Collins Unbound

This week, I’m wrapping up the indexing piece of my project and beginning to actually format my Excel spreadsheets so they’ll be easier to transfer when I have to start putting the information online.

Right now, this is what my spreadsheets look like:

See all that red? Those are my random notes on what the subject heading of the article should probably be. What I’m working on is making all of those random notes into Library of Congress (LOC) official subject headings. The blue ones are headings that are closer to being LOC but may need to be updated or reformatted. But how to find the official LOC subject headings (which are called “authorities”)?

This (not) beautiful and (not) straightforward website. You’d think that the authoritative website on authorities would be much more streamlined. After all, it’s run by a place full of people whose livelihoods consist of cataloging and organizing information, and this website does not make one feel as if the information is at their fingertips. Using the LOC Authorities website requires a lot of digging and word manipulation.

But enough complaining. Ultimately the website is incredibly useful for finding relevant subject headings and determining where certain articles belong. I’ve just had to spend quite a bit of time finding those relevant subject headings.

Luckily, I’m not the only one who has struggled with using the LOC Authorities. A former UPS librarian created several thesauruses for specific things related to the University (a thesaurus in indexing is the specific system/group of headings consistently used in the index). And it’s in a much more user-friendly format…

Yep! Good old Excel. Much easier for me to use and does not require tons of word manipulation. Not everything in here is LOC official but it’s at least a lot closer than my own random headings that I’ve been using.

What’s the big to-do about using LOC Authorities? Using LOC headings will make the indexed articles searchable by subject and accessible to the general public, not just the campus community. It will allow the index to be included in larger database searches, not just in Sound Ideas. It makes my project mean so much more.

BONUS!

Right as I began to wrestle with the LOC Authorities website I came back across an article from the October 28, 1964 issue of The Trail about Collins Memorial Library’s conversion from Dewey Decimal system to the Library of Congress classification system, which is way more popular today. It doesn’t involve the LOC Authorities, but deals with the general domination of the LOC over all aspects of library life.

By: Jillian Zeidner

I’ve just returned from a ten day vacation, so I haven’t had time to really prepare a juicy blog post for this week. But I would like to present to you this gem of an advertisement from a 1964 issue of The Trail.

Because I definitely ski in a cowboy hat.

By: Jillian Zeidner

With each year, the columns in The Trail changed as old writers and new writers came in. At the beginning of the 1964-1965 academic year, one of the new columns/features was the provision of comedic “proverbs” as if they were serious advice. They were mainly space fillers, and for the most part they were just placed in random spots throughout each issue. Like this one:

Pretty much all of them are dubious and kind of weird. I know that’s supposed to be funny but…I don’t get the humor.

In the first few issues, the proverbs were contained in a column entitled “Confucius Say”. They were framed as if a non-native English speaker was writing them in the form of Confucian adages. I doubt that The Trail would run a column with this format, or at least worded this way, now. Some of the proverbs are hilarious.

From October 1, 1964:

My favorite is hands-down “Girl who wear glasses look better than girl who drain too many.”

From October 8, 1964:

These proverbs were very obviously things that everyone needed to keep in mind. They certainly provided some dubious advice.

By: Jillian Zeidner

I’ve thoroughly enjoyed diving into the history of the University of Puget Sound. While I’ve learned a lot about the University through my indexing work (reading every single article from one and a half years’ worth of The Trail so far, I got an awesome opportunity to learn so much more this past week.

In my quest to discover what Bob’s Place was, I came in contact with Bill Baarsma, a Logger, former editor of The Trail, former faculty member, and the former mayor of Tacoma. In the course of our phone call, I got a lot more than I bargained for and he told me some excellent stories about his time as a student here. The stories were so valuable that I hoped to record them, and was able to set up a time to do a more formal, recorded interview with Bill about his time as a student and as the editor of The Trail.

Above: Bill Baarsma ’64 at the inauguration of University President Ronald Thomas in 2004

I prepared a set of seven questions about his time as the editor of The Trail and his policy on the reporting of national events, printed out a consent form, checked out a recorder, and reserved a few pages in my notebook for notes on the interview. I felt like a full-blown official oral historian.

Bill arrived at the library on Thursday morning and I immediately felt at ease. He’s a really nice, open, and friendly man, not that I expected anything less.

The interview lasted one hour exactly, and although he kept referring to it as a “conversation,” I only interjected to ask a question when the previous question had been exhausted. It was almost all him sharing his stories.

