Online Sources: Baltimore and the Black Arts Movement

Cover art from a 1980 issue of Chicory magazine

From 1966 until 1983, Enoch Pratt Free Library published Chicory, a literary magazine by Baltimore residents. According to historian Mary Rizzo, Chicory began as a federally funded Great Society program run by Evelyn Levy and Thelma Bell. It sought to give a voice to residents in Baltimore’s poorest neighborhoods and to develop black aesthetics in the arts locally.

Want to know more about this long-overlooked Baltimore arts magazine? View digital copies of all 126 issues in the statewide digital collection database, Digital Maryland: http://collections.digitalmaryland.org/cdm/landingpage/collection/mdcy

Try Out Oxford University Press

Oxford University Press is at Langsdale for a limited time!

Langsdale is hosting trials for four Oxford University Press resources up until February 16. You can find them here, as well as on our Databases page. Check out the right hand column to see what's new or available for a limited time.

At Oxford Reference Online, you can find some of Oxford University Press' most well-known and visited titles from their Encyclopedias and Companions and from selected partner publishers' scholarly works.

Oxford African American Studies Center is the most comprehensive collection of over 10,000 scholarly articles that focus on the lives and events that shaped African American and African history and culture.

Oxford Bibliographies Online provides accurate and reliable resources on a variety of academic topics, written by academic experts, that guide faculty and students through the current scholarship.

Social Explorer is a demographic data visualization and research website that engages the public with society and science through dynamic maps and customizable reports.

Check out these resources while they're available at Langsdale and let a librarian know what you think!

Preserve the Baltimore Uprising

Screen capture of Preserve the Baltimore Uprising online

Local cultural heritage organizations and university faculty members are working together to create an online digital collection related to the events surrounding the death of Freddie Gray in police custody on April 19, 2015. The public is invited to submit content to the online project.

Angela Koukoui, a UB undergraduate and Langsdale Library student assistant, is one of two interns currently working at the Maryland Historical Society on building the digital repository. She was recently interviewed alongside Maryland Historical staff member, Joe Tropea, about the collaborative initiative. You can view their online interviews on Channel 2 and Channel 13.

The Soul of Baltimore

As mentioned in a previous blog post, the WJZ-TV and WMAR-TV Collections at the Langsdale Library hold approximately three hundred 2-inch Quad reels that are in need of digitization to preserve their unique audiovisual content. One of these reels was digitized recently and uploaded to the Internet Archive. It read on its original label ,“Master: SOUL OF BALTIMORE 27:51”. The term “master” indicates that this is the highest quality version of this content. 

After researching historical newspaper databases, this title was found to potentially be a 1968 WMAR-produced special entitled, “The Soul of Baltimore”. This seemed like a great candidate to digitize as it was about the history of Baltimore’s Pennsylvania Avenue, the center of the city's African American community in the first half of the twentieth century. The special is also narrated by Walter P. Carter, civil rights activist and chairman of the local chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). After digitization, the content on the video reel was found to match the content on the label, as well as having ten minutes at the end of the reel that had not been recorded over or erased. These “extras” included 1960s era broadcast footage of two other WMAR-produced shows, a few commercials, and a few minutes of a nationally syndicated show, “Truth or Consequences”.

"The Soul of Baltimore" is especially powerful to watch in light of the recent uprising and protests surrounding the death of Sandtown-Winchester resident Freddie Gray, as many of these events transpired on or near Pennsylvania Avenue. You can watch the entirety of "The Soul of Baltimore" below.

Roots in the Road Fights

Photo credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center/Bill Hrybyk

"Mikulski's legacy starts with the 'battle of the road.'" That's the Baltimore Sun headline that caught my eye on the iPad this morning. Columnist Dan Rodricks highlights the roots of Senator Barbara Mikulski's political career in Baltimore's expressway fights of the 1960s and 1970s.

According to Rodricks, "There are a lot of parts to the Mikulski legacy. But the one Baltimore long-timers remember -- and newcomers should know and appreciate -- was the fight against the highways, way back when."

Want to know more about the road fights? You're in luck, because Langsdale Library contains the archival records of two of the grassroots organizations that fought expressway construction through their neighborhoods: Southeast Council Against the Road (SCAR) and Movement Against Destruction (MAD).

Check out our digital exhibit, which highlights selected material, or browse the collections as they've been scanned in their entirety: MAD and SCAR.

Want to learn more? Contact Special Collections or make an appointment to view the collections in person.

