The Jefferson Street Church will live on (at the library!)

Well, by now I think everyone in town is well aware of the sad state of this building, and that in the near future it will no longer be a part of our cityscape. [For the record, I got to go inside it to take some pictures when I heard it was coming down, and folks, it was SCARY BAD in there. Sometimes you just have to know when to start fresh, and *this* fervent history lover agrees that this was the right thing to do here.]  

This, friends, is why we work to create and preserve a rich historical record of our dear city. If you’re interested in learning about this building, and the people associated with it, you know where to come.

• The online History Index refers to numerous stories which appeared in the local papers about this church (scroll down to look under CHURCHES–FREE WILL BAPTIST and further on under  CHURCHES–UNITED BAPTIST.)
• We have images up on Maine Memory Network of the church in 1955 and the reverend who was serving in 1895, Rev. Musgrove (who just happens to look kind of like Gerald McRaney–remember Simon & Simon?!?)
• And just this week I digitized our copy of the Jefferson Street Baptist Church directory from 1926 and added it to our growing library of archival resources on the Internet Archive, which is fully downloadable and readable in multiple formats.

This is just a taste of what we have, and you can access even more here at the library (especially the newspaper articles, which are usually a treasure trove of information). We continue to try and to pull even more resources together to add to our “BUILDINGS + BLOCKS” binder, to make it easier for folks to locate materials which may live in several different collections.

In any event, be assured that there are people who are working to make sure that as time moves forward, one will be able to look back on where we have come from.

The only thing new in the world is the history you don’t know.  ~Harry S. Truman

Ancestry has Biddeford-Saco City Directories, you know.

Did you know this? I didn’t, until I came across it while doing a search a week or so ago. So I figured I ought to check it out and see just what they have to offer…and folks, it’s pretty good.

At first I thought perhaps it was just transcriptions of the books, until I dug around a bit. Not that transcriptions aren’t great, but we all know that people (and optical character recognition software) can’t help but make mistakes, and that can mess with your search results. So it’s nice to be able to look at the page yourself, just in case. I managed to locate the place where you can pull up directories by year, and browse through the entire issue. There are a couple ways to get there.

THE LONG WAY:

• Go to Ancestry.com HOME PAGE
• Go to CARD CATALOG
• Go to collection list on left, look for SCHOOLS, DIRECTORIES & CHURCH HISTORIES
• Go to CITY & AREA DIRECTORIES
• Look for “U.S. City Directories, 1821-1989″ in the list of titles in the middle of the screen.  Click on it to open.

THE SHORT WAY:

• Go to Ancestry.com HOME PAGE
• Click on SEARCH and select CARD CATALOG
• Type in “U.S. City Directories, 1821-1989″ to pull it up, then click on it to open.

Once you get there, you can either search for someone specific, or browse whole editions. If browsing, select which year you want in the search box on the right hand side. [NOTE: You'll first need to tell it you're looking in MAINE, then either BIDDEFORD or SACO. *SACO will pull up the 1849 Directory (the first one); all the rest are listed under BIDDEFORD.*] When you’ve clicked on the year you want in the drop-down, you will then be able to browse page by page, including advertisements and other interesting information found in these wonderful little research gems.

Finally, don’t forget: if you don’t have your own subscription to Ancestry, you can come into the library and use it for FREE! You can access it on our public computers, or bring in your laptop and search via our Wifi. As long as you are using the library’s IP address (which, if you’re using our Wifi, you will be) you’ll be able to get onto Ancestry via MARVEL. **Library staff will by happy to help you navigate there.**

I’m putting a list of the Directories available on Ancestry up in the Catablog in the “Electronic Texts” section, just for reference. Happy Researching!

How the internet helps us preserve access to worn materials: a story

Folks, sometimes you just have to say “no”.

And in a public library, with a mission to provide access to *all* our collections, this can be problematic. Especially when the materials are some pretty amazing notebooks which chronicle the creation of the heart of the massive mill complexes here and across the river — the waterways.

I’m talking canals. I’m talking dams. I’m talking, well, Saco Water Power. But the notebooks, think about them, carried by an engineer on his way upriver to figure out how to harness the power for the manufacturers being built in Biddeford and Saco. These are working papers, chock full of calculations, tables, and drawings–plus scratch outs and erasures. Shoved in a pocket, sat upon, tossed in a box or a drawer by a desk…until they are relegated to a box or a drawer in a closet or attic. Someone moves or dies, and corners are cleaned out, materials are found, somehow they end up in the library. And for many years they are fine. But then as time goes on, people start to become very interested in the information found in those little books. They start getting pulled out day, after day. The notebooks, the YOUNGEST of which is *at least* 105 years old, start to fall apart. They start to get damaged, and pages begin to fall out, and covers become separated…spines break.

