Recovering the 1970s

This summer, I began processing a collection of the Office of Student Activities and Facilities’ (OSAF) records. While processing this collection, I stumbled upon a folder simply titled “IFC Functions.” In a haze of student group folders, ASDU folders, DSG folders, etc., I was not particularly struck by this folder. This was a mistake. Upon opening this folder, I found pure gold.  This folder contained memories of the 1970s that I am sure our parents, at least mine, have willfully chosen to forget.

This folder contained information sent to the Inter-Fraternity Council (IFC) of cover bands who wanted to play at Duke. These band promotion packets contained blurbs and publicity about the bands, such as this quote from the promotion pack of a band that called “Hydra”: “Hydra is unquestionably the finest heavy hard rock band in the Southeast. They are also the most danceable group you will find anywhere.”

So I was intrigued and wanted to learn more.  That is when I found the most amazing thing of all.  Every band sent a picture of themselves with their packets; these photos chronicled the outstanding fashion trends of the 70s.

Each band had a different look, a different style, and everyone was fantastic.  There were such bands as “Hydra,” who was 70s Goth; “Radar,” who was bohemian rock; “Brother Bait,” who was a 70s version of what I would call hippy chic; and “Choice,” who struck me as a 70s version of the Jonas Brothers.

Hydra, “the finest heavy hard metal rock band in the Southeast” and “the most danceable group you will find anywhere.”
Radar, more relaxed than Hydra.
Brother Bait: fashionable hippies.
Choice, aka The Jonas Brothers of the 1970s.

This folder was so interesting because it really allowed me to catch a glimpse of such an iconic era.  I thoroughly enjoyed working on this collection as it enabled me to take a step back in time and learn about a fascinating part of Duke’s rich student history.

Post contributed by Julia Eads, Trinity College ’14 and student assistant in Technical Services.

Newspaper Superlatives

As they work their way through the Rubenstein’s basement, the holdings management staff have been nominating newspapers for superlatives. And the winners are…

The Journal of the Times — asserting its cuteness with a quarter for scale.

Post contributed by Jessica Janecki and the Holdings Management Team in Technical Services.

 

Dispatches from the German Judaica Project

Solving Cataloging Puzzles, or, How Digitization and the Web Makes Our Work More Accurate and Efficient

Difficult cataloging puzzles occur when a volume’s title page is missing. Sometimes information written into the book by a previous owner is correct, sometimes it is not. When I first began cataloging, the only resources were printed bibliographies, printed catalogs, the famous National Union Catalog (NUC), British Library catalog and other specialized catalogs. Unless you could correctly “guess” the title, it was difficult to positively identify such works. Now that Google Books has put so many up for view, the cataloger now has more “tricks” available to solve problems.

An example of this is a volume that is missing the title page and begins with the Preface, table of contents, and has 246 pages (apparently complete). On the front flyleaf is a penciled note: Verhandlungen der ersten israelitischen Synode in Leipzig vom 29. Juni bis 4. Juli 1869 (Enthaltend: Protokolle, Stenograph. Niederschrift etc.) Berlin 1869. Such a book does exist in OCLC, but it is described as vi, 260 p. Searching for the title in Google Books brings up the following:

Clearly this is not the book in hand, because, not only is the pagination different, but the content is entirely different. Back to the puzzle.

Fortunately, search engines index more than just the title page information. I then search Google Books for significant words from one of the articles (2nd one): referat orgelspiel Sabbath wiener. The resulting “hit” reveals the correct title with matching contents. Once I know the correct title, I can search OCLC and find a good cataloging record.

Google Books solves the puzzle!

You can find the final catalog record for the book here.

Post contributed by Lois Schultz, Catalog Librarian for Monographic Resources in Perkins Technical Services.

Middlesworth Award Winners Announced!

The Rubenstein Library is pleased to announce this year’s winners of the Chester P. Middlesworth Awards!

The Middlesworth Awards were established to encourage and recognize excellence of research, analysis, and writing by Duke University students in the use of primary sources and rare materials held by the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library. Funding for the awards has been provided by Chester P. Middlesworth (A.B., 1949) of Statesville, North Carolina.

This year’s winners are:

Catherine A. Miller, for her paper “Women-in-Action’s Brand of Biracial Activism: The Politics of Race, Gender, and Class in 1960s-1970s Durham,” written for Dr. Karin Shapiro and Dr. William Chafe, History 195S-06: Racial Justice.

Joline Y. Doedens, for her paper “How to Go to the Gynecologist’s Office: Feminist Realities in Durham in the 1970s,” written for Dr. Kathy Rudy, Women’s Studies 195S: Senior Seminar.

Julia Simenauer, for her poems “The Island of Moss and Snow,” written for Dr. Deborah Pope, English 109S-01: Poetry and Memory.

The Duke University Libraries will host an award presentation for both the Middlesworth Award and the Durden Prize followed by a reception in the Rare Book Room on October 26 at 3:30 p.m. All are welcome to attend this public event!

