 Yes Okay, hi there everyone. This is Jessica Hagman again at Aldum Library and today we have a live video interview with Carmen B. Croft and Stacy Lavender who are going to tell us about an exhibit and collection that they have been working with similar the exhibit will be called Civil War Stories and Next week they're going to talk about launching a digital archive of Civil War materials So they're going to tell you all about that and some of the amazing materials in this collection And we hope will be able to join us next week. So can we just start with introductions first? So maybe you could tell us I think you've both been on our videos before but for anyone who's missed them Could you introduce yourselves and say what you do in the library? Sure. My name is Carmen B. Croft. I'm a digital projects librarian I work in digital initiatives. I image I oversee the imaging of Unique and rare materials from the Monsenter for archives and special collections, which is where Stacy works and Then I describe them and then I put them online Yeah, and I'm Stacy Lavender. I'm our special collections librarian for our manuscripts collections. So I Those basically are the collections that are not rare books and they're not university archives So they're archival collections that are not specifically related to the university. So it runs a really broad gamut of Topics a lot of southeastern Ohio related materials, which is what we're going to be talking about today But basically I just curate those collections oversee their preservation needs and promote their use and make people aware of them. So could you just tell us a little bit about what sort of materials are in the Civil War correspondence collection? Yeah, so it's Eventually it'll be materials from about 16 15 or 16 different manuscript collections It's largely Civil War correspondence so letters that people wrote to each other during the war But we also have a little bit. We have several diaries Like these a lot of soldiers kept little diaries while they were a waste. We have a handful of those And some other military documents. This is a you probably can't see it But it's like a volunteer enrollment list where people signed up to join the fight So we have some military documents. We have some medical documents a couple of the collections are people that were Doctors during the war or nurses during the war So we have some medical related stuff in there, too So it's a pretty a pretty broad range of things that are in the collections and it totals I think about a thousand ish items online now. We have almost 500 letters Oh So whose stories or what kind of stories are we going to find if we start looking into these collections? a lot of different stories, so The collection that's already online the Brown family collection and it's a family writing back and forth to each other So you have two sons that are away fighting in the war They're writing home to their mother who is also writing back and forth back and forth to her brothers and sisters and other places spread out through Ohio and Where is still water? So writing to family far away writing about You know raising children and illness and traveling in that time period So you get a lot of aspects of rural Ohio life along with stories of the war As I mentioned we have people that were serving as doctors. So you get Some stories about battle injuries. We have people that were prisoners of war. So their stories about being held captive Also people writing back and forth to their loves We have some pretty dramatic Relationships represented in this class romantic relationships. Some people split up over this So yeah, I don't think there's a lot of different stories that are really personal and really engaging I think will help people connect with something that was so long ago Knowing that people are experiencing the same kind of feelings that we experienced today So interesting it's very personal stories right these aren't like You know the stories of great leaders that we might have heard of out of the civil war It's very much just everyday people. So What do you feel like people well? We can take away having looked at those personal stories and these kind of materials in the archives But what what can we learn research wise like what how my people use these collections? So I'll start from the big picture and then get a bit more More personal as it were so When we think of history where we're talking about Like an infinite number of data points that are both recorded and unremarked on they're observed in Unobserved and then history is the stories we tell About those things that happened So we need to keep going back to primary source documents to retell reinterpret and reimagine those stories over time as more data points are added to that gigantic corpus By looking at history from the bottom up We can see the impact of these monolithic events as we learn about it in school These monolithic events that we learn about in school on ordinary people how they adapted to and interacted with them and how they Reinforced or rejected these stories And finally, you know, most of us aren't famous leaders and authors. It's easier to relate to people that don't have a ton of power To shape their own destinies who are just trying to do the best they can in desperate situation It's really about making history seem personal. So who do you see using this collection either here or outside of the university? Well, I'm hoping you'll see a lot of news fire students I'm hoping we can get it into some classroom use Especially since these materials are going to be available online now. I mean people can access them at home Professors could access them, you know in the classroom without me having to bring physical materials somewhere or them to come to me So I'm hoping for that. I'm also hoping anyone who's interested in this award people in the community I think you know, there's a lot of Areas of interest for people, so I'm hoping as many people as possible So