So what’s an archivist to do? This is when we make what we call a “surrogate” or a “use copy”. Years ago things would be transcribed and printed in book form, often with lots of other materials–work intensive and cost intensive. Then, with the advent of copying technologies, you could start to make in-house copies–a little less intensive and a little cheaper. Currently, thanks to scanning technologies and the web, we can make a digital copy and post it on the internet. Still work intensive, but to my mind you reach the widest audience for the least amount of money. And what happens to the original? It gets cleaned up, packed gently in some nice, snug, archival quality storage medium and put on the shelf for safekeeping.

This, friends, is what has happened to our amazing notebooks. They are officially retired to the shelves, and that is where they need to stay so that we can ensure their structural integrity. But there are full-color, fully interactive copies out there on the internet–in The Internet Archive, to be precise. All 9 notebooks are there for anyone to use. Download a copy, and access it at your convenience on your device. Or just use them online, Internet Archive has a dandy interface and we like it an awful lot. It’s up to you! They are there, ready and waiting, and I’m pretty sure you’ll get why they are so cool. I don’t like that they were in such rough shape, but I *really* like the fact that now everyone can enjoy the wealth of information contained within them.

Enjoy!

~~Links to Saco Water Power engineering notebooks #1 – #9~~

1907 souvenir online!

Good news friends–we have added another text to the Internet Archive! You may now have full access to the Biddeford, Saco, Kennebunk and Kennebunkport souvenir, 1907 which just so happens to be chock-a-block full of information. Buildings? check. People? check. Businesses? check. And this one is absolutely bursting with pictures of people and places which you probably gave up on ever being able to access. There isn’t an index (yet) but we’ll see whether we can do something about that for you all. In the meantime, please take a few minutes to look it over, it is really quite awesome.

Also, we’ve created a new ELECTRONIC TEXTS page in the Catablog to help you find the various full-text materials available online. *Bookmark it!*

~Enjoy and happy friday~

L’amour fou, l’amour folle

Sweethearts postcard, circa 1915. [From the library's collections]

Ahh love. Nothing gets us in thinking about that lovin’ feelin’ more than Valentine’s Day. Fun fact: greeting cards are the most common gift given in the United States for Valentine’s Day, and is second only to Christmas in the number of  cards sold. In 2011 alone more than 190 million (yes that’s MILLION) cards were sent in the U.S., and that number doesn’t include greetings exchanged between schoolkids. (I don’t think it includes e-greetings either.) That is a LOT of paper, glitter, hearts and red ink.

In the spirit of the upcoming holiday, the library is very pleased to host a display of valentines from the private collection of local collector Aurelie Wallach. The cards, which range in origin from the turn of the 20th century to the present day, come in every size, shape, color and greeting you can imagine. It is a marvelous look into the artistry, design, consumer culture, and social tradition associated with the modern American celebration of St. Valentine’s Day.

The display will be up for the rest of January and throughout the month of February, and I do hope you’ll take a moment to pop upstairs to the entrance of the Carroll Reading Room and check out this interesting collection.

Interested in learning a bit more? Here is A Brief Introduction to the History of Valentine’s Cards from The History Channel

Hey so it looks like people really like this ole blog

WordPress, being awesome, sent me this cool report about the total usage of the blog sites over 2012–and guess what? We had around 4,500 visits this year. Well I promise to continue to add more information next year, as well as trying to add more vignettes and stories about the collections since it seems like folks really use these resources.  If you’re curious, here is a link to the full report:

http://mcatablog.wordpress.com/2012/annual-report/

Have a wonderful New Year everyone, here’s to making local history accessible!

Play cast in production of “Tonkourou”, Biddeford, 1910.

 

Too much inspiration, too little time

Today I’m lamenting the number of projects I want to do and the inability to do it all. Processing collections, creating finding aids, mounting exhibits, collaborating with other cultural organizations in the area, working with professional groups, mentoring, creating opportunities for volunteers and citizen historians…just to begin. Oh yeah and writing lots of (successful!) grants so my archives is funded like crazy. But I’m one person, and though I’m willing I haven’t mastered to organizational savvy required to get this whole thing up an running. And speaking to a number of my colleagues, I know that this is pretty much universal for many of us lone arrangers working in public institutions. I’m incredibly fortunate just to be employed full time, as many others are struggling with these same issues but on a 20+/- hour a week schedule, if you can imagine it. And don’t forget all the volunteer organizations, who do this strictly for the glitz and glamor of it all (ha!). 

So, what are my strategies for making it all happen? As of this second, I’m working on it. The most important thing is going to be harnessing the power of volunteers, but that becomes a huge management issue in itself, which creates even less time to work on projects (catch 22, I hate you!). The other thing is to perfect time management, say no to work that falls outside of the scope of the historical collections, and keep a steely-eyed focus on my task list and not getting sucked into other departments’ projects. Easier said than done, but a worthy goal. 

What kind of strategies are you employing (or thinking about) to try and be more productive and less exasperated?