Just the phrase “authority records” is probably enough to put any non-librarian to sleep — and maybe some of us in the profession, too. I mean, how interesting can they be? A name, some dates, maybe a reference as to the source from which the information was taken. Snooze, right?

Well, authority files are about to get a lot more interesting with the implementation of the Encoded Archival Context – Corporate bodies, Persons and Families standard, or EAC-CPF as it’s known to its friends. EAC-CPF is to authority files what EAD is to finding aids. It makes it possible to store a lot more information in an authority record, including relationships among Cs, Ps and Fs (familial, business, etc.) and the relationship of a given C, P or F to a set of archival records (subject of, creator of, mentioned in, etc.). Combining this level of authority description with EAD finding aids means you could have an interface that allows a researcher to navigate from a finding aid for a collection, to the biography of a person whose letters appear in it, to a list of all the archival collections related to that person, to the finding aid for any one of those collections, and so on.

Even better, it could power a visual interface that displays all the connections between various Cs, Ps and Fs, similar to Muckety or the Yaddo Circles project. Instead of approaching your holdings via one or more discrete collections, a researcher could approach it through the people represented in it, wander about from person to person, and explore connections that might not otherwise be visible. It’s like your archival holdings are a party, and the researcher can walk right in and start meeting people.

Some people have already begun exploiting this new form of structured data. The SNAC project (Social Networking and Archival Context) has put together a prototype of how this sort of linkage can provide new ways of accessing and exploring a set of collections (below) — be sure to check out the cool radial graph demo.
Harvard and Yale have started a joint project to explore how EAC-CPF might illuminate connections between author Samuel Johnson and his circle.

Obviously this sort of thing becomes exponentially more powerful and useful (and fun!) if you can do it not just within one institution, but across all repositories. The first baby steps towards this are happening on May 21st and 22nd, when 90 archivists, librarians, curators, scholars, and representatives of funding agencies and foundations will meet at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) in Washington, D.C. to begin looking at at the business, governance, and technological requirements of establishing a sustainable National Archival Authorities Cooperative (NAAC).

Just imagine what all this interlinking of authority and archival data might make possible…

I was reading “Recorded Sound” the Newsletter for the Recorded Sound Roundtable from the Society of American Archivists and found myself identifying with the lead article by Robin Pike. The following two lines stuck out at me the most:

 ”Colleagues in libraries and archives frequently ask how I was trained”

and

“Many audio archivists start out as audio engineers or subject specialists who have learned to work with the formats presented to them.”

In my case, both hit home, made me reflect and share my own experiences. When I tell people in the biz my Master’s degree is in Linguistics, yet I work as an archivist, the inevitable follow up is an explanation of how I got where I am. Sometimes short, sometimes long, but in the end, I feel like its a good story.

There’s an Estonian proverb, “The work will teach you how to do it.” So the short answer is: by working with the materials I was presented. I started working in an archive in Grad school on projects to digitally transfer and describe field recordings from as far back as the 30s. I was lucky enough to have an audio engineer to teach me the ropes about how to deal with the legacy formats and clean the machines. I already had a background in using software to record consultants (the currently preferred nomenclature for those with whom or on whom you do your research), so I downloaded a couple of Technical Reports from IASA (International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives) and ARSC (Association of Recorded Sound Collections) and started reading about preservation formats and best practices.

I learned description because, again, it was my job. I was asked to meet with metadata librarians and SCRC catalogers to incorporate their practices into our work. So I waded into the world of Dublin Core, Public Broadcasting Core, METS, LCNAF, and scads of other standards, schemas and vocabularies. At first cautiously, asking lots of questions of the experts and reading a lot of listservs. What started as information gathering and reporting quickly became something else. I found myself thinking about the reasoning behind these systems, standards and vocabularies. How they related to the information and how they related to the object (either digital or analog and in some cases both).

Before long, I found myself at 10pm on a Friday writing a 4-page email to my supervisor on the difference between relation refinements in Dublin Core and how they applied to the multiple generations of materials in our collection and how I thought we should use them. I felt the transition was complete when I could not stop laughing at the following webcomic and showed to nearly everyone I knew (because it’s funny!):

I came into audio archiving as a grad student in a completely different field, but the work I was doing brought me to it as a serious pursuit. I fell in love with it by accident and then decided I did not want to do anything else.

Image Source: Geek and Poke by Oliver Widder (http://geekandpoke.typepad.com/geekandpoke/2010/04/meta.html)

By Joseph Hughes, Grove Press Graduate Student Assistant

For much of the 1950s and 1960s, the view of homosexuality as a pathology or symptom of moral weakness tended to prevail in public debate. McCarthyism raised the specter of the “Lavender Menace.” New York Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. exploited the open secret of Bayard Rustin’s homosexuality to foil Martin Luther King’s planned march on the 1960 Democratic Convention and force Rustin’s resignation from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. 

Media documentaries such as CBS Reports: The Homosexuals (1967) privileged the views of psychiatrists such as Charles Socarides, who is now recognized as a forefather of the reparative therapy movement. Educational ‘hygiene’ films such as Sid Davis’ “Boys Beware”(1961), helped to reinforce the stereotype of the homosexual as pedophile.

Amidst this hostile cultural climate toward homosexuality, Grove Press published two landmark works on homosexuality: John Rechy’s novel, City of Night (1963) and Raymond de Becker’s The Other Face of Love (1968).

Rechy’s narrator in City of Night flees from a home where he has been routinely molested by his father and his father’s friends as a child, and becomes a hustler. Traveling from city-to-city he finds an “America” that is “one vast city of night . . . fusing darkcities (sic) into the unmistakable shape of loneliness” (11). In this city of night Rechy’s narrator encounters communities of hustlers, drag queens and avowed ‘queers’ who are connected by trauma, isolation, disenfranchisement, and fear of police raids. Rechy humanizes the gay experience by linking it to an often inhumane, ‘straight’ world that is, in fact, complicit in the construction of this dark city.    

