And...We're In!

Apologies for the lack of updates, but the move has been something of a time killer. The good news is that we have been comfortably ensconced in the new building for a month now, and while we have yet to get absolutely everything moved in from our off-site storage (both locally-housed and at Iron Mountain), we are more or less up and running. Here are a few things we learned during this most recent move:

1. New buildings can be dustier than 'old' archives
   The new compact shelving (left, with your cruise directors posed by photographer Dan Burke) is wonderful, but we had to wipe it down with old t-shirts before moving in the first portion of our holdings. Then there was a bit more construction work done which added yet more dust - but luckily, it seems this layer will be cleaned up by people who actually do that professionally, rather than by a few archivists.



2. New buildings mean many visitors
   While I've moved offices before, this is the first time I've experienced a nearly-daily stream of visitors coming to tour the new space. It's certainly not unpleasant to see people taking notice, but it does behoove one to keep things tidy - not always an easy prospect in this line of work!



3. New buildings have glitches
   While this is a no-brainer, the challenge has been trying to predict what those will be before they pop up - and who is responsible for fixing them when they do. So far, we've been relatively lucky and have managed to avoid any showstoppers.



4. New buildings generate 'stuff'
   Starting the day we moved in, various departments appeared with 'potentially important stuff' - the accessioning table filled up rapidly (and stayed that way).
   



5. New buildings have no impact on 'regular work'
   On-site and remote research has continued apace - we've been a bit slower in responding to requests, but we have yet to completely turn anyone away. The same is true of grant applications, College events, digital projects and the like; we may have to offer a bit more expectation management than normal, but the world does not stop for anyone - certainly not us!



6. New building t-shirts don't design themselves
   But we still hope to get around to doing that in the near future - I still have my 'I survived the Women.com server migration' shirt from the late 1990s, and it's only fair to commemorate this event in the same classic style.
   

We expect the rest of the collection to appear some time in January - and then a complex integration project will begin!

Imminent Move

We have been assigned a moving date, and, as promised, we've received a full two weeks notice. The Thanksgiving holiday will eat a chunk of that but with the help of our supporters we will pack our offices and on-site collection materials and move on Friday, December 4th.

As previously noted, we're returning to familiar ground. Our new building on the Queen Lane campus (2900 W. Queen Lane, 19129) is not far from the former Medical College of Pennsylvania Hospital, the campus built and occupied by Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania in 1930.

Before we leave our current home at Hagerty Library we are hosting an Open House at the library on December 2, 4-6pm. Please join us to commemorate our partnership with the University Archives and celebrate our move to our new space.

Here's a peek at the new space.

Miles of aisles!

The as yet un-populated reading room.

Art shelving.

From the Collections: Women Physicians at War

We have previously taken a brief look at female doctors who served during the Civil War; today, with Veterans' Day upon us, we will examine a number of women physicians who served in twentieth-century wars.

In 1917, Dr. Bertha Van Hoosen (at that time the president of the Medical Women's National Association) established a War Service Committee; it evolved into the American Women's Hospitals (PDF finding aid). The name was chosen to reflect the good works of the Scottish Women's Hospitals, which sent teams of female doctors and nurses throughout war-ravaged Europe. Although their direct military service had been rejected by the US government, AWH doctors designed their own uniforms and sailed to Europe in 1918, establishing their first hospital in France.


Under the leadership of Dr. Esther Pohl Lovejoy, AWH established hospitals and clinics in various parts of France, Serbia and the Middle East. In 1922, AHW staff witnessed the burning of İzmir (or Smyrna, as it appears from time to time in the correspondence in the collection) and physicians including Dr. Mabel Elliott became heavily involved in treating refugees and orphans throughout Turkey, Armenia and Greece under obviously trying conditions. While most AWH doctors and nurses were never officially members of the military (a few were accepted as contract surgeons, but were not commissioned officers), their service during wartime was certainly comparable - and it laid the groundwork for the next generation.


A bill to allow female physicians full appointments in the Army and Navy Medical Corps was brought before Congress in 1943; while it makes fascinating reading in general, the testimony from Dr. Emily Dunning Barringer apparently had quite an effect on the committee, and what became known as the Sparkman Act was duly passed.


Immediately thereafter, the first woman doctor was commissioned in the Army Medical Corps; Dr. Margaret D. Craighill, dean of Women's Medical College from 1940-1946, was given leave to take up her post. After her appointment, she encouraged newly-minted women doctors to consider a military career. (A small aside - this clipping and photo detailing Dr. Craighill's 1944 WMC commencement address advice is particularly interesting, given that many Japanese-Americans were still in internment camps - and Dr. Toshiko Toyota, a native of Utah, overcame considerable adversity in her medical school career, according to notes in the Faculty Minutes - there were several attempts to have her expelled).



