 Good evening everyone and welcome to an inside look into the Mechanics Institute's archives and special collections with our archivist Diane Lye. My name is Taryn Edwards and I am one of the librarians here at the Mechanics Institute of San Francisco. Before I introduce our speaker, I just want to thank all of you for attending, especially those of you who chose to support this event by paying a little something. Now more than ever your support counts and it helps the Institute provide more free events that help explore San Francisco's history. A word about the Institute for those of you who are unfamiliar with it. The Mechanics Institute is an independent membership community founded in 1854 that houses a wonderful library, the oldest in fact designed to serve the public in California. We are also a cultural event center and a world renowned chess club that is the oldest in the United States. We hold San Francisco and value activities such as this. I encourage you to consider becoming a member with us. It is only $120 a year and with that, you help support our contribution to not only San Francisco's history, but its culture and its future. Hello, our speaker tonight is my colleague Diane Lye, who joined Mechanics in 2012 as the full time public services librarian. Shortly thereafter she assumed the role of archivist and worked with consultants and interns to establish an archives and special collections program here at the Institute. In the last few years with the help of grants and donations and more volunteers, the Mechanics Institute's archives and special collections program has become a permanent part of the library and the Institute at large. Since 2019 Diane has transitioned into her role as the sole part time archivist at the Institute. Next steps in I just wanted to tell you that we have a large group of registrants tonight so we are using the webinar format of zoom, which means that you cannot see or hear the other audience members you'll just see me and Diane. There will be time however after Diane's presentation to take questions. So as they occur to you please put them in the chat space, and we will get to them at the end. All right, thank you so much for coming and thank you Diane. Welcome. Hello everyone, I am thrilled to be here. And let me share my screen so I can get to the presentation. So here we are. I am Diane lie as Terence said the archivist at the Mechanics Institute. And tonight, I am going to give you a brief history of the Mechanics Institute and highlight events that impacted our archival holdings, including a sense of how the archives and special collections grew over the last 10 years. What items are collected in the archives and special collections, a glimpse at some of our treasures, and then an overview of recent projects and some of the donations we've received in the last couple of years. So this is a picture of our Mechanics Institute at 57 post streets. This may be the, the newest photo that you will see tonight I've got a lot of pictures that I want to share with you. Let me start with a little bit of the Mechanics Institute history. As Terence said, we were founded in 1854 and mechanics institutes at that time were really popular in English speaking countries such as the UK, Australia, and New Zealand, and the structure of the Mechanics Institute was comprised of three elements. There was always a library. There was always some form of recreation in our case it was chess and checkers at the beginning. And we offered technical or vocational classes. And in our case we collaborated with UC Berkeley to offer our technical classes. And certain events that occurred in our 167 year history were that we organized and ran 31 industrial exhibitions in San Francisco between 1857 and 1899. We merged with the mercantile library, another membership library located in San Francisco in January of 1906, and then our building and our collections were all destroyed in the great earthquake in April 1906. This picture that I love this bear because primarily because it is cut out and pasted on this note paper, and someone has taken the time to point out where the Mechanics Institute building is on post street. This was the building that actually was destroyed in the 1906 earthquake. It is in the same place that our existing building is located. And it gives you a really clear view of what post street looked like back in 1880 as it's noted on the bottom of this picture. So we started the MI archive project. It actually started before I joined the Institute in 2012. With the objective to protect and to preserve our legacy. So I'm about 2010 our previous library director realize that we needed to do something about protecting our historic records and organizational records and started to take steps to establish an archive. Our records were scattered throughout our building. It's a nine story building and the picture that is on the slide kind of represents how things were stored at that time. This is a picture of the loft area in our library director's office. It was kind of used as a repository for everything. And it wasn't really set up to be an archive. But there is a large window. So there is light pollution in this area. And also temperature and humidity could not be controlled in this area. We found records all over the place in closets under printers. So starting in about 2014 after I had joined in 2012. We started collecting and sorting and housing all of these items down in our basement and the previous library director had designated a part of our basement book room, which houses overflow of the circulating collection. And it was determined that that area in the basement was the best place in the building for an archives. It not only had security, it also had no windows, and it had 10 the same temperature and relative humidity, it was constant throughout the year. And it's a dry