Likewise, in his The Other Face of Love, Belgian journalist and writer Raymond de Becker seeks to give an objective and comprehensive account of gay history that transcends this public climate of defamation and misinformation. Peter Ogren’s review of the book in the April 27^th 1970 issue of the periodical, Gay News, perhaps puts it best:

“Homosexual history books tend to take forms that are usually predictable. For example: the Gay Apology (explanation, not “I’m sorry,” such as The Homosexual in America), the Psychological Study, and the Who’s Who (Jonathan to Gide). Here, on the other hand, is a homosexual history from a humanist and humanitarian point of view” (4).

Ogren further describes the book as a “beautifully written and compassionate brief for the acceptance of gay love” (5).

In publishing these two works, Grove provided an avenue for homosexuals to voice the hardships they experienced as social outcasts and also sought to give homosexuals a legitimate place in history, not as social or psychological aberrations, but as distinct individuals whose presence and contributions to civilization could be found in cultures around the world and throughout centuries.

By Ben Chartoff, William Safire Graduate Student Assistant

William Safire worked as a columnist at the New York Times for over thirty years, and was an incredibly well-respected member of the paper’s staff. The research files are filled with memos and informal notes between Safire and other members of the staff, including frequent, friendly letters to and from Arthur “Punch” Sulzberger, the publisher and chairman of the paper for much of Safire’s tenure.

In his role as an Op-ed columnist, Safire had a relatively traditional journalistic position within the Times, and I am looking forward to further exploring his Subject Files, which contain research for these columns, as well as for other non-On Language related research. However, the research files are primarily concerned with the On Language columns, and as such occupy a niche within the world of The New York Times.

Safire was based out of Washington D.C., and, based on what I have read, he and his assistants were given relative free reign to research and write whatever they liked. As such, the research files serve as a sort of microcosm of the journalistic process – Safire had a network of sources who he frequently consulted, a staff of researchers and fact-checkers, and editors attuned to the vagaries of grammar, etymology, and lexicography (sometimes the roles were reversed and Safire served as editor and fact checker to other Times journalists – the research files are peppered with forwarded inquiries on the English language, appealing to Safire as an authority). In the same way that another journalist might turn to a well-placed official or subject specialist in researching an article on current affairs, Safire was constantly consulting experts on language. One such expert was Ben Zimmer.

Zimmer’s name caught my eye on an e-mail in the file for the word “Barack” (researching the meaning and etymology of Barack Obama’s first name) since he was the writer who took over the “On Language” column after Safire’s death in 2009. Zimmer wrote on the Arabic and Swahili roots of Barack, as well as on coverage of the then-Senator’s first name in the press and online. He demonstrated the same thorough and succinct analysis that exemplified Safire’s columns.

At the end of a June, 2008 e-mail to one of Safire’s assistants, Juliet, Zimmer asks about the search of Safire’s replacement. This question about Safire’s staffing might demonstrate Zimmer’s closeness to the “On Language” team, and may even be a preamble to future discussions with the New York Times about taking up Safire’s mantle of “language maven”.

References:

Syracuse University, William Safire Papers (2011), Barack. Correspondence: Zimmer, Ben.

By Ben Chartoff, William Safire Graduate Student Assistant

Sitting at my desk, reading through William Safire’s research files and columns, I often found myself laughing out loud. In all Safire’s writing, from his carefully constructed columns to his hastily scrawled notes, he could be hilarious – his voice had a wonderful mix of tongue-in-cheek snark and childlike glee. He got a real thrill out of the English language, with all its quirks, mutability, and opportunities for endless play.

One of my favorite delights of language, and one which Safire wrote about dozens of times over the years, is the palindrome. A palindrome is a word or phrase (or a number) which reads the same both forwards and backwards (for example “wow”, “kayak”, or the famous palindromic phrase about Teddy Roosevelt’s civic digging project “A man, a plan, a canal: Panama!”).

In the research files on palindromes, there are a number of wonderful letters containing palindromes created or found by readers, but some of the most entertaining materials in this file (or, in my opinion, in the whole collection) are five issues of The Palindromist: A journal for people who write and read palindromes. They are an absolute delight to read through, containing palindromic gems such as “Nag a placid Arab, or rob a radical pagan?” or “An era came: MACARENA!” as well as other fun word games, such as redividers (phrases with the same letter order but different word divisions (i.e. spaces), a simple example being “redone / red one”) such as “The IRS, a dismal location / Their sadism allocation” or “Amiable together / Am I able to get her?”

In one of his “On Language” columns, Safire includes a reader-submitted palindrome on the takeover of the Damon Corporation by Nomad Partners L.P.: “Damon was I ere I saw Nomad”. It’s quite a funny palindrome in its own right, but Safire goes on to comment on the takeover:

“How do you suppose the deal originated? I can hear it now: the comptroller at Nomad turns to his junk-bond investment banker and asks, ‘Is there any company we can take over that happens to have our name spelled backward?’ The high-yield hostilier chortles, ‘Fat chance. Wait; there’s a listing here for Damon Corp. I wonder what they do. . . .’”

It’s written with Safire’s characteristic wit and charm, the type of writing which has made me chuckle or guffaw dozens of times in the past few months, shaking my head as I mutter fondly, “Oh, Bill…”

References:

Safire, W. (1989, March 9). On Language: Pen Palindromes. The New York Times Magazine.  Retrieved
from http://www.nytimes.com

Syracuse University, William Safire Research Files (2011), Cock and Bull. The Origins of English Words: A Discursive Dictionary of Indo-European Roots