see mentioned things are online. So how do you like get to these things online? And like, how do we search them? I mean, especially since 500 things, that's a pretty big collection. How do we kind of find out what we want to see through there? So to access the digital archive, you can go straight from the library's homepage There is a tile that says digital archives That would give you a list of all of the collections that we have our collection is called civil war correspondence Clicking on that link will take you to the landing page These items are fully transcribed. So it's about 350,000 words We did preserve misspellings and alternate spellings But this will allow you to do keyboard searching within the letters. You can also search by facets So the author and recipients are all available to be searched by as well as the place where the letter was written So, um, can you I've seen you both kind of was you're tweeting about kind of discovering these Stories and from the Alden look digital account I've even kind of talking a little bit about the stories that you've seen here. Can you tell us about I'm gonna have materials here Can you tell us anything about those interesting stories you came across or what kind of? Just a little bit of an introduction to what you found Yeah, yeah, I'll tell you about something really cool that happened to me this week So as I mentioned the Brown family collection are the letters that we digitized first And it's a collection of about five hundred almost 500 letters Of the Browns writing back and forth to each other And so we have all these materials about these people and Carmen I think both have read all these letters at this point So we feel like they really know all the Browns, but there's no pictures anywhere of any of them until this week I was picking up An envelope it has Edwin who is one of the sons who fought in the war who is like one of my favorites in the Brown family He has his discharge papers and a little envelope and I picked it up in this teeny tiny if you won't be able to see it On the camera, I'm sure but this teeny tiny little picture of him fell out of the envelope But I'd never seen him before so it was like getting to see somebody I'd like known just you know Virtually but not in real life But I feel like I do so we digitize that picture of Carmen did yesterday So you'll be able to see Edwin in the exhibit that we have opening next week Which we haven't mentioned yet, but we have an exhibit with some of these materials opening on Monday And his little picture and perhaps a slightly blown-up version of the little picture will be in the exhibit for people to see us So that was a really exciting discovery for both of us. We scan that photo at a thousand pixels per inch So hopefully we'll be able to show you a little bit more of his expression Then you can see in this like one and a half inch by one inch Ten types snip. It's like a large photo or a large postage stamp. Basically. Yeah, basically Yeah, very small So what about so this is a diary? Yeah, this is Edwin's diary. Oh, we have two of them that he kept during the war and They're really interesting They can be really difficult to read because Edwin was less literate than some of the other Letters that we have in the collection. I transcribe those I can attest to that I really wished when I was working on it that he would spell things wrong the same way twice, right? It's much easier if you just Speak aloud what you're seeing on the page. He spelled phonetically and he spelled with a little bit of an accent so Yeah, you're talking it makes a lot more sense than what you're looking at on the page So that's that process that so you said you're like so you're looking after it's been scanned Do you kind of look at the document? You're reading it to yourself and then transcribing it as your okay? Yeah letter by letter when possible Some stuff is just illegible We did the best we could okay. We've done several iterations at this point and We've gone over it with multiple people in order to pull out as much as we can And so you have students probably working on this to write a lot of students working in the digital Yes, we currently have a student doing like a final quality control Run through of all of the letters that are currently online to remove Character encoding artifacts so where things suddenly turn into question marks when you move them from one program to another and also to to Apply her own discretion in in some of the words that are unintelligible So I've seen you tweeting about a lot of your research like into the Brown family So what kind of other things did you do is that did you like go look at other materials besides what we have here? Or like what did you do to do that? So I used our the library's institutional newspaper archive accounts in order to search for more information about Specifically their deaths because there were four children in the family three of them died in their 20s van died The earliest use 21 he died of smallpox during the war And then two of the other children the only daughter and the youngest son died very close to each other Unknown illnesses and we didn't know what happened to them So I looked up their obituaries. Luckily their uncle used to own the Athens messenger. So yeah, yeah, so Their their stories were perhaps better reflected in print than other people in Athens County Okay, but so speaking of Nelson Van Voorhees and the Athens messenger He is very Integral to the story of one of the people that we'll be highlighting in the exhibit who is not going to be part of the digital collection But it's very important to the Civil War in Athens County and how we remember the war His name is Milton Holland. He was born a slave in Texas. His father was his owner When he was 11 years old his father sent him north to Albany which is also in Athens County he Works for Nelson Van Voorhees When war broke out because he was 16 and he was too young to serve as a soldier And when he turned 18 