Tag Archives: gamble

Announcements, Behind the Scenes, Digital Collections, New Collections

2.5 Years in the Life of Digital Collections

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Admit it, you have been wondering what your favorite digital collections team has been up to. Well after 2.5 years, the wait is over.

So. Many. Digitization. Requests.

When I last shared a digital collections update, it was the end of 2020, and the digital collections team was focusing on managing and refining our folder level patron request digitization workflow. This workflow has two main goals:

  • simplify the patron request process in the Rubenstein Library;
  • preserve and make accessible files from patron requests in the Duke Digital Repository (DDR).

Note that in this context, our patrons are generally folks that want to access Rubenstein Library materials without making the trip to Durham. Anyone, regardless of their researcher or academic status, can request digital copies of Rubenstein collections.

Moving digitization requests through this workflow continues to be the major focus for the digital collections team and the Digital Production Center (DPC). Given the folder level nature of the process (whole folders of manuscript material at preservation quality), more requests are digitized by the DPC than under our previous workflow. Additionally, the new request process became an essential tool to serving remote researchers during the pandemic. It continues to be a valuable service, and we have not seen demand lessen significantly since the peak of the pandemic. Below is a chart showing the number of patron requests managed by the DPC since before the pandemic (note that we track our statistics by fiscal year or FY, which in Duke’s case is July – June).

FY18 FY19 FY20 FY21 FY22 FY23
# of requests 81 77 39 394 438 469
Files produced 1,323 676 1092 79,519 74,517 73,705

Patron requests received and files produced from said requests by the DPC.

As a result of the new patron request workflow, the digital collections team has made portions of hundreds of collections accessible in the digital repository. We also see new materials from the existing collections requested periodically, so individual digital collections grow over time. Our statistics for new digital collections are in the chart below.

FY21 FY22 FY23
New digital collections from patron requests 36 154 119
Additions to existing collections from patron requests 4 12 6
Print items digitized for patron requests 16 21 30
Non-patron based new digital collections 131 15 80
Additions to digital collections (not patron request oriented) 4 4 5

Numbers of collections launched in the Duke Digital Repository since 2020.

The patron request workflow, like all other digital collections projects, is carried out by the cross-departmental Duke Libraries Digital Collections Implementation Team (DCIT). DCIT members include representatives from Conservation Services, Digital Curation Services, the Digital Production Center, a Digital Projects Developer (from the Assessment and User Experience Strategy department), Rubenstein Library Research Services, and Rubenstein Library Technical Services. The group’s membership shows how varied the needs are to develop and sustain digital collections. 

Not Just Patron Requests

Although the digital collections team shelved strategic projects when the pandemic began, we have still managed to complete some project work. One of our highest priorities in this area has been the Documenting African American Life in the Jim Crow South: Digital Access to the Behind the Veil Project Archive project (funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities). Work on this project was just featured on Bitstreams, so I won’t share too many details here. Stay tuned for more news about this incredible effort.

We have also been making slow progress on the “Section A” mass digitization project. This project is named for an old Rubenstein Library shelving location, and contains over 3000 small manuscript collections.  Many of the collections document life in the South in the 19th Century. Since 2020, we have been able to make 210 Section A collections accessible online. Many of these were scanned before the pandemic began, however the DPC continues to scan Section A when time permits. We have also seen at least 25 Section A collections come all the way through the patron request workflow, and there are more in progress.  I’ve included embedded links to 3 Section A collections below.

 

 

Here are a few other project highlights from the past 2.5 years.

Deed of manumission freeing Sue, an enslaved woman, and her daughter Margaret, Georgetown, South Carolina, 1815 October 6
Deed of Manumission from the American Slavery Digital collection
Migrants and refugees walk to a waiting bus after arriving on a rubber dinghy on a beach on the Greek island of Lesbos, January 29, 2016.
Image from the Darrin Zammit Lupi digital collection

Looking ahead

Digital Collections has a lot to look forward to in 2023-2024. Along with the John Hope Franklin Research Center we expect to wrap up the Behind the Veil grant in 2024 (lots more news to come on that). The digital collections team also plans to continue refining the patron request workflow. We are hoping to find a new balance in our portfolio that allows us to continue serving the needs of remote researchers while also completing more project based digitization. How will we actually do that without significantly changing our staffing? When we figure it out, we will be happy to share.