basement and we don't have any little critters running around. So that was determined to be the best area. In 2015, we hired some consultants to help us assess our collections, and also to help us determine what subject areas would be designated as our special collections and I'll get into that in a little bit. So this peak at what our archives in the basement looks like. Because we lost so much in the 1906 earthquake. Our archives is really relatively small. We have little survived, although we have over the years collected things like annual reports and and such that other people had maybe in their homes that were not affected, or we have two large safes in our basement and the items that were located in those safes survived the earthquake and fire, but really the good news and the good news is it's a relatively small archive so it's easily handled the bad news is it's a relatively small archives. Our archives consists of our organizational records of the Mechanics Institute, and those items are things like the Board of Trustee meeting minutes, bylaws, historical papers correspondence. We have annual reports, industrial exhibition reports of our own personal industrial exhibitions, the library newsletters and bulletins. It chess, we have a visitor's register from chess that is in our archives, cross tables photos, that type of thing and membership records. Our membership records over the years and we only have membership records from about 1908 forward are in many different formats. So these are a couple of our treasures from the archives on the left hand side is a large book leather color covered volume. This is actually our first volume of handwritten Board of Trustee minutes, and they are minutes from 1854 to 1857. This volume was actually lost in the 1906 earthquake and fire. We did not know where it was. You can see from the note and I'm not sure if you can read the note that is next to it on the yellow note paper. This volume was returned to us in this manila envelope in 1958. What happened, according to this note is that this it was located this volume was located in the vicinity of the library after the earthquake, and a man had picked it up and taken it home. He picked it and he had it until he and his wife both died, and they asked a friend of theirs to return it to us upon their death. So we actually got this volume back in 1958, according to the note. On the right hand side of the slide is the visitor's register for the mercantile library. And as you remember from my brief history. This is the mercantile library in January of 1906. So we had all of their document documents and records. We had already absorbed into our, into our organization. The mercantile library association visitors record register is was a real surprise, a surprising treasure I should say that I really realized that we had just this past year. I happened to be going through and just kind of confirming what my container listings said and what was actually in each container and I came across the register and I started looking through it carefully. And I wrote that said that many important people had signed the register, such as Captain Ulysses as Grant, and that is circled and read there on the page. What happened to be that he was in 1853 he was coming through San Francisco as part of the fourth infantry, and he was on his way to a fort in northern California to take over and run the fort. And he happened to stop in the mercantile library and he signed this register. Other names that you might recognize are that signed this register are Don Jose Noriega, John C Fremont, the Reverend Thomas star King, and also the author Herman Melville. I was really excited. One of the things that I love most about being an archivist is it's almost like you're a treasure hunter and when you find something like this. It is very exciting and kind of makes your whole year. So our special collections we determined we have seven special collections. And I'm going to speak about four of them a little bit more in depth. And those are the ones that I've starred on this page. The other three special collections are relatively self explanatory California and Western Americana refer to volumes that either the subject matter is about California, or West, the Western United States, or maybe the off the authors from California or the Western United States. And then membership libraries because we are one of a few membership libraries, especially in the United States, although they're all over the world. We have a very small collection about membership libraries. So the first collection I want to speak about is our chess collection. We have a very large chess collection, it is the largest collection of chess monographs, newsletters, and periodicals west of the Mississippi. The second only to the john G white chess collection at the Cleveland public library. That is a wonderful chess collection if you ever have the chance to visit the Cleveland public library. The Deb Hunt and I when we were out there for a conference a couple of years ago went over and visited. And it's, it's a remarkable chess collection. We have in both our collect circulating and special collections. We have over 2000 volumes and approximately 500 volumes are in our special collections, and our collection runs from. From the late 1700s to the present. We are our chess director is in charge of continuing to buy items for our chess collection. We are particularly particularly strong in chess periodicals. As you can see on the far right side of your screen is the British chess magazine and we have the full run of that from 1881 to the present. And that is continues to be published on the far left of the screen is the chess volume, titled entitled chess by Richard twists, and that was published in 1787. And then I've included a couple of other items that you might find in our chess