 Welcome everybody. It's really great to have you here tonight, despite the World Series. I'm trying to get Gladys to come sit down, but she's enjoying herself too much back there. So welcome. I'm the manager of Special Collections and the current city archivist, and I'm really pleased to see everybody here tonight. And we are celebrating our 50th birthday. Woo! So 50 years ago, city librarian William Holman, who sends us his congratulations, Mayor John Shelley, past president of the Library Commission, Nat Schmulowitz, UC Berkeley professor James D. Hart, and president of the Friends of the Library, Marjorie Stern, our patron saint, came together to formally dedicate the opening of the Rare Books and Special Collections Department at the Library with a public event and program. I am so proud of what we've accomplished over these last 50 years. Operationally, when I first arrived 19 years ago in the old, beautiful building across the street, we had one staff computer for the entire Special Collections Department of 10 people, and nobody was using it. We also shared one staff telephone. I'm not kidding you. We now have a staff of 18, most of us with our own computers and telephones. We have gone from a five-day-a-week operation closed for lunch, which was very civilized, and now we've gone to our current opening of seven days a week, including evenings. We have gone from a department with no processed archival collections and finding aids to a room filled with researchers using Hollinger boxes of collections. It just warms the cockles of my heart, and our finding aids are accessible both in our catalog and in the online archives of California. In our photo collection, we have gone from scheduled photo shoots in the room to having over 40,000 digitized images online, processing hundreds of photo orders each year, and delivering most of them electronically. We have grown and achieved quite a bit. There's something special about working in a Special Collections Department in a public library. It's different from working in a university or in a historical society setting. We have a wide range of patrons. We serve many kinds of communities, income levels, ages, and interests. Our reading room is open to everyone, and our materials are available to everybody. I think of us as the university for the rest of us. A true democracy, a place where any interested person can come in to view our Kelmscott Chaucer, so long as your hands are clean, or handle Harvey Milk's original speeches with his annotations, or look through the pages of the psychedelic hippie newspaper, The San Francisco Oracle. It's an honor for all of us to work for and manage this San Francisco resource. There's something wonderful about helping a patron who's coming to Special Collections for the first time, and we get them all the time. They're sent up from other floors, other departments, from a mild sense of resentment on their part. Why do I have to check my bag? Why can't I use a pen? They often move to a place of awe and gratitude. You're letting me hold the original? I can't believe this is here. This is one of the best things I pay for with my tax dollars. More people should know about this place, and all of us have heard that from our patrons. Being part of a public library places us in the path of many new users, including students of all grade levels, and we serve a significant educational role in the community. Here Special Collections are a part of people's everyday lives, and in addition to the first timers, we do have many accomplished researchers and writers over the years who are working on documentaries, and books, and web projects, and we especially like the ones who bring us chocolates from Italy, and the ones who sing us Johnny Mathis songs. You know who you are. Our collection materials have been reproduced, quoted from, and used repeatedly in publications and exhibitions. I think what makes us exceptional are our collections and our staff. We have wide-ranging collections. There's the book arts and special collections, San Francisco History Center, and the Hormel Gaines Lesbian Center. And these all represent the stories and the history of the people of San Francisco in very many different ways. I'm not going to talk about the collections more, but after remarks here, there is a reception upstairs on the sixth floor, and there is a beautiful exhibit that the staff has created so you can see the collections for yourself. I do want to talk about the staff. The staff here is passionate. They're passionate about building our collections. They're passionate about helping people find what they need. And we owe a great debt to staff and curators who came before us. And I saw Johanna Goldschmidt was here, and Pat Ochre, who's our former photo curator, is here. Can you guys stand up, wherever you are? Thank you. Right next to each other, very convenient. And also Susie Taylor, our former calligraphy curator, couldn't be here. Susie is teaching the last night of a class, and she's very sorry that she can't be here. Yeah. And my time here, I've worked with incredibly skilled and dedicated staff, and I am going to call everybody out by name, and if you could please stand up. Lisa Dunn-Seth, she's in the back of the room. Andrea Grimes. And Tom Carey. Tom, where are you? And the three of