From the Collins Memorial Library – Wishing you a safe and happy new year!
Peer research advisors and a librarian will be available to help you at any stage in the research process, no appointment needed!
When: Wednesday, December 2, from 7:00 to 9:00 pm PST
Where: Zoom, via link below
Join Zoom Meeting
https://pugetsound-edu.zoom.us/j/95191989116?pwd=ejZ3UGd5cnNEN21zVG5nT1FUc2VVZz09
Meeting ID: 951 9198 9116
Passcode: VnUC29
The University of Puget Sound’s Artists’ Books Collection is live!! WOW what a fun project to have completed. As an avid bookworm and visual artist, I was surprised I had not been introduced to this medium before but now these books often run through the back of my mind. When I started working on the artists’ books project, it was just a job that I felt extremely lucky to be enjoying. However, as I opened box after box of these amazing works, I became utterly lost in the minds of these creators. Sometimes art feels very far away and unattainable, beautiful yet impersonal. Not with these books. In handling these works and searching for information surrounding them, I became acquainted with the artists behind them. I found inspiration for my own art in every volume I encountered! I now have a list of my own ideas and topics to create books around and I have been exploring book binding as a result as well. My forever favorite will be the first book I was introduced to, Local Conditions by Chandler O’Leary. OH MY GOSH. When that book was pulled as an example, I was simply stunned; I had no idea a book could look so very unlike a book, and still be a book. Working and interacting with these incredible works of art for the last six months has been nothing short of a privilege and a boon to my own work.
Topics in the collection range from recipe collections to a history of Jewish wedding rings to environmental, political, and social outcries and so much more. There are a number that explore the world of typography, something I had no idea was a thing people even did. Some books were almost too big to fit into the light box while others were so small I had to crouch down and actually get inside the light box to get a decent shot.
I highly recommend you get lost in this collection as soon as you can and also that you make an appointment with Puget Sound Archives & Special Collections to view them in person, when COVID restrictions are lifted. In the meantime browse away! You will not regret it and you will come away with a greater appreciation for all the things a book can be.
– By Kendyl Chasco, Library Assistant & Photographer, Studio Art ‘22
This year marks the 100th anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment, which guaranteed the constitutional right of women to vote. In honor of this, we are highlighting our Collection of Women’s Suffrage materials, which includes postcards, photographs, and ephemera related to the suffrage movement. This collection was purchased several years ago for use in teaching and learning. Recently, the entire collection was digitized and the materials should be available online this fall.
The women’s suffrage movement in the United States began in the mid-1800s and lasted nearly a century until the 19th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified on August 26, 1920, enfranchising American women. The campaign for women’s suffrage began in the decades prior to the Civil War, as women were becoming increasingly involved in reform groups such as temperance leagues, abolitionist organizations, and moral reform societies. In 1848, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott organized the Seneca Falls Convention to discuss issues surrounding women’s rights. In 1890, the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) was formed with Stanton acting as its first president. By 1910, some states began to extend the vote to women, but southern and eastern states in particular resisted. In 1916, NAWSA president Carrie Chapman Catt presented a plan to gain the right to vote, a campaign that mobilized state and local suffrage organizations across the nation, focusing particularly on the states that had taken a hard line against enfranchising women. The First World War slowed their progress initially, but in 1920 the 19th Amendment was finally ratified and approximately 8 million American women voted in elections for the first time on November 2, 1920.
The Collection of Women’s Suffrage materials contains 54 postcards from seven different countries that depict both the positive aspects of enfranchising women and the many negative stereotypes associated with the suffragist movement. Suffrage related postcards were popular in the 1910s and were used as propaganda on both sides of the movement. As Lisa Oberg writes in her article “Postcards and the Battle for Women’s Right to Vote:”
“Postcards aimed at dissuading support for women’s suffrage often depicted women in very derogatory ways, as broad caricatures of ugly spinsters, domineering harridans and more… Anti-suffrage cards also insinuated giving women the right to vote would be political chaos and lead to women who were decidedly less feminine and emasculate men by forcing them to perform women’s work such as housekeeping and childrearing.”1
Artist cards designed by popular artists and illustrators and real photo postcards were also popular during this time and showed images of suffragettes, parades, and other events.