In the meantime, all digital collections are available through the Duke Digital Repository.
Happy Browsing!

 

Collections, Digital Collections

My Family Story through the Duke Digital Collections Program

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Hello! This is my first blog as the new Digital Production Service Manager, and I’d like to take this opportunity to take you, the reader, through my journey of discovering the treasures that the Duke Digital Collections program offers. To personalize this task, I  explored the materials related to my family’s journey to the United States. First, I should contextualize. After migrating from south China in the mid-1800s, my family fled Vietnam in the late 1970s and we left with the bare necessities – mainly food, clothes, and essential documents. All I have now are a few family pictures from that era and vividly told stories from my parents to help me connect the dots of my family’s history.

When I started delving into Duke’s Digital Collections, it was heartening to find materials of China, Vietnam, and even anti-war materials in the U.S. The following are some materials and collections that I’d like to highlight.

The Sidney D. Gamble Photographs offer over 5,000 photographs of China in the early 20th century. Images of everyday life in China and landscapes are available in this collection.The above image from the Gamble collection, is that of a junk, or houseboat, photographed in the early 1900s. When my family fled Vietnam, fifty people crammed into a similar vessel and sailed in the dead of night along the Gulf of Tonkin. My parents spoke of how they were guided by the moonlight and how fearful they were of the junk catching fire from cooking rice.

The African American Soldier’s Vietnam War photograph album collection offers these gorgeous images of Vietnam. This is the country that was home for multiple generations for my family, and up until the war, it was a good life. I am astounded and grateful that these postcards were collected by an American soldier in the middle of war. Considering that I grew up in Los Angeles, California, I have no sense of the world that my parents inhabited, and these images help me appreciate their stories even more. On the other side of the planet, there were efforts to stop the war and it was intriguing to see a variety of digital collections depicting these perspectives through art and documentary photography. The image below is that of a poster from the Italian Cultural Posters collection depicting Uncle Sam and the Viet Cong.

In addition to capturing street scenes in London, the Ronald Reis Collection, includes images of Vietnam during the war and anti-war effort in the United States. The image below is that of a demonstration in Bryant Park in New York City. I recognize that the conflict was fought on multiple fronts and am grateful for these demonstrations, as they ultimately led to the end of the war.Lastly, the James Karales Photos collection depicts Vietnam during the war. The image below, titled “Soldiers leaving on helicopter” is one that reminds me of my uncle who left with the American soldiers and started a new life in the United States. In 1980, thanks to the Family Reunification Act, the aid of the American Red Cross, and my uncle’s sponsorship, we started a new chapter in America.

Perhaps this is typical of the immigrant experience, but it still is important to put into words. Not every community has the resources and the privilege to be remembered, and where there are materials to help piece those stories together, they are absolutely valued and appreciated. Thank you, Duke University Libraries, for making these materials available.

Digital Collections

Digital Dogs

In a recent feature on their blog, our colleagues at NCSU Libraries posted some photographs of dogs from their collections. Being a person generally interested in dogs and old photographs, I became curious where dogs show up in Duke’s Digital Collections. Using very unsophisticated methods, I searched digital collections for “dogs” and thought I’d share what I found.

Of the 60 or so collections in Digital Collections 19 contain references to dogs. The table below lists the collections in which dogs or references to dogs appear most frequently.

Digital Collection Number of Items Referring to Dogs
Outdoor Advertising Association of America (OAAA) Archives, 1885-1990s 91
Historic American Sheet Music 40
William Gedney Photographs and Writings 39
R.C. Maxwell Company Outdoor Advertising 27
OAAA Slide Library 24
Sidney D. Gamble Photographs 12
Emergence of Advertising in America 11
Hugh Mangum Photographs 10
Musée des Horreurs 9
AdViews 7
Ad*Access 5
John Paver Papers 5
Documentary Photographs of Early Soviet Russia 4
Broadsides & Ephemera 3
American Song Sheets 3
Michael Francis Blake Photographs 2
Italian Posters 2
Paul Kwilecki Photographs 2
Medicine and Madison Avenue 1

As you might guess, not all the results for my search were actually photographs of dogs. Many from the advertising collections were either advertisements for dog food or hot dogs. There were quite a few ads and other materials where the word “dog” was used idiomatically. The most surprising finding to me was number of songs that are about or reference dogs. These include, “Old Dog Tray” and “The Whistler and His Dog” from Historic American Sheet Music, as well as “A Song for Dogs” and “Bull Dog an’ de Baby” from American Song Sheets.

