JHU Students Explore Langsdale's Special Collections on Baltimore 'Gayborhoods'

Langsdale’s Special Collections was recently featured in Johns Hopkins University HUB after their students took great advantage of the wealth of resources at home in UB’s Learning Commons: “Students sift through archives to uncover the history of Baltimore’s ‘gayborhoods’”.

Johns Hopkins students of the Intersession course “Gayborhood” Histories visited Langsdale’s archives to learn both the history of Baltimore’s “gayborhoods” and to learn how to work with archival resources.

Special Collections is the home to the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Community Center of Baltimore and Central Maryland’s archives. The GLCCB is committed to “uniting and empowering sexual and gender minorities in Baltimore and Central Maryland and advocating for a better quality of life the entire community” (GLCCB). The center recently celebrated its 35^th anniversary and is working with MICA on their LGBTQIA History Project.

This is the second time the course has been taught by JHU doctoral student Mo Speller. The class incorporates a breadth of unique experiences to expose students to the history of Baltimore’s gay community. These experiences include neighborhood tours, readings, short reflections, and an explorative group project.

Request an appointment with Special Collections today to explore the archives and learn about Baltimore’s ‘gayborhoods.’

First Television Station in Baltimore

In 1956, 2” Quad became the first videotape format with commercial success. From that point until the late 1970s, this video format was used to record the vast majority of broadcast television. The playback equipment needed to view 2” Quad tape is extremely expensive to purchase and maintain which makes accessing the analog video signals recorded in this format very difficult. The only effective way to provide access to these unique moving images and recorded sounds is to digitize them.

 

 

The Special Collections Department at the University of Baltimore’s Langsdale Library recently reformatted a part of the local Baltimore television collection, WMAR-TV Collection. The content was stored in its original inaccessible form of 2” Quadruplex open reel videotape (2” Quad), which is the most unstable video format.

 

Local television stations, such as Baltimore’s WMAR, are continuing to cover both regional and national news stories and events. TV came to Baltimore during the post-World War II bang. WMAR-TV was the first television station in Baltimore and one of the first TV stations in America, going on air on October 30, 1947. WMAR is one of the three major Baltimore television stations, which have survived, providing a significant historical video documentation of the region and nation from a Baltimore viewpoint. There are several mentions of national political figures in the 2” Quad from WMAR-TV, such as President Eisenhower, dating from 1965-1969, including “Eisenhower Obituary”, as well as Spiro Agnew, 55^th Governor of Maryland and 39^th Vice President of the United States who resigned after corruption charges. These tapes date from 1968 to 1973. There are several other notable topics in this collection including: the Preakness (1974), “1984 in Maryland: A Birthday Celebration”, and “Sights and Sounds Baltimore City Fair” (1983).

 

If you would like to find out more about what is available in our WMAR-TV Collection, you can browse the complete database here.


“1984 in Maryland: A Birthday Celebration”

 

Be Kind, Rewind: Putting Endangered Collections First

Quad Tape, soon to appear at a nonprofit regional archive near you.

Tick-tock! Time is running out for videophiles to enjoy the glitchy, retro pleasures of analog media. Last year, the last videocassette recorder (VCR) was manufactured in Japan, and preservation experts recommend migrating VHS and other types of analog video to digital formats within 10 to 12 years. Langsdale Special Collections has been caring for two major audiovisual news morgues: the WMAR collection and the WJZ collection, which both consist of raw footage and broadcast materials from the two local network-affiliated television stations. 

Baltimore Poetry Library comes to Langsdale

In the Winter of 2015, the University of Baltimore’s Klein Family School of Design became the new home of the Baltimore Poetry Library, the largest independent collection of poetry in the Baltimore metropolitan area.

In an effort to expedite campus-wide transparency, Langsdale Library recently partnered with the Baltimore Poetry Library to catalog the impressive collection consisting of thousands of volumes of poetry. 

Cataloging the collection will provide a proper accounting of what is in the collection, identify unique titles not yet available at Langsdale, and it will allow it to be searched online. The purpose of which will allow the collection to be accessible to the UB community and wider Baltimore community interested in special collections and poetry titles.

