What's New? A Fun Way to Get the Word Out

In Chester, the editor of a new publication, Chester Neighbors, asked me to contribute a monthly piece on the area's history on behalf of the Library. I'm always happy to write for a local publication, so I agreed. It's a great opportunity to raise awareness of the Library and its Local History collections, and it allows readers to get to know their Local History Librarian (me) a bit through my writing. 

So far, I've written about the Chester Optimist Club Collection, Chester Little League Collection, our 1860 topographic map of NJ, and the Andy Rogers Collection. After the story of the Optimists hit the collective front porches of Chesterites in the Borough and Township, I received a call from a local person whose late husband not only was an active member of the club, but also served as an officer. We set up an appointment, and she donated her son's t-shirts from the famous Turtle Races, her husband's Optimist International lapel pins, and a Turtle Races hat he wore each year. She also lent us some photos that I digitized and returned to her.

She and I talked a bit, and I told her about using t-shirts in my current Chester Little League exhibit. She also had her son's team shirts (6 of them!), which she also donated to the Library on a visit the following week. She specifically said that she wanted the Optimist materials to go into the collection on her husband's behalf, and the baseball textiles to go into that collection. I am happy to honor her requests because of the nature of the two collections.

Both started with analog items, as well as the video interviews (think oral histories, but that's now an outdated term that doesn't apply to non-verbal researchers and/or interviewees). Both have contributions from more than a handful of individuals. I can't call them artificial collections, because they're not. They both contain records of volunteer organizations created by the donating members, as well as their artifacts. I like to think of them as living, active collections because as soon as someone hears about them, they come to visit me with a donation and/or they post to You Know You're From Chester If... on Facebook with a story.

I'm excited to see the feedback when our locals who don't know about the map (likely new or non-library-going-people) read the story and check online to read more about it. I'll have a few legacies when I move on from Chester, and the map is definitely one of them. Another is the Memories of Chester video interview series, with everyone from Tommie Barker to Andy Rogers.

Andy and I spent the better part of a year together, at least once a month, while he sat with me and told me his life story. It is fascinating, with many twists and turns. Frankly, I think there's a book, and possibly, a movie in it. Throughout is the continuing thread of the love story between Andy and his lifelong (her life long -- she died about 10 years before he did) partner, his wife Jan.

During the interviews, Andy became sicker and sicker. He'd been in treatment for a very rare skin cancer that had gotten the better of him, and he died last November. Currently, I have a volunteer who just transcribes interviews for me. She's about 12 sessions into the Andy videos -- there are 15. When he felt like he could, he would sit for 2 hours with me. In the beginning, he spoke about how he was the first member of the Chester Lions Club. In the end, he spoke about Jan's death. I nearly wept aloud, but kept it in due to the recording.

Even when we had completed our time together, I still called once in a while to check on him because even with all his treatments and advanced age, he was still the kind of guy to get up on a ladder to fix something on the roof. Mind you, he fell off and broke his hip, but he got himself into the house to call for help. I'd already known that he was extraordinary, but each week held its surprises.

Writing the little features gives me a chance to shine some light on our collections, sharpen my skills, and take another look at materials I haven't spent much time with in a few years. It also allows me to show our Board and others the value of the Local History department and the Archivist/Local History Librarian professions. I think the next one will be on the Superfund site records. That collection is always an adventure.

Thoughts on the Practice of Description

As an archivist and local history librarian, one of the primary elements of my work is the description of collections and individual items. Sometimes, this description ends up in a finding aid such as this one on the Combe Fill South Landfill Records (http://chesterlib.com/local-history-room/finding-aids/combe-fill-south-landfill-records-finding-aid/). The purpose of that work is to make it easier for researchers to find and use the collection. It also provides a much deeper level of documentation of the collection that previously hadn't existed.

Beyond the finding aids, I also create a fair number of exhibits each year, both online and in cases within the Chester Library. Each of the items featured in the exhibits requires some description, but the more exhibits I create, the more time I spend describing the items. For my latest online exhibit, I kept a friend of mine in mind as a potential visitor. He uses a screen reader to experience web sites, as well as digital documents (think Word files), because he's blind.

Last week, I talked with another librarian about these types of motivations and decision-making efforts when it comes to description. I was reminded of attending the ARLIS annual meeting in Boston a few years ago. In one of the sessions, the speakers touched on the nature of description as applied to artworks. Her talk was in the context of describing paintings and other works to patrons with varied abilities, such as my friend Ken. 

Thinking about how to make a meaningful experience for anyone who might use a screen reader drove my process. Here is an example from the Memories of Chester, Herman Rademacher Series exhibit, "West Main Street and Morris Chamberlain" (http://chesterlib.com/local-history-room/online-exhibits/memories-of-chester-west-main-street-and-morris-chamberlain/):

The postcard, copyrighted in 1915 by local printer George E. Conover, shows leafy trees lining the right side of the dirt road. On the left side of the image are businesses, a gas station, and a garage. There is an early Model T parked in front of the striped gas pump tower. A man stands in the doorway of the second building on the right (the Masonic Lodge). The Lodge is a two-and-a-half story building with a painted shield hung between two windows on the second floor. The garage is a single-story building with a flat façade.

It's been a few months since I released the exhibit, and without the pressure of a deadline, I can see areas where I could have been more descriptive. For example, I would describe the façade as a brick one in the block, Art Deco style. Here's a link to the high-quality, larger image of the postcard: https://librarychesternj.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/westmainstreet_front.jpg.

This week, I've been teaching a volunteer and Friend of the Library how to describe another set of postcards given anonymously to the library. These came fully captioned and annotated on their versos, but they still required more description. For the first postcard, I told her what I was seeing, and I brought out a large magnifying glass so that we could read a hanging sign in the card. (It reads "heste House," due to weather damage, but it should read "Chester House," because that's what the subject of the image is).

We talked about the fact that the trees had no leaves, which indicated winter (confirmed by the snow on the dirt road), and the possible time of the day based on the shadows. She understood right away why we were embarking on this project, and did a great first pass. This particular volunteer completed all the transcription work on the Herman Rademacher oral history videos, and enjoys her work in Local History. Because she was so familiar with that project, she was able to transfer what she learned onto her current project.

In my very compact schedules at Chester Library and the Plainfield Historical Society, it's a challenge to spend as much time thinking about projects as I'd like to do. Fortunately, I have a handful of smart and capable volunteers (who sometimes end up with the fun projects I'd like to do myself) doing great work and, through training, taking a some of that thinking off my plate.

Just as an aside, recently I've become President of the New Jersey Library Association's History & Preservation Section. That also puts demands on my time, but I'm happy to do what I can to help move our profession forward. For example, with great help from Jacqueline Haun, the Archivist at the Bunn Library, our next meeting on July 27 will be held with the Princeton Preservation Group at The Lawrenceville School. Importantly, in addition to our meeting, we booked a hands-on photo preservation workshop with Peter Mustardo of The Better Image. I also arranged a catered lunch for those interested in staying for it. It will be a day of filling our minds and bodies with very good things.