 Penn State Public Broadcasting's Treasures of the Special Collections luncheon program with a marks by Melanie Dobler and Christian Berg at the 161st ARL membership meeting. Convened by Ann Kenney. We're going to start our program. I'm Ann Kenney, the Carl A. Croc University Librarian at Cornell and also the chair of the Special Collections Working Group. So it's with real pleasure that I am able to introduce our special luncheon program today. So Penn State Public Broadcasting is developing treasures in the Special Collections, which is an exciting new public television and web access series, which celebrates libraries as the guardians of collective memory and the keepers of the human story. This series is intended to reach out to audiences with engaging stories originating from the remarkably diverse and rich materials found in Special Collections throughout North America. From the earliest cuneiform Sumerian laws to the Twitter-fueled protests of Arab Spring. Using minimalist re-enactments, theatrical interpretations, and graphic techniques I like the sort of disclaimers there. This series seeks to champion the mission of research libraries and demonstrate that it is the use of Special Collections that makes them truly special. We have several colleagues with us from Penn State Broadcasting who will tell us about the program and share with us a short video. You may have met them at last night's reception and I encourage you to read their bios in the program as they bring a wealth of experience in research, educational programming, and outreach partnerships. But I'm going to introduce our two speakers, Kristen Berg, who is series producer at Penn State Broadcasting. He's an award-winning producer, writer, and director of nonfiction, television, and new media. He includes among his credits the greatest trials, the Scottsboro Boys, and the capture and trial of Adolf Eichmann, as well as the primetime PBS series History Detectives. And I just learned at lunch that he also did something on plant genome at Cornell. So I don't know why that's not in the bio. Our second speaker will be Melanie Dobler, who has over 25 years experience working in educational program planning, development, and evaluation in a variety of academic and field settings. She joined Penn State Broadcasting in 2004 to lead their engaging faculty initiative. And during her tenure, she has developed the Public Services Media Initiative that brings together robust academic research with the power of public media to impact public audiences. So we're looking forward to both of them. Before I turn the podium over to them, I also would like to acknowledge two other colleagues who have been involved in this project. Elaine Berzicki is here. Elaine, would you please stand? She's the manager of project development, and Joe Myers, creative director, unfortunately, could not be with us today. I think he's back home working hard, right? So please join with me in welcoming them to the podium. Thank you, Anne. And I want to thank all of you for allowing us to be here today and to talk about our newest project. We are currently in development. We have great hopes and all intentions that this will be a series, and that we will be able to air it on public media across the country. And what would make my heart even warmer would be if we could premiere it with this group. Sometime in the future. So today you're going to see the trailer. I'm going to give you a brief overview of how we came to do this type of work. And then I'll be tagging Christian to set up the trailer, which is about eight minutes, and which you will then have access to online, so you can share with your colleagues and friends and anyone else. And then Christian's going to give you an overview of some of the collections that our research has uncovered and what types of stories we envision telling inside this series. Then we'll leave about 15 minutes for questions. So we're looking forward to that. So I'm sure you're all familiar with NPR and PBS, but what's probably a little bit to inside baseball to know is that one-third of all public television and public radio stations are licensed to universities. And Penn State public broadcasting happens to be one of them. For many years, WPSU-TV FM, which is what we're known in our broadcast, how we're known in our broadcast area, we kind of sat off on the side on the edge of campus. And when we engaged with faculty, it was we went over there onto campus, picked them up, put them in a chair, interviewed them for, oh, 10 minutes, and then picked them up and put them back on campus. And that was really the way we engaged with faculty. Almost a decade ago, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, they developed an initiative called Engaging Faculty in a Digital Future. And it was designed to bridge the divide between public broadcasting stations and the academic institutions in which they sit. And Penn State, as well as Ohio State and University of Wisconsin, in particular, those three kind of led this initiative. And we took it very seriously. We resourced it inside Penn State, and I'm very proud to say that it has developed into an extraordinary number of programs and quality of programs that we have put together. Since that time, we've done several large-scale public service media projects that combine our award-winning storytellers with associations and organizations such as yours to engage audiences in the work of the Academy. Treasures of the Special Collections marks the first time that we have partnered with our library. And we are grateful to Dean Barbara Dewey, who, there, right there, for her support and for allowing us access to the very special collections that we have at Penn State University. And we