Digital Video - at Langsdale and from the White House

I've been thinking a lot about digital video the last few days. My new graduate assistant, Antoinette Woods, will be starting work at Langsdale next week, and her job will be to create short, original videos for the library. These will range from six-second Vines to longer tutorials and video tours on YouTube or Vimeo.

I've also been talking to our archivists, Ben Blake and Aiden Faust, about some of the interesting things they are doing with our historical news footage collections. We've also started planning the hardware and software that the library will need to acquire for the new audio/visual archivist position they are looking to fill.

Photo: Pete Souza

So with all of this fresh in mind, I was very interested to hear a piece on WYPR this morning on the future challenges to organize the "thousands and thousands of hours" of footage the first White House videographer, Arun Chaudhary, has amassed since President Obama took office. I was also please to hear a historian at our affiliate school Towson quoted on the topic. It's always nice to hear from local experts on national programs, even if they aren't from UB.

This got me thinking: Massaging all these videos into a coherent collection that can be meaningfully used by researchers will require a lot of hands from a lot of disciplines. From metadata experts describing the content, to web programmers designing the UI, to historians putting it in context with the more official videos. So -- current UB history majors and design students interested in digital video -- now's your chance to start thinking about these kinds of projects. Get some real world experience working with digital video here or other archives in Baltimore, and solve the problems these types of resources bring with them.

It would be great to hear from one of you on NPR someday talking about how you helped make all this historical, behind the scenes, footage easily available to the world.

From the "Langsdale Link": The Ways We Read Books

At the end of last year, sometime right around the beginning of the holiday shopping season, it seemed editors and writers in just about every popular-news-and-editorial-based magazine and website were complaining that publishing was coming to an end as we know it … or, at least, there’d be an end to print. That turned out not to be the case, and probably never will be. The end was not so nigh as some may have had us believe. But that’s not to say that there is no massive sea change in the ways people are now buying and reading books, in the ways publishers are disseminating and promoting books, and the ways libraries are lending books. There are, and all these new processes of buying, selling, lending e-books and the copyright rules and rules of ownership that are paired with e-books─not to mention the decisions inherent in choosing from the different file types, the device requirements, and the terms of use from the publisher, the retailer, etc., etc …. This can all get really confusing and really murky─really quick.

At Langsdale, though, we are trying to make your choices, digital or print, as easy as possible. For all students, staff and faculty, it was and will continue to be easy to get books not only physically from our shelves, but also to have books delivered to Langsdale from any public university in the state within a few days (just a few clicks on the website or a quick chat with our circulation staff).

The Walters Goes Digital

Past the glass cases lined with Grecian urns and Roman armor, past the gift shop and the cafe dressed in Medieval stone archways, past the bronzes of Buddhist saints and paintings of Hindu gods, there are rooms at The Walters Art Museum lined with wooden cases that house some of the museum's richest collections. These rooms hold the institution's collection of ancient manuscripts, some dating back to the 8th century. And unless you happen to be a curator at the museum, you would never know that most of them existed, until now. With the help of a generous grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Walters' staff are in the process of digitizing their entire collection of manuscripts, some of which are already available online and can be used in any way by the public.

I can't think of a better ways to waste a few hours online.

Folk Songs and Light Bulbs

From Wikipedia

Let me just preface this post by saying: I am not a librarian -- at least not in any technical sense. I never went to school... never even thought about going to school... actually, before I started working here, I'm not sure I even knew there was such a thing as a degree in library science. I just hung around a lot of libraries, used them a lot, read in them a lot, napped in them more than a few times before class, so when I started working here as a student it fit naturally. But possibly because I never studied libraries or the science of them, never really considered them in anything resembling a holistic, or comprehensive way, I still, even after a few years working here, find myself astounded at some of the things I find from time to time, usually by accident, doing this or that at work.

I'll share just a few quick examples:

• The Library of Congress website: If you've ever been to Washington (and this being Baltimore, there is a pretty good chance that you have) more than likely someone -- a tour guide, a cab driver, a cousin -- pointed this building out to you. It gorgeous (see above). The library does exactly what it says it does: it's the library for congress. So unless you're a representative or senator, or an aid to one or the other, you can't actually check books out of the building. But, there is enough on their website to keep even the mildly curious happy for a while. A few suggestions: 
• The American Folklife Center: Here you'll find digital transfers of wax recordings made around the country in the 1930's and 40's (folk songs, sea shanties, field hollers, Native American rituals, etc.), as well as pictures and maps of historical America.

