 Jessica Hageman at Alden Library again and we today we have a live video preview of a new exhibit we have going up on the fifth floor called Civil War Stories. We have an event next week as well Tuesday at 2 p.m. on the fourth floor where you can learn more about the materials in this collection and the family who plays a pretty central role. Some of the people include the family who plays a central role in these materials of Civil War letters. So I'm going to move away and let you meet the all their library staff who are working so hard. I'm putting this together today because that's what they're doing. They're literally putting the exhibit up today on the fifth floor. So Stacey would like to come on in. Hi everyone I'm Stacey Lavender. I'm the Special Collections Librarian for our Manuscripts Collections here at Alden. And yeah so today we're installing an exhibit about the Civil War with my colleague Carmen. Yeah. We'll be working on now. Okay so yeah so we just started putting things into the case. This is the first case I think that has anything in it. And so these are just some documents about what it was like being a soldier in the Civil War we have. Just some like rules for the regiment and the list of people that didn't show up for drill. I'll show you my favorite. Oh yeah so can we hear the story behind this tiny image once you. Yeah okay so this is Edwin Brown. Little tiny picture. And he the Brown family is a family that we have about 500 letters that members of that family wrote. And Edwin's one of the largest featured people in that class. We have about 200 letters I think from Edwin and he fought in the Civil War. And so Carmen and I have spent all this time reading these letters but we have no photographs of anyone in the Brown family so we thought until earlier this week when I opened up an envelope that has Edwin's discharge papers in it and this teeny tiny photo of him popped up. So it was the first time that any of us got to see him and so we were really excited about it because it was like finally getting to put a face to someone that you've known for so long. It was like having an internet friend or someone and then something and then meeting them in real life. So yeah we're really excited about that and he's going to be in the exhibit. This little tiny version and also a slightly blown up version because it is really small. But yeah so that was a really exciting discovery for this week and how about we we'll flip around and then we'll talk to you. All right so I'm going to slowly without trying to make anyone dizzy turn around so you can see kind of what else is going on here. So this is the fifth floor of the library. We're going past the exhibit space and then turning around there's the administrator's space. You can see we have some more this whole all of these are going to be filled right yeah so there's some kind of flat cases here that will eventually have parts of the display and now there's more of the display and Carmen who is reminding me of your title. Digital Projects Library. Yes so you've been working largely on getting these materials digitized right and online so can you tell us a little bit about that and then yeah so it's been a very long process the planning digitization description the database design and then putting those items into the database has taken us almost a year now so we're very excited to have this material online and people to be able to make their own Civil War stories with the materials that are available for research. So as part of this exhibit we will be focusing on the lived experience of the Civil War as well as the experience of remembering the war in subsequent decades using rare books from the Montcenter and special the Montcenter for Archives and Special Collections. We will be focusing on material that will be in this case which will be focusing on Paul Lawrence Dunbar who is a famous Ohio poet whose father fought in the Civil War for the Union Army after escaping slavery after the emancipation procuration and this is going to be called inherited memory because not only are you seeing the inheritance that Paul Lawrence Dunbar got from his father but after Dunbar died of tuberculosis when he was only in his early 30s that mantle was passed to Elliot Blaine Henderson another Ohioan African-American he was from Columbus who wrote in the same style as Dunbar but he was angrier he they both wrote they composed their verse in a style that was attractive to white audiences of the day and there's evidence that Henderson really rankled a bit more at being economically forced to write in this style and so it's a very interesting transmission of the the story of African-American troops from the Civil War period until the early 20th century. So the case behind you at the very far wall will be remembering the war the case that Stacey is stalking at the moment is living the war. What about in the middle? We're going to have a selection of diaries from several soldiers in the war contrasted with a modern artist book interpretation of a prisoner of war style so it has a lot of really interesting infusions in it such as bones, dirt, some some really cool artistic compositions and we'll be flipping a page in the artist book every week and then the other case will just be the patriotic letterhead and um envelopes that were printed by a number of printers during the war period some of them are are very um very very very strong yet pointed um have very strong messages about deaths to traitors and and the tree of liberty and so like propaganda in themselves the the people who study these call them patriotic covers but they're it's very much popular it's also very very colorful very visually appealing it worked well for the exhibit and we'll be swapping those out yes okay yes you probably get both of you and if you want to yeah we'll be swapping the patriotic stationary out I think we have a lot of it so we want it to get as much of it to get shown as possible and it's sensitive so we want it not to be out there's definitely there's concerns about the light-sensitive nature of the materials that are going to be in the exhibit because in case when exposed to light um and the paper will yellow but um for example um the blood on William McKnight on the letter yeah we have a William McKnight body um might not be on display um all three months we ever met similarly that we'll be putting up if the uh if it looks like if it starts to look like it's having a problem okay swap it out is that um was it like a cheaper paper because of it was like mass produced or um like or is it just the nature of the time period it has to do with the transition from rag pulp paper to wood pulp paper in the 1850s so um earlier paper um tends to last a lot longer the the very um toxic process of creating paper in the early manufacturing period um involves a lot of acid so that is um just it's the inherent vice um as it's called in conservation circles of the material it's just from the moment it is manufactured um that acid is just eating away at the fibers and they're getting shorter and shorter and shorter which is what makes it brittle and also makes it discolored there's a particular um chemical in the I think maybe the lignin of the um of the wood pulp that causes it to discolor I think it's a binder I'm not sure you haven't studied the chemistry of paper down to the that level of detail um okay so could you just talk a little bit for like those of us who aren't who don't do exhibits like this what is like the process like for deciding what goes in and then it looks like you're doing like these things in the background like could you just walk us a little bit through that process of creating yeah um in exhibit design you want to create multiple levels of possible engagement so you want to be able to visually arrest the people who are this is a