Here’s a sampling of some photographs of dogs from Digital Collections, and a few cats as well.

Kwilecki

Hugh Mangum Photographs


Sidney D. Gamble Photographs



William Gedney Photographs and Writings







Documentary Photographs of Early Soviet Russia

R.C. Maxwell Company Outdoor Advertising


OAAA Archives

Michael Francis Blake Photographs


Behind the Scenes, Digital Collections, Projects, User Experience

Who, Why, and What:  the three W’s of the Duke Digital Collections Mini-Survey

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My colleague Sean wrote two weeks ago about the efforts a group of us  in the library are making towards understanding the scholarly impacts of Duke Digital Collections.  In this post, I plan to continue the discussion with details about the survey we are conducting as well as share some initial results.

Surveying can be perilous work!
Surveying can be perilous work!

After reviewing the analytics and Google Scholar data Sean wrote about, our working group realized we needed more information.   Our goal in this entire assessment process has been to pull together scholarly use data which will inform our digitization decisions, priorities, technological choices (features on the digital collections platform), and to help us gain an understanding of if and how we are meeting the needs of researcher communities.    Analytics gave us clues, but we still didn’t some of the fundamental facts about our patrons.   After a fervent discussion with many whiteboard notes, the group decided creating a survey would get us more of the data we were looking for.  The resulting survey focuses on the elemental questions we have about our patrons:   who are they, why are they visiting Duke Digital Collections, and what are they going to do with what they find here.

 

The Survey

Creating the survey itself was no small task, but after an almost endless process of writing, rewriting, and consultations with our assessment coordinator we settled on 6 questions (a truely miniature survey).  We considered the first three questions (who, why, what) to be most important, and we intended the last three to provide us with additional information such as Duke affiliation and allow a space for general feedback.  None of the questions were considered “required” so respondents could answer or skip whatever they wanted; we also included space for respondents to write-in further details especially when choosing the “other” option.

Our survey in its completed form.
Our survey in its completed form.

The survey launched on April 30 and remains accessible by hovering over a “feedback” link on every single Digital Collection webpage.  Event tracking analytics show that 0.29% of the patrons that hover over our feedback link click through to the survey. An even smaller number have actually submitted responses.  This has worked out to 56 responses at an average rate of around 1 per day.  Despite that low click through rate, we have been really pleased with the number of responses we have had so far.  The response rate remains steady, and we have already learned a lot from even this small sample of visitor data.  We are not advertising the survey or promoting it, because our target respondents are patrons who find us in the course of their research or general Internet browsing.

Hovering over the help us box reveals expectations and instructions for survey participants.
Hovering over the help us box reveals expectations and instructions for survey participants.

Initial Results

Before I start discussing our results, please note that what I’m sharing here is based on initial responses and my own observations.  No one in digital collections has thoroughly reviewed or analyzed this data.  Additionally, this information is drawn from responses submitted between April 30 – July 8, 2015. We plan to keep the survey online into the academic year to see if our responses change when classes are in session.

With that disclaimer now behind us, let’s review results by question.

Questions 1 and 4:  Who are you?

Since we are concerned with scholarly oriented use more than other types in this exercise, the first question is intended to sort respondents primarily by academic status.   In question 4, respondents are given the chance to further categorized their academic affiliation.

Question 1 Answers # of Responses %
Student 14 25%
Educator 10 18%
Librarian, Archivist or Museum Staff 5 9%
Other 26 47%
55 100

Of the respondents who categorized themselves as “other” in question 1, 11 clarified their otherness by writing their identities in the space provided.  Of this 11, 4 associated themselves with music oriented professions or hobbies, and 2 with fine arts (photographer and filmmaker).  The remaining 5 could not be grouped easily into categories.

As a follow up later in the survey, question 4 asks respondents to categorize their academic affiliation (if they had one).  The results showed that 3 respondents are affiliated with Duke, 12  with other colleges or universities and 9 with a K-12 school.   Of the write-in responses, 3 listed names of universities abroad, and 1 listed a school whose level has not been identified.

Question 2:  Why are you here?

We can tell from our analytics how people get to us (if they were referred to us via a link or sought us out directly), but this information does not address why visitors come to the site.  Enter question 2.