In addition to the postcards, this collection contains photographs of prominent suffragettes including Carrie Chapman Catt, Anne Dallas Dudley, Christabel and Emmeline Pankhurst, and Millicent Garrett Fawcett among others and several pieces of ephemera such as a meeting notice for the Union County, New Jersey Equal Suffrage League. The Archives & Special Collections also contains a few other items related to women’s suffrage that are not part of this collection, including a pamphlet titled “What President Wilson Says” published in 1917 by the New York State Woman Suffrage Party and a pamphlet titled “National Grange in Favour of Votes for Women” published in 1915 by the National Woman Suffrage Publishing Company.
1. Oberg, Lisa. “Postcards and the Battle for Women’s Right to Vote.” The Journal: Book Club of Washington, Fall 2020, pgs. 28-35.
The Archives & Special Collections is currently unable to host in-person researchers. If you need assistance or would like to set up a virtual appointment, please email us at archives@pugetsound.edu.
By Laura Edgar, Assistant Archivist
In August 2019, the Archives & Special Collections received a Washington Digital Heritage grant to digitize, transcribe, and make available online nine journals written by the artist Abby Williams Hill (1861-1943). These journals focus on Hill’s travels throughout the United States between 1895 and 1906 and provide a unique female perspective on significant issues affecting the nation at that time, including education, tourism, and the rights of women, African Americans, Native Americans, and the working class. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be using the blog series to highlight each of the journals and their significance for researchers. Abstracts for all of the journals can be found here.
Last week we discussed the journal from Hill’s year-long trip across the United States with her children in 1901 and 1902. The fourth piece in our digital collection is a daybook from the summer of 1903. That year, Hill secured a contract with the Great Northern Railway to paint scenery along their rail line in the North Cascade Mountains in Washington State. In exchange for her work, Hill asked for 1,000-mile railroad tickets for her and her four children. Hill set off from Tacoma in May 1903 and headed east to Chelan to begin her work. She had a letter of introduction from the Great Northern Railway to present to the station agents along her route. The letter urged the agents to assist her in any way possible. At that time, the North Cascades Highway did not exist and access to the mountains was difficult. Hill writes of traveling by rail, taking a steamer to the north end of Lake Chelan, and then having to travel on foot or by horse into the mountains from there. She painted entirely en plein air, meaning she painted outdoors and on site. She faced many challenges with terrain, wildlife, including rattlesnakes and bears, and weather. Hill wrote:
“Snake came and looked at me. Big land slide came down behind me… I start [Horseshoe] Basin picture. Pitch my awning on a rock, very windy, have to sit astride… Miners at cabins. Showed them pictures. ‘That’s the real stuff boys, no need to come see the Basin if one can see those’… Paint on rock. Hard wind, difficult to stick on. Awning blew down.”
Another day, she writes of difficulty with the snow. “Mr. B. sent Mr. Cooper and a horse for me. Leave the horse, cross the snow on foot. Climb over a trail above a crevasse, by ropes down a hole, up a rock over snow and slide [down] rock to the ledge. Slide over 800 feet, returning, men roar at our inability to steer… Finish the Basin picture. Ione and I have a tumble.”
The Great Northern Railway selected twenty-one canvases by Hill to use in their marketing and promotional materials. The paintings depict scenery in and around Leavenworth, Index, Lake Chelan, and the North Cascade Mountains. On April 12, 1906, Hill wrote a single entry in the daybook, updating her readers on the outcome of the Great Northern Railway commission. She writes:
“What a long interval! My collection which I was painting when I kept this book has been long finished and was exhibited at the St. Louis [World’s Fair]… The Great Northern published a folder illustrating it and circulated 30,000 of them at St. Louis.”