collection on the slide. Other chess periodicals that we have are American chess bulletin chess review chess life. But we have many, many chess periodicals. Also in our collection are photos many photos chess pieces and other ephemera cross tables, etc. And the special collection I want to talk about is industrial exhibitions and World's fairs. Because we held our own industrial exhibitions. We planned them, we ran them. And these did this all voluntarily. And we, we had our own industrial exhibitions, primarily to to make money to run our Institute. But because we had our own are some work board of trustee members and other members of the Institute would go out on their own and go to these industrial exhibitions and World's fairs. And so we could use them nationally but internationally, and bring back items, booklets and pamphlets and things like that, that we could use as ideas for our own industrial exhibitions. We have a large collection of items from the Panama Pacific International exhibition, which took place here in San Francisco in 1915. And due to the fact that our board of trustee president at the time and our secretary, I believe they both were on the board of the PPI and so they had access to a lot of these items. We have mostly pamphlets and booklets but also maps and correspondence, a lot of items. So we have 200 about 200 items for the PPI. And then we have an international exhibition which took place on Treasure Island in 1939. We have about 100 items. Again, it was a local fair so it was easy for people to attend and bring back items for our collection. And then the California midwinter international exposition in 1894, which took place in Golden Gate Park. We have a small collection of items from that fair. This particular leather bound volume is a history of the fair. But other than that we have a few pamphlets and booklets and things like that. And I said, these were very popular industrial exhibitions and world's fairs all over the world during the 19th century. So we have a kind of a smattering of items from other world's fairs and expositions including, but not limited to the world's Colombian exposition in Chicago in 1893. We have a view book on the bottom of the slide there from that fair. The Crystal Palace exhibition in London in 1851, the Hudson Fulton celebration in New York in 1909. The New York World's Fair in 1939, the exposition, Universal in Paris in 1867, and the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in 1904. A special collection that we have is our area and press collection. The area and press is a small printing establishment located in the Presidio here in San Francisco. It is still publishing works. It primarily as a 20th century kind of publishing company but it continues in the 21st century to also publish. So we have a design press, limited edition books with original art. We have a few more than 75 volumes. And the reason we have this collection is because one of our members donated the entire collection to us. The, the type in these books is handset. The paper might be handmade slip covers are to protect the volumes are unique, always unique and they're made in in house. And I've just kind of included on this slide. These are examples of area and press books. So on our far left is the Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. And above the title page are the paw print is on the cover of the book. And then next to it is the slip cover for the volume. And it's a little hard to see, but it is a misty field, and way in the back are trees behind the mist. And then in the middle we have a Christmas Carol, and the Fezzy Wigs are dancing on the cover of the book, and then the red is the slip cover for the fourth book. And then I've included a shelf of one of the shelves of area and press volumes that we have in our special collections area. There are, I didn't include any of the very oddly shaped ones there are some round books that are in almost like a film can. There are large volumes we have a two volume Bible. So they're all interesting and and this is truly word as art, but they're beautiful books and we're very lucky that they were donated to us. And finally, the last special collection I want to speak about is the Civil War collection that we have, and this is kind of an unlikely special collection to have at the Mechanics Institute in San Francisco, and not many people know that we have it. I have approximately 250 volumes in this special collection. I've included on this slide, just a sampling of the books that we have in the special collection. And the reason that we have this special collection, again, is because it was donated by two of our members who donated their personal collections of this of their Civil War collections that they had. I particular when when I started pulling items that I thought I wanted to include on the slide. I think I want to read some of these I haven't really sat down and read them all. But life and death in rebel prisons and the report on the Fort Pillow massacre. I've never heard of some of these things and so I will probably pull them and and sit down and read some of these and I hope that other people will know about this special collection and do the same thing. Now I'd like to speak a little bit about some of our projects that have happened over the last five years or so, as we've built our archives and special collections. And one of the first things we did was to replace this metal and wood cabinet that we have on our in our second floor library with a an archival display cabinet which you'll see on your right. It was intended specifically to exhibit our items from our special collections and our archives. And hanging above it is one of our treasures. It is an 1854 Bridgens map that was based on the 1853 survey map of San Francisco drawn by Richard Bridgens. This institute acquired it in 1859, and