Question 2 Answers # of Responses %
Academic research 15 28
Casual browsing 15 28
Followed a link 9 17%
Personal research 24 44%
Other 6 11%
54

The survey asks that those who select academic research, personal research, and other to write-in their research topic or purpose.  Academic research topics submitted so far primarily revolve around various historical research topics.  Personal research topics reflect a high interest in music (specific songs or types of music), advertising, and other various personal projects.  It is interesting to note that local history related topics have been submitted under all three categories (academic, personal and other).  Additionally,  non-academic researchers seem to be more willing to share sharing their specific topics; 19 of 24 respondents listed their topics as compared to 7 out of 15 academic researchers.

Question 3:  What will you do with the images and/or resources you find on this site?

To me, this question has the potential to provide some of the most illuminating information from our patrons. Knowing how they use the material helps us determine how to enhance access to the digitized objects and what kinds of technology we should be investing in.  This can also shed light on our digitization process itself.  For example, maybe the full text version of an item will provide more benefit to more researchers than an illustrated or hand-written version of the same item (of course we would prefer to offer both, but I think you see where I am going with this).

In designing this question, the group decided it would be valuable to offer options for the those who share items due to their visual or subject appeal (for example, the Pinterest user), the publication minded researcher, and a range of patron types in between.

 

Question 3 Answers # of Responses %
Use for an academic publication 3 6%
Share on social media 10 19%
Use them for homework 8 15%
Use them as a teaching tool in my classes 5 9%
Personal use 31 58%
Use for my job 2 4%
Other 10 19%
53

The 10 “other” respondents all entered subsequent details; they planned to share items with friends and family (in some way other than on social media), they also wanted to use the items they found as a reference, or were working on an academic pursuit that in their mind didn’t fit the listed categories.

Observations

As I said above, these survey results are cursory as we plan to leave the survey up for several more months.  But so far the data reveals that Duke Digital collections serves a wide audience of academic and non-academic users for a range of purposes. For example, one respondent uses the outdoor advertising collections to get a glimpse of how their community has changed over time. Another is concerned with US History in the 1930s, and another is focused on music from the 1900s.

The next phase of the the assessment group’s activities is to meet with researchers and instructors in person and talk with them about their experiences using digital collections (not just Duke’s) for scholarly research or instruction.  We have also been collecting examples of instructors who have used digital collections in their classes.  We plan to create a webpage with these examples with the goal of encouraging other instructors to do the same.  The goal of both of these efforts is to increase academic use of the digital collections (whether that be at the K-12 or collegiate level).

 

Just like this survey team, we stand at the ready, waiting for our chance to analyze and react to our data!

Of course, another next step is to keep collecting this survey data and analyze it further.  All in all, it has been truly exciting to see the results thus far.  As we study the data in more depth this Fall, we plan to work with the Duke University Library Digital Collections Advisory Team to implement any new technical or policy oriented decisions based on our conclusions.  Our minds are already spinning with the possibilities.

Collections, Digital Collections

Mini-memes, many meanings: Smoking dirt boy and the congee line bros

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Children are smoking in two of my favorite images from our digital collections.

One of them comes from the eleven days in 1964 that William Gedney spent with the Cornett family in Eastern Kentucky. A boy, crusted in dirt, clutching a bent-up Prince Albert can, draws on a cigarette. It’s a miniature of mawkish masculinity that echoes and lightly mocks the numerous shots Gedney took of the Cornett men, often shirtless and sitting on or standing around cars, smoking.

At some point in the now-distant past, while developing and testing our digital collections platform, I stumbled on “smoking dirt boy” as a phrase to use in testing for cases when a search returns only a single result. We kind of adopted him as an unofficial mascot of the digital collections program. He was a mini-meme, one we used within our team to draw chuckles, and added into conference presentations to get some laughs. Everyone loves smoking dirt boy.

It was probably 3-4 years ago that I stopped using the image to elicit guffaws, and started to interrogate my own attitude toward it. It’s not one of Gedney’s most powerful photographs, but it provokes a response, and I had become wary of that response. There’s a very complicated history of photography and American poverty that informs it.

Screen Shot 2015-06-09 at 11.23.58 AM
Screen shot from a genealogy site discussion forum, regarding the Cornett family and William Gedney’s involvement with them.