them put together the amazing exhibit that's upstairs. Christina Moretta, our current photo curator. Thank you. Tim Wilson, who's our Hormel Gay and Lesbian Center Library Archivist. Tommy Suzuki, who does our mayoral and municipal records. Dee Dee Cramer, who figures out all of our technology for us and how to get it online. Sylvia Rowan, who's upstairs on the reference desk. Jeff Thomas and Penelope Houston. John E.B., who's back there. And then our paging staff is Lisa Weddle, Will Murdock, Megan Martini, Spencer Rohr, and Jennifer Weiser. So thanks to all the staff. Looking towards the future, our world of special collections is not insular and static. As many of you know, we've been leading the charge towards digitization. We've been doing it for about six years now, and that's making our material more widely accessible on the web. We were one of the first public libraries to digitize all our city directories, and they have been used thousands upon thousands of times. And we continue to digitize materials in all formats, including maps, which are quite difficult, and including fragile AV items. We've been using social media to communicate about our activities and our in-the-stacks work life, and we are grappling with how to collect born digital materials. And also, we continue collecting recent and older materials on an ongoing basis. Last week, a huge box came. It was a collection from Molly McKay. She's a civil rights activist, and she led the fight 16 years, the Freedom to Mary movement for gay and lesbian couples. So that just showed up in the department. This month, we're collecting material on the current San Francisco housing and affordability crisis, including flyers and posters that were brought to us from protest rallies. And I would like to announce tonight that we recently received a truly exceptional gift, the significant photo collection belonging to local collector Marilyn Blaisdell. And this is really a wonderful, wonderful resource that's many years old. We are able to build our collections and offer them to the public through the generosity of our donors, such as people like Marilyn, and she couldn't be here tonight. She's too ill, but we really appreciate this wonderful gift. Now I want to turn to an event that defines San Francisco history, the 1906 earthquake and fire, and the person who embodies it. Gladys Hansen, San Francisco's archivist emeritus, ran the San Francisco history room and worked at the library for over 30 years. Gladys made history fun for San Francisco, from her court of historical review to the numerous exhibits and slideshow she created. She collected many historical materials that form the kernel of our current collection. Gladys did so much for our department in San Francisco history over the years she was here, often with limited budgets and resources, and I know a lot of that from talking to her. Gladys is best known for questioning the official count of the dead during the 1906 earthquake and fire. Catherine Axley recently completed a short film at seven minutes long called Counting the Dead, one former city librarian's 50-year long quest to account for the names of those who died in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire. And we're very pleased to be able to show this film today as a tribute to Gladys who's right here in the front row and her work. When people think of you as a death lady, it peaks their curiosity. Oh, is she still doing that? I'm trying to find proof for my grandmother that her father had perished in the earthquake. He had been sending money home to Italy for his family. After 1906, nothing was ever received from him again. My grandfather's entire family was killed in the earthquake. He was four years old. She refused to believe he had perished and fully expected him to walk through the door, having found fame and fortune in America. As no death could be established, the family was left destitute. The grief doubtless shared by countless families around the country whose stories have never been told. Only go out and beg. And this is what has happened from people that want to be remembered, want their families to know. Hey, we were here. And I so enjoyed. It's hard to say you can enjoy a project like this. But it started out at the city hall. And it started out with a woman's meeting that I attended. And one of the questions was, do I have a list of those that died? Well, imagine that. I didn't have that. So I said, well, you come back to the library, give me some time, and I'll get you a list. And so it started with the ladies. And I'm still... Anyone that comes into my home, the first thing I answer is, are you? Yes, I am. And I said, where's my literature then? You know, it's like a payment. Come on, give me some more. Give me some more. The ladies that first heard that I had started this came over and said, well, so and so died and so and so died. Do you have a list of their names? And I said, no, I do not yet. Like, give me a week and I'll have something for you. And they volunteered. They wanted to come. Let's do it. Let's do it. Well, look, they didn't do it. But everything, every book I picked up, I checked it. And this is the results. And it's been people like you that have made it possible. And if you didn't make it possible, I kicked you out. You know, you're