• Alexander Graham Bell Family Papers: This site doesn't have quite as much info, but what it does have I think is pretty interesting: scans of Alexander Graham Bell's journal (containing many preliminary drawings for future inventions), and letters to and from him and his family (including one from Mark Twain, where he (jokingly) berates Bell's father-in-law for telephone service that always seems to cut out when he's practicing his cursing).

Columbus and a Sea of Blue Ideas

Columbus Breaking the Egg (Christopher Columbus) by William Hogarth

For a scientist -- or anyone for that matter -- to proclaim the discovery of a physical thing (a country, a particle, a planet, a new species of fish) has always rubbed me as a potentially childish endeavor, and, maybe more to the point, an altogether arrogant claim.* How could they possibly know, for sure, that in the thousands of years of recorded history no one else has found what they have?

Since we have recently celebrated Columbus Day, let’s use him as an example. “He,” the claim goes, “discovered America.” Well, actually, no. There are lots of things wrong with this claim, but I’ll only go into a few very briefly because the topic has been belabored by so many historians and activists that my adding to that body of lit. will do no one any good:  (1) he found a country/continent that was inhabited for about 12,000 years prior to his arrival, by an Asian population that walked an unimaginably long and icy bridge into Canada (which now, of course, isn’t there); (2) even if we try to claim that he was the first European to find the continent, there are problems here too; Vikings living on the southern tip of Greenland had traded and frequented the continent (they called it Vinland) long long before Spain traveled much further west than the Canary Islands; (3) he didn’t find America, he found Cuba.

Of course, this, the historical, empirical version of Columbus is not the person that we celebrated this past Monday. We celebrated the symbol of Columbus. A symbol that, for better or worse, is the symbol of America: determined; individualistic; steadfast in the face of the great, dangerous expanses of the unknown; slightly arrogant and reckless; and ultimately victorious in his endeavor to go where no one thought was possible – to add icing to the cake, he also came back rich. The story of Columbus mirrors the founding story of the US so well that to critique Columbus, even Columbus as myth, while continuing to sing the refrain of our own origin story, would rival the appearance of a patient suffering a traumatic brain hemorrhage caused by a great unknown cognizant dissonance. So here we are, kind of stuck with him, and a story we now know to be bull--

Graven and digital tablets: new technology at Langsdale

Langsdale On the Go! kiosk

It is difficult to disassociate libraries with books. Drive down any main street in the US and chances are you will run across a public library marked with the logo of a silhouetted human-type-figure sitting with an open book; or maybe you’ll see a logo of a book with its pages flapping haphazardly, whimsically, colorfully in the wind,  inviting you into its mysteries; or maybe the logo will be of a book lying on its spine, whose pages have spontaneously released a butterfly, or whose pages have nurtured a tree to grow – a tree which, chances are, will have at least one apple hanging from its limbs; etc. etc. You get my point. Logo designers need not even be creative in order to make the public come to this association. If anywhere you see a logo of a book, I’m sure you think “library.”

This is of course understandable. Since the clay tablet and the scroll went out of fashion a few hundred years before Guttenberg, the stock and trade of libraries the world over has been those thin pieces of tree bark smeared with ink and squashed between two thicker pieces of tree bark, covered as they are in cloth or gold or ivory or that annoying protective plastic that crinkles when you open it and seems to hold every piece of dust it ever encountered. But just as the graven tablet and the papyrus scroll have come and gone, the book also appears to be fading into the pages (read ‘digital files’) of history. The nostalgia for the printed book aside, there is little reason to lament the end of the book. The library will survive and so will the transmission of knowledge and ideas. It will just look different.

And as an academic library, we are involved in shaping how this transition to digital will look. In addition to bolstering our collection of eBooks, we have been developing new ways to search and find the document (digital, paper,  or otherwise) that you may be looking for. One of the new ways that you can peruse our collection is by way of our Langsdale On the Go! app. This can be saved onto your phone or iPad, and can be used to search for a book, ask a librarian a research question, find an available computer, or get hints on research strategies, among other things. In the spirit of unending progress -- from stone tablet, to scroll, to book, and back, in a way, to tablet – we are releasing the app in a beta format and ask students and staff to let us know if anything comes up short of your expectations. And while it is still a work in progress, all of the functions listed above are currently functional. 

 If you don’t have an iPad, or left it at home, you can use one of our iPad kiosks soon to be located throughout the building. These will allow you to do everything you can do on your own device, without lugging it all the way to class.

As time goes on, libraries and archives will look very different than they do right now. And these new developments in technology at Langsdale may just show the difference from where libraries began, to where they will surely go.