he returned to Athens and raised a company of 149 other African-American young men at the Athens County fairgrounds and they became company C of the fifth United States Colored infantry, I think it was yeah And they went on to Milton went on to win the Congressional Medal of Honor He was promoted on the battlefield to captain and then demoted because of his race and While he was serving in the war He was writing letters to Nelson who then published them in the Athens messenger And so we have a very good idea of what he was experiencing as he was experiencing it because of that relationship I saw your your tweet about his mother's yeah, right. Yeah, like I found several sources When I was doing research on him that says mom is unidentified. She was a slave. We can't find any information on her She's buried right next to his brother with our mother Matilda Holland and So I corrected the Wikipedia page Got a little digital information when I see an action there, so I love this like idea that you're You're not only just making these materials online, but you're also adding to our knowledge about these ideas Like I don't think I mean as someone who's not an archivist or works in digital collections It's probably not something I would have thought of is see the work You know the immense amount of work that goes into making this accessible to people and as much Giving as much information as possible so people can do their research How long have you been working on this? It's been what like your months and many months. I'm sure it was Yeah, when we first started working here is digital projects librarians identified as one of the priorities for us to get started on because The letters were rights as you three they were in the public domain And because the format was conducive to the scanning equipment that we have it was easier to put the letters on a flatbed Scanning try to photograph a bound volume. Okay, so we've been working on this about a year. Yeah, that was last August Planning scanning describing and then building the digital collection and Injustice and adding these items to it You had said that Edwin was your favorite brown. Can you tell me why that? Yeah, I mean, I don't know I to me he comes across as the The sweetest of the grounds letters. He's always really sick of lonely. I think he has a hard time in the work He doesn't like being there He's one of the ones that has a really dramatic Relationship with his fiancee That spoiler alert it does not work out and she I don't like her so it makes me like Even more. I don't know. I just I think you read, you know, 200 letters by somebody and you kind of develop Either you love them or you hate them, but the other that I think Yeah, that was definitely my experience as well. There's some people that we complained about a lot. Yeah I think you at one point you told me that they they talked a lot about health. Yeah, oh my gosh Health details are amazing. Especially one person. Her name was Jane She was Elmira Brown to like the main focus of the Brown family collections Sister and she talks a lot about the digestive problems of her immediate family and The horrific broken leg of her son and lots of detail. Yeah. Yeah Yeah, the amount of information I know about people's foul habits from the 1860s now is really shocking There's not something you think about. Yeah Like I said that means that like you could even from like a health public health for not public health But a health perspective like what is medicine and like discussions of health look like at that time Yes This is another item that will be in the exhibit And we will be photographing the covers and some of the other salient details of this book with published by the collection But this is hospital sketches by Louisa May Alcott She wrote little women. I'm sure you're probably familiar with that She actually served as a volunteer nurse for six weeks during the Civil War She contracted typhoid fever and was treated with mercury which affected her for the rest of her life But the protagonist of hospital sketches is named tribulation periwinkle Which I yeah, which is a which is a detail that I think is Particularly interesting Fun fact Okay, so I so just as you're talking about these kind of personal Did you find that you ever thought about like how this is maybe similar or different to how we communicate now And like I keep seeing the shades of like you can't believe I can believe what that person posted on Facebook in a same We're like I can't believe what that person wrote in the letter like obviously it's different But do you feel like there are any kind of yeah To kind of how we communicate no, especially how letters were passed on after they got to the initial recipient There's a lot of letters in the collection where somebody says Please don't read this out loud because that was often how everybody would gather around the letter would be read out loud It's like the person was in the room a lot of them use that language So they would say please don't read this out loud. Don't give this to so-and-so or burn this letter Yeah, there's a lot of just destroy this after you read it. There's one Very creative example in the collection where a person wrote a letter in ink Then turn the letter upside down and wrote in pencil between the lines a secret message and then said just erase the pencil marks And they did kind of so I was able to like reconstruct some of what she wrote It's mostly just complaining about this person that she doesn't like who's living with them. But yeah, all sorts of petty secrets and Gossip and Obviously people didn't bring their letters. They did pass them on and that's how we have them today Do you think there's any any obvious things missing like can you see any reference to like a letter that you just wasn't in the collection? Or do you feel like they were they're the type that really saved everything I think there's tons and tons That's missing. Yeah, especially since because the mail service was so I'm