Congratulations to Lois Gibbs and Phil Lampi on receiving honorary degrees during the Tufts University’s 157th Commencement on May 19, 2013.
Stephen Lester and Lois Gibbs from the Center for Health, Environment, and Justice with Philip Lampi from the American Antiquarian Society and Anne Sauer, Director and University Archivist, Tufts University Digital Collections and Archives
The DCA is pleased to announce that the finding aid for the papers of the Center for Health, Environment and Justice is now available.
The Center for Health, Environment and Justice was founded in 1981 by Lois Marie Gibbs. The organization began as an information clearinghouse for environmental health issues and developed into an organization that focuses on raising awareness for environmental health concerns and assisting communities, organizations and individuals faced with environmental threats. CHEJ publishes a quarterly newsletter, Everyone’s Backyard, and works on campaigns that raise awareness of significant environmental threats to communities across the country and abroad. CHEJ works by conducting conversations with community leaders about their problems and provides advice, leadership training, education and assistance. Through this approach they are able to address a large number of environmental threats and empower communities to take action on their own.
Ms. Gibbs will be on campus this weekend to receive an honorary doctor of public service degree at Tufts’ commencement on Sunday, May 19, 2013.
The DCA staff was overjoyed to see the announcement that Philip Lampi and Lois Gibbs are among the 2013 recipients of honorary degrees. Both Phil and Lois are amazing people who are hugely deserving of this honor, and they are near and dear to all of us at DCA.
Researcher Philip J. Lampi and project director John B. Hench of the American Antiquarian Society
As the New Nation Votes elections portal states, Philip J. Lampi has been collecting election returns for the past 45 years. His dedication and expertise in the area of Early American Politics has aided many contemporary scholars in their research at the Society. In the past, this body of election data was thought to be impossible to collect because of the vast and unwieldy nature of the unindexed newspapers and poor record keeping in this early period. He has received several grants over the years to assist him in his collecting. Under the current NEH grant, project staff and consultants at the American Antiquarian Society, DCA, and elsewhere are working to digitize a good portion of the tens of thousands of typed and handwritten tabulations and raw source materials that Lampi has accumulated as part of his life’s work. The project website will be updated frequently to monitor progress. The available election returns are fully searchable by such key index points as year, geographical constituency, office, names of candidates, and party labels.
Lois Gibbs is an environmental activist who formed the Love Canal Homeowners Association after discovering that her entire neighborhood of Love Canal, Niagara Falls, New York, had been built on a toxic waste dump which also included dioxin. Against strong opposition by local, state and federal government agencies and Occidental Petroleum, the organization succeeded and President Carter issued an Emergency Declaration in October 1980 to get 833 families evacuated and Love Canal cleaned up. Lois Gibbs and the association were instrumental in the establishment of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act, or Superfund. Gibbs founded the Citizens’ Clearinghouse for Hazardous Waste, eventually Center for Health, Environment and Justice in 1980 to support and assist community groups and is its executive director. She has published about Love Canal and their efforts to get it cleaned up and a TV movie was made in called ‘Lois Gibbs: the Love Canal Story.’ Lois’ papers, as well as those of the Center for Health, Environment and Justice are held by the DCA. A new finding aid for the collection will be released in the next few weeks.
DCA is pleased to announce it has recently signed a donor agreement with the Cambridge based organization, Cultural Survival, to preserve its historical records. Cultural Survival (CS) was founded in 1972 to assist indigenous peoples across their globe in ‘struggles for human rights, sovereignty, and autonomy.’
CS was founded by David Maybury-Lewis, Evon Vogt, Jr., Orlando Patterson, and Pia Maybury-Lewis and was originally loosely affiliated with Harvard University where David Maybury-Lewis was a professor of anthropology. To find out more about CS, take a look at its online history.
CS boxes from 2nd shipment
This week DCA received the second major transfer of historical records including office records, project and special project files, CS publications, reports, publicity material and limited runs of smaller indigenous publications that might be difficult to obtain elsewhere. Among these records, photographs, slides, and VHS tapes created by indigenous peoples will be invaluable in documenting a history long ignored in Euro-American discourse regarding indigenous issues, self-empowerment, and the development of indigenous organizations across the globe.
As part of this donor agreement, Ted MacDonald, CS first project director, also transferred about 25 linear feet of historical materials to DCA. His files cover the first 15 years of projects developed, funded, or rejected by CS and will reveal many gems: take here a look at a very early example of self-demarcation by the indigenous Ye’kuana in Southern Venezuela (creating ethno-cultural maps) completed in 1995.
And then read a CS Quarterly article about this project, The Ye’kuana Self-Demarcation Process, published fifteen years later when such demarcation projects had become wide-spread.
The Fletcher Forum of World Affairs is now freely available online. This twice-yearly student publication was founded in 1975. It publishes articles, essays, and book reviews on legal, political, economic and diplomatic aspects of international affairs. Thanks to the new digital library interface you can now browse the the articles by issue.
Digital Collections and Archives, in conjunction with UIT Educational & Scholarly Technology Services, is pleased to announce the launch of our new interface for the Tufts Digital Library.
Our new interface is built entirely on FLOSS (Free, Libre, and Open Source Software). The underlying data storage is managed with the Fedora Commons Repository. Our user interface is developed using Blacklight and Hydra, with indexing powered by Solr.