While preparing this post, I did some research into the Cornett family, and came across the item from a discussion thread on a genealogy site, shown here in a screen cap. “My Mother would not let anyone photograph our family,” it reads. “We were all poor, most of us were clean, the Cornetts were another story.”  It captures the attitudes that intertwine in that complicated history. The resentment toward the camera’s cold eye on Appalachia is apparent, as is the disdain for the family that implicitly wasn’t “clean,” and let the photographer shoot. These attitudes came to bear in an incident just this last spring, in which a group in West Virginia confronted traveling photographers whom they claimed photographed children without permission.

The photographer Roger May has undertaken an effort to change “this visual definition of Appalachia.” His “Looking at Appalachia” project began with a series of three blog posts on William Gedney’s Kentucky photographs (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3). The New York Times’ Lens blog wrote about the project last month. His perspective is one that brings insight and renewal to Gedney’s work

Gedney’s photographs have taken on a life as a digital collection since they were published on the Duke University Libraries’ web site in 1999. It has become a high-use collection for the Rubenstein Library; that use has driven a recent project we have undertaken in the library to re-process the collection and digitize the entire corpus of finished prints, proof prints, and contact sheets. We expect the work to take more than a year and produce more than 20,000 images (compared to the roughly 5000 available now), but when it’s complete, it should add whole new dimensions to the understanding of Gedney’s work.

Another collection given life by its digitization is the Sidney Gamble Photographs. The nitrate negatives are so flammable that the library must store them off site, making access impossible without some form of reproduction. Digitization has made it possible for anyone in the world to experience Gamble’s remarkable documentation of China in the early 20th Century. Since its digitization, this collection has been the subject of a traveling exhibit, and will be featured in the Photography Gallery of the Rubenstein Library’s new space when it opens in August.

The photograph of the two boys in the congee distribution line is another favorite of mine. Again, a child is seen smoking in a context that speaks of poverty. There’s plenty to read in the picture, including the expressions on the faces of the different boys, and the way they press their bowls to their chests. But there are two details that make this image rich with implicit narrative – the cigarette in the taller boy’s mouth, and the protective way he drapes his arm over the shorter one. They have similar, close-cropped haircuts, which are also different from the other boys, suggesting they came from the same place. It’s an immediate assumption that the boys are brothers, and the older one has taken on the care and protection of the younger.

Still, I don’t know the full story, and exploring my assumptions about the congee line boys might lead me to ask probing questions about my own attitudes and “visual definition” of the world. This process is one of the aspects of working with images that makes my work rewarding. Smoking dirt boy and the congee line boys are always there to teach me more.

Digital Collections

Taken near doorways

We’re continually walking through doorways or passing them by, but how often do we linger to witness the life that unfolds nearby? Let the photographs below be your doorway, connecting you with lives lived in other places and times.

Man holding small boy in the air while a woman looks on from doorway.
Man holding small boy in the air while a woman looks on from doorway, from William Gedney Photographs and Writings

Man in doorway. Woman walking down sidewalk
New York City: Greenwich Village, from Ronald Reis Photographs

Man sitting on chair holding a small child.
Man sitting on chair holding a small child, from William Gedney Photographs and Writings

Woman, boy and man near entrance to store.
Outside entrance to Wynn’s Department Store, 1968 Dec., from Paul Kwilecki Photographs

Woman with cat in doorway
Woman with cat in doorway, Pear Orchard, 1961, from Paul Kwilecki Photographs

family portrait taken in front of doorway.
N479, from Hugh Mangum Photographs

Man eating, with child in background
Man Eating, with Child in Background, from Sidney D. Gamble Photographs

Be adventurous. Explore more images taken by these photographers as displayed within Duke University Libraries’ digitized collections.

Behind the Scenes, Collections, User Experience

Analog to Digital to Analog: Impact of digital collections on permission-to-publish requests

We’ve written many posts on this blog that describe (in detail) how we build our digital collections at Duke, how we describe them, and how we make them accessible to researchers.

At a Rubenstein Library staff meeting this morning one of my colleagues–Sarah Carrier–gave an interesting report on how some of our researchers are actually using our digital collections. Sarah’s report focused specifically on permission-to-publish requests, that is, cases where researchers requested permission from the library to publish reproductions of materials in our collection in scholarly monographs, journal articles, exhibits, websites, documentaries, and any number of other creative works. To be clear, Sarah examined all of these requests, not just those involving digital collections. Below is a chart showing the distribution of the types of publication uses.

