Monthly Archives: April 2010

Newberry Minute: French Revolution Pamphlet Collections

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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycHc-NOSIlc]

The most recent Newberry Minute video that I worked on deals with several large collections of pamphlets from the French Revolution. The collections, as detailed on the Newberry’s website, came to the Newberry in the late 1950s. The collections document, in a very rich and detailed way, what people were thinking and writing about during this turbulent time in French history.As the video discusses, a majority of the items deal with political, economic, and other social issues. But other times, like the boot maker’s pamphlet in the video, provide a different grain to the texture of our understanding, revealing how the culture at large got along at the time.

Jennifer Thom, who presents in the video, is the Cataloging Projects Manager at the Newberry. Right now, her main job is to oversee a large, grant-funded project to create detailed catalog records for these collections (or the FRC). Currently, these pamphlets can be considered to be “hidden collections,” which libraries use to designate substantial collections that are not accessible to users. In the library world these days, accessibility almost always means accessible through a finding aid like an online catalog. The problem with the FRC is that there exists a paper catalog of a similar collection owned by the Biblioteque nationale in Paris. Newberry staffed have annotated this catalog to indicate what we hold as a stop gap measure.But, as you can see below, the collection is very large, and the analog, paper catalog is not the most efficient way to discover what these boxes contain.

The team that Jennifer oversees, supported by funds from the Council on Library and Information Resources, are working to create what are called item-level catalog records for the FRC. An item-level catalog record contains detailed information about each item in a collection (rather than a general description of the collection as a whole, or descriptions of large chunks of the collection). With these detailed records loaded into the online catalog, Newberry users will be able to search for these great resources using keywords, titles, and subject headings.

Plane Crashes

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Whenever I think about the novel that I finished but never revised (and desperately needs revising), I always think about plane crashes. During the course of thinking about the novel–taking its structure apart, reassembling it, reinventing the structure, taking that one apart, and so on–I often imagined a plane crash playing a prominent role. Probably the scene that seems most clear and most interesting to me involves two people crash landing in a field, their plane sliding uncontrollably into a barn. One of the passengers is a resident of the town; the other is not. The latter charms his way into the town’s society and causes problems along the way. The later shrinks to nothing, unable to bear being back in the place where chance returned her.

To make any of this convincing, though, I want to know more about plane crashes. This novel has tended to have a mid-century setting, placing it firmly in the high era of civilian, amateur aviation. I’m always terrible about doing the kind of research for writing that such a period piece would need (a source of dissatisfaction). So, I thought that scanning Youtube for video of plane crashes might be interesting. I also started in with my default tool–Proquest’s Historical Newspaper Database (thank you UIUC for the remote access!).

I actually found out a few interesting things that could work into a scene. First, was a fact that really reconfirms something I already knew, but that the influx of surplus airplanes after WWII made planes plentiful and cheap. One story about a crash in a suburb south of Chicago explicity mentioned this and that the plane had been purchased for a mere $150 (about $2000 today).

From Proquest/Chicago Tribune Database

I was also reading/watching about the Piper Aircraft Corporation that built the Cub and Cherokee planes. Piper planes were often used as training planes. In fact one of their advertising pitches was that for $5 you could fly a plane , just by visiting a Piper dealer (“Anyone could walk into a Piper dealer and get an introductory lesson for $5″). This fact alone offers a nice little detail to add in to a portrait of someone who really shouldn’t be flying a plane, but has acquired just enough skill to convince people he is quite capable.

Piper Aircraft advert

Promotional gimmick by Piper Aircraft

The company history of Piper is also quite interesting. The company (which really is a giant in civilian aviation) started as a small firm in NY. As it grew, local business leaders in Bradford, PA enticed the company to move there with larger facilities and investment capital. Bill Piper was one such business person and eventually took over the company. In any case, the process by which local politics attempts to lure capital to itself has always interested me.

Finally, I came across a video of a tow truck and a group of men trying to upend a plane and tow it out of a field. The video had great examples of body language, posture, and the dynamics of trying to work with an implacable object that seems to resist being moved.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLcUMUY-Nuk]

I still want to read more about how plane crashes, what can cause them to crash. The key for me is to figure out how a plane can crash (particulary if it is already in the air), but not a) explode and b) kill the people inside. It does seem a bit macabre, I suppose, to be watching Youtube and scanning the web for such things. I have found that as long as I don’t read the comments (which often contain contentious and sententious “dialogs” between people, particularly on the crash sites where people are equally hyper de/sensitized to the content).

Wanting houses, having houses

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Every few months, we go and look at houses around town. This, of course, seems to precipitate a mini-crisis in which our heads and hearts battle it out for dominance. We recently looked a smallish 1950s ranch house near the hospital that my heart wanted to cling to so tightly and desperately that…well, I’m blogging about it.
As I said, the house was somewhat on the small side–really too small for a house to “grow into.” But the house seemed to sit in a little magical pocket of unreality that was hard to resist. It sat at the end of a dead end street that ran parallel to the train tracks, really parallel. In fact, the train probably ran no more than a few hundred feet. As you can see in this picture, the trains are very close:

In fact it is kind of amazing that Google captured two trains passing the house, must be over a span of time

Another strange feature of the house was that it sat right next to a power substation–similar to this one, again, very close. You could hear the hum of the substation, and the rattle-clack of the train. One was persistent; one was occasional. Both were prominent features of the house.

Despite the potential NIMBY quality of both the trains and the substation, both contributed to the unreality, if you can imagine that.  Of course, I should also mention that because it is spring time, the foliage around the house and in the park between the house and the train was green and growing. A path led through the lushness to the other side of the block where people had set up a community garden. And, here’s the catch, this garden felt like a Japanese shrine. The kind of shrine you see tucked away in the strangest of places.

Certainly the garden and the green made this house and its spot feel magical and strange. But the layering of the very real world things–substation and train–with the almost unreal garden together made the place seem incredibly thick and dense and rich. You felt that you could really experience life in a spot like that.

Investing this kind of meaning into a place that you don’t even own (and really have no business considering owning at this given moment in time), is a dangerous game and liable to lead to several days worth of “should we; should we not” conversations at dinner, before bed, and even during Lost.