 

 

Conversation with an Advertising Legend

Date: Thursday, October 25, 2012
Time: 3:00 to 4:30 PM
Location: Biddle Rare Book Room, Perkins Library
Contact information: Jacqueline Reid Wachholz, 919-660-5836 or j.reid(at)duke.edu.

The John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History at Duke University will be hosting “Tea and Conversation with Carl Spielvogel.” University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill James L. Knight advertising professor, Robert Lauterborn will moderate and lead the Ambassador in a discussion of his career in advertising.  Spielvogel’s journey from the NY Times, to McCann Erickson, Interpublic, and Backer Spielvogel ultimately lead to his appointment as Ambassador to the Slovak Republic by President Clinton. Please join us for this fascinating discussion.

The event is free and open to the public. Refreshments will be served.  For more information, visit the Hartman Center homepage or contact Jacqueline Wachholz.

Post contributed by Jacqueline Reid Wachholz, Director of the John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising, and Marketing History.

Oblivion Receives WOLA-Duke Book Award

The Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) and Duke University have named Hector Abad’s book Oblivion, A Memoir (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012) as the winner of the 2012 WOLA-Duke Human Rights Book Award. The award honors the best current, non-fiction book published in English on human rights, democracy, and social justice in contemporary Latin America.

Abad will receive the award on November 28 at Busboys and Poets in Washington, D.C. The event will include a reading of Oblivion and a discussion of how the human rights situation in Colombia has evolved since the death of the author’s father 25 years ago. Abad will then travel to Durham, North Carolina, to do a reading on November 29 at 5:00pm in the Rare Book Room of Duke’s David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library.  For more information on the reading, contact Patrick Stawski at (919) 660-5823 or patrick.stawski@duke.edu.

Abad’s book begins with the author’s memories of his father, Dr. Héctor Abad Gómez, who developed practical public health programs for the poor in Medellín, Colombia. The increasing violence and human rights abuses of the 1970s and 1980s led Gómez to fight for social justice in his community. As a physician, he recognized the violence as a societal sickness in need of a cure, but his political views put him at odds with those in power, and they labeled him as sympathetic to Colombia’s left-wing guerrilla groups. In Oblivion, twenty years after his father was killed by a right-wing death squad, Abad pays homage to the man who continues to inspire him, and he shows us the importance of standing up against injustice.

Judges for this year’s competition called Abad’s book “deeply moving,” “beautiful,” and “original,” recognizing it for painting a heartfelt picture of how damaging political violence is for victims and their families and for stressing the importance of fighting for social justice and the respect for human rights, despite staggering opposition.

Award judge Holly Ackerman described Oblivion’s main accomplishment as its ability to “make us deeply feel the value of every human life and the terrible consequences of political violence wherever it occurs. It is a universal vignette… The book sharpened and renewed my conviction that ‘recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.’”

According to Leonor Blum, the chair of this year’s award judging panel and emerita professor of history and political Science at Notre Dame of Maryland University, the book “is a sensitive portrayal of the multiple facets of this modern Don Quixote who is idealistic to a fault, who cares about ‘el pueblo,’ who lives a middle class life surrounded by a loving family with its laughs, quirks, and tragedies.”

“It kept me up at night and brought me to tears and will bring, at least in my mind, something like eternal life to the murdered Doctor Héctor Abad Gómez.” says journalist, writer, and  award judge Roger Atwood.

Robin Kirk, Director of the Duke Human Rights Center, explains that she chose this book “because it offers us something new and challenging, something surprising and hard—being an activist and making a difference can sometimes cost your life.”

Started in 2008, the WOLA-Duke Human Rights Book Award is a joint venture of Duke University and WOLA, a leading advocacy organization based in Washington, D.C. Books are evaluated by a panel of expert judges drawn from academia, journalism, and public policy circles. The 2012 judging panel included Holly Ackerman, Librarian for Latin America and Iberia, Duke University; Roger Atwood, journalist, author, and former WOLA communications director; Leonor Blum, WOLA board member and emerita associate professor of history and political science at Notre Dame of Maryland University; and Robin Kirk, director, Duke Human Rights Center.

Previous WOLA-Duke Human Rights Book Award recipients include: Katherine Sikkink for The Justice Cascade in 2011; Victoria Bruce and Karin Hayes, with Jorge Enrique Botero for Hostage Nation in 2010; Ambassador Heraldo Muñoz for The Dictator’s Shadow: Life Under Augusto Pinochet in 2009; and Francisco Goldman for The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop? in 2008.

Introducing the 2012 Nobel Laureate Economist’s Papers

Alvin Roth, from http://scholar.harvard.edu/roth.

