James Leach, chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, presented Philip Lampi, the driving force and researcher behind the A New Nation Votes project, with a commendation “for scholarly perseverance and tireless research into election returns from the earliest decades of the American republic” at a ceremony at the American Antiquarian Society on February 16, 2012.

DCA would like to send out our congratulations to Phil and thank him for his years of work that have made A New Nation Votes a reality. Phil is a tireless researcher, a keen scholar, and just about the nicest person one could ever hope to meet.

Did Tuesday’s results in the Republican primary confuse you?  As explained here, by the New York Times, the three elections on Tuesday didn’t really award any delegates.  Yet, that didn’t stop people from voting in them (not a lot of people, as turnout was quite low, but thousands of people nonetheless).

This prompted one colleague to ask me, is there any historical precedent for this?  Or have we just gone crazy, voting for nothing?

The good news (maybe) is that we haven’t gone crazy.  There is a long, storied historical precedent for this.  A perfect example is the 1824 Presidential election.  Do you remember this one?  It’s the one where the President was actually chosen by the House of Representatives because none of the four candidates received a majority in the Electoral College.  There are already a number of misconceptions running around about this election, namely because several states, including New York, which had by far the largest population, didn’t directly elect their presidential electors, and so the popular vote that we have is far from representative of the country as a whole.  But New York wasn’t the only state who didn’t direct elect their electors.  South Carolina was another state where the state legislature elected the electoral ticket.  The rest of the population had absolutely no say in who the legislature would choose.

But that didn’t stop them from saying it anyway.  As can be seen here, there were polls around the state throughout the summer and autumn where the people chose to have their say.  Luckily for them, when the legislature did actually make their choice, they went with a ticket dedicated to Andrew Jackson, the same person who overwhelmingly won the state poll.  But there was nothing that required that the legislature agree with the rest of the population.

And it could have been even more confusing.  At least in South Carolina they knew who they were electing.  In Delaware, they weren’t certain who the electors would vote for and there was a question as to whether they were legally elected.  As seen here, one of the three electors chosen by their legislature ended up voting for William Crawford in the Electoral College.  But of the eight newspapers that reported on the legislative election, five of them listed him as a supporter of Henry Clay.  And there were 30 members of the Delaware legislature at the time and two of the electors only received 15 votes.  “Through a strange and unexpected interpretation of the state law governing tie votes, the president officer of the senate cast an additional vote for each of the Crawford men, both of whom were declared elected.” (History of American Presidential Elections 1789-1968, Volume 1, Arthur M. Schlesinger, jr. Editor, p 374)  And even then, thanks to the confusion in the newspapers, the people still didn’t know who their electors were voting for.

So, cut the people in Colorado, Minnesota and Missouri some slack.  They’re just following historical precedent in casting votes that don’t mean anything.

In the course of doing our work at Tufts, we create or receive a lot of records in paper and electronic form. Many of these records are drafts, copies, or other records that we will need to dispose of at some point. (See the general Records Retention Schedule for rules on how long to keep records and when to destroy them and which records to transfer to the DCA for enduring preservation.) A lot of records we handle at Tufts has confidential or sensitive information that we need to protect. So when we need to get rid of these records we should’t just throw them away in the recycling bin or just leave them on thumb drives or computers that we later throw or give away. This exposes the University to the unnecessary risk of a data breach.

We should all take care to destroy these records confidentially. Fortunately, Tufts has a new set guidelines that explain the best way to destroy records confidentially at Tufts.

Guideline highlights:

• Confidential records destruction should be a habit rather than an exceptional activity.
• Use a cross shredder or Cintas’ destruction bins. Cintas is Tufts’ vendor for confidential records destruction services. More details about using Cintas are in the guidelines.
• Contact your IT support group about what to do with old workstations and laptops. Computers store data in a complex manner that is not readily apparent to end-users. Don’t assume you have manually deleted all confidential or sensitive data on your computers.
• Contact your IT support group about disposing of CDs, flash drives, or other media. One should not give flash drives or other memory devices to family or friends for reuse. Memory devices store data in a complex manner that is not readily apparent to end-users. Deleting files may not fully destroy files on these memory devices.

You may be asking yourself, “why is DCA posting about the Poetry Society of America?”  If you are asking that question, you don’t know about Gustav Davidson. Davidson was executive secretary of the Poetry Society of America from 1949 to 1965, after which time he was elected executive secretary emeritus, and DCA has his papers. I am personally very fond of this collection in that it was one of the first collections that I processed. Additionally, it was a somewhat unique experience for our Archives in that it consists primarily of books.  But before I get into the collection materials, here is a little bit more about Davidson himself:

Gustav Davidson was born in Warsaw, Poland on December 25, 1895.  His family moved to New York City in 1897.  He received his bachelor and master degrees from Columbia University in 1919 and 1920 respectively.  During the twenties and thirties, he wrote and published both dramatic works and poetry and founded and edited several literary magazines.  In 1940,  he founded Fine Editions Press and he was an integral part of the American poetry establishment through the rest of his life. In 1965, he published his most well known book, A Dictionary of Angels, Including the Fallen Angels. Davidson married Mollie Strauss in 1942.  He died February 6, 1971 in New York City.

As for the collection, the majority of this material consists of books from Davidson’s personal collection, many of which are inscribed.  There are some letters, clippings, photographs and promotional brochures interfiled with the books.  Also included in the collection are photographs, clippings, diaries, correspondence, drawings, awards, poems, programs, bulletins, and publications.

