and users expect discovery and delivery to coincide, how should libraries respond? What mechanisms should be developed to meet the needs of students and faculty?

What roles do major players (such as Google and Amazon) currently have in the overall search and discovery environment and how will these roles evolve? In the years ahead, how will the library interact with these players and their services?

What is the future role of the local library catalog? Does it exist? What should it contain? How should it be defined?

What are library staff roles in this new discovery and delivery environment? Where are the future alignments for library expertise?

We have been given a number of readings in preparation for today's presentation. These include:

* Horizon report 2009: The Horizon Project produces a yearly report identifying emerging technologies that are likely to have a large impact on learning-focussed organizations. Worth reading because it places the technological developments affecting academic libraries in the context of the key trends and challenges facing the learning institutions that they serve. Includes executive summary and a summary of the key trends reviewed.
* University of Minnesota Libraries Discoverability report executive summary (staff access only; don't know why). The Libraries' Phase 1 Discoverability report identifies key trends related to discovery and offers principles to guide decisions involving discovery. The full report also provides an analysis of usage data for the Libraries' main discovery systems.
* Mark Dahl, "Evolution of Library Discovery Systems in the Web Environment". Dahl recounts his work on a series of projects that take him beyond traditional library discovery tools. Provides an engaging narrative framework for understanding the need for new types of discovery and the development of technology to support them.
* Peter Brantley, "Architectures for Collaboration: roles and expectations for digital libraries". Former Executive Director of the DLF offers some personal views on what libraries need to do to adapt to their changing environment. A broad, high-level view of the changing responsibilities and opportunities facing libraries.
* Lorcan Dempsey, Four Sources of Metadata about Things. Our speaker, Lorcan Dempsey, delineates four kinds of metadata which libraries can use to enhance their discovery services.

And, finally, here's a little bio blurb for Lorcan Dempsey:

Lorcan Dempsey, Vice President, OCLC Programs and Research and Chief Strategist, oversees the research division and participates in planning at OCLC. He is a librarian who has worked for library and educational organizations in Ireland, England and the US. He has policy, research and service development experience, mostly in the area of networked information and digital libraries. He writes and speaks extensively, and can be followed on the web at Lorcan Dempsey's weblog and on twitter. Before moving to OCLC, Lorcan worked for JISC in the UK, overseeing national information programs and services, and before that was Director of UKOLN at the a national UK research and policy unit at the University of Bath.

I'm debating whether or not to live blog this event. We'll see.

MinnPost - Digital government records provide challenges for historical preservation

2009-10-21T09:34:00.000-05:00

MinnPost - Digital government records provide challenges for historical preservation

Old Dictionaries

2009-10-20T14:30:00.002-05:00

An interesting article in the New York Times Magazine by Ammon Shea on old dictionaries.

Lorcan Dempsey's weblog

2009-10-09T10:21:00.001-05:00

Lorcan makes some comments on work done here at the U. The report is, most definitely, worth a look.

Lorcan Dempsey's weblog

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Harvard Acquires Updike

2009-10-07T12:19:00.001-05:00

Good news for those interested in Updike.

MinnPost - Broadband connectivity is a big issue in rural and remote parts of Minnesota

2009-10-07T12:17:00.001-05:00

You can't have Web 2.0 without good access to the 'Net. Here's a story that came across my desk this morning.

MinnPost - Broadband connectivity is a big issue in rural and remote parts of Minnesota

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Rare Books on front page of the MN Daily

2009-10-07T12:05:00.005-05:00

A nice article that appeared in today's Daily. My thanks to Luke Feuerherm and photographer Marija Majerle for the coverage.

University’s rare book collection held deep underground

One of the nation’s most unique collections of rare books is preserved and available on campus.

Library curator Tim Johnson points out archived books Tuesday in the Elmer L. Andersen Library. Comprised of nearly 3 million volumes, the library is home to one of the world's foremost rare book collections.

Published: 10/06/2009

By Luke Feuerherm

When searching for rare art on campus, most turn to the aesthetic grandeur of the East Bank’s Weisman Art Museum. However, some of the University of Minnesota’s rarest art lies buried beneath 90 feet of shale and limestone across the Mississippi River.

Elmer L. Andersen Library is home to one of the world’s foremost rare book collections, containing 120 special collections and additional archives that make up nearly 3 million volumes in total, including Andersen’s vast personal collection.

“Our Sherlock Holmes collection is one of the largest, if not the largest in the world,” said Kris Kiesling, director of archives and special collections at the University libraries.

The volumes are held in two main caverns that protect them from four major threats: temperature, humidity, dust and light. This protection includes filtered ventilation, low-flow fire sprinklers, pressurized halls and chemical detectors used to discern fires before they happen.

While these intricate caverns are closed to the general public, their rare treasures are not. Reading rooms are available during library hours where library workers access the rare collections to retrieve works upon request.

“There’s just something that happens to you when you hold a book that’s over 500 years old,” library curator Tim Johnson said.

The University library system is North America’s 15th largest research library and assists the University in its status as a research university.

“There’s just no way to get across its value in any type of virtual mode. It has an artistic value; it has a tactile value,” said graduate instructor Kevin Mummey, who recently took his students to the library to view 3,000-year-old stone tablets.

“Our hope is that the collections support the research our students do,’” Johnson said.

The collection stands as a valuable supply of primary sources on campus.

“We get a lot of students using the collection in a variety of ways. We probably see between 800 and 1,000 students in the course of an academic year, either through class presentations or working on papers or projects using the collection,” said Marguerite Ragnow , library resources advisor for graduate students.

In addition to research, the library’s collection also stands as a preservation of the art of literature. The value of the rare books extends beyond simply information.

“It’s not just the text in the book but the creator and the art,” said Johnson. His favorite pieces in the collection include “The Kelmscott Chaucer,” regarded by some as the most beautiful book in the world, and a Sherlock Holmes novel that once belonged to Tsaritsa Alexandra of Russia.

The thick stone that encases the rows of rare literature is in place to protect them from their environment, not shield them from the public, for which they are open to daily upon request.

Go Twins!!

2009-10-07T08:40:00.004-05:00

Like politics, there won't be many times when I interject my enjoyment of certain sports and teams into this blog, but I can't resist the opportunity to hype my Minnesota Twins. Last night's game against the Detroit Tigers was, truly, one for the ages. I've seen many games in my life and this one has to rank near the top. To use the cliché, both teams left it all on the field. This game is full of highlights and I hope the Twins or somebody in Major League Baseball puts that game on a DVD and offers it for sale. I'd buy a copy in an instant.

I don't know what to expect in the Twins-Yankees series. Its only a best of five series, so there's not a lot of room for mistakes, but I think the Twins will surprise a lot of folks. They've been full of surprises all year; their run through the final stretch of the regular season was an amazing thing to watch (or listen to on the radio, for those of us without cable television).

Every year, come about the time of Spring training, I pull out my vhs recordings of the 1987 and 1991 World Series games, in anticipation of the coming baseball season. Next year maybe I'll have one more game to watch as I get ready for the Twins and a whole new adventure in their new outdoor stadium.

Book TV: Allison Bartlett

2009-10-05T14:36:00.003-05:00

Book TV on C-Span has this program related to "The Man Who Loved Books Too Much." The blurb for the show reads: "Allison Bartlett talks about John Charles Gilkey, a rare book thief who stole hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of books, and the rare book dealer who tracked him down and brought him to justice. She spoke at The Booksmith in San Francisco."