Types of permission-to-publish requests, FY2013-2014
Types of permission-to-publish requests, FY2013-2014

What I found especially interesting about Sarah’s report, though, is that nearly 76% of permission-to-publish requests did involve materials from the Rubenstein that have been digitized and are available in Duke Digital Collections. The chart below shows the Rubenstein collections that generate the highest percentage of requests. Notice that three of these in Duke Digital Collections were responsible for 40% of all permission-to-publish requests:

Collections generating the most permission-to-publish requests, FY2013-2014
Collections generating the most permission-to-publish requests, FY2013-2014

So, even though we’ve only digitized a small fraction of the Rubenstein’s holdings (probably less than 1%), it is this 1% that generates the overwhelming majority of permission-to-publish requests.

I find this stat both encouraging and discouraging at the same time. On one hand, it’s great to see that folks are finding our digital collections and using them in their publications or other creative output. On the other hand, it’s frightening to think that the remainder of our amazing but yet-to-be digitized collections are rarely if ever used in publications, exhibits, and websites.

I’m not suggesting that researchers aren’t using un-digitized materials. They certainly are, in record numbers. More patrons are visiting our reading room than ever before. So how do we explain these numbers? Perhaps research and publication are really two separate processes. Imagine you’ve just written a 400 page monograph on the evolution of popular song in America, you probably just want to sit down at your computer, fire up your web browser, and do a Google Image Search for “historic sheet music” to find some cool images to illustrate your book. Maybe I’m wrong, but if I’m not, we’ve got you covered. After it’s published, send us a hard copy. We’ll add it to the collection and maybe we’ll even digitize it someday.

[Data analysis and charts provided by Sarah Carrier – thanks Sarah!]

Collections

Vacation, all We Ever Wanted

We try to keep our posts pretty focussed on the important work at hand here at Bitstreams central, but sometimes even we get distracted (speaking of, did you know that you can listen to the Go-Gos for hours and hours on Spotify?).   With most of our colleagues in the library leaving for or returning from vacation, it can be difficult to think about anything but exotic locations and what to do with all the time we are not spending in meetings.  So this week, dear reader, we give you a few snapshots of vacation adventures told through Duke Digital Collections.

Artist’s rendering of librarians at the beach.

 

Many of Duke’s librarians (myself included) head directly East for a few days of R/R at the one of many beautiful North Carolina beaches.  Who can blame them?  It seems like everyone loves the beach including William Gedney, Deena Stryker, Paul Kwilecki and even Sydney Gamble.  Lucky for North Carolina, the beach is only a short trip away, but of course there are essentials that you must not forget even on such a short journey.

 

 

K0521

 

Of course many colleagues have ventured even farther afield to West Virginia, Minnesota, Oregon, Maine and even Africa!!  Wherever our colleagues are, we hope they are enjoying some well deserved time-off.  For those of us who have already had our time away or are looking forward to next time, we will just have to live vicariously through our colleagues’ and our collections’ adventures.

Collections

Digital collections places I have and have not been

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The era in which libraries have digitized their collections and published them on the Internet is less than two decades old. As an observer and participant during this time, I’ve seen some great projects come online. For me, one stands out for its impact and importance – the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Black-and-White Negatives, which is Library of Congress’ collection of 175,000 photographs taken by employees of the US government in the 1930s and 40s.

The FSA photographers produced some of the most iconic images of the past century. In the decades following the program, they became known via those who journeyed to D.C. to select, reproduce, and publish in monographs, or display in exhibits. But the entire collection, funded by the federal government, was as public as public domain gets. When the LoC took on the digitization of the collection, it became available in mass. All those years, it had been waiting for the Internet.

"Shopping and visiting on main street of Pittsboro, North Carolina. Saturday afternoon." Photo by Dorothea Lange. A few blocks from the author's home.
“Shopping and visiting on main street of Pittsboro, North Carolina. Saturday afternoon.” Photo by Dorothea Lange. A few blocks from the author’s home.