spotty and hard to do with the Civil War going on So I mean you'll have you know Edwin for example saying, you know It's been six months and I haven't gotten a letter that that's probably long But like two or three months and I haven't gotten a letter from you guys and you know Almyra's at home writing every week And you know she'll say I've sent you ten letters and why haven't you gotten me? So I know that there a lot was getting lost in translation that way I would imagine Just based on the volume of letters that the letters that made it they probably mostly kept Would be my gut feeling but I mean yeah, there's definitely gaps and if somebody did burn a letter we obviously don't yeah That's true. I wouldn't even know that we don't have it, right? Yeah So you've got an exhibit that you're putting up later this week, right? And then you have an event coming up next week. So could you tell us about those? Yeah, so the exhibit will be up on the fifth floor of Alden Library From September 18th to December 15th 2017 It's a whole room. Yeah, so we have a selection of letters from the digital collection And we're terming that side of the room the living the war Experience and then we have the remembering the war experience where we're drawing on these rare books from also from the Monsenter collections and this The the juxtaposition of living and remembering and how we remember what remember, you know what stories? get passed on and and who were what gets forgotten is is Very important to The research process and becoming a scholar and a historian and it's also in the news right now And the event is on Next Tuesday the 19th at 2 p.m. It'll be on the fourth floor of all And so at that event we'll talk a little bit about the collection And then we're also going to have some live readings of some of the letters from the Brown family So hopefully people can get a real feel for how personal and dramatic and interesting These letters are getting to hear some of them out of loud And then after that we're going to have an activity where people can write their own Civil War era letters We'll have some stationery from the period and fountain pens and ceiling wax and so I think it's going to be a lot of fun so we will have Student actors and professors from the theater department reading these letters out loud so you'll get a very dramatic And an interpretation of these events hopefully yes, and we just think it's going to be a lot of fun All right, so I guess one last thing before we go What would you say is your favorite or most interesting item or kind of thing that you encounter? I feel like I'm putting on the spot a little bit because it's 500 things But if you can think of just one thing that you would say people just have to see is most exciting or interesting I'm just going to keep talking getting more and more time to say wow So I'm not sure if everybody knows this but Paul Lawrence Dunbar who is the poet who is very famous for his poem We Wear the Mask Was born in Ohio? His parents were both born slaves his father escaped from slavery after the Emancipation Proclamation and became a soldier in the Union Army and so Paul was born 20 years after the war ended but he keeps coming back again and again to the sacrifice of black troops during the war and This particular item is a Collaboration that he did with one of the most famous commercial artists of the day Margaret Armstrong whom you will see in the publishers binding collection and The Hampton Institute Camera Club, so they're poems that are all illustrated with stage photography and he Has this beautiful beautifully Staged poem about Soldiers marching off to war and so it's going to be really interesting to To delve into this story a bit more and show both the anachronisms like for example in this famous photo This guy's wearing loafers and his uniform and also to to discuss the reasons that Dunbar used the writing style that he did and how even in a very white dominated Publishing industry. He was able to be subversive in some manner There's so many stories You can spend like your whole life just writing research. You're doing research. Yeah, you're absolutely good. Fortunately, we Yeah, yeah, we have two jobs, but all right. I say your turn. Oh, yeah Mine's not gonna be that good But I'll tell another item that I have the same sort of like visceral responses when I found the little tiny Edwin picture There's another collection here. It's the William McKnight collection and he was another Soldier that fought and he and his wife wrote back and forth to each other while he was away And they from the letters that they're just were clearly very much in love They're really romantic letters and they really miss each other a lot and he ended up being killed in battle And so I found there's a poem that he had written for her This you know really sweet like not particularly, you know well written poem But like the the idea is just so so sweet And it was apparently found on his body when he died And it looks like there's like blood stains on it and when I found it in the in the back that I was reading it And I realized what it was there was a little note with it I said found with this body it actually made me cry, which you know, it doesn't happen to me every day Okay, but so that that was a procedurally I think moving moment for me with these materials Wow that is amazing Like this is a personal. Yeah, that's not a word, but the of that story that yeah, the intimacy and like yeah, that's It was really yeah, I'm really moving Wow Okay, well on that note We hope that you will join us for the event next week Tuesday at 2 on the fourth floor or when you get a chance Come visit the exhibit on the fifth floor or take a look at the materials that are available online If you have any questions, of course, you can always put them on Facebook or you can We'll pass them on to Stacy and Carmen who of course know the most about this collection But thank you so much for watching and we will talk to you soon