The Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy Railroad

Starting in the 1940s, the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy railroad (CB&Q) began depositing parts of its company archive in the Newberry Library’s collection. Today, the CB&Q collection comprises nearly 5,000 cubic feet of materials, encompassing much of the company’s nineteenth and early twentieth century operations.

Hidden away in the archive, were thousands of photographic negatives taken for a project that the Newberry Library’s president, Stanely Pargelis headed up in the late 1940s. The CB&Q hired Pargelis along with Lloyd Lewis and two photographers–Esther Bubley and Russell Lee to document “daily life” in the places that were shaped–and in some cases, created–by the railroad. The project culminated in a book titled, Granger Country: A Pictorial Social History of the Burlington Railroad (Newberry Library, H 668 .1619).

Two years ago, the Newberry digitized some of these images to make them accessible to people who are interested in the social and cultural history of the 1940s, the Midwest, and railroad. The exhibit allows users to search for photos by keyword and examine each image in very close detail.

One of my favorite images from this collection (and there are many, many of these) includes this image (featured in the video) of a woman riding in one of the “vista-dome” cars that were a prominent feature of the Zephyr trains.

Morning Zephyr to Minneapolis. 5. Scenes along route

Between now and October 16, 2010, you can learn more about the CB&Q and the Newberry’s collection by visiting our Spotlight Exhibit on the first floor. In the meantime, be sure to watch the most recent Newberry Minute video in which one of the exhibit’s curators, Ginger Frere, talks about the Granger Country project and the CB&Q digital exhibit.

Newberry Minute: French Revolution Pamphlet Collections

The most recent Newberry Minute video that I worked on deals with several large collections of pamphlets from the French Revolution. The collections, as detailed on the Newberry’s website, came to the Newberry in the late 1950s. The collections document, in a very rich and detailed way, what people were thinking and writing about during this turbulent time in French history.As the video discusses, a majority of the items deal with political, economic, and other social issues. But other times, like the boot maker’s pamphlet in the video, provide a different grain to the texture of our understanding, revealing how the culture at large got along at the time.

Jennifer Thom, who presents in the video, is the Cataloging Projects Manager at the Newberry. Right now, her main job is to oversee a large, grant-funded project to create detailed catalog records for these collections (or the FRC). Currently, these pamphlets can be considered to be “hidden collections,” which libraries use to designate substantial collections that are not accessible to users. In the library world these days, accessibility almost always means accessible through a finding aid like an online catalog. The problem with the FRC is that there exists a paper catalog of a similar collection owned by the Biblioteque nationale in Paris. Newberry staffed have annotated this catalog to indicate what we hold as a stop gap measure.But, as you can see below, the collection is very large, and the analog, paper catalog is not the most efficient way to discover what these boxes contain.

The team that Jennifer oversees, supported by funds from the Council on Library and Information Resources, are working to create what are called item-level catalog records for the FRC. An item-level catalog record contains detailed information about each item in a collection (rather than a general description of the collection as a whole, or descriptions of large chunks of the collection). With these detailed records loaded into the online catalog, Newberry users will be able to search for these great resources using keywords, titles, and subject headings.

Newberry Minute: Rival Richards!!!

This is the latest Newberry Minute video that I created just last week. This video was made with the quickest turnaround time to date…just two days! Considering that in the past, I have let weeks go before getting around to editing a video, this was quite a feat for me.

The video coincides with a Spotlight Exhibit at the Newberry Library on the performance and acting of Shakespeare and his characters on the stage since the 1700s to the present. In the video, Jill Gage talks about a satirical print made in 1817 that lampoons the actor Junius (not Julius) Brutus Booth for taking on the role of the Richard III at the same time that a more famous actor, Edmund Kean, was portraying the character…across the street!

Jill and I spoke before shooting the video about the culture of celebrity that arose in the 19th century, when the print featured in the video was made. She talked about how, for 19th century audiences, actors were, in some ways, more important than the characters they played. Audiences often associated a character with a particular actor. In the case of the print, Booth is subject to humiliation for trying to take on a role (Richard III) that audiences associated with Kean.

Walt Whitman called Junius Brutus Booth “the grandest histrion of modern times”

Another interesting dynamic at play in this video involves the tension between the urban theater world of London and that of provincial England. According to Jill, Booth was a provincial actor trying to break-in to the London theater world. As the print suggests, people felt that Booth had a publicity machine pushing and puffing him in public view.

The conflict between Booth and Kean came to an interesting conclusion just a year later. The International Dictionary of Theatre explains that Kean “invit[ed] the younger man over from Covent Garden to Drury Lane on 20 February 1818 to play Iago to his Othello and providing the London public with compelling proof of his superiority.”