it's noted for the vignettes that are on the border of the map, and their vignettes of San Francisco landmarks and architecture in San Francisco. It is only one of a handful of these maps still in existence today. And it is remarkable for its pristine condition. There is a bit of a water stain on one corner of it. We believe that is probably because it was folded up, and it was in one of the safes in our basement. So it actually made it through the earthquake and fire with a little bit of water damage on it. And it's in very, very good condition. And anyone that can should come and take a look at the map. It's a remarkable treasure of ours. Also in 2016, we started a big digitization project. And we started with digitizing our historic meeting minutes from the board of trustees meetings. We started with digitizing volumes of these historic meeting minutes from 1854 to 1923. This happens to be our very first volume, and this is the volume that if you recall from earlier in the presentation had been damaged in the earthquake and fire and return to us in 1958. And as you can see, it's very faded and hard to read. There is down here along the spine, you can see the water damage that occurred. So we decided we would start with our historic meeting minutes because they're unique. They are about our history, and they're fragile. And as you can see with the fading of the handwriting the fading ink. We felt that it was better to start with these sooner the better to get them digitized. And, and then safely secured the original safely secured in our archives. I'm going to show you a little bit more about this further in in the presentation. We also digitized our chest room visitors register which was in use between 1913 and 2014. This isn't religiously use so there are gaps within the visitors register, but we have signatures of many notable chess players in this register, including us champions world champions. Marshal Alexander Alakine, Mikhail tall, a J think Walter Lovegrove, Emory Kodig, George Koltenowski, and Boris spasky, just to name a few. And then in 2017. We continued our digitization project by digitizing the mechanics institutes industrial exhibition reports. These reports were written after each of our industrial exhibitions. And we have almost a full run of these, we are missing the final, the report for the final industrial exhibition, and they did not write a report a full report for the third industrial exhibition because it didn't go well, and they didn't make very good money. We know that because someone kindly wrote a note about this, and why they hadn't produced a report. So, at least we know we're not just missing that report. One of the most frequent research questions that we get from the general public is about someone that they are researching who exhibited something at one of our industrial exhibitions and they want to know did, did this person exhibit there, what did they exhibit and to give them as much information as possible. Unfortunately, these reports really only give you maybe a title or if it's an artwork, it's the title of the artwork or, or it, they produced some kind of flower or something that they exhibited. There were many different subject areas and so it could be they, you know, they were some, they exhibited something and they just want to know what it was, and just kind of confirmation that they did exhibit and when, and that's about as much as we can tell them. We have a few photos from these industrial exhibitions, but the reports are really all we have left of that. In 2018, we actually had to go in and modify our basement archives area. But after, after storing things, you know, after we went through the collecting and sorting and organizing and storing, putting things into boxes, etc, we discovered that regular bookshelves are way too narrow for our boxes. And so we had to slightly modify our basement archives area by installing deeper shelves that could handle the boxes that we have on them. We also added grids on some of our walls so that we could store framed images on those grids. And we also put in flat files that handle and store large format items such as these photographs that you see in this picture. We have blueprints. We have a lot of blueprints. And that's primarily blueprints of our building posters, anything that is large format and flat art gets stored in these flat files. Almost immediately after we installed these they were full. It just gives you an idea of how much of that type of thing we have in our archive. In our recent digitization projects, starting in 2018, we joined and became a member of the California revealed project. And this is a project that is handled out of the California State Library. And the benefit of this one is that they will digitize items for us for free, which is kind of a big deal for us. And the benefit of this one is that it has to be a California based item, and it has to be unique. So, in 2018 2019 with the help of the former chess director, we selected six California chess clubs or associations that had a run of it was important to chess in California, and we sent those all up to the California State Library and they digitize them. And once those are digitized, then the California revealed project uploads those into the Internet archive to WorldCat, Callasphere, and the Digital Public Library of America. And the reaction on this slide of three of those associations. And the reason I selected them, at least for two of these is the chess voice one has Paul Whitehead on the cover. As a count Northern California champion, and then the California chess journal actually has Nick de Fermi and also winning a championship and both of these gentlemen are current chess club employees at the Mechanics Institute. And in order, I just like the image. So, we had primarily full runs of these newsletters for for chess voice California