are also grateful to ARL. And, please, when we came down here and met, oh, what is it now? Two or three months ago, we're just delighted when we left there, we said, what great people. Hey, how come, I mean, this will be fun to partner with them, too. And we want to thank you for introducing us to this wonderful area of work and to each of you. With that, thanks. I'd like to turn things over to Christian, and he will set up the trailer. Well, my own experience with Special Collections started on the first documentary that they allowed me to do at Twin Cities Public Television in St. Paul. I'm actually a Minnesotan. I'm a recent transfer to Central Pennsylvania. I did a documentary on the 1862 U.S. Dakota War called The Dakota Conflict. And I was able to go down with the videographer to the Newberry Library, where the original sketches of Frank Blackwell Mayer reside. And he was a witness at the 1852 signing of the Treaty of Traverse to Sue, which basically relinquished all the lands west of the Mississippi from the Dakota people. And it was a remarkable thing. I mean, you all know, but I'm sure you hear from people who come into your libraries. It's a remarkable thing to hold the original document in your hands. And I know that the white glove question is controversial as well, so I won't go into it. We had a similar feeling from one of our faculty, our director of theater, who you'll actually see in the trailer, love Special Collections. And he brought this idea of doing a series to our president. And then we heard about it secondarily. And we thought, well, you know, his idea was to do it on the Big Ten Network of Big Ten School Libraries. And we thought, well, I think this is a little bigger than that. Once we started looking around, once we made the connection with the ARL, I was going to bring down my celebrating research book, but it is literally falling apart. I know. Well, thank you. Actually, we got another one. It's still in the shrink wrap. I'm saving it. I guard it with my life. And so anyway, we decided that we would, you know, to do a little bit of a proof of concept and to take a look at the stories that we could find in one Special Collections library. And, well, with the caveat that we actually involved the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign as well. But the interpretation and performance of that piece actually was by Penn State people. So we were able to budgetarily do it all on campus. And this is the result. Hidden in these stacks are primary sources born at the dawn of recorded time or in the digital now. Collected, restored, guarded and shared, telling the human story from the treasures of the Special Collections. In the basement archives of a small county museum, a professor stumbles upon a document that sheds new light on the political climate following the Civil War, an early case of voter ID. I had been coming to Belfont to look at the tax records for some time. It was tedious work. And so I would take breaks in between and see what else was down there. Well, it was sitting under a couple of other volumes, and I couldn't even tell what it was at all. It was literally covered in dust. Lo and behold, she was faced with this title saying a descriptive list of deserters. With the names, their physical characteristics, and where they deserted. And she said, Bill, have you ever seen anything like this? There's the deserters list. They realized immediately more than I could really how significant it was. I believe it's the most complete document. It is at least two feet by three feet, almost 300 pages. But I had no idea why this thing existed. None. So you go to 1866, you start looking for every newspaper you can. What are they saying about deserters? And once we started taking it apart, it appeared there were perforations on it. And what the archivists found was that this is probably hung. Finally, they found what I needed, a direct letter that said we need this record to regulate our elections. This document was used by one political party to deny the right to vote by another political party. And here we go. This guy's a character. Invented in the early 1800s, the tin type made photography affordable, and opened a window on the lives of everyday people. A curator with one foot in the past keeps the craft alive. There's definitely something I think very arresting about many tin types. When people think about tin types, generally they picture a stiff, formal, non-smiling portrait. My personal theory about why people don't smile is that it wasn't invented as a convention yet. The entire history of portraiture has been through painting, and no one smiles in painted portraits. Tin types were cheap, they're easy to make, it's one of a kind, you can't reproduce it. There were no masterpieces and there were no masters. I think what sets me apart from most other curators is that I have a background in practicing the craft. I like working in these old processes because there is a period of time involved in the taking of a photograph. To make a tin type takes at least 15 minutes, and that's time during which you're interacting with your subject. You have to develop it immediately, and at this point it's a negative, and you dip it in the fixer. And the picture appears. Judy Chicago has always been in the face of the art world. I remember this incredible advertisement in Artform magazine where Judy is standing in a boxing ring, daring you to come at her, and I thought, wow! Judy Chicago has challenged the male-dominated art world since the 1970s. I still walk into museums and all I see is absence. There's the history. Women's history, and there's the art. Is women an art? No. The dinner party blew my mind. The lace, the embroidery, things that are typically