Dr. Craighill, in her capacity as Major Craighill, went on to survey conditions for the Women's Army Corps and recommended that air conditioning be provided as a matter of course for those stationed in hot climates; noting its success in Tehran, she said, "I do hope some of these lessons learned in the Persian Gulf will be carried out in the Pacific" (New York Times, 6/24/45).


Dr. Bernice R. Walters (WMC 1936) was the first woman doctor assigned to shipboard duty in the US Navy. She served aboard the USS Consolation, which was chiefly stationed off the Korean coast, beginning in 1950, but had actually joined the Naval Reserve in 1943. Of her initial induction, she noted, "They didn't even know how to process me...I almost wound up as an apprentice seaman" (Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 11/23/52).


Our collections in this area are some of our most heavily-used by researchers, and yet the role of women doctors in the military and at war seems little-known to the general public; we hope future research and a few upcoming publications will help to correct that deficit.

Latest Construction Photos: Nearly There!

Despite last week's torrential rain, some brave members of Team Archives went to the Queen Lane campus to check on the progress of our new building - and it's almost at the 'finishing touches' stage. Without further ado, a quick photo tour:

An exterior wall, just outside the lobby

Stairs off the lobby head down to the Archives, as is right and proper

Inside the future stacks - note the rails for the compact shelving

We will host future researchers here, in the reading room

Office interior - the windows may be well above eye level, but they still allow natural light!

From the Collections: Women's Suffrage

Today marks the 89th anniversary of the 19th Amendment going into effect (which, oddly, doesn't get an artistic rendering from Google). In a few short weeks, as part of the Institute for Women's Health and Leadership, we'll be kicking off Vision 2020 at the National Constitution Center and we will also be involved in quite a few events to celebrate the 90th anniversary of women's suffrage next year as well as working toward the centennial in 2020. In light of that, here are a few items from the collection related to winning the right to vote.

Although it was at the forefront of women's medical education in the 19th and early 20th centuries, it may come as a surprise to some to learn that not all Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania students and faculty were in favor of the suffrage movement. This editorial in the student magazine from 1912, was very much opposed to the notion, even though the author (an anonymous female medical student) agreed, in principle, that women should have the right to vote - it just wouldn't be a good thing for the nation as a whole.


However, that was most definitely not the majority view; another anonymous student satirized the anti-suffrage viewpoint held by some men under the none-too-subtle pen name 'J. Ilted' in this poem from the very next issue of the magazine.

Throughout this period, there are notices of pro-suffrage meetings being held in the Philadelphia area (such as this one), and some WMC faculty members were by no means quiet about the issue.

Dr. Ellen C. Potter (WMC 1903) issued a call to arms in 1912, lamenting the fact that contemporary young women medical students were apathetic compared to the previous generation's struggling pioneers. Dr. Potter was a very popular professor and later a pioneer in public health and preventive medicine, which was a cause taken up by not a few suffragist physicians.

One of those was Dr. Anna Howard Shaw, who was a regular visitor to WMC, serving as commencement speaker when her schedule permitted (she was the leader of the National American Woman Suffrage Association for a number of years); her death, only a few months after the passing of the 19th Amendment, inspired the creation of the Anna Howard Shaw Memorial Deptartment of Preventive Medicine - although it was no easy task. The department was not officially created until 1930, even though a campaign was begun in 1920 to raise funds.

Despite earlier anti-suffrage positions from some students, there is no indication that anyone chose not to take advantage of the college holiday afforded by the 1920 election; the account in the Bulletin recorded that, '...the casting of our first ballots assumed the solemnity of a religious ceremony.' Students took the opportunity to do some of the above-mentioned fundraising, '...collecting the National American Woman Suffrage Association's 'thank-offering' for the Anna Howard Shaw Memorial.'

It may have been a working holiday, but it was a most welcome one.

Louisville Floods & Racing History

It's typically an extremely rare occurrence when my worlds collide - oddly, this is the second time it has happened this year.

As many in the archival world know, I write about horse racing. And some in the horse racing world have a vague idea that I'm an archivist, but people in both spheres are probably a little unclear about what happens in the other one.

Here's the short version for each group - first, for the archivists: horses run around a track and I comment on it. American horse racing has a long and storied history that could be more (and here I'm dropping in a professional buzzword) accessible - but more on that later. For the racing folk: archivists preserve documents, photographs, ephemera, etc. from the past so that people (and not just historians) can learn about (and from) that shared past. We also do a lot of complicated things with digitization and metadata - while the usual adjectives employed to describe our profession are 'dusty' or 'musty,' that's only a small part of what we do.