Our old interface, an entirely homegrown product written in Java, served us well for nearly a decade, and we are thankful for the designers and developers who helped us bring our materials to the public as one of the earlier university digital libraries. Now we have a new design which brings a modern discovery interface to aid our users, and a broad community of developers with whom we can collaborate.
DCA is grateful for everyone who has helped us bring this new interface from design to fruition in one year.
(This morning as I was walking around the office, cajoling my coworkers into labeling themselves with stickers that say “I Support Open Access”, I realized how many of us are employed in the business of creating open access to scholarship and research data. Just thinking about all of my colleagues who are digitizing the painstakingly gathered election data that comprise the “A New Nation Votes: American Election Returns 1787-1825” project makes me proud; we are creating a vital research collection for historians, and jobs for us. Huzzah for open access, I say!)
Sally Ride died a week ago, after a battle with pancreatic cancer. She was amazing not only for being the first American woman in space, but for her career after her retirement from NASA. She (among many other achievements) founded Sally Ride Science, an organization dedicated to motivating both girls and boys to pursue their interests in science, technology, engineering, and math.
Since Apollo 10, NASA has used music to awaken astronauts on space missions. On her fifth morning in space, Dr. Ride — a Stanford alumna — was awoken by the “Stanford Hymn” (among other songs). But on her second morning in space Dr. Ride and the rest of the crew were awoken by an a cappella rendering of “Tuftonia’s Day” by our own Beelzebubs. Why? Because on Dr. Ride’s first flight, shuttle mission STS-7 from June 18-24, 1983, she was joined by pilot Rick Hauck, A62.
Dr. Hauck, an NROTC student, more recently served on the Board of Trustees from 1988 to 2002, and received an honorary Doctorate of Public Service. In 1985, Tufts awarded the Presidential Medal to Dr. Hauck, who presented then-president Dr. Jean Mayer with a patch and flag which had traversed the world in the space shuttle Challenger. That patch and flag — along with a photograph of the entire crew, including Dr. Ride — are pictured here.
We mourn Dr. Ride and honor her life and achievements.
The recent talk of the archive world is this article from the Atlantic. I know this because I was sent it by my colleagues here at Tufts and my colleagues at AAS. In essence, it points out that what people term “discoveries” aren’t really discoveries. They’re in the archives and have been preserved, but many archives don’t know everything that’s there because there isn’t time enough in the world for item-level cataloging.
Well, at A New Nation Votes we know what we have – over 40,000 pages of election information. But as we get to the nitty-gritty of election results, we do find some amusing tidbits. (Well, we find them amusing.) Like the fact that in 1821, one person in the town of Boston (Boston didn’t become a city until the next year) voted for Napoleon Buonoparte for Governor. Napoleon got only the one vote, which was good, since he was in exile on St. Helena at the time and he died only a couple of weeks after the election was held.
There was also the congressional race in the 16th District in New York in 1804, when Judas Iscariot got one vote. And that wasn’t Judas’ only vote in New York. He received a vote in the Assembly race in Washington County two years later, along with Napoleon, Talleyrand and Benedict Arnold. Clearly some voters weren’t happy with their choices for candidates.
So, remember, whether you voted for Bill Clinton or Bill the Cat (my go-to write-in vote in elections that frustrate me thanks to years of Bloom County), your vote has been recorded for posterity. And you might just create a good laugh for some researcher 200 years from now.
Whoa, it has been a month since we last blogged. It’s busy around here in archivesland!
One of the many world events on our mind is the decision in the Georgia state e-reserves case. Of course e-reserves themselves are the purview of the library, not the DCA, and I admit I am speaking here with dual hats: Digital Resources Archivist and co-chair of the Tufts Scholarly Communication Team. But while wearing either of those hats (have I mentioned how much I adore hats?), I care passionately about copyright, fair use, and open access. The Tufts Digital Library hosts the University’s open access repository for faculty, student, and staff scholarship. Meanwhile, the Scholarly Communication Team helps faculty both publish open access (by providing advice as well as it co-administering the Provost’s Open Access Fund to fund open access publishing) and negotiate fair use as they design their own teaching materials.
While much of the 350-page decision (PDF) will primarily be of concern to people designing the reserves or online coursework, some of the decision will be of concern to anyone who deals with scholarship, open access, or the publishing. In some cases the court found for the defendant (GSU) because the publishers could not show a chain of copyright registration, work for hire agreements, or copyright assignment. As James Grimmelman put it, the putative owners didn’t have all their papers in order. This should be a warning to those of us who negotiate any rights, even the deposit right into open access repositories. Do we have a reliable chain of custody over that documentation? Courts care.
We should also note that the court looked at log files for evidence of whether or not works were downloaded when making their decision. Should this have an effect on the retention policies around our log files? Worth thinking about, at least.
The Center for Health, Environment and Justice was founded in 1981 by Lois Marie Gibbs. The organization began as an information clearinghouse for environmental health issues and developed into an organization that focuses on raising awareness for environmental health concerns and assisting communities, organizations and individuals faced with environmental threats. CHEJ publishes a quarterly newsletter, Everyone’s Backyard, and works on campaigns that raise awareness of significant environmental threats to communities across the country and abroad. CHEJ works by conducting conversations with community leaders about their problems and provides advice, leadership training, education and assistance. Through this approach they are able to address a large number of environmental threats and empower communities to take action on their own.