Items of special note include a drawing of Robert Frost by Oscar Berger and a letter signed by Robert F. Kennedy (which made me tear up a little as I held it). The full finding aid is available on the Tufts Digital Library.

Materials were donated to DCA by Babette Bandler in 1999.

In an era where people claim we have lost all civility in politics, we look back at an era where civility in politics had a whole different meaning.  Specifically, we can look at three specific elections in Virginia in 1817 and 1818.

In the first one, the congressional race for the 8th district in 1817 (back then, Virginia held their Congressional elections in odd years), we see a close defeat of Armistead T. Mason.  This, in and of itself, doesn’t mean much without context.

Then, in 1818, we have two different elections.  In the first, we have the election for the House of Delegates in Loudoun County.  In this election, John M. McCarty is elected to the House of Delegates.  But, in December of that same year, we have a special election to replace McCarty in the House of Delegates.  What was it that lead to McCarty being unseated in the House of Delegates?  It turns out, from looking at the Genius of Liberty from December 22, 1818 as listed in the notes of Philip Lampi, the lead researcher on the New Nation Votes project, McCarty refused to sign the oath against dueling that was required at the time.  He was unseated and a new election was held to replace McCarty, the aforementioned special election.

So how does this relate to the congressional election from the year before?  Well, as is documented at the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress, McCarty and Mason were brothers-in-law.  And that refusal to sign the oath against dueling?  Well, just two months later, on February 6, 1819, McCarty killed Mason in a duel that arose from the bitterness over Mason’s failed congressional run.

So, the next time you watch the candidates yelling at each other, just be glad they’re not shooting at each other.

Congratulations to our former intern Derek Mosely who the Black Caucus of the American Library Association just named an ALA Emerging Leader! We loved having Derek around and are proud to see the field recognizing him for his leadership skills.

We wish you the best, Derek, as you bring the profession into the future!

You can read the full press release here: http://www.americanlibrariesmagazine.org/news/ala/davis-mosley-named-bcala-emerging-leaders

It’s hard to fight the perception that archives are filled with old things: dusty old elephant tails and black and white photographs. Now, old things can actually be great. Every day on my way to my office I walk by Tisch Library’s black and white print, taken in 1930, of Dorothy Myers at a telescope. I love this image, and its age is part of what I love about it.

But I also love that we have recently taken in a large selection of the photos shot by the University Photography department between 2005-2010. Because as much as I love the dusty old things which are part of our mission, I also love the shiny, colorful things which are also part of our mission.

I just find this set of images so aesthetically pleasing.

Inside Tisch Library.

Parents’ Weekend, 2005

Senior Class Reception, 2005

Tufts Community Day, 2005

Naming ceremony for the Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine, 2005

The last major beam is lifted onto Sophia Gordon Hall after being signed by construction workers, 2005.

The Digital Collections and Archives is pleased to announce the completion of its TAPER Project (Tufts Accessioning Program for Electronic Records). During the project the DCA designed, developed, and implemented machine-readable submission agreements and records context records. The DCA fully implemented the machine-readable submission agreements to document accessions and integrated the production of records context records encoded in EAC-CPF into its normal descriptive practices. By the end of the grant project the DCA encoded 51 records context records about Tufts departments and offices in EAC.

The project deliverables, including our local instructions for implementing EAC, are available to use, adapt, and modify.

TAPER was funded by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission as an electronic records Program Expansion Project grant.

To mark Open Access Week the Tufts University Libraries’ Scholarly Communication Team has launched a website celebrating the recipients of our Provost’s Open Access Fund. The fund has two components: the first, for publishing, funds scholars who choose to publish with author-pays open access; the second, for digitization, supports the creation of sustainable open access digital collections of unique research materials created by Tufts faculty.

All of the publications which have been funded for open access publication have also been made available in the Tufts Digital Library. The digitized research materials will also be made available in the TDL once they are created, digitized, and described.

So congratulations to the recipients of the fund!

Publishing Fund

• Mary E. Davis for “A Retrospective Assessment of Occupational Exposure to Elemental Carbon in the US Trucking Industry in Environmental Health Perspectives.
• Dan Dennett for “Homunculi Rule: Reflections on Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection (Oxford University Press, 2009) by Peter Godfrey Smith” in Biology & Philosophy.
• Daniel Jay, for “Extracellular Heat Shock Protein (Hsp)70 and Hsp90<alpha> Assist in Matrix Metalloproteinase-2 Activation and Breast Cancer Cell Migration and Invasion” in PloS One with Tufts co-authors Jessica Sims (phD student) and Jessicia McCready (postdoc).
• Michael Court, for “Evolution of a Major Drug Metabolizing Enzyme Defect in the Domestic Cat and Other Felidae: Phylogenetic Timing and the Role of Hypercarnivory” in PLoS One with Tufts co-authors Binu Shrestha from the Tufts University School of Medicine, J Michael Reed and Philip T Starks from the Tufts School of Arts and Sciences, and Gretchen E Kaufman from the Tufts Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine.
• Karen Panetta for “Multiresolution Decomposition Schemes Using the Parameterized Logarithmic Image Processing Model with Application to Image Fusion” in EURASIP Journal on Advances in Signal Processing .
• Andrew Ramsburg for “Analytical Modeling of Degradation Product Partitioning Kinetics in Source Zones Containing Entrapped DNAPL” in Water Resources Research with Tufts doctoral candidate Ali Boroumand.

Digitization fund

• Marie-Claire Beaulieu for Greek Epitaphs Online.
• Mark Pokras for Pathology Atlas Digitization.