A couple of my questions revolved around President John F. Kennedy’s visit to Tacoma on September 27, 1963 and his assassination in Dallas two months later. I think that section is where Bill told my favorite stories of the morning. He had told me a shorter version of these stories in our initial phone call, and I thought they were so important that I wanted them recorded. Just a small excerpt: for Kennedy’s Tacoma visit Bill and two other Trail writers were able to get their hands on press passes to sit with the White House Press Corps, and he and one of his fellow writers were able to meet Pierre Salinger, Kennedy’s press secretary.

And I noticed in my research that The Trail did not publish for three weeks after the President’s assassination, which I asked Bill about. His reaction and response to that question were both indicative of the sheer effect of that event on him and his fellow classmates. His description of campus, and the entire country, in the wake of the assassination as “emotionally wrought” almost seems to be an understatement.

I also asked Bill about the effect of the civil rights movement on campus. After all, in his time as editor James Meredith, the first African American to attend the University of Mississippi, visited campus and delivered a speech on the meaning of race in the United States. Bill said that one of the Associated Student Body Vice Presidents, was instrumental in bringing Meredith to speak at the school. After the speech, that ASB Vice President was severely reprimanded by University President R. Franklin Thompson for bringing such a controversial figure to campus. Apparently, President Thompson was worried that the school would lose conservative donors who might be offended by the student body’s warm reception of such a controversial figure. He also remembered civil rights in relation to campus life; he only can remember three African American students on campus, two of whom were blocked from joining sororities and fraternities due to their race. One was also a controversial figure for dating a white student very publicly, and their relationship caused some tension on campus. However, Bill also remembers many students on campus being quite tolerant and supportive of the civil rights movement.

His information about student life is extremely valuable to the Archives & Special Collections, as well as to my research.

I had an excellent time listening to Bill’s stories and gained valuable experience from preparing and recording an oral history just like a pro!

By: Jillian Zeidner

If last week was about me figuring out what the heck I’m actually doing, this week was about me figuring out just how to do that.

I had a difficult time deciding where to start with my indexing, because while I did narrow my project to the 1960s, that’s still ten years and a lot of issues of The Trail. So, I took a step back and situated myself in the larger context of the 1960s by making a highly technical and accurate timeline.

Yeah, that clearly took me a lot of time to make…

However, it was a very useful place to start. Now that I have these dates nailed down, and in an easily referenced place, I can look for parallels or stories about the events in The Trail.

Not that the timeline came in handy when I actually started indexing; I pretty much just chose a random article on the front page of the issue from November 6, 1963 and indexed out from there. In hindsight, there was a much more natural place to start: October 2, 1963. It would have been more logical in a variety of ways; in addition to being the first issue in the 1963-1964 school year, it was the published the day after John F. Kennedy visited Tacoma and it has a lot of material on him, including descriptions of his speech and student opinions on what he said. But you live and you learn, right?

The indexing itself is going much smoother than I anticipated, and I’ve been getting through two or three issues each day! Way better than I thought. I will have to do a lot of cleaning up at the end of the summer (and figure out how to actually find Library of Congress headings for all of these), but for now this is great progress.

Perhaps the greatest (worst?) thing I learned this week is that Microsoft Excel is not infinite. Since I was a child, I have believed that Excel would just go on creating rows and columns forever and that it didn’t have any end. Well, young Jillian, behold:

I have found the last possible cell in Excel. That highlighted one in the lower right corner. It’s kind of a letdown, and young Jillian is very disappointed.

If I actually reach these limits this summer, it will mean that I’ve been a little too enthusiastic with my use of subject headings.

By Jillian Zeidner

This summer, I’ll be indexing all of the issues of The Trail from the 1960s. Even though it’s just one decade of the run of this student newspaper, that means indexing approximately 500 issues all by myself so I’m sure I’ll have my hands full. I’ll also be doing some research on how students wrote about the assassinations of public figures during the 1960s (e.g. John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Robert F. Kennedy).

Here are some photographs from my first day in the Archives & Special Collections. I spent my day getting acquainted with how things work here and doing some research on indexing methods past and present:

I picked up the indexes for The Times and The New York Times just to see examples of how newspapers have been indexed over time. The Times index looks basically like a book index with normal sized font, no surprises there. However, The New York Times index is different…much different:

Look at how tiny that font is! Above are the first of multiple pages under the heading “Government”. They packed some major text on those pages.

Here’s a close-up:

Unlike (most) book indexes, there’s a description of each location listing, which is pretty useful. However, the locations are just mixed in with the descriptions and many of the descriptions make very little sense, so all told it’s not a super user friendly index. At least it’s all online now, and much easier to use.

Side note: The New York Times index was handwritten, in the same format, from the paper’s start in 1851 until 1913. HANDWRITTEN. I’ll just have to keep that in mind if my job ever feels tedious; no matter how much I feel like complaining, at least I’m not the person who had to hand write The New York Times index.

By Jillian Zeidner