considered domestic. She's using these to pay homage to those people who may have been ignored. If somebody said to me, you could have a helper because you're not going to have a forklift. I'm like, great! At age 72, she continues to produce work at a blistering pace. Now she has donated her archives to Penn State to be used as a living curriculum. She has actually really affected change. She really has, and part of it is through being a role model. Well, one of the reasons I'm so thrilled about the launch of the dinner party curriculum and the fact that Penn State will keep it online in perpetuity is that it's something that we women have not had enough of, but have seen our ideas transmitted through institutions to the future. What can a play tell us about the past? What can it tell us about ourselves? A discovery in the rare books and manuscripts collection of the University of Illinois transports us to the time of Shakespeare, and a performance not seen in over 400 years. In the University of Illinois Special Collections Library, there's a quattro which contains a 1592 play by Thomas Nash called Summer's Last Will and Testament. And it's never been produced in a public arena, because the plague was on, and so all of the theaters in London had to be closed. And died I had indeed unto the earth, but the Eliza, England's beauty queen. It's like discovering a new play. Eliza? Except that you're tied into historical roots from 400 years ago. Wow! A little familiarity with the queen. Pick that up so that you're holding the play. My character's kind of the fool. He's not ready at all to go out and perform, and he has to pull himself together really quickly. He starts talking bad about the playwright because they've embarrassed him by pushing him on stage when he's not ready. Without. You can't just look at something on a page and know what it's going to be when it's fully brought to life. You have to hear it or see it. To be able to do that's really exciting. It had physical humor. It had the drop my pants joke. I mean this is three stooges. That's how far back it goes. And it still gets a laugh. I, a fool by nature, and art do speak to you in the person of the idiot, our playmaker. I believe every research library in the country has bountiful treasures. That's beautiful. Waiting for all of us to experience and cherish and be reacquainted with. Whenever we go back and try to walk in the shoes of another time and place through an original document, I think it enriches our understanding of who we are in a way nothing else does. So you kind of get the idea. This is, you know, with this modest effort, you can see what kinds of stories might be out there and how the public might come to appreciate what's held in these collections and how they're being used. So I have, just to envision a little bit, we've done some legwork on these things to, like I say, my dog-eared copy of Celebrating Research will show that there's no shortage of ideas. And I know that you all complain that you only got one collection that you could put in there, right? So, and there's a lot more. In fact, some of them are in here. Now, the Charles Blockson Collection where there's one collection at Penn State and there's one collection at Temple. Charles has dedicated his life to collecting. He was a Penn State track and football star, actually, got an offer from the New York Giants, which he turned down, and then went into, I mean, he really has been an evangelist for African American culture, and it all started when he was seven years old and he had a teacher tell him that blacks had no history. And he took that as a personal challenge and devoted his life to collecting. And most recently, at 77 years old, he's 78 now, he inherited Harriet Tubman's hymnal and a bunch of other items that he then, I think he looked at them in his room for about a month. And then his conscience led him to donate them, not to his own collections, but he's donated them to the Smithsonian African American Museum that's opening up on the moment, which was a great PR splash for the museum for his opening as well. And so we've already started some projects with Charles. We have a grant in for a website dealing with the Charles Blockson collection. And so, like with Judy Chicago, she's controversial, she's great TV, and she wants to give her life's work to a special collections museum. People like Charles and like Judy Chicago, you know, those are great sources for stories as well. Now, the Habs Collection is amazing at the Library of Congress. And Roberta Schaffer, if you're in the room, you can, we love your staff. Now, the Habs Collection was made during the Depression. There were a thousand out-of-work architects and draftsmen that were hired to systematically document America's antique buildings. So, all this is online as well. There's thousands, you know, everything from Monticello to simple barns, churches, and gas stations, and since so much of those buildings are gone, this collection, what they recorded, is the only remaining trace. And what I found in doing a little research is that Hollywood set designers use this collection a lot. And in fact, through a mutual friend, I found one who was part of the Oscar-winning team of the Curious Case of Benjamin Buttons. And you can see the background is the photograph from the collection, which inspired the, you see the blue and the figures up there, that's actually the set design from the Button Factory in Benjamin Button. And they would be thrilled to participate. And the Library of Congress folks are thrilled as well. And apparently this collection is still being added to. So we would love to go out and record the documentation of a new addition to this Depression-era collection. This one