no good to me unless you can produce. And I've received mail from throughout the world. And that's really fun. It's not fun, but it's interesting. And it's time somebody did it accurately. And I still get mailed to my home now. The mailman hands them to me and say, here, Gladys, here you go again. But that's all right. It's made you happy, hasn't it? I do want to introduce my son to you. Now, he's my son. I'm very proud of him. And he has worked really and truly hard. Richard, where are you? Without him, this project, especially the, what do you call it, new thing, old thing. Oh, fine. And without him, you're going to say something. I don't do anything with a computer. Aren't I lucky? You guys have got the problems. I have no problem. And my son's no problem, but he keeps the spirit up because he comes up with different things. We get mail from throughout the world now, throughout the world. And without Richard, come here. You tell them what you've done. With a computer, I don't talk about computers. This doesn't know how to turn it on, which is probably a blessing. But the internet site that we established way back pre-1990, SF, museum.org, brings in every single day new information, people doing family genealogies. Now, 99% of all the incoming data is coming in from the internet. Very little in the mail. We're about to push the dead study way up. And the narratives that are coming in range from one page to as high as 55 pages, single space type. And people are doing their family genealogies and they are wanting to get this information out. So we now have in our possession many thousand narratives on 1906. And someday we'll hopefully find a home and be out of our home. Thank you. I just wanted to say to you that are in the library business that keep your ears open. There's no reason you can't do the same thing but don't touch mine. Leave mine alone. Get your own subject and start working on something. It only takes four or five. It started with, I think, five letters. And you're the best ones to get. Anyone guess who's the best to start with? They're still insurance companies. You'd be surprised what you get out of insurance companies. And now it's the children. Grandma started talking to the children and they talked to me. And they've, you know, even done books. So there are so many ways. I'll be watching you. Glad us will be upstairs if you have questions for her. Thank you. Now I want to introduce a great supporter of the library, Peter Booth Wiley, who served on the board of the Friends of the Library for many years. Peter wrote the book on the library, a free library in this city, for which he spent a fair amount of time in our department and we all got to know him pretty well. He's also co-authored two books on the west and he wrote the National Trust Guide to San Francisco. And I'm going to turn it over to Peter. Thank you. Thank you, Susan. It's old home week. There are a lot of people that I work with going back about 20 more years in this, not in this library in the building next door, but it's a real honor to introduce Kevin Starr tonight. I was given a biography, a short biography, but it's not the Kevin Starr that we should know. Many of you know him, have read his work. I think he's best known among all of us for his Americans and the California Dream, which is at eight volumes and completed. Is that right, Kevin? Up to 63. Okay, but he was talking tonight about writing multiple other books, so he's a machine. He's a writing machine and if you've read his stuff, you know he writes with extraordinary grace and that he really can take you into the history. And I think it's really important to talk about Kevin briefly in the context of librarians and who librarians are because you saw his picture here and he was the city librarian. So Kevin is a San Franciscan, he's an institution, he's one of the greatest historians in California and I think he's had a national impact and he's a character. I was pleased to find when I was working on the library book, a photograph of him in the Fife and Drum Corps marching across the civic plaza to City Hall to try to get the Board of Supervisors and the Mayor to raise the budget in San Francisco. So he's a person of tremendous imagination and it's just a real honor for me as a fan of his works, who introduced him to my daughter who is now reading through her works, through his works very avidly, introduced him to all of you. So Kevin, thank you. Glad to see whether that stunt got us an improvement in our budget. I tend to think that it did not. And what a pleasure to be here and glad as I did my best when I was state librarian, we, the state library, put about six or seven million dollars into the Bancroft to do some 100,000 documents, primary documents relating to the fire and earthquake, or correction, earthquake and fire, and about 10,000 images which are all available digitally now. And that sort of interaction of primary sources and digital technology, I think is what Richard is suggesting, or what you suggested that so much of what Richard is saying comes over the internet now. And I think the combination of the two, the primary source and the digitalization is very important for special collections and for thinking about libraries in general, a book that I enjoyed a number of years ago is John Nazbet's