GENERAL SOCIETY OF MECHANICS AND TRADESMEN LIBRARY

Look around you, New Yorkers. What do you see, in the most literal way? Bricks, of course! We live in a city made out of bricks. These humble little rectangles of baked earth – red, yellow, or glazed into unnatural colors – constitute the visual signature of New York. Until the grand old 19th and 20th century buildings are replaced by the glass and aluminum cereal boxes poking straight up, they remain the single most dominant building cladding material and gives the city the warm earth-tone glow of the old industrial city it once was.

brick wall

But no one thinks too much about the poor, humble brick except maybe architects, bricklayers, designers and the people who actually create them. For the curious among us, who need to know the whats and wherefores of even common objects, brick might be a candidate for a morning’s research – where do they come from? How are they made? Why is New York so full of brick and not pine or plastic or Vermont granite?

If you are so inclined to add another brick to your wall of learning, the next stop would be find some expertise on the subject. And that is what brings us to the remarkable 200-year old General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen Library at 20 West 44th Street in Manhattan. This subscription library, which is open to the public for a small fee, offers a 100,000+ volume collection of urban construction information that is a builders’ dream. You want to know about bricks? Here’s a sample of what their catalog offers on the subject.

Library at the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen

The headquarters is stunning inside, with a soaring skylight and enough turn-of-the-century oak details that make you think CorneliusVanderbilt himself is about to drop off his overdue books on railroad construction and engineering. And a little odd bit of interest: the library houses a collection of more than 400 rare and unusual locks. The society hosts a lecture series, curtailed now because of the Covid, but check back in when life returns to whatever will be the closest to normal we can muster. You can use the locksmithing collection to practice your safecracking skills or simply brush up on the finer points of designing supertall plumbing risers.

Details on the Society’s library, services, fees and hour are here.

GET SMARTer EXTRA CREDIT!

CCNY Libraries

There’s no place like home.

Covid-19 may have closed the doors on City College’s libraries, but it hasn’t shut down the services

Campus may be all but inaccessible until at least Fall 2021, but the libraries are still serving faculty and students remotely.

Best yet, you can use the enforced isolation of the current lockdown to learn more about what the library can do for you. Get to know this invaluable resource.

First things first. This is not a public library, so you will need to login with your CCNY credentials to access the catalog and ask questions of the reference librarians.

Login here:
https://library.ccny.cuny.edu/

THE DIVISIONS

At City College, there is no single library, but different divisions each featuring collections that serve the research and study needs of different groups of students and professors.

The Morris R. Cohen Library
https://library.ccny.cuny.edu/cohenlibrary

Morris Cohen

When most CCNY students think of “the library,” what they have in mind is the main library in the NAC, the Morris R. Cohen Library, which specializes in the humanities and social sciences and serves as the primary library for the college.

The Music Library
https://library.ccny.cuny.edu/musiclibrary

For jazz fans, it offers a brilliant collection of jazz recordings, plus scores, 12,000 books and videos. It’s in Shepard Hall.

Architecture Library
https://library.ccny.cuny.edu/architecturelibrary

When you need a blueprint for study of buildings, green construction, design or other guidance on the built environment, see the master information builders at the Architecture Library in the Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture building

Archives and Special Collections
https://library.ccny.cuny.edu/archives

Wait no longer to explore these extensive archives, where the singular collection offers details on the storied City College of New York – they sometimes call Harvard the CCNY on the Charles – and its remarkable Hatch-Billops oral histories of prominent African-Americans collected between 1970 and 1974.

GENERAL SOCIETY OF MECHANICS AND TRADESMEN LIBRARY

Look around you, New Yorkers. What do you see, in the most literal way? Bricks, of course! We live in a city made out of bricks. These humble little rectangles of baked earth – red, yellow, or glazed into unnatural colors – constitute the visual signature of New York. Until the grand old 19th and 20th century buildings are replaced by the glass and aluminum cereal boxes poking straight up, they remain the single most dominant building cladding material and gives the city the warm earth-tone glow of the old industrial city it once was.

brick wall

But no one thinks too much about the poor, humble brick except maybe architects, bricklayers, designers and the people who actually create them. For the curious among us, who need to know the whats and wherefores of even common objects, brick might be a candidate for a morning’s research – where do they come from? How are they made? Why is New York so full of brick and not pine or plastic or Vermont granite?

If you are so inclined to add another brick to your wall of learning, the next stop would be find some expertise on the subject. And that is what brings us to the remarkable 200-year old General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen Library at 20 West 44th Street in Manhattan. This subscription library, which is open to the public for a small fee, offers a 100,000+ volume collection of urban construction information that is a builders’ dream. You want to know about bricks? Here’s a sample of what their catalog offers on the subject.