chess journal the chess reporter chess in action. I have a graphic voice. I have the California and California chess news are the ones that were digitized in the 2018 2019 project. In 2019 2020, we sent them 74 photos, historic photos of the Mechanics Institute. During the pandemic, this kind of got stalled. So I'm still waiting for those to be uploaded to be digitized and uploaded and returned to us. But the pictures that I actually have on the slide show our new building and new being the building that was built after the 1906 earthquake that we currently occupy. These photos were taken in 1915 just before we reopened this new building. Some of our members that are with us tonight will recognize the tables and the chairs because we are still using a lot of those tables and chairs. The left hand slot picture. That is the third floor library, which has had some changes to it since 1915. The middle picture is our chess club and it looks remarkably similar to our chess club today. And then on the right hand side is our second floor library, which also has had some major changes to it since 1915, although the tables and the chairs look very much alike. Very much the same because we are still using those. I mourn the loss of some of these beautiful light fixtures. I keep hoping that I'm going to open up a closet and find them someday but I don't think that's going to happen. So, one of the projects that I worked on during the pandemic. And that we recently completed is the addition of an archives and special collections web page on our mechanics Institute website. And I'm going to take us out of this and show you this web page because here we are and we're on the web page and to get here you would go to the mechanics Institute website and then go to books and more and hover over that and drop down to research. And there's the archives and special collection page. And that's where we are right now. And this, for those of you that are interested, it gives a much more detailed description of what is in all of our archives and let me just scroll down to the bottom here. What is in our special collections. And please if you are interested, go on down there and take a look in its gives you a much more detailed description of what is in that we have. But what I want to point out is that our digitized holdings are industrial exhibition reports, which you can see are all listed there. Our board of trustee minutes are all listed there and our chess room visitors register there but these are direct links to our digitized holdings so let me just show you so let's click on volume seven of the board of trustee minutes. And hopefully this will take us over to the Internet archive where these are stored. There we are, you can see the Internet archive. And so it shows you. That's the, of course, the book cover. And you can kind of just flip through it. So as you can see, they're a little hard to read. But you can, you can make it larger, and then you can zoom in as far as you need to go in order to read it, and you can manipulate the page so that you can actually go in and read. We are, we, so we, as I said before, we have digitized the nine volumes of the board of trustee minutes, all of the reports for the industrial exhibitions and the chess register and those are all available on on the archives and special collections website. So please take some time and go and look through those we are, I'm busy, having worked from home so much the past year, I've been doing a lot of other scanning and I hope to get some of our other records up on this website as well. Okay, so let me go back. Oops, to this. There we go. Okay. And what we are also doing is and this is a project that has been ongoing for a couple of years. We have been starting to transcribe those handwritten historic board of trustee meeting minutes. I've just kind of taken a screenshot of the September 11 1855 handwritten board of trustee meeting minutes, and then next to it to the right are is is our transcription of what is handwritten to the left. This is a long labor intensive type of project. We've only gotten this as far as we have because of our wonderful volunteers and interns. And we have completed the transcription of the first volume of meeting minutes, and partially we've completed the second and third volumes, and this is going to be an ongoing project. I want to talk a little bit about some donations that have come in in just the past couple of years. The fine arts museums of San Francisco over during the pandemic have been kind of culling through their collections. And I think they have, they sent us early, or I guess mid 2020 a list of items that they thought we might be interested in. They had some kind of connection to the Mechanics Institute. And so we've taken a look at them and we accepted some of them we have to be somewhat picky or selective because we only have a certain amount of space. But some of the items that they have donated to us are true treasures and we are so thrilled that they offered them to us. This is a portrait of John Seim. John was one of the founding members of the Mechanics Institute. He was on our board of trustees for many many years, and he was the board of trustees president from 1857 to 1858, and they sent us this wonderful portrait of him. I love, I love the beard. Other items that they donated to us were 12 medals from various of our Mechanics Institute industrial exhibitions. We handed these out to kind of best in class of the people who exhibited at our industrial exhibitions. Either there were gold, silver or bronze medals. The ones that they gave us are dated between 1857 and 1891 which and we are thrilled to have them. We had already 22 medals in our archive and to add 12 more is truly remarkable. The picture that came again from the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco this year is a portrait