The Cradle of Coaches: A Legacy of Excellence

Miami University will be having its annual Alumni Weekend, June 19-22.  Among the events will be a presentation on the Cradle of Coaches by Johnathan Cooper of the Miami University Libraries.  The presentation is titled “Cradle of Coaches: A Legacy of Excellence” and will be held at 1:45 on Saturday June 21 in room 320 of King Library.

The presentation will include Weeb Ewbank, Paul Brown, Sid Gillman, Woody Hayes, Ara Parseghian and several others, as well as some background information about the “Cradle” and current coaches who are carrying on the torch.  There will also be items from the Cradle of Coaches Collection on display and discussed in the presentation.  The collection is housed in the Walter Havighurst Special Collections in King Library.

Please note that, as of June 1st, the URL of the Bowden Postcard Collection Online is http://digital.lib.MiamiOH.edu/postcards.

It’s been about a year since the project first began, so I thought now would be a good time to review the latest updates to the Bowden Postcard Collection Online. As I wrote about in November, this digital collection is being developed from the donation of roughly 480,000 postcards by two friends and Miami alumni: Clyde N. Bowden and Charles Shields. The project began last summer with a pilot that used a handful of cards from each state in Bowden’s collection. These cards were digitized, given metadata records, and added to CONTENTdm – our digital content management system.

One of the Oxford, Ohio, postcards being pulled from the cabinet.

In the year since we began, we have digitized nearly 2,200 postcards, mostly from Ohio. There have been some setbacks along the way, most notably the recognition in December for a need to revise our already existing metadata records. At the same time, however, we have also made great strides forward. Clyde N. Bowden, the donor and namesake, was very excited to hear about the project and has given us a very generous donation to fund the current Ohio-focused work. His was not the only positive feedback we have had, either. Since joining the Commons, our digital collections’ Flickr account – of which the postcards represent a substantial portion – has averaged between 10-20,000 views a day, and the number of monthly hits we have received in CONTENTdm for the full collection has likewise increased several times over. One particularly memorable response was from someone who recognized his father in a photograph used for one of the Oxford postcards.

The work of creating card numbers and sorting the cards in the Shields collection was made significantly easier thanks to his labels.

In addition to his financial contribution, Mr. Bowden also donated to us several boxes of books about postcards, books of postcards, and other postcard-related miscellanea. We are also receiving another generous donation from the Columbus Metropolitan Library in the form of roughly 500 postcards from their own collection – many of them being from the mid-20th century Middle East.

So where do we go from here? Thanks to Mr. Bowden’s donation, we are able to investigate commercial digitization which will save a significant portion of our students’ time and labor, allowing them to focus on creating the metadata records and adding them to the collection online. We also are expanding our operation and bringing on a third student this summer to help with the work. With the digitization outsourced and the extra help, I am anticipating having over 5,000 postcards online by the end of 2014. Once we have completed the roughly 8,000 postcards remaining in the Bowden collection, we will add the Ohio postcards from the Shields collection. My goal for the project is to complete both collections’ Ohio cards – about 15,000 in total! – by the end of spring 2016. I have also created a Twitter account – @bowdenpostcards – to track new postcards being added to the collection. Although currently inactive for the summer break, I look forward to seeing the account continue to log the latest additions to the collection, including this fascinating postcard flipbook from early 1900’s Portsmouth, Ohio.

Finally, as part of the aforementioned metadata revisions, we have narrowed the geographic location of each card – sometimes even to a specific street or building! Using this new information, we are developing a map to visualize the data in the collection. The map will be created using the Leaflet JavaScript Library, as well as some homegrown PHP and MySQL. In order to gather the necessary information from the CONTENTdm database, I wrote a script that queries the API for information about each item. This information is then pushed to a SQL database on one of our library’s server – and in turn will be used to populate the map. The script itself is set to run on a weekly basis to continually update the SQL database. By preloading all the responses from the API, we are able to significantly reduce the time required to load the map. I am hoping to deploy the map by the end of June, so keep an eye on the collection!

Proof of concept for postcard map

Happy browsing.

Marcus Ladd
Special Collections Librarian & Postcard Czar

We have several new finding aids available online to scholars, all of which are the culmination of many hours of hard work and dedication by our staff and students.

We now have comprehensive finding aids for the entire Usigli Archive, thanks to temporary project staff member Eleanor Castaneda who spent two years immersed in the life and works of the father of modern Mexican drama, Rodolfo Usigli.  This extensive collection is now described in two finding aids, one for Correspondence and another for the Papers, which encompasses a wide range of materials including manuscripts of both published and unpublished works, photographs, published materials, theater programs and ephemera, scrapbooks and diaries, publicity prints, and audio-visual materials.  Already these finding aids have improved how researchers use the Archive, both in our reading room and remotely, by making the discovery and retrieval of items in the collection much more efficient.

Rodolfo Usigli Archive: Correspondence
Rodolfo Usigli Archive: Papers

John Bickers, an undergraduate student  and member of the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma, has recently graduated, completing three semesters of work in Special Collections with the Myaamia Collection.  In addition to assisting with the description and transcription of historical documents, including annuity rolls and land grants, for the Myaamia Collection Online, John has also created finding aids for manuscript and research materials in the Myaamia Collection.