Indeed the railroad did publish Hill’s work in a brochure titled “Scenic Washington Along the Line of the Great Northern Railway,” which we are lucky enough to have several copies of in the Abby Williams Hill collection. In addition to the brochure and this daybook, the collection also includes Hill’s original contract with the railroad, the letter of introduction Hill took with her while she traveled, and a list of the paintings that were exhibited at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904 and their values. Hill and her children traveled to the fair to see the paintings and her observations are documented in the journal we’ll be looking at next week. In addition, the university owns sixteen of the twenty-one canvases that were part of this commission. Images of those paintings can be seen here.
This project was supported by a grant from the Washington State Library with funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services.
The Archives & Special Collections is currently unable to host in-person researchers. If you need assistance or would like to set up a virtual appointment, please email us at archives@pugetsound.edu.
By Laura Edgar, Assistant Archivist & Archivist for the Abby Williams Hill Collection
Collins Memorial Library is recognizing Open Access Week Oct 19-25 with a series of posts and events. This is the fifth of five in a series of blog entries about Open Access.
– Ben Tucker
Open textbooks are a subset of Open Educational Resources (OER). OER can be viewed as a close relative of the Open Access movement, which itself was born of a need to increase free access to scholarly communications. The OER movement was inspired by the need to share and customize affordable resources for teaching and learning.
Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition’s (SPARC) definition of OER:
“Open Educational Resources are teaching, learning, and research resources released under an open license that permits their free use and repurposing by others. OERs can be full courses, course materials, lesson plans, open textbooks, learning objects, videos, games, tests, software, or any other tool, material, or technique that supports access to knowledge.”
Another way to conceptualize OER is by considering how their licenses allow them to be used. The Open Education movement is built around what David Wiley calls the “5Rs of Openness”
“Defining the “Open” in Open Content and Open Educational Resources” by David Wiley is licensed under CC BY 4.0
Open textbooks seem to have generated the most interest of all OERs. That’s likely due to the high cost of textbooks for students. Over the last three decades, textbook costs have increased almost three times higher than the Consumer Price Index increase. At a time of increased competition for undergraduate students amongst liberal arts colleges, the University of Puget Sound can ill-afford to miss opportunities to save students money.
Adopting Open textbooks is a proven means of reducing costs to students and improving student performance and retention, especially those with greater economic need.
Using Open textbooks also has potential pedagogical benefits. Taking advantage of the ability to revise, remix, and redistribute textbooks allows faculty members to tailor the text to best meet the needs of Puget Sound students in the context of the university’s curriculum.
There are already local success stories in the area of authoring Open textbooks. The University of Puget Sound’s own Rob Beezer (Math & Computer Science) developed an open source textbook platform, PreText, which he used to publish his textbook A First Course in Linear Algebra. The platform has also been used by Rob Hutchinson for his text Music Theory for a 21st Century Classroom, and the Center for Writing Learning and Teaching’s Sound Writing.
Further Reading
Collins Memorial Library is recognizing Open Access Week Oct 19-25 with a series of posts and events. This is the fourth of five in a series of blog entries about Open Access.
– Ben Tucker
Similar to OA journal publishers, OA book publishers provide readers free access to scholarly monographs. Collins Library is a founding member of one such publisher, Lever Press. Supported by a consortium of liberal arts institutions focused on, and renowned for, excellence in both research and teaching, Lever is grounded in three essential commitments:
Lever Press’s model is based on member liberal arts college libraries paying annual dues to the press which cover its operating costs. Lever’s books are then made available at no cost to all readers in a digital format using a Creative Commons License of the author’s choosing.