book on high tech and high touch. And I'll redact it for you though. It was one of the early books to sort of look into the sociology, social psychology, anthropology, even of the digital age. And Nazbet suggests that when the first digital culture started to dawn, there was a fear that we would all turn into these, into cyber jellyfish, just sort of swimming out this great cyber sea, floating like some characters in a science fiction novel. And exactly the opposite came true. The more we went out into the universal world and what we're to today have this almost, not almost, but this global space, more we went out into that space, also the more our local spaces, our local places, our local identities began to count to us, that you had high tech and high touch. That I used to remember a state librarian quoting when we built so many libraries in California during that Mark Nivasant period where we had a half a billion dollars for library construction. The lines from John Dunn's poem make this room an everywhere. And of course the library is an everywhere, but it's also a place. It's also a specific place. And one of the pleasures as a historian of California over the years, one of the pleasures of being in that place and to go out and be with those 1,000 or so public libraries was to discover those 1,000 or so California's really the localization of experience which for me as a native San Francisco and a fourth generation San Francisco began in the branch over by Kesar Stadium in the 1940s and continued on to the time I met Gladys. We used to use the library before I became city librarian and Gladys was there even then talking about the city archives that the city needed and would have and so much of her efforts went into making that come true. But the here, where do you find California? What we find it in San Francisco we're sort of narcissistically find it in San Francisco after all we published an 800 page history of ourselves the annals of San Francisco in 1855 when we were only something like eight years old as a city. So I mean that's a very high level of self-esteem 100 pages per year. Exactly. Exactly. But you find it in all of the places you find the poetry and the challenges the tragedies etc. the specifics the colorization of there swirling around the libraries especially now across the say counties in which libraries do so much other duty they duty as libraries, they duty as digital centers they do duty as after homework centers for young people there's no more there's now a welcoming to creative welcoming to young people in the rural counties that's where the Board of Supervisors will meet and so you have the library as this great section of this great sense of the definition of the public self for say for instance in a city like Weaverville, Trinity County it's the library that defines Weaverville over and over again I encountered that the most prosperous suburbs the most up-to-date suburbs and the most venerable Goldbrush countries had that in common and of course we have that in common in San Francisco. Think of that great magnificent George Kellum building next door now the Asian Art Museum and all the complaints about it et cetera still absolutely a stunning stunning building Kellum of course also did the Powell Library at UCLA so how could one San Francisco based architect you ask yourself define place so beautifully for us and then so beautiful in 1917-18 and so beautifully for UCLA just a few a decade or so later one of the pleasures also of the of being state librarian was to go around and to see in terms of special collections the yearbook collections the collections of the local high school yearbooks and as many times as not you would encounter groups of teenagers there looking at various while this is where this picture of dad 1947-48 and that kind of laughing or even now my goodness 47-48 88 98 and laughing and seeing their parents as teenagers or even seeing their grandparents as teenagers you get a thrill with that you get a thrill in that shock of recognition I got that thrill when I saw that marvelous picture that you showed me of the all the firemen and policemen who fought the earthquake and fire all the pictures and I think my grandfather was I think if I remember correctly 217 or 117 the number he was strategically placed what a thrill that was there to see him I know the current Governor Brown's grandfather was in that he was a lieutenant lane in the police department at the time and that's a very profound pleasure because it's like the people who write you we want closure in our lives we want to visualization of our lives we want a sense of the extended narrative that each life needs now believe me this will be very brief but I could go on at length on it that archives and libraries share the same institutional base in the ancient world so when Susan we think about special collections we don't think about something that was added on to libraries we think as a kind of co-evil evolution of the archive and special collections before the pre-existed special collections pre-existed the Library of Alexandria by what 500 years so we have to be very proud about that that these instinct to collect, to define to record experience etc. gave rise to the archive when I did my PhD at Harvard I had the privilege of knowing and reading