Myaamia Collection: Godfroy Family Papers
Myaamia Collection: Lambillotte-Willard Collection of Turtle-Wells Family Papers
Myaamia Collection: Luke Scheer Papers

We also benefit from the work of the graduate assistants in our department who, in addition to supervising researchers in our reading room, are often assigned manuscript processing projects. Eric Souder, a history masters student focusing on Russian history, cataloged Russian language ephemera in the de Saint-Rat Collection of Russian History, Literature and Art and created a detailed finding aid for the James W. Hamilton Family Papers. The Hamilton family papers consist largely of correspondence between three brothers in mid-nineteenth century Ohio and Illinois, all of whom practiced medicine and two of whom became successful local and state politicians.  The collection, now accessible to researchers for the first time, adds to our rich resources on nineteenth century American life in the Midwest.

James W. Hamilton Family Papers

My sincere thanks to Ellie, John, and Eric for their fine work!

Kimberly Tully
Special Collections Librarian

Sungkyo Cho’s translation of Ohio

As I struggled for a topic for my blog post this week, I serendipitously found my subject in a small stack of Walter Havighurst’s books that were sitting on a booktruck next to my desk. There I discovered a Korean translation of Walter Havighurst’s Ohio: a bicentennial history. After reading the inscription in the book I knew that this was what I was looking for.

The translation was made by Sungkyu Cho, a former student of Dr. Havighurst, and was published in 1987. Dr. Cho was a member of the Department of English Literature at Yonsei University in Seoul, Korea. He had been a student at Miami in the 1960’s and had worked as an assistant in the library, back when the library was in Alumni Hall. The inscription in the book reads:

Dear Dr. & Mrs. Peterson:
This is a translation of Dr. Walter Havighurst’s Ohio, which was originally published in 1975. He completed it when he was 75. In order to pay my respect for his work, I translated it because I liked it and primarily because he dared to write Ohio when he was 75. “Who will read the history of Ohio in Korea,” asked some Koreans?” It did not bother me at all. As long as Ohio is published in Korean, I am most happy.

March 17, 1987

Sungkyu Cho Read more ›

Graduation is a time of many transitions. One transition we’re very aware of this time of year at Miami is the transition from student to alumna/alumnus.

Here in the Miami University Libraries we are already planning for Alumni Weekend, coming up June 19-22. In Special Collections and at the Archvies we will welcome alumni back with some extended hours and special exhibits – more on that to come.

The quiet of an Oxford summer will be enlivened by the return of a diverse population – young and old, men and women, scholars, business people, teachers, lawyers, scientists, artists, mothers, fathers, grandparents, great-grandparents – all united by one thing: a collection of fond memories of the time they spent here as students.

They will try to match their memories of the campus with the changed reality that is a living university. Some things may look the same, some very different – and some a combination of the two.

The Slant Walk is one of the most iconic parts of campus. During the past 30 years the gates and the walk have not changed significantly. But look back a few decades further and the Slant Walk – at one time the Slanting Walk – had a more rural feel.

I hope you enjoy these images from the Clyde Bowden Postcard Collection Online of an earlier Miami.

And congratulations to the Class of 2014, our newest alumni. Hurry back.

Elizabeth Brice
Assistant Dean for Technical Services and
Head, Special Collections & Archives

Today the Oxford Community Arts Center will be holding a dedication of an Ohio Historical Marker honoring Oxford’s First Lady Caroline Scott Harrison, and the Oxford Female Institute (which is now the Oxford Community Arts Center).

Caroline Scott Harrison was married to Benjamin Harrison, grandson of the ninth President (William Henry Harrison, elected in 1840). Benjamin Harrison graduated from Miami University in 1852, served in the Civil War as a Union officer, and was elected to the United States Senate from Indiana in 1881. As Senator, Harrison defended the interests of homesteaders and Native Americans against the railroads, supported generous pensions for ex-soldiers, and fought for civil-service reform and a moderately protective tariff. He served one term as the 23rd President of the United States (1889-1893), a moderate Republican who won an electoral majority while losing the popular vote by more than 95,000 to Democrat Grover Cleveland. On his campaign to secure a second term, he chose as his Vice-Presidential candidate Whitelaw Reid, Miami University alumnus (1856).

Special Collections is home to the Benjamin and Caroline Scott Harrison collection, including materials from the 1888 and 1892 Presidential campaigns, letters and telegrams; fourteen titles by Benjamin Harrison and sixteen volumes about him as well as reproductions of a place setting used during his term as President.

Resources from our collection were recently used in the research and publication of Remembering Caroline Scott Harrison, Oxford, Ohio’s First Lady by Marjorie Foster Bowers. Bowers’ research on Caroline Scott Harrison first began several years ago as preparation for a display for the Oxford Community Arts Center, to be mounted during Miami University’s Alumni Weekend. Bowers’ research eventually led to the publication of Remembering Caroline Scott Harrison, all proceeds of which benefit the Oxford Community Arts Center.

Oxford Community Arts Center, previously the Oxford Female Institute

The dedication will take place at 5:15 pm at the front sidewalk entrance of the Arts Center. The ceremony is free and open to the public. The Ohio Historical Marker was made possible through funding from the W. E. Smith Family Charitable Trust from a grant submitted by Kathleen S. Fox through Citizens for Historic and Preservation Services.

Ashley Jones
Preservation Librarian