Lever’s stated values are in alignment with the academic pursuits favored at Puget Sound. Lever Press’s value statement reads:
“As a press aligned with the ethos and mission of liberal arts colleges, we seek out, identify, evaluate, and advocate for transformative scholarship that spurs creative dialogue within and between traditional fields of inquiry, emphasizes disciplinary innovation, draws upon new models of collaborative research, and strives to reach the broadest audience possible. We value:
- leadership and the courage to push existing boundaries
- diverse voices and viewpoints
- the principles of equity and social justice
- building community among our members and beyond
- continuous learning
By living our values we will be responsive to the needs of readers, authors, and member institutions, share our liberal arts focus broadly, and engage globally with others in the exchange of new scholarship.”
“Open Access Week 2012” by OpenEdition
is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
In addition to support from Collins Memorial Library, Brett Rogers, Associate Professor and Chair, Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies, serves on Lever Press’s editorial board. The editorial board reviews proposals at various stages of the publication process, and votes on books to move ahead in the production pipeline. The editorial board also discusses programming that increases awareness of the press and its publications, and issues of institutional membership.
Further Reading
Collins Memorial Library is recognizing Open Access Week Oct 19-25 with a series of posts and events. This is the third of five in a series of blog entries about Open Access.
– Ben Tucker
Over the last few decades, the subscription cost of scholarly serial publications has grown at a rate far outpacing the rate of inflation. Caused largely by the concentration of academic journal publishing residing with a handful of commercial publishers, these price increases and the resulting strain it has caused for subscribing libraries, has become known as the serials crisis. This crisis has resulted in reduced access to scholarly journals for many institutions, and caused a budget shift away from monographs, and other resources, as libraries struggle to maintain access to desired journals.
The commercial publishers’ preferred business model of bundling a large number of journal titles together for a discounted aggregated package further complicates budget decisions for libraries, resulting in subscriptions to unwanted journals in order to access essential ones.
These practices, combined with budget restrictions, often result in impediments to free and open scholarly communication. OA journals, which provide free and unfettered access to their content, act as an alternative model that can alleviate some impediments to scholarly communication.
OA journals use Creative Commons and other open licensing to permit open sharing of scholarly work without making the work public domain. You can read more about Creative Commons Licensing on the library’s Scholarly Communications LibGuide.
Muddying the waters of OA and subscriptions to scholarly journals are a wide spectrum of hybrid options. Some journals allow authors to archive pre- or post-publication versions of articles on institutional or subject repositories after an embargo period. This model is sometimes referred to as green OA, in contrast to fully open OA journals that are referred to as gold OA. Furthermore, other journals use a pay for OA model where a publisher requires payment from the author for an article to be made freely available on the journal’s website. This can help increase access for readers, but often at a steep price for the author or their institution.
Collins Library provides access to many hundreds of OA Journals that are searchable in Primo, our online discovery tool.
Further Reading
Collins Memorial Library is recognizing Open Access Week Oct 19-25 with a series of posts and events. This is the second of five in a series of blog entries about Open Access. – Ben Tucker
Sound Ideas represents the scholarship and creative works of the faculty, staff and students of the University of Puget Sound. Organized and made accessible by Collins Memorial Library, Sound Ideas demonstrates our institutional commitment to helping enrich the global academic community through sharing and collaboration.
Sound Ideas provides faculty members a venue for posting iterations of their published work, in compliance with their publishers’ license, resulting in increased user access, as well as providing a means of complying with the Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act. Faculty members who are unsure about what a publisher’s license permits in relation to posting work on personal websites or institutional repositories can contact their liaison librarian for a consultation.
Faculty members can self-submit their work to Sound Ideas if they’ve retained the required rights. First time users will need to create an account, while returning users can simply login, fill out a form with descriptive information, and upload their work.
Sound Ideas content is accessed by users around the world
Notable scholarly collections:
Some journal publishers allow authors to pay for individual articles to be fully Open Access. Fees vary, but can be significant at times. The University Enrichment Committee facilitates funding opportunities for faculty members seeking Open Access or other publication fees. Details can be found on the Faculty Research Guidelines Document.