The FSA photographers covered the US. This wonderful site built by a team from Yale can help you determine whether they passed through your hometown. Between 1939 and 1940, Dorothea Lange, Marion Post Wolcott, and Jack Delano traveled through the town and the county where I live, and some 73 of their photos are now online. I’ve studied them, and also witnessed the wonderment of my friends and neighbors when they happen upon the pictures. The director of the FSA program, Roy Stryker, was one of the visionaries of the Twentieth Century, but it took the digital collection to make the scope and reach of his vision apparent.

Photography has been an emphasis of our own digital collections program over the years. At the same time that the FSA traveled to rural Chatham County on their mission of “introducing America to Americans,” anonymous photographers employed by the RC Maxwell Company shot their outdoor advertising installations in places like Atlantic City, New Jersey and Richmond, Virginia. Maybe they were merely “introducing advertising to advertisers,” but I like to think of them as our own mini-Langes and mini-Wolcotts, freezing scenes that others cruised past in their Studebakers.

The author at Kamakura, half a lifetime ago. Careful coordination of knock-off NBA cap with wrinkled windbreaker was a serious concern among fashion-conscious young men of that era.
The author at Kamakura.

Certainly the most important traveling photographer we’ve published has been Sidney Gamble, an American who visited Asia, particularly China, on four occasions between 1908 and 1932. As with the FSA photos, I’ve spent time studying the scenes of places known to me. I’ve never been to China or Siberia, but I did live in Japan for a while some years ago, and come back to photos of a few places I visited – or maybe didn’t – while I was there.

The first place is the Great Buddha at Kamakura. It’s a popular tourist site south of Tokyo; I visited with some friends in 1990. Our collection has four photographs by Gamble of the Daibutsu. I don’t find anything particular of interest in Gamble’s shots, just the unmistakable calm and grandeur of the same scene I saw 60+ years later.

More intriguing for me, however, is the photo that Gamble took of the YMCA* in Yokohama, probably in 1917. For a while during my stay in Japan, I lived a few train stops from Yokohama, and got involved in a weekly game of pickup basketball at the Y there. I don’t remember much about the exterior of the building, but I recall the interior as somewhat funky, with lots of polished wood and a sweet wooden court. It was very distinctive for Tokyo and environs – a city where most of the architecture is best described as transient and flimsy, designed to have minimum impact when flattened by massive forces like earthquakes or bombers. I’ve always wondered if the building in Gamble’s photo was the same that I visited.

* According to his biography on Wikipedia, Gamble was very active in the YMCA both at home and in his travels. 

YMCA, Yokohama — 横滨的基督教青年会. Taken by Sidney Gamble, possibly 1917.
YMCA, Yokohama — 横滨的基督教青年会. Taken by Sidney Gamble, possibly 1917.

So I began to construct a response to this question based entirely on my own fading memories, some superficial research, and a fractional comprehension of a series of youtube videos on the history of the YMCA in Yokohama. To begin with, a screenshot of Google street view of the Yokohama YMCA in 2011 shows a building quite different from the original.

Google street view of the YMCA in Yokohama, 2011.
Google street view of the YMCA in Yokohama, 2011.

The youtube video includes a photograph of a building, clearly the same as the one in Gamble’s photograph, that was built in 1884. There are shots of people playing basketball and table tennis, and the few details of the interior look a lot like the place I remember. Could it be the same?

Screen shot of the Yokohama YMCA building from video, "Yokohama YMCA History 1."
Screen shot of the Yokohama YMCA building from video, “Yokohama YMCA History 1.”
The YMCA building in Yokohama, showing damage from the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923.
The YMCA building in Yokohama, showing damage from the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923.

But then we see the building damaged from the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923. That the structure was standing at all would have been remarkable. You can easily search and find images of the astonishing devastation of that event, but I’ll let these harrowing words from a correspondent of The Atlantic convey the scale of it.

Yokohama, the city of almost half a million souls, had become a vast plain of fire, of red, devouring sheets of flame which played and flickered. Here and there a remnant of a building, a few shattered walls, stood up like rocks above the expanse of flame, unrecognizable. There seemed to be nothing left to burn. It was as if the very earth were now burning.

Henry W. Kinney, “Earthquake Days.”The Atlantic, January 1, 1924.

According to my understanding of the video, the YMCA moved into another building in 1926. Based on the photos of the interior, my guess is that it was the same building where I visited in the early 1990s. The shots of basketball and table tennis from earlier might have been taken inside this building, even if the members of the Y engaged in those activities in the original.