Library at the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen

The headquarters is stunning inside, with a soaring skylight and enough turn-of-the-century oak details that make you think CorneliusVanderbilt himself is about to drop off his overdue books on railroad construction and engineering. And a little odd bit of interest: the library houses a collection of more than 400 rare and unusual locks. The society hosts a lecture series, curtailed now because of the Covid, but check back in when life returns to whatever will be the closest to normal we can muster. You can use the locksmithing collection to practice your safecracking skills or simply brush up on the finer points of designing supertall plumbing risers.

Details on the Society’s library, services, fees and hour are here.

GET SMARTer EXTRA CREDIT!

The Web of Knowledge. (Not a metaphor.)

Real webs in a real library shut down the stacks.

It’s European. It’s reclusive. It’s hella poisonous.
Compare to the size of the adult European recluse spider, above. (To scale.)

You just knew they were in there, didn’t you? The back of the library stacks always were places of mystery and danger. They were also good places to make out, catch a nap or hide out from that bonehead from Econ class bugging you for your notes. Thanks to the remoteness of the shelves, they also are ideal habitats for creatures who also want to stay out of other people’s way, for reasons of their own.

Include in that last category of stacks dwellers the European recluse spider.

Turns out the librarians at the undergrad library at University of Michigan in Ann Arbor discovered a couple of the little buggers lurking there and totally freaked out – they shut the doors for two days depriving the Wolverines not only the consolations of post-modern lit crit and the comforts of study carrells ringed with coffee stains, but robbed them of the chance to risk life and limb braving arachnid neurotoxins. The New York Times spins out the details.

True, the spiders are called “recluses” for a reason. They want nothing to do with the likes of us, or so the entymologists want us to believe. As every parent has told every child cowering in fear when coming across a creepy-crawly, “They are more afraid of you than you are of them.”

Sure. Even dim five-year olds know the truth. You’re lying to me now, Pops.

The experts assure us that these guys only bite in self-defense. They don’t attack because they are out to avenge themselves on the human race on behalf of their insectoid brethren. Even the library bosses agreed that shutting the doors over a couple of hairy-looking little beasts just trying to live a peaceful life in the corner of the bound volumes was overkill.

Still, you can’t blame them. The last thing library managers need in these days of cutbacks and competition from online services and janky wifi is another reason for patrons to stay out of the real library. Hairy, fanged spiders harassing the undergrads is one of them.

***

CCNY Libraries

There’s no place like home.

Covid-19 may have closed the doors on City College’s libraries, but it hasn’t shut down the services

Campus may be all but inaccessible until at least Fall 2021, but the libraries are still serving faculty and students remotely.

Best yet, you can use the enforced isolation of the current lockdown to learn more about what the library can do for you. Get to know this invaluable resource.

First things first. This is not a public library, so you will need to login with your CCNY credentials to access the catalog and ask questions of the reference librarians.

Login here:
https://library.ccny.cuny.edu/

THE DIVISIONS

At City College, there is no single library, but different divisions each featuring collections that serve the research and study needs of different groups of students and professors.

The Morris R. Cohen Library
https://library.ccny.cuny.edu/cohenlibrary

Morris Cohen

When most CCNY students think of “the library,” what they have in mind is the main library in the NAC, the Morris R. Cohen Library, which specializes in the humanities and social sciences and serves as the primary library for the college.

The Music Library
https://library.ccny.cuny.edu/musiclibrary

For jazz fans, it offers a brilliant collection of jazz recordings, plus scores, 12,000 books and videos. It’s in Shepard Hall.

Architecture Library
https://library.ccny.cuny.edu/architecturelibrary

When you need a blueprint for study of buildings, green construction, design or other guidance on the built environment, see the master information builders at the Architecture Library in the Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture building

Archives and Special Collections
https://library.ccny.cuny.edu/archives

Wait no longer to explore these extensive archives, where the singular collection offers details on the storied City College of New York – they sometimes call Harvard the CCNY on the Charles – and its remarkable Hatch-Billops oral histories of prominent African-Americans collected between 1970 and 1974.


Picture perfect.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then the Library of Congress’s
Print and Photograph Division is worth 14 x 109 of them.

Pre-selfie.

There are certain inventions that explode on the scene. The telephone, the automobile, the airplane and the Internet all took off from critical breakthrough into commercially viable products in just a few short years.