The 2012 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Honor of Alfred Nobel (commonly known as the Nobel Prize) was awarded yesterday to Alvin Roth and Lloyd Shapley “for the theory of stable allocations and the practice of market design.”  We in the Rubenstein Library were delighted to hear this, as the Alvin Roth Papers arrived here last year and are now available for scholarly use as part of the Economists’ Papers Project.

Much of Roth’s work involves decision-making and matching within markets; perhaps the most important real-world application of his ideas involves more efficiently matching organ donors to those in need of a transplant.  His papers at the Rubenstein include drafts of his writings on these and other topics, a wealth of information from Roth’s early career at the University of Pittsburgh, and correspondence with dozens of economists including his fellow Nobel laureate Lloyd Shapley, Robert Aumann, and many more.

The Alvin Roth Papers join many other important collections in the Economists’ Papers Project in game theory and market design, including the papers of Leonid Hurwicz, Oskar Morgenstern, Martin Shubik, and Vernon Smith.  Congratulations, Professor Roth!

Post contributed by Will Hansen, Assistant Curator of Collections. 

A Conversation with 2012 MacArthur Fellow Laura Poitras

Date: Wednesday, October 24, 2012
Time: 6:00 PM talk, 7:00 PM reception
Location: Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University
Contact information: Kirston Johnson, 919-681-7963 or kirston.johnson(at)duke.edu

Join us for an evening with documentary filmmaker and MacArthur “Genius Award” recipient Laura Poitras at Duke’s Nasher Museum. Known for her incisive and nuanced portraits of individuals that emerge in and from wartime in the Middle East and New York City, Poitras is an Emmy and Academy award nominated filmmaker. Her films, My Country, My Country and The Oath won numerous awards including the Inspiration Award and the Special Jury Award at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival respectively.

Arts advocate, historic preservationist, author and accomplished television interviewer Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel will facilitate the discussion.

Duke University has established the Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel Visiting Filmmaker Series to feature artists whose work addresses significant contemporary topics of social, political, economic, and cultural urgency.  Filmmakers chosen to participate have a recognized body of work and show promise of future contributions to documentary filmmaking.  Visiting filmmakers are invited to Duke for a two-day residency.

The Diamonstein-Spielvogel series is unique in its exclusive attention to documentary filmmakers with a global perspective.  By giving Duke faculty and their students an opportunity to explore the films of socially engaged filmmakers and discuss the work with them, this new series hopes to inspire and encourage the next generation of young documentarians.

Co-sponsored by the Rubenstein Library, the Program in the Arts of the Moving Image, Screen Society and the Center for Documentary Studies.

The Future of Trendspotting: JWT’s Ann Mack

Date: Thursday, October 18, 2012
Time: 5:00 PM reception, 6:00 PM talk
Location: Gothic Reading Room, Perkins Library
Contact information: Jacqueline Reid Wachholz, 919-660-5836 or j.reid(at)duke.edu.

The John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History at Duke University celebrates its 20th Anniversary in 2012 with a lecture series of advertising luminaries. Please join us next Thursday for the third talk in the series.

Ann MackAnn Mack, Director of Trendspotting at JWT will talk about 10 Trends that will Shape the World in 2012 and Beyond, sharing details on some of the key trends that brands will need to understand in the years ahead. Mack will outline these changes in the global zeitgeist, explain what’s driving them, and detail how they’re starting to play out in society. She will also discuss the role of trends at JWT and her process, as well as her career trajectory.

The event is free and open to the public. For more information, visit the lecture series website.

This 20th Anniversary Lecture Series event is sponsored by the Duke University Office of the Provost, Fuqua School of Business, Trinity College of Arts & Sciences, Markets & Management Studies, Duke Marketing Club, and JWT.

Post contributed by Jacqueline Reid Wachholz, Director of the John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising, and Marketing History.

This Post is DUMB

In an earlier blog post, we mentioned that we’ve been processing thousands of sports-related negatives and prints transferred to the Duke University Archives by Duke’s Sports Information Office.

I recently began reviewing images from the 1930s and 1940s.  In envelopes labeled “football sidelights” are negatives of the Duke University Marching Band, fondly known as DUMB.

In existence since the early 1900s, DUMB is an integral part of Duke sports, providing music and vocal support at games, and has established a reputation for performing creative and highly entertaining halftime shows.  For more information, take a look at the finding aid to DUMB’s own records, part of the University Archives’s collections.  Below are a few of my favorite images.

Duke University Marching Band, October 7, 1939
Duke University Marching Band, October 7, 1939
Duke University Marching Band Drum Line, October 21, 1939
Duke University Marching Band Drum Line, October 21, 1939
Duke University Marching Band, October 28, 1939
Duke University Marching Band, October 28, 1939
Majorette Lucille King and her Mother, November 19, 1938
Majorette Lucille King and her Mother, November 19, 1938
Duke University Marching Band and Blue Devil, 1940
Duke University Marching Band and Blue Devil, 1940

Post contributed by Kimberly Sims, Technical Services Archivist for Duke University Archives.

Dispatches from the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Duke University