is in the research book, the A.R.L. book. The, you know, Emily Dickinson, you know, she only published 10 poems while she was alive, all anonymously. She cared nothing for fame. And then they found, her sister, Lavinia, found 40 handmade booklets, the famous Fasticles. And Harvard's Houghton Library has these and the largest Emily Dickinson collection in the world. And the collection is a hotbed of scholarly and artistic activity. And there is both a scholar and visual artist named Jan Burvin, who has made a series of quilts. And they're all based on the Fasticles. And it's also, she's really doing a study of the punctuation and the variant markings in her manuscripts. I mean, Emily Dickinson was using these crosses and things almost like hypertext. You could go down to the bottom of the poem and you'd find something that you could, you know, that you could substitute and it would change the meaning of the poem. And of course she only had a fairly small number of people that she would be sending these works to so they kind of knew her or learned her shorthand for what she was doing. And this is so progressive, this is so, you know, and she's doing it in her own, basically, in this own small world that she's creating. So a much more esoteric example of how a library is being used, but I think a really fascinating one to explore. Of course, the Frank Lloyd Wright collection, sometimes the Special Collection is a huge news story. And I've been out to Tally Us in West. It would be so great. This would be so epic. Maybe more than we could handle, but it would be great to try to show how a library, you know, acquires processes, decides what stories to tell, and then exhibits to the public. So this would be one of those long-term ones that we would nurse over a long period of time and then show. But we started some conversations with Columbia and the Avery Library there. And I'm really intrigued to follow that one as well. Now, sometimes the collections aren't just old things. This one is being built from its inception. Vincent Siani, with the help of Duke, Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, is he's doing a photojournalistic portraits of Gays in the Military. It's called Gays in the Military, How America Thanked Me. And he's doing oral histories as well. And all of this is being gathered even as he creates it. And that's another facet of Special Collections Libraries that I don't think people are really aware of. I wasn't aware of it. I'm like, how unique. And Vincent is very, he's very excited and he thinks that there's a few people that he's still documenting. He's almost done actually with this work, but there are a few people that would be willing to have us come in and have him and let us tape him interviewing them and be part of the story. Because this is a huge, you know, it's a huge undocumented civil rights story in American life. Oh, I love this collection. My big sister went to Northwestern. That is a good note. But David Easterbrook from Northwestern's Africana collection, which I'm told is the largest or one of the largest in the world, happened to be in Africa in 2007 when Obama was barely a candidate and he started seeing t-shirts and he started seeing all this paraphernalia. And so he thought, what a unique opportunity. He put his word out through his scholarly network and the artifacts started flooding in and now they have the Africa embracing Obama collection at Northwestern, which may or may not have a resurgence after November. And in a non-spark partisan spirit, if Mexico responds the same way as Africa to Mitt Romney, we'll feature that collection too. And then there's the birth of soul food. I love this. The University of Alabama has 450 books. African American, most of these are fundraisers for churches, you know, and you know, like a lot of cooks, a lot of cooks go to the grave with their recipes. They're loath to give them out and there's lots of stories like that. I think this would be a great and probably a great cross-promotional possibility as well. Chef Jeff Henderson from the Food Network actually has a book out of soul food origins that he himself has been doing research into the birth of soul food and how Native American and African influences have come into American cuisine. And soul food is such a great way to explore all kinds of other facets of American life. The family, gender roles, race, you know, it's just so rich. And again, this is very dangerous to get going because you know, you all have all these stories clicking in your head as well and we want to hear them. Not all at once. But this is what we'd like to do. There's so many different ways into the stories. There's profiles of people. We could do straight documentary styles. There's mysteries, you know, like I used to do on History Detectives, certainly. You know, there's the deserter's roster. Of course, the deserter's roster, we wouldn't have been able to do on History Detectives because you know, those pesky academics figured it out, you know, and we have to make it look like our guys did it, right? Anyway, so I think that, you know, that the format constricted what we could do on that show that are wide open for us. So we'd like to find a nice, you know, combination of styles and techniques that we could use and talented and excited hosts and reporters as well. So, oh, I'm sorry. There's one more that I want to talk about. This is the Henry Tufts Collection, it's a labity collection at the University of Michigan. This was, these papers were donated by the top cop in Vietnam. He investigated in Eli, and there was another one that the Army squashed. The Army squashed the investigation and they forced him to resign. And then he gave all of his papers to the University of Michigan