Open Data Applications

Hi! I'm Pete Ramsey, one of the Reference and Instruction librarians at Langsdale Library, and I also teach the Information Literacy (IDIS 110) course in first-year student learning communities.

In my course, I like to include a segment where students demonstrate an interesting web site or web-based tool that relates to information literacy. I saw some interesting (and occasionally controversial) demos this semester, including these two:

Microsoft's "Pedestrian Route Production" Mobile App 

Sometimes called the "Avoid Ghetto" app, this tool recommends walking directions based on weather, crime statistics, and population demographics. The app has received a lot of attention, due in large part to protests from civil liberties organizations, which claim that it highlights social discrimination and drives away potential business from the neighborhoods that need the most attention.

The Baltimore Sun's Homicide Mapping Website 

This site, not-so-affectionately called the "Baltimore Death Map," shows a map of Baltimore homicide victims as far back as 2007. Clicking on a pin shows the victim's name, age, gender, race, cause of death, and a link to any Sun articles about the homicide. A bit disturbing, I suppose, but an intriguing way to reveal the darker side of living and dying in Baltimore.

About the Open Data Movement

Both of the above tools demonstrate intelligent use of information made available by "open data" practices. The idea behind open data is to provide certain statistics and data freely for people to use without worrying about violating someone's intellectual property restrictions. A lot of governments and cities are providing this kind of data, and app and web developers are making really interesting reports and tools.

Baltimore's Open Data 

Baltimore city has two top-notch open data projects. There's OpenBaltimore with its goal of providing "access to City data in an effort that supports government transparency, openness and innovative uses that will help improve the lives of Baltimore residents, visitors and businesses" (Hint: recently got a parking citation? Look it up here). There's also the VERY nice CityView map, which offers various base maps of the city and numerous data layers (for example, you can see a sobering map of the many vacant buildings).

New technology at Langsdale



Printing Press circa 1811; Deutsches Museum Munich, Germany


Technology has become a part of our everyday lives. With the growing desire for faster and easier technology, the staff at Langsdale is always striving to keep up with the latest technologies.

Here are a few of the newest technologies available at Langsdale:

Slingbox: The library has found a novel use for something really designed for personal use, called Slingbox. The service is supposed to let you stream to your PC or Mac what is currently playing on your TV at home. We use it to let you watch one of our Reserve DVDs from home!

My Account: You can monitor what you’ve borrowed from the library, as well as get information on books you’re waiting to receive.

E-reserves in Sakai: Get all your class e-reserves without leaving Sakai.

Research Help: Have a question about an upcoming paper? No problem, students can chat with a librarian from anywhere on campus or from home.

Borrowing Laptops: You can now borrow a Lenovo laptop or netbook for a few hours. Instead of lugging around your laptop, you can simply check-out a laptop and find a space where you’re comfortable and return when finished.

New technologies coming to Langsdale:

Mobile Printing: You’ll soon be able to print from your smartphones! If you’ve typed notes or need to print out directions, you’ll be able to print and go.

Smartphone Apps: Soon you might have the option of searching the catalog, renewing your books, checking computer availability, reserving a group study room, or even accessing your course reserves from an application on your cell phone!

Discovering Our Hidden Resources

On the move: Arabbers on Baltimore streets (Sept-Oct 1969) 

The Special Collections Department is often an overlooked resource at Langsdale Library. It doesn’t help that it is located on the fourth floor, housed behind locked doors and open by appointment only.  However, the staff of three archivists is work diligently to make the treasures to be found within more accessible.  There are 134 individual archival collections, the majority of these related to the making of the modern city of Baltimore. Collectively they document the built environment, civic groups, public agencies, and nonprofit organizations from 20th century Baltimore City. Among the holdings can be found: oral histories, photographs, television news footage, architectural plans, and the papers of prominent Baltimore citizens.

As part of increasing awareness and promotion of the resources several digital initiatives over the last couple of years have been undertaken.  These range from completely digitized archival collections to select photographs and news footage on flickr.  Another impetus for improving access is researcher interest, recently MICA professor Mikita Brottman wrote about her experiences with this regard while trying to learn about the history of the Belvedere Hotel.  It was her use of this collection that led the staff to enhance the collection overview and creating a finding aid on the department’s website.  Collection overviews have also been created for all 134 collections and this information will soon be available in the library’s catalog.

Fewer clicks, no extra passwords

Langsdale Library is always looking for ways to make things easier and faster for faculty and students. Well, we have successfully made retrieving E-reserves as simple as 1 click.  Watch the before and after demonstration. Then try it out for yourself.