of John Hugh McDonald who was a board of trustee member in 1873 and 1874. This donation actually came from a private donor who contacted our chess director and wanted to know if we would be interested in this handwritten score sheet from 1924. This is a, this was a tournament, a chess club tournament between Alexander Alakine and Fisker but I'm not sure what his first name is. Of course we were thrilled to have it and when I went back and I looked at our chess club register, sure enough Alexander Alakine had signed our chess room register on February 27, 1924. We were contacted earlier this year by one of our members who's a chief land surveyor for the San Francisco city's public works. And he wanted to know if we would be interested in this precision survey level for a long term loan. And the reason why it's special to us is that the a leads manufacturing company actually was one of our tenants in our commercial space in our building from 1916 to 1936 approximately there. We were also exhibited at some of our industrial exhibitions. So we are thrilled to be able to have this on loan and it will be exhibited in one of our display cases soon as soon as you know we open up a little bit more to our members in the public. And that's it. Thank you very much. I'm so happy to have had all of you here about our archives and special collections. Well thank you Diane. We are ready to take your questions I see that there are a few here. The first one was from Florence, and I did put some details in the chat space about this but maybe you could comment as well Diane. She asks are the archives made available to researchers. They, yes they are made available. You get the researchers and our members and public really can't access it in the basement, but if a researcher calls me and makes an appointment and tells me what they're looking for. I'm more than happy to do a little, you know do some research find items that might be of interest to them and then make an appointment to have them come in and and see the items in the library, they would be in library only. And then just a word about the pandemic restrictions. Right now or just open mechanics members but soon. Correct. I have been doing some research over the phone and if it's something that I can scan and send I'm happy to do that. So if it's, if it's a smaller, you know, manageable size than that that can work as well. Great. And then Carol asks, are items in the special collections, such as rare chess magazines, consulted by mechanics members, or is the idea to preserve them rather than make them necessarily available to readers. We do have some of our members who are voracious users of our special collections. They tend to be chess aficionado kind of people. We are preserving them for the future, but we encourage we want to encourage people to to look at these items again special collections would be in libraries only. But we are that's one of the reasons we're trying to digitize so much is that people can access it from anywhere. We have actually been working on digitizing some of the chess periodicals and those are available on the internet archive. Great. And then Maggie asks, do you have any history or artifacts on the mechanics pavilion in the collection. We do have some on the pavilion. We know that we have listings of events that took place at the mechanics pavilion. We have some images of the mechanics pavilion not a lot. But yes, we do have some. We actually now for we and actually Taryn you can probably answer this even better than I can. But we had different pavilions. I'm assuming they're talking about the last pavilion that we had that burned up in the earthquake and fire. But for our industrial exhibitions we constructed pavilions, and we had seven or eight of them throughout the years for just for the industrial exhibitions, and we do have images of those. So yes, we would have some information, probably not lots and lots but we would have some, depending on what the specific question is. So a time period would be best if you are inquiring because there were several mechanics pavilions so just let us know what year. Carol has another question. Do you now have every item in the archives identified and cataloged every photo. No, we do not that is a huge project and since there's only one of me and while I have used interns a lot. We, I have container listings but those not necessarily cataloged. So I can find things, but no you are not going to be able to find everything in the catalog in our catalog. And Maggie asked another question regarding the pavilions she asked because one of her ancestors attended a ball there in the late 1800s and I just wanted to comment that events that were held at the mechanics pavilions over the years were heavily covered by newspapers. And so I'm going to put in the chat space a date a free database that has newspapers that you know you can search for mechanics pavilion and find articles related to the events held there. Yes, and if there is something specific if you have a specific date or specific specific range of dates, I can probably go and and and see what we have about the pavilion at that point in time. All right, any other questions. Steve comments great resources and preservation projects Thank you very much. Lots of thank yous rolling in. We appreciate it. I had a fun time putting this together and, and I hope everyone enjoyed all of the images that I showed during the presentation. Yeah, I certainly did. Well, I don't see any other questions but tons of thank yous. So, I just want to announce that the video for this event will be emailed to you. The link to it, and the video will reside on the mechanics institutes YouTube channel so you can refer to it later if you like. I just want to thank all of you for coming out tonight and thank you Diane. Sure, my pleasure. All right, have a nice evening. Bye bye.