Add photography to that list of overnight sensations. The ability to “fix a shadow” as the early pioneers of photography called their goal, first became practical in the 1840s. But by the time of the U.S. Civil War, anyone who was anyone was having his portrait taken at Mathew Brady’s studio in New York or Washington; soon, the technology became so cheap and the demand to have pictures made was so great that ordinary people clamored to have themselves snapped for posterity. (Nothing back then snapped in the way we mean it today. Early cameras and the chemistry needed to produce an image were notoriously slow. cf. Cellphone photography.)

Kodak turned us into a nation of amateur photographers. We’ve been saying cheese ever since.

The result was a society that began to photograph and record everything. There are photos galore of the rich, the famous, the criminal and the historical. There are landscapes and cityscapes and dogs and cats and … look … If you can point at a camera at it or make a print of it, there’s probably a picture of it.

Nowhere can you take a deeper dive into the fascinating and rich pictorial record of the United States than at the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress. It’s an immense collection. Better yet, about 1,000,000 of its 14 million images are digitized and many of its prints are available for low-cost purchase in digital format for printing at home. This is a treasure vault of images for historians, artists, designers and the merely curious. Covering more than 18o years of materials, this is single largest archives of photos and prints in the world. Don’t miss it.

* **

Why so glum? In case you’re wondering why it was everyone looked so damn somber in those old pictures, it’s not because they couldn’t simple take selfies and show them off on some 1863 version of Instagram. Nor is it because post-mortem photography was a thing in the Victorian era.

Smiling in photos actually has a complicated history. Common wisdom was that the serious expressions were a by-product of the lengthy exposures required to get an image back then (30 seconds to 2 or 3 minutes, depending on the light). Holding a smile that long is near impossible. Try to find a non-blurry child or horse in old photos. They can’t ever stand still long enough.

Makes sense, but that’s only part of the story. Smiling in a painted portrait usually didn’t come across as “happy” back then. Instead, smiles and grins in pictures came across as drunk, crazy or evil. There is still has no single satisfactory answer of why we still say “cheese” and smile for pictures, but it’s probably easier to figure out how the smile became standard than understand the whys and wherefores of duck face.

BONUS ARCHIVE: The Duchenne Medical Photography Archives and Museum

Sometime around 1875, French doctor G.-B. Duchenne used electrical stimulus on the facial muscles to simulate different emotional states and photographed the results. This subject is smiling, but he doesn’t appear particularly happy, know what I’m sayin’?

Web site

http://www.loc.gov

Catalog

https://www.loc.gov/pictures/

Collection and Subject Area Guides and Finding Aids

https://www.loc.gov/rr/print/coll/collguid.html

Search tips

https://www.loc.gov/pictures/help/#tips

Voter suppression. It’s getting worse.

If your vote didn’t matter, they wouldn’t be trying so hard to take it away from you.” — Samuel L. Jackson

There is an old saying in politics, usually mis-attributed to Joseph Stalin: “It’s not the vote who counts, but who counts the votes.” Despite the baseless claims of Donald Trump’s post-election rampage of lies and misinformation regarding election results, a cynical project of bad faith that culminated in a bloody riot at the Capitol on January 6, American elections are actually secure and accurately reflected voter preferences. Nevertheless, the made-up outrage over “election fraud” is not only is not going away, GOP lawmakers are still pressing home the fiction that American elections cannot be trusted. Keep tabs on that vile efforts afoot to roll back laws that impede voters, especially non-white voters, at NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice.

Voter suppression, of course, is nothing new and has an old and ugly history in the United States, dating to Reconstruction and the associaed racial terror immediately after the Civil War aimed at maintaining white supremacy at the ballot box. The effort to deny full voting rights is still with us and is in full flower a statehouses across the nation.

It is one of the oddities of American politics that elections, even for federal offices like the Presidency, are not governed by federal law but by a hodgepodge of 50 state laws, subject to the whims of state lawmakers. That’s why it is so important to pass H.R. 1, a federal bill now in Congress will help protect voters throughout the U.S. and help prevent partisans from playing games with the single most important part of a democratic republic: the right of the people to have their vote count and to be free of interference in the process of casting that choice.

Write, call, text or e-mail your representative in Congress to voice your support of the a bill, which recently passed the House. The similar Senate bill, S. 1 will be kicked around to an uncertain future in the Senate. Keep an eye out for it in the news. When it comes to voting and suffrage that came at the expense of people’s lives, don’t let your franchise be stolen from you. Use it or lose it and most of all, protect it from people who are giving up on democracy itself.

To scan or not to scan. That is some question.