high traffic low engagement area so you want to be able to have things that will really um pop out and maybe somebody will just learn one fact and that's fine then you also want to be able to um engage like the the medium um visitors who people who will maybe spend five minutes here they might read um each one of these wall case sections will have a theme and so they might read a little bit of the introduction to that theme um and then we also have individual item labels because we um as a academic library have to follow best practices in terms of citations and um allowing people to because these material will all be available for in-person research that's one of the great things about a library as opposed to a museum which museums are also awesome but um we want people to be able to follow these threads on their own if they so desire so each item will be identified there will be more information about um some of the items it's just it's it's a multi-level um engagement process yeah and for me I mean we sort of split the cases up and we're working pretty freely on our each on our own sections but for me it farts out as a much more theoretical process like the kinds of things that I want to be in the exhibit and engage in being able to engage different people and then the next thing you do is try to actually lay it out in the cases and see sort of logistically what will work and that help that makes you have to make a lot of changes as well um so a few weeks ago I we both laid stuff out in our cases to make sure like we had enough stuff and that we wanted to fit and that sort of thing um and then today we've been putting up these um colorful backings in the cases because usually they're just white and they're kind of dingy looking um and then yeah starting to put the physical stuff in and then next will come labels and um text and that sort of thing so it's there's still a lot stuff to go it sounds pretty intensive yeah and if we're trying to um to create um and these people to be able to explore these individual items online we'll see how that works yeah yeah hopefully there will be like a link you can follow to the item online or something like that but that's not no promises there okay and so some of these materials are part of the Civil War correspondence collection using yes so and can you just kind of briefly tell us about what that is exactly yeah so what's online I guess yeah okay so right now what's online is the brown family letters which I mentioned earlier is one of our largest collections almost 500 letters um so those are already publicly available online through our digital collection site um and then slowly we'll be adding more Civil War letters from other collections we have about 15 collections that have Civil War letters so theoretically almost everything that's in this exhibit at least the Civil War era documents not the rare books um will eventually be part of this collection it's just going to be a slowly growing kind of thing because that's also a pretty intensive process right Garmin well and as soon as I'm done with this exhibit I can actually start adding stuff in again um I had I had to take a break um and yeah yeah the last three weeks of that we'll be back to yeah for us we'll be back to regularly scheduled programming next week okay so when you come to visit this exhibit be you know that Stacy and Carmen and the students who probably help you like with put the materials online like and all that kind of stuff have been working on this for literally more than a year and the exhibit itself it sounds like for a couple weeks intensively and then about to mention all the planning so um can you just briefly talk about the event on Tuesday and what will happen there yeah sure there's a lot of stuff going on at the event um the dean will introduce us we'll talk for a little bit about the process of getting the digital archive online and also what's in it what you could expect to find how you can search in it um what potential uses this could have for research um why these people who were not famous leaders or generals um are important and why um being able to study the experience of ordinary Ohioans can um lead us to some very startling conclusions about what life was like here and then we will go into the dramatic portion of the event where students and faculty from the theater department will be dramatizing the letters they will be wearing um clothing that suggests the period they're not going to pull out in costume but they're currently practicing um their letters they will be embodying five different characters from the Brown family um and you'll get a really good sense of um their trials and tribulations um when um the world literally split apart for them um and they're you know southeast Ohio is right on the border um there's a lot of interesting things that were happening here during that time period um and then finally there will be a hands-on participatory session for all people who are um going to be in the um attending the events where they will get to make their own civil war era um letter using period stationary um fountain pens ink and ceiling wax awesome that sounds like super fun yeah it's been really fun um not near the materials i'm sure yes okay awesome um all right anything do you want to show us anything you have handy like just close up or is it all kind of packed away still um we have grab the diary yeah we have edwin's diary oh um edwin um this is just a tiny strip of fabric um that edwin wrote his name and home on and he would have um sewed this into all of his uniforms oh wow um so it's actually four different um same thing yeah four repetitions um for four different pieces of clothing um and then we have this diary um which is one of two that edwin wrote during the war in pencil he was less literate perhaps than some of the other people um represented in the collection so let me tell you transcribing it was interesting um he uses a lot of really phonetic spelling um it makes a lot more sense if you're reading it out loud with a little bit of an accent you can see the accent in the in the letters that he chose um when spelling the words um it was it was a very interesting story especially when he was um serving at a hospital and he's talking the the civil war was the first um war where um morphine um especially and um and advances in surgery allowed for mass amputations so when people were getting limbs shattered by um by the the new fangled bullets um then they would just take off the limb and so he's talking about like three limbs off today four limbs off the next day um it's just it's a it's a very personal visceral um window into this experience yeah he talks that I know there's like one quote where he's like I've gotten so good at cutting off fingers as easy as pie or something not exactly that but to that effect and you're like whoa and he lost a finger as well yeah um and he was given like a two week for a low because of it and then they sent him right back so wow that wow yeah okay well I'm really looking forward to you anymore about edwin and all the browns and um yeah is there anything else you want to say before we sign on you just really got to come and um see the whole experience yeah I think so we're gonna have to get some pictures for sure when everything is back up and I love that you're um training I'm gonna show these like flat cases here when you so the one is the one over there is going to have the letters with the different ones each week okay so we'll try to get some pictures and put them on our instagram for you so you can see but please join us on Tuesday at 2 p.m on the fourth floor of the library and thank you so much to Carmen and Stacy who I'm going to swivel over here and show for all their work and for being willing to be on camera and talk about it endlessly all right so thank you both thank you