What’s new on the Brewstorian blog? Three years of OHBA means three months of celebrating!

did you knowAs we surged toward the 3rd anniversary of the founding of the Oregon Hops and Brewing Archives, I pondered a way to share the amazing work we’ve done over the past three years with all our friends, donors, advocates, and all the others who just think this is a pretty cool thing we came up with.

August 1st running through October 31st, be looking for daily postings on The Brewstorian, but also some reposting on Twitter and Facebook.

And please share – we have all these amazing friends and collections because that’s exactly what’s happened for the past three years. People have gotten excited, shared and saved, and now we have a rocking archive of local beer history.

Resident Scholar talk this Friday!

1422404383578Our next Resident Scholar lecture has been scheduled for Friday, August 5th at 2:00 PM in Willamette West.  Our speaker this time is Dr. Michael Kenny, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Simon Fraser University.
Dr. Kenny has been working with the Pauling Papers in developing his talk, “‘Fear of the Mutant:’ Recessive Genes and Racial Degeneration in the Nuclear Fallout Debate.”  An abstract of this presentation is below. We hope to see you there!
 
By the 1950s geneticists had come to partially understand the role that recessive genes play in certain hereditary disorders, some of which were obvious (e.g. Sickle Cell Anemia), others presumably concealed within morbidity and mortality statistics. These possible latent effects were very much on the minds of those, such as Hermann Muller, Linus Pauling, and George Beadle, who were critical of atmospheric nuclear testing. Their concern was a latter day expression of what had been a long-standing obsession of the eugenics movement – the fear of cumulative racial degeneration and decline. This presentation examines how these ideas were articulated in the context of the nuclear fallout debate.

What’s new on the Pauling Blog? Pauling’s Final Year, Part 1

Pauling posing at lower campus, Oregon Agricultural College, ca. 1917.

Pauling posing at lower campus, Oregon Agricultural College, ca. 1917.

In 1917, at sixteen years of age, Linus Pauling wrote in his personal diary that he was beginning a personal history. “My children and grandchildren will without doubt hear of the events in my life with the same relish with which I read the scattered fragments written by my granddad,” he considered.

By the time of his death, some seventy-seven years later, Pauling had more than fulfilled this prophecy. After an extraordinarily full life filled with political activism, scientific research, and persistent controversy, Pauling’s achievements were remembered not only by his children, grandchildren and many friends, but also by an untold legion of people whom Pauling himself never met.

Read the whole post online!

 

What’s new on the Rare @ OSU blog? Agrippa and his invisible forces

The images below are taken from a 1727 edition of Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim’s first two books, translated into French as La Philosophie Occulte de Henr. Corn. Agrippa. With these images, Agrippa hopes to instill in the reader an understanding of the invisible forces that actuate matter in reality as we know it, and the means by which these forces can be predicted and manipulated.

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Read the whole post at http://osurarebooks.tumblr.com/post/148005039786/agrippa-and-his-invisible-forces.

Post contributed by Matt McConnell, graduate student in OSU’s History of Science program and SCARC student assistant

What’s new on the OMA blog? Nuestras Voces y Herencia ~ Yamhill County’s Latino/a community

Voces-Project

Nuestras Voces y Herencia is a grant funded project dedicated to gathering and preserving the life stories of Yamhill County’s Latino/a community. The Yamhill County Cultural Coalition and the Yamhill County Historical Society & Museum are partnering with the OMA and Unidos Bridging Community to share the stories gathered. On July 18, 2016, our project’s granting agency, the Yamhill County Cultural Trust, hosted a “Thank You Party” for all the grantees and the Voces project was delighted to attend!

Read the rest of the post at http://wpmu.library.oregonstate.edu/oregon-multicultural-archives/2016/07/23/voces-project/.

What’s new on the Pauling blog? Another view of the Pauling models!

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This past spring, Thomas Brennan, a photographer and the chair of Art and Art History at the University of Vermont, paid us a visit to capture his own set of images of Pauling’s models. Brennan’s research concerns the history of symbolic representation in the history of science with three-dimensional modelling, work which has taken him to institutions and repositories including the Laboratory of Molecular Biology at Cambridge, the Museum of the History of Science at Oxford, the Museum of Science in London, and the M.I.T. Museums.

Brennan’s photographs of Pauling’s models were captured using a low-light technique that he has used in the past for a project that he calls “Collecting Shadows.”

Read the whole post online!

What’s new on the Pauling Blog? A View of Pauling’s Models

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In 2010, Oren Eckhaus, a photographer based in New York City, visited our facility to photograph several of the molecular models that remain extant in the Ava Helen and Linus Pauling Papers. He did so in support of Jane Nisselson’s documentary-in-progress, “Unseen Beauty: The Molecule Imagined,” which she was researching with support from the OSU Libraries Resident Scholar Program.