under and having lunch with frequently Louis Mumford the historian of cities and Mumford would emphasize the fact that basically the ancient city was a library of human activity and archived the things that people needed they needed water, they needed sanitation they needed protection they needed market, retail all the things that cities today still need and that the inventory of human life then became the inventory of the city and then the city then became the inventory that created the archive, the library the zoo, the garden just think that the hanging gardens of Babylon were very important and biblically important etc. but they're sort of relate very closely to the herbarium here in San Francisco or the or any other cities the human instinct to count to see what's here and to arrange it in some fashion and make it accessible were served by these two institutions I remember when I was state librarian correction when I was city librarian I was offered by Alphonse Cardner-Stickler to go over and join the Vatican library staff I think Mrs. Stearns would have been happy about that if I had gone over there and as what's called a secretarius which is a lay person there and Cardner-Stickler came out here and we had lunch together and he was going through a major modernization of the library very much anticipating many of the things that we were talking about at the San Francisco public library in anticipation for this for this structure but the Vatican library of course is an example of a collection that is both relating to archives special collections as well as the printed book after all it was founded more or less 500 years or so before the invention of printing so it has all sorts of objects as well as manuscripts as well as the printed word and so do all the great national libraries of Europe or Latin America or the Library of Congress or New York New York City for instance with its combination of the Aster, Lenox and Tilden trusts which is special collections that is so powerful that it has built then the special gorgeous library at let me see if I have this correctly at 44th and 5th I think I'm around the corner there and the idea that what we call today the New York Public Library is basically special collections of the downtown New York Public Library or the Boston Public Library which is similar the British Library evolved called the British Museum in most of our lifetimes until recently the British Library it evolved from George King George to the third's collection of private books and artifacts and memorabilia I think King George if you saw the movie The Madness of King George he was so depressed about losing North America that he went into book collecting as a kind of therapeutic activity but that's what then became the nucleus for the great library the British Library today this multi-identity comes to American colonies through the subscription libraries we didn't have public library laws those of you who read Edward Edwards history of the libraries we didn't really have public library laws in terms of public subscription for libraries being thought about until the 1830's and we really didn't put it implemented here in the United States until the 1850's so the early libraries were subscriptions local people subscribe to and supported it and so you'd have all sorts of things you'd have books you'd have religious tracks you'd have novels you'd have things from grandma's collection or stuffed birds etc and it's one of the delights of traveling through New England for instance to go across these old libraries and to see still this idiosyncratic nature of their collections that go back 17 to the 18th century this multi-identity of course is very much part of the California State Library and that was what the founders of the state library Colonel Stevenson had in mind in 1850 when the library was established as a department of government was the idea that California would have to be documenting itself how would California think through itself how would California do its legislative business etc we talk about the legislature of a thousand drinks in 1849 while you also need a thousand books as well as the drinks I remember as state librarian gathering some of that material that had come around the horn with Colonel Stevenson's regiment having it in the library there the original Constitution of Iowa which we based our Constitution on the whole series of volumes on the crops the vegetable and fruit crops of New York State which formed such an important role in our development of our agriculture books almost scriptural I think books almost a special collection books almost scriptural in their power to project larger ideas and ambitions as these 1000 plus public libraries to include our own great San Francisco public do today now we've been those of us in the library world being led off by Gladys tonight and we've had what 40-50 years of the dialogue let's see if we can say 50 years you could almost say 50 years because Memorex was coming up with library programs in the late 1950s early 60s and what was that big debate we had on getting CLSI wasn't that the thing where we could finally check out our books and computers etc my goodness it was marvelous but over that dialogue it has been a very we've been very successful in the public library world because