Quite often, the archives (and the archivists who work there) are located in the basement - and that becomes a major issue in, say, a flood. The Kentucky Derby Museum at Churchill Downs just completed a renovation to their basement (where the storage and, as ever, archives are), including new shelving, when they were hit by a flash flood yesterday.

New shelving to an archivist is a precious commodity - we are rarely lucky enough to get shelving that is truly designed for archival use and it is difficult to raise money for it (as we have been doing in our archives for many a long day) because it's not immediately apparent to someone outside the profession how much the right shelves help protect and maintain the collection.

But of course, even the best compact shelving cannot save the collections from the archivist's second-greatest fear - water. At least one of the comments on the Courier-Journal article by Jennie Rees is wondering why the historical collections were stored in the basement, where they would be subject to flooding - and while that may seem unusual to the public, that's essentially standard practice; except for the few institutions that have successfully implemented a visible storage project, cultural institutions cannot take up exhibit space with shelves and processing space - and you need a large open space for most useful shelving systems. Best practices may seek to get the archives and artifact storage above the flood line, but it rarely happens - indeed, when our archives moves into our new building, we will again be in the basement. (It may come as something of a surprise to some to discover that water damage happens even when collections are stored on higher levels - leaky pipes are a constant source of worry in the archival world).

Regardless of how the water gets in, archivists usually respond in just the way the Derby Museum staff did - by creating a human chain to get the materials and artifacts to higher ground. To add insult to injury, several museum employees lost their cars to the floodwaters while working to save the collections - but the good news is that it seems nothing was lost - just made very wet. Conserving wet materials is not as easy as just letting them dry off - the most effective approach is to have them freeze-dried and dealt with by a disaster mitigation firm. Obviously, that's not cheap, but some organizations are lucky enough to have insurance to cover those costs - I don't know whether that's true of the Museum, but I hope they are able to get their collections back to the pre-flood state I enjoyed when visiting the Museum only last month.

Public libraries are rarely that fortunate - and the Louisville Public Library sustained very serious damage to both the physical plant and the books and computers (as did several of the branch libraries). In their case, a fund has been set up and donations are being accepted; keeping libraries running can be a challenge under the best circumstances, but the combination of a down economy and a major disaster is one that no library director wants to face - it's a worthy cause.

I mentioned accessibility above and the lack of accessibility to horse racing history was, rather serendipitously, the topic of Teresa Genaro's article in The Saratogian today (a note to the archivists reading - Teresa writes the rather wonderful Brooklyn Backstrech blog and was one of my co-bloggers for BelmontStakes.com this year). She noted how difficult it was to authoritatively establish basic facts not only from the more distant past, but even statistics from recent years - and as someone on both sides of that fence, I couldn't agree more with her conclusions. American racing history is fairly widely dispersed - there's the Keeneland Library, the currently-damp Kentucky Derby Museum, the International Museum of the Horse, the National Museum of Racing and the National Sporting Library and while there is some crossover, for the most part, each has a different collection policy and research goals.

That list does not even begin to take into account an individual racetrack's holdings (and who knows what happens when they close - where are the records of Ak-Sar-Ben? Who will take on those of Hollywood Park?) including their film and video storage. Other sources of racing history, like the Daily Racing Form or Equibase, tend to be considerably more proprietary about their information. Unlike the aforementioned libraries and museums, making their information accessible is not the goal - and while that makes a certain amount of sense in their business models, it would be nice if they turned their data over to one of the aforementioned institutions or had a records management policy that involved making that data available online (with a preservation copy elsewhere) after a certain time period - I'd be happy to recommend a number of Kentucky-based archivists for the job.

It's difficult enough for researchers to find the information they are looking for under normal conditions; dealing with a disaster like the flooding in Kentucky makes the archivist's goal of preserving the past and providing access that much more difficult. The only potential upside is that the spotlight these cultural institutions unwittingly find themselves in brings in some much-needed funds for repairs and, hopefully, future improvements that serve both the collections and the public.

Construction Update: July

We were lucky enough to get some updated photos of how construction is proceeding; while it's certainly exciting to see the exterior come together, we were thrilled to get some previews of our actual workspace as well.

Building exterior: those partial windows at the bottom left will be ours.

Inside (and, you'll notice, down the stairs, as is the rule for archives): we're reasonably sure this is where the compact shelving is going.

Interior: this looks to be the reading room (or the office watching over it - we're not entirely sure which side of the wall we're seeing).

Interior again: Finally, an office! And, in an even more exciting development, we can see what I understand is a 'window' - something nary a one of us has had at work for years. Granted, it's above eye level, but it's still natural light.

Now we just need to figure out how and when we're moving everything...