Further Reading
In August 2019, the Archives & Special Collections received a Washington Digital Heritage grant to digitize, transcribe, and make available online nine journals written by the artist Abby Williams Hill (1861-1943). These journals focus on Hill’s travels throughout the United States between 1895 and 1906 and provide a unique female perspective on significant issues affecting the nation at that time, including education, tourism, and the rights of women, African Americans, Native Americans, and the working class. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be using the blog series to highlight each of the journals and their significance for researchers. Abstracts for all of the journals can be found here.
Two weeks ago we discussed Hill’s journal from a summer spent on Vashon Island in 1900. The third journal in our digital collection contains Hill’s writings from a year spent touring the United States with her children between 1901 and 1902. This journal is 950 pages long so we separated it into five parts online for easier access by researchers (see links to all five parts at the bottom of this post). There is also a daybook that covers the same period of time. The daybook contains very brief notes on Hill’s daily activities, which she used to inform her longer narrative-style entries in her journal.
Hill began her year-long trip in October 1901 with her two oldest children, Romayne and Ione. They traveled from Seattle by rail, stopping in many cities throughout the Midwest and on the East Coast, including Chicago, Cleveland, Boston, New York City, Washington D.C., Philadelphia, Baltimore, and other locations. Hill and the children visited monuments, museums, zoos, social settlements, industrial complexes, schools, and other sites during their travels, the details of which were meticulously recorded by Hill in her journal.
In February 1902, Hill and the children traveled south to Alabama, where they stayed at the Tuskegee Institute for ten days as guests of Dr. Booker T. Washington. They were there during the annual Farmer’s Conference and Hill attended numerous lectures and activities, again recording everything in her journal. These entries are a highlight of the collection, though researchers must take care to read them with Hill’s perspective as an upper middle class white woman in mind. Hill was so impressed with Booker T. Washington and what he had accomplished that when she was given the opportunity to name a mountain in the North Cascades in 1903, she named it Mt. Booker after him. At the end of her visit to Tuskegee Hill wrote, “I have never been anywhere so short a time that I learned to like so many people so well.”
From Alabama, the family traveled to New Orleans and then on to Bay St. Louis, Louisiana, where they stayed for five weeks while Hill’s son Romayne recovered from a bout of pneumonia. When he was feeling better, they continued west to Los Angeles, where they were joined in May 1902 by Hill’s younger daughters, Ina and Eulalie. After some sightseeing in the city, Hill and her four children embarked on a lengthy camping trip near Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks. She was thrilled by the scenery and the sequoia trees. She wrote,
“What thoughts these trees bring. What is a hundred years to them? Moses could have seen the General Grant [Tree] had he been in this forest. The oldest living thing. I fancied they would simply be a curiosity, but they look in every foot of their height, in every twisted branch, that they represent another age, that they have lived to remind us that all things belong to one plan, one system in which events serve one end and everyone contributes.”
Hill and the children continued their adventures, heading north to San Francisco, then into Oregon and Washington, where they set up camp at Trout Lake near Mount Adams on the north side of the Columbia River. The family remained there from late June until the end of August. Hill wrote of their adventures camping, rowing, and hiking in the wilderness, where there were lava formations, ice caves, waterfalls, and caverns to explore. She provides details of their daily life in Trout Lake, including the layout of their camp, the meals they cooked, the wildlife they encountered, and the friends they made. The last entries in this journal are written from Warrendale, Washington in October 1902, after which Hill likely returned home for the holidays.
Hill’s journals provide a rich and varied resource for scholars of all ages. Check back next week for the next installment in our series…Hill’s daybook from her trip to the North Cascades in 1903, where she was painting scenery for the Great Northern Railway.
This project was supported by a grant from the Washington State Library with funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services.
Links to the United States Tour journal:
The Archives & Special Collections is currently unable to host in-person researchers. If you need assistance or would like to set up a virtual appointment, please email us at archives@pugetsound.edu.
By Laura Edgar, Assistant Archivist & Archivist for the Abby Williams Hill Collection