Labity Collection. And there was like a six month grace period where reporters from the Toledo Blade, because he gave all of his papers to his neighbor, who was a reporter. And he didn't like reporters, but he liked his neighbor. And his neighbor donated them to the University of Michigan so that they could enter the public domain. And from that came a series of articles in the Toledo Blade in 2004 that won the Pulitzer Prize. And Mike Sala is, you know, gives all props to the Special Collections Library and is willing to come back and re-enact his discovery in a story on this. So, you know, here's one that's almost like all the President's men and has kind of the same kind of intrigue and cover-up. But very important and shows another very important role of Special Collections Libraries. So, yeah. Yeah, as you can see, we have no enthusiasm for this. And, Sue, how much time do we have? I don't want to keep people. We have seven minutes. And we want one of the things that Dean Dewey asked us last week when we were talking about coming here was what do you want from this group? And, you know, we want your ideas, as Christian said, not all at once. We want your ideas, we want your feedback on this as a concept and on the trailer. We also want your suggestions on where we may go to find funding for this kind of project. You know, if you have ideas on any of, you know, on any of those, we would love to hear it. And Christian and Elaine Bersicchi, who Anne introduced, hear their contact information. But you have the little club cards that are on your table. Please take those with you. And if you have a need for, you know, 50, 100 more, you know, just let us know. We're happy to drop them in the mail. And, but that if you go to that website after we premiered the trailer today, the trailer will be up and you can share it, as I was saying earlier. So with that, if you have questions or anything for us, we would be happy to answer. So if you have ideas as to who should see it and if you have introductions for us, because just getting an unsolicited email in our experience with other projects isn't really going to get us to the people who need to see it. Often we can get it inside an organization or a corporation or, you know, or a government agency, but we can't get to the decision maker. So if you have those, you know, those connections or want to share those with us or want to make it yourself and see if there's interest even just to send that link, we would be thrilled for that kind of help. And this is generally how we develop these projects is we find the key organizations that share the vision and also share the level of caring. And you all, that's the thing that is just lovely about this and this was what, you know, the book, the dog-eared, our dog-eared book showed us that they know, they know where the treasures are, this association, and the people who, and the organizations that belong to it understand this in a way that, you know, you are the experts in this area. We are the storytellers. So hopefully we can bring that together in a way that allows us to take off with this. Penn State Public Broadcasting actually has a fairly small reach. Our broadcast area was our footprint. Went into Southern New York and the whole way to the border with Maryland. We have the largest rural footprint east of the Mississippi. What has happened with the work that we're doing now is we're not actually producing for our broadcast anymore. Of course we will broadcast it and we're proud to. But we are, under this engaging faculty initiative, we're actually producing for national and international broadcast and we've had considerable success with that. And so we are looking to distribute to all public television stations across the country as well as internationally We've had a tremendous amount of interest in our work from different organizations around the world. Right now I'm talking with France about one of our projects and called World on Trial. So, you know, we were always very, for many, many years, we had the constraint of the broadcast area. Once that started to move, once that started to give way with the internet and then once we became able to produce at this national level, we are now able to produce nationally. There are big producing stations for the PBS system and Boston, WGBH, everyone knows. WNET in New York. Those are the big, you know, Minnesota, Oregon. Penn State just has come on to that stage. So from that perspective, there aren't that many public television stations across the country that have this production capability. And so we certainly, we work with other stations, as I was saying, we've worked extensively with Ohio State and with Wisconsin to develop university-based programming. But we have not, we don't have, we don't share the level of production quality, but mostly just production resources. You know, because there's talented people everywhere. To be able to do that type of everybody buys in and you all do your own locally and then it comes into us and we curate. And it is possible, it's a little more difficult. I think that what we might want to do and as we develop this project, I'm going to keep that in mind because once we start to establish this, I think that we could probably do that. Huh. Yeah, right now. I'm thinking that's a great, that would be a great way to think about this. Yeah, let's talk. Thank you very, very much. I appreciate your time. Well, I want to thank Kristen and Melanie and Elaine for joining us today. I'm looking forward to sharing the trailer with my mother who's convinced I stamp books all day. So this won't be good. Thank you for listening. Music was provided by Josh Woodward For more talks from this meeting, please visit www.arl.org