Events, Hartman Center, News and Features, Readings and Talks

Nancy Fletcher on Outdoor Advertising

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Date: Thursday, November 8, 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 fourth talk in the series.

Nancy Fletcher, CEO of the Outdoor Advertising Association of America (OAAA) will talk about Outdoor Advertising: Unified Vision. Bold Future. Outdoor advertising is one of the oldest forms of media in existence, dating back to the circus posters of the 1800’s. Since those early days, outdoor advertising has constantly evolved to adapt to new markets, formats, technology, and opportunities. Please join us and take another look at one of the fastest-growing advertising media around. 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, NCOAA, SCOAA, Fairway Outdoor Advertising, and Adams Outdoor.

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

From Our Collections, Hartman Center, History of Medicine, New at the Rubenstein Library

Two Words for Halloween: Scary Clowns!

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Cover of Merchant’s Gargling Oil Dream and Fate, Palmistry, &c. Songster, Lockport, NY, ca. 1880-1890s.

We’ve seen many advertising campaigns of yesteryear here at the Rubenstein Library, thanks to the John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising, and Marketing History.  Our History of Medicine Collections contain many examples of promotional items for patent medicines and related remedies.  And the Library holds an extensive collection of American songsters, or ephemeral booklets of song lyrics popular in the nineteenth century.  But never have we seen more terrifying examples of any of these genres than the Merchant’s Gargling Oil Songsters, which feature scary clowns on their covers.

We have the Merchant’s Gargling Oil Co. to thank for these frightful specimens.  The Hagley Museum and Library’s online exhibit on patent medicines tells us that the oil was “primarily used as a topical ointment to treat horses and other animals for burns, scalds, sprains, and bruises,” but could also be used to treat other odd ailments, from foot rot to mange.  The oil was not, apparently, gargled.

We know what you’re asking: why use scary clowns to promote veterinary medicine?  We presume that the clowns used to promote the Merchant’s Gargling Oil Liniment were not intentionally scary.   Perhaps they were not creepy at all to the nineteenth-century eye, but rather appeared amusing, colorful, and whimsical.  However, the fact that these particular songsters combined popular song lyrics with instruction on dream interpretation and fortune telling lends itself to the belief that there’s more to these clowns than meets the eye. Not to mention the owl on the shoulder of one of the clowns, and the deranged look in the eyes of the other.

Cover of Merchant’s Gargling Oil Songster, Lockport, NY, ca. 1880-1890s.

We wouldn’t want to meet either of these clowns on a dark Halloween night, but you’re welcome to come see them in person in the Library’s reading room… if you dare. Happy Halloween!

Post contributed by Will Hansen, Assistant Curator of Collections. 

 

Renovation, Technical Stuff

Take This Shelf and Hang It!

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As usual, things are really humming over here at Rubenstein Renovation HQ. We have been slowly shipping newspapers and manuscript collections to our offsite facility since the end of August. It’s been very exciting to watch our collections move offsite. We have been seeing quite a few empty shelves appear, which means we are making some real progress!

The Rubenstein Library has also officially taken occupancy of the 3rd floor of Perkins, our temporary library. Although we are not moving offices or the reading room until mid-late December, we are starting to move in some special shelving and hang it at the heights we require. For those of you who really obsess about this kind of thing (and who doesn’t??), most of the shelving in Perkins/Bostock is 9” wide. We have quite a few 11” shelves in the Rubenstein Library, and the extra space allows us to shelve our records cartons and document cases more efficiently than if we were using 9” shelving. We do not have a lot of space in our temporary location so any space advantage we can manage is key.

The shelf hanging process began this week! It is a tedious process, as you can imagine, but we have been moving quickly. Thanks especially to one of our student assistants who is actually a shelf whisperer!

For more information about the renovation, please visit our renovation website.

Post contributed by Molly Bragg, Collections Move Coordinator in Rubenstein Technical Services.

Bingham Center, Events, History of Medicine, Readings and Talks

Susan Reverby to Lecture on “Escaping Melodramas”

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Date: Thursday, November 1, 2012
Time: Lecture begins at 5:30 p.m.; Reception to follow
Location: Gothic Reading Room, Perkins Library, Duke University, Durham, NC
Contact information: Rachel Ingold at (919) 684-8549 or rachel.ingold@duke.edu

 

Please join the History of Medicine Collections for our fall lecture to be held on Thursday, November 1, at 5:30 pm in the Gothic Reading Room. Susan Reverby, PhD, will be presenting on “Escaping Melodramas: Reflections on Telling the Histories of the Public Health Service’s Research in Tuskegee and Guatemala.” Susan Reverby is a historian of American women, medicine, and nursing, and is the Marion Butler McLean Professor in the History of Ideas and Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Wellesley College.

She has written one book and edited a second on the Tuskegee Syphilis study (1932-72), the longest running non-therapeutic research study in U.S. history that involved the United States Public Health Service and more than 600 African American men in the counties surrounding Tuskegee, Alabama. Her scholarship has appeared in a broad range of publications from scholarly journals to editorials in the popular press. Professor Reverby speaks widely on the history of gender, ethics, and health care issues.

This event is co-sponsored by the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture, Duke University Department of History, and the Trent Center for Bioethics, Humanities, and the History of Medicine.

Students and Interns, Technical Stuff, University Archives

Recovering the 1970s

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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.

Renovation, Technical Stuff

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.

 

From Our Collections, Rare Books, Technical Stuff

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.

Events, From Our Collections, News and Features

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!

 

 

Events, Hartman Center, Readings and Talks

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.

Events, Human Rights Archive, Readings and Talks

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.

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