Still, I couldn’t help but ask – would the Japanese have played basketball in the original building, between the game’s invention in 1891 and the earthquake in 1923? It seemed anachronistic to me, until I looked into it a little further.

We’ve all heard that the inventor of basketball, James Naismith, was on the faculty at Springfield College in Massachusetts, but the name of the place has changed since 1891, when it was known as the YMCA International Training School .** The 18 men who played in the first game became known in basketball lore as the First Team. Some of them served as apostles for the game, spreading it around the world under the banner of the YMCA. One of them, a man named Genzabaro Ishikawa, took it to Japan.

** The organization proudly claims the game as its own invention.

It’s not hard to imagine Ishikawa making a beeline from the ship when it docked at Yokohama to the YMCA. If so, it makes the building that Gamble shot one of the sanctified sites of the sport, like many shrines since ruined but replaced. Sure it was impressive to gaze up at a Giant Buddha cast in bronze some 800 years prior, but what I really like to think about is how that sweet court I played on in Yokohama bears a direct line of descent from the origins of the game.

Announcements, Collections

New Collection Addition: Sidney D. Gamble’s Hand-Colored Lantern Slides

I started working on the metadata of Sidney D. Gamble photographs in January 2008 on a spreadsheet with no matching images. The nitrate negatives from the collection had just been digitized and resided in a different location. I was, however still amazed by the richness of the content as I tried very hard to figure out the locations of each picture, half of them were so challenging that I must have guessed wrong for most of them in my struggle to meet the project deadline. It was after the digital collection was published that I started to study more thoroughly these images of Chinese life more than 100 years ago. And they have since then continued to amaze me as I understand more of their content and context with the various projects I’ve done; and to puzzle me as I dig deeper into their historical backgrounds. I’ve imagined China in those times in readings, enhanced by films early and recent, yet Gamble’s photographs help me to get closer to what life really looked like and how similar or different things appeared. Recently the hand-colored lantern slides in the collection have made me feel even more so.

Zagunao, Sichuan

Lantern slides are often hand-colored glass slides, commonly used in the first half of the twentieth century to project photographs or illustrations onto walls for better visualization. We are yet to find out whether Gamble colored these slides himself or instructed the work by giving details of the description of the objects. I find the colors in these images strikingly true, suggesting that they were done by someone familiar with the scene or the culture. Whether it is a remote hillside village in a minority region in Sichuan as shown above or the famous Temple of Heaven in Beijing below, the color versions are vivid and lively as if they were taken by a recent visitor.

Temple of Heaven, Beijing

Gamble used these color slides in his talks introducing China to his countrymen. He included both images of Chinese scenery and those of Chinese people and their lives. The large amount of images of Chinese life in the collection is a record of his social survey work in China, the earliest of its kind ever done in China; as well as a reflection of his curiosity and sympathy in Chinese people and their culture. Funeral is one of Gamble’s favorite subjects, and I have no clue whether green was the color for people’s clothes working at funerals as I see several images with men dressed in green doing all sort of jobs, such as this man carrying the umbrella, the color is not offensive but needs to be studied.

Funeral Men Umbrella Carrier Blowing Horn
Funeral Men Umbrella Carrier Blowing Horn

The Lama Temple, or Yonghegong, is an imperial Tibetan Buddhist Temple. Every year in early March, masked lamas performed their annual “devil dance”, a ritual to ward off bad spirits and disasters on a Monday. I learned about this performance through Gamble’s photographs and the color images have simply added more life. A search online for images taken today brought back photos that look just similar.

Devil dance at Lama Temple, Beijing
Devil dance at Lama Temple, Beijing

There are nearly 600 colored slides in the collection, one can imagine the reaction of the audience when Gamble projected them on the wall in his talk about the mysterious China in the Far East. With the help of a capable intern, I was able to create an inventory last fall, matching most of them with existing black and white one in the collection. A project was proposed and approved quickly to digitize these lantern slides. The project was done quickly and a blog post by one of our digitization experts  provided some interesting details. In June this year, selected color images will appear in the travelling exhibit that professor Guo-Juin Hong and I curated and started in Beijing last summer when it opens at Shanghai Archives’ museum on bund. I believe they will fascinate the Chinese audience today as much as they had when Gamble showed them to the American audience.

Post Contributed by Luo Zhou, Chinese Studies Librarian, Duke University Libraries