Information wants to be free.” – Stewart Brand (1984)

Why not just scan everything in the archive? Look what Google did for more than 40 million books forlornly sitting on library shelves throughout the world, unloved, unknown and worst of all, unread. Google started scanning them.

After enlisting the cooperation of librarians and trundling some high-octane scanning tools into the stacks, Google made all those otherwise orphaned books accessible. They OCR’d everything from rare titles to historical materials to … well, whatever it is that is represented by those 40 million books. Once scanned, the contents of these works can now be surfaced almost effortlessly at the end of a specialized Google search. It is a brand of magic that would make Merlin throw out his wand and pointy hat and quit sorcery to enroll in a computer science class.

Scanner.
Someone’s got to man the scan.

The benefits of scanning text collections, as we know now from G-Books, are very clear. What’s stopping archivists? Why don’t archivists roll in the scanners, digitize the fonds, upload the results to their Web site and Presto! Change-o! Instant full-text search, easier finding without all that record profiling and best of all, protection of rare, fragile or popular materials from the abuses of mishandling.

Would that it were that easy.

Start with the very simple fact that no archive in the world has a fraction of the money that Google does. Scanning costs money. It’s laborious. It’s expensive to do on a large scale; even such archival behemoths as the Smithsonian and the Library of Congress haven’t burrowed very deeply into their own collections and those guys are working with jillionaire budgets.

When it comes to the “scan/no scan” question, see what the archivists at the Peel Archives and Museum (serving the region of Peel in and around Brompton, Ontario) have to say on the subject in this interesting post. It is not a simple issue.

In the same vein, this video covers much of the same turf. It comes courtesy of the Australian Mutuals History. In short, scan where you can or scan where you must, but understand that finding aids and archivists are still the best way for archives to help their patrons get their (gloved and protected) hands on an archival record.

Giamatti Research Center at the Baseball Hall of Fame

Resources available at sports halls of fame can make research a slam dunk.

Il Bambino x 9.

If there is one aspect of American life that cries out for archival preservation, it’s the memory of our sports leagues and competitions. Name your favorite sport and there is more than likely (1) a Hall of Fame for the sport, (2) an associated reference library associated with that hall staffed by smart researchers who can field even arcane questions and (3) usually an archive.

The Giamatti Research Center at the Baseball Hall of Fame, named the former MLB commissioner Bart Giamatti, is one of the great ones. Their research library and archives have old box scores, multimedia records of broadcasts, line-ups, bios of players and just about anything else to make the heart of a diehard [Insert your team here] fan go thumpetty-thump.

The researchers are awesome. Arguing with your uncle about some obscure 1936 Yankees game? Don’t go to the videotape. Go to these researchers. They’ve archived all the play-by-play you will ever need.

OTHER SPORTS HALLs OF FAME

Basketball

Alas, no searchable archive or research library, though the contacts do list an archivist. The University of Kansas maintains a centralized archive of materials concerning basketball’s inventor James Naismith. Good luck finding a collection of original Air Jordans.

Web site
The Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame

Bowling

Bowling has a hall of fame. In St. Louis. I have been to it. I am proud of that.

There is no library or searchable archive that I could find, but the international museum does have a feature titled “Explore the Vault” – you might want to tune in to the oxymoronic “Bowling Fashion” for tips on how to stay stylin’ on the lanes.

Web sites
Bowling Museum and Hall of Fame
International Bowling Museum and Hall of Fame

Football

Web site
Pro Football Hall of Fame
Research
Pro Football Research and Preservation Center
You have to submit requests in writing. Information about how to proceed is on the site.

Golf

Web site
USGA Golf Museum

Research
USGA Gold Museum Research and Resources

Soccer (“Football” to non-Americans)

Web Site
FIFA World Football Museum

Library
The Library at FIFA World Football Museum

Tennis

Web site

International Tennis Hall of Fame

Research
Information Research Center

eight ball

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Library and Archives

Mick and Keith brush up on the day’s current events.

Not everyone from the heyday of rock and roll was so burned out that they forgot to keep stuff. The original rockers and rappers, stars and wannabes alike, left a considerable amount of interesting materials behind. These are records donated by obsessed fans and collectors, collections of actual musicians like Steve “Little Steven” Van Zandt (Bruce Springsteen’s guitarist sidekick, Silvio from “The Sopranos” and host of Little Steven’s Underground Garage satellite radio show) and assorted business records, concert ephemera and the other unique materials, like stuff from the Ramones’ manager Danny Fields. (Note: Don’t ever describe archival records as “stuff”).

Note: Don’t ever describe archival records as “stuff”

Rock and roll will never die, but parts of it will be properly mummified for eternity on the shores of Lake Erie.

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