Read the rest on the Pauling Blog. 

What’s new on the OMA blog? “LGBTQ+ Activism in Oregon: Then and Now” ~ an OSU Queer Archives Exhibit

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Join the OSU Queer Archives in highlighting a newly acquired collection, the After 8 Records! After 8 was an organization that championed for LGBTQ+ rights in Benton County during the 1990s. The OSU Libraries and Press PROMISE Intern 2016, Cece Lantz, curated a small exhibit that features materials from the collection and showcases a number of current Oregon LGBTQ+ community organizations. Come see the display in person at the Valley Library and check out photos of the items featured through the Digital Display in Flickr.

Read the whole post on the OMA blog!

A Multitude of Maps: Processing the William H. Galvani Rare Maps Collection

This post was written by Lauren Goss, MLIS student at San Jose State University and student assistant in SCARC. 

Adirondack Survey 1873 - Specimen of Preliminary Reconnaissance Sketch Showing the Approximate Positions and Names of Thirty Nine Ponds or Lakes Important and New to the Maps (Pl. 11), circa 1870

Adirondack Survey 1873 – Specimen of Preliminary Reconnaissance Sketch Showing the Approximate Positions and Names of Thirty Nine Ponds or Lakes Important and New to the Maps (Pl. 11), circa 1870

Last spring, Anne Bahde (Rare Books and History of Science Librarian in SCARC) presented me with a new project of processing the rare maps collection of William H. Galvani.  In 1947, the Oregon State University Library received the maps through Galvani’s bequest of his personal library, a gift that included about 5,500 books. The maps were transferred to SCARC a few years ago, and at that time it was unknown the total number of maps in the collection, or their geographic or temporal span.  My initial workflow focused on determining if the maps had been separated from books in Galvani’s collection, as many of the maps show signs of being part of a bound volume at one time.  However, this project quickly took on a much larger scope as I determined all of the maps were an entirely separate collection.  Not one of the over 1,050 maps originated from Galvani’s books, a fact which provides some insight into his avid and eclectic interest in historic materials.  A future blog post will explore Galvani as a collector and his multi-decade relationship with Oregon State University.

The process of identifying, organizing and describing the maps grew longitudinally (pun intended).  The maps had been moved from the dusty forgotten map drawer where they were originally discovered to a combination of oversize boxes and map folders, and some related maps were inadvertently separated.  Initially, it was difficult deciding what and how much information to record especially because the scope and purpose of the project evolved.   My spreadsheet captured an amalgamation of data focusing on three themes of information: geographic, bibliographic, and archival.  After identifying every map, I normalized this data and developed a hybrid finding aid.  I encountered difficulty in locating a finding aid for a similar map collection at another institution (one comparable in extent, collection of an individual and not a specific institution or originating organization, and the broad geographic and temporal scope).  So, the finding aid I created includes a series for each continent, identifiable bibliographic sources for a map or set of maps, and individual map information including title and date, creators (engraver, lithographer, publisher, etc.), and geographic location. These access points will enable a number of different routes of inquiry for scholars and students.

Despite the challenges of this large collection, I am proud of the robust item-level finding aid.  In 1949, Clara Egli LeGear, who worked in the Geography and Map Division of the Library of Congress, published Maps: Their Care, Repair and Preservation in Libraries.  With regard to map cataloging and classification, she said: “all the time and energy spent on them, however, is infinitely worthwhile, for a single map portrays instantly what thousands of words cannot reveal” (viii).  Maps are an underutilized historic research tool, and the recently completed William H. Galvani Rare Maps Collection should prove useful to a variety of researchers.  The majority of Galvani’s maps depict 19th century military campaigns in Europe and Asia, but the collection also includes topographical surveys, explorers’ charts, and detailed maps of cities from around the world.  The next blog post will feature particular highlights of each series, but in the meantime, here is a map that exemplifies the visual power of these cartographic resources.

Austral

The Carte de l’hemisphere Austral: Montrant les routes des navigateurs les plus celebres par la Capitaine Jacques Cook (Pl. 2) to the left shows the different routes of Captain Cook’s voyages in the southern hemisphere.  Notably, there is no outline of the continent Antarctica, as formal exploration had not yet occurred.

New batch of digitized films ~ with a focus on athletics.

Here’s the latest batch of films digitized from U-Matic and VHS, released on July 12, 2016! And while this particular batch is rather eclectic, you’ll see they all have to do with athletics in one way or another.

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All items are held in the News and Communication Services Motion Picture Films and Videotapes Collection. (FV P 057)