we've fought to a draw initially there was these predictions that the library that would disappear and special collections would disappear and rare books would disappear those are speeches usually given by politicians elected officials excuse me who didn't want to give you your budget but the library world persisted and the contemporary library then is at once all throughout this nation a generic everywhere with a capital E recapitulating the emergence of archives and libraries in ancient times and the amount of money that taxpayers have made available each federal and state funds in this state of California even during very difficult times for special collections and programs I think is extremely impressive yet as John Nazmut points out the hunger for localism remains intensified you can see it in our architecture it's a beautiful article I think it was in the marina times on the local books, local buildings being fixed up by architects especially Eichler homes surviving I don't think there are too many Eichler homes in San Francisco but those that have how precious they seem have how venerable yet that's just the 1960s my goodness that's just yesterday isn't it so there's this idea of the physical texture of the past which is extremely important to us and cross referencing primary sources and digital retrieval the San Francisco earthquake collection that I referred to patting myself in the back with these a bankrupt done by the California State Library as an example of that or the five million dollar project we did documenting the Japanese American the internment of Japanese Americans in 1902 so that never again that this never happened again is another project that we worked on or the creation of a digital medical library for the University of California medical schools that they all could share in common these materials must be preserved if they are materials have to be preserved if they are to be digitized and projected say for instance like the American Memory Project I'm sure many of you have seen that 1905 film on the front of the streetcar going down San Francisco down Market Street towards fairy building just on the beginning just weeks or so before well maybe within a year before the earthquake so special collections then refer to the fact that in mainstream materials this whole range of more fragile material more perishable sometimes you might even say ephemeral material each are needed and each needs the other special collections anchors the generic library in the book, rare books and in the place, the archive otherwise there's a danger of the library becoming a mere entertainment center and those who want to make it a mere entertainment center maybe sort of be giving we in the library community a sort of temporary sugar high but in the long run there will be a real problem whether the institution will be sustained over time because and Susan was talking about this the competition of other so many worthwhile projects it's not good versus evil it's like Hegel says tragedy consists not of good versus evil but when competing goods war with each other my love of the San Francisco history room as a fourth generation San Francisco then and as a researcher of the American California dream series has been tested over time in the many many hours I spent in the in the San Francisco history room it was wonderful for instance to find your own past I found my uncle James Brown in the archive just accidentally I was looking at soldiers returning from World War II and there he a picture of him that had been distributed by the armed forces having finished his 50 missions over Europe and then coming home alive he was going to make it he was going to come back and the picture the picture was again worth more than a thousand words to see that young man from coal street saying nations high school University of San Francisco having flown over Europe 50 times in very dangerous circumstances would be coming home there's the evidence there reading for instance the bulletin series on San Francisco neighborhoods from the 20s to that class you turn that you introduce me to that series that was done about what 23-24 please I don't know was that the Greyhound bus ticket to Ukiah that Marjorie Stern had left on my desk oh the CSI check out well no I didn't get mad at you I gave you a sort of set speech how we all have to embrace the future it's quite frankly you did kick me in the pants a few times but so in the history room for myself or all of us read that bulletin series we get close to the edge to feel the color of a bygone San Francisco which is also the San Francisco present and future to be who would think that such a book like Gary how do you pronounce his last name your mama the new the new 49 the hills of San Francisco was a great runaway success you think oh no anybody just writing a history a guide to the city is not gonna that's fine they'll sell certain etc. absolute runaway because the people coming into the city fixing up homes staying here making a life in San Francisco want to know what echoes what voices are here from the past and that's the last theme of my 20 points tonight special collections and cultural memory special collections and cultural memory but lo and behold that's where libraries began in the first place thank you and congratulations