This process is currently underway, with approximately 10% of the titles cataloged. Due to the large and comprehensive nature of the collection, it is estimated that the project will be completed within a year and a half. That is a lot of poetry. The searchable WorldCat List of current titles and their contents can be found here.

Currently, a sampling of the Baltimore Poetry Library is on display in Langsdale Library. An assortment of handmade books, zines, and broadsides serve as examples of the broad definitions that “book,” and “poetry” can take. While some pieces are Xeroxed and glued together, there are also perfect bound collections from local and regionally diverse small presses.

 

Read the press release to get a better sense of what the collection includes and its broader purpose. To access the collection, contact Lyndsay Bates (LAP 107, lbates@ubalt.edu, 410.837.6038). It is located in UB’s Liberal Arts and Policy building, room 303.

The White Lung Preservation Project-- Wishes Granted (Almost!)

Our fundraising page-- click here to donate

Langsdale Library Special Collections is thrilled with the love shown to The White Lung Association Collection! Our link to the White Lung Preservation Project went live this week, and within two days, we met our initial fundraising goal, and then some ($4500 as of this writing-- and our new goal is to reach the 7 grand mark.)
The WLA Records preserve the history of not only a nationally prominent--now shuttered-- nonprofit, but tells the story of how Baltimore laborers challenged workplace safety standards when it came to asbestos exposure. 

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.

Ewww-Matic

Between our WMAR-TV and WJZ-TV Collections, there are about 10,000 U-matic tapes with unique local television content that need to be digitized for preservation--we have started to slowly go through these tapes, starting with the oldest tapes from 1977 and those that are requested by researchers.

In the last few days in Special Collections we have been dealing with some sticky issues with some U-matics that a researcher needs to view. In December of 1982, it seems that WJZ started to use a different, cheaper brand of U-matic. This specific brand is extremely problematic for audiovisual archiving now: the splices that hold the tape to the plastic hubs need fixing for almost every tape, many of the inner workings of the cassette are made of cheap plastic that breaks easily, and the glue that is holding some of these components together has started to seep out, leaving a gooey, sticky substance over certain parts of the tape that can damage the tape and the playback deck.

Our intern Massimo Petrozzi will be spending the day opening up these cassettes and cleaning the glue residue before the tapes are put into the playback deck. Check out our step-by-step guide on how to open a U-matic tape, and most importantly, how to put the tape back together again.

With a lot of hard work and patience, these tapes will eventually be digitized and available online, like this successful U-matic transfer:

The Granddaddy of Video

The silver reel you see on your right is an example of the first videotape format ever released into the world (as compared to the size of a standard VHS videocassette tape on the left). The name of this format is 2-inch Quadruplex, also known simply as "Quad". The "2-inch" refers to the size of the width of the tape (please see below the open reel brown 2-inch-wide Quad tape versus the 1/2-inch VHS tape encased in a plastic shell, respectively).

CBS was the first on-air user of the 2” Quad machine, to tape-delay the evening CBS News broadcast with Douglas Edwards on Nov. 30, 1956. From that point until the late 1970s, the vast majority of broadcast television was recorded onto this video format.  

In the WJZ-TV and WMAR-TV Collections at the Langsdale Library Special Collections Department, we hold approximately three hundred 2-inch Quad reels from these local television stations. Highlights from the labels suggest that they are masters of several local television broadcasts and even national broadcast news ranging in date from the early 1960s to the early 1980s. However, we can't be entirely sure of the content until the tapes are digitized--an expensive endeavor due to the professional expertise, time, and obsolete equipment needed. According to an estimate by the Library of Congress' National Recording Preservation Plan, by approximately 2027 these tapes will no longer be physically able to even undergo digitization! Contact specialcollections@ubalt.edu for more information.

Finding AV in Special Collections

There have been a few blog posts written before about the WMAR-TV and WJZ-TV Collections, but today I would like to discuss the process of actually finding and accessing an AV item that is requested.

First, how might researchers even know where to look for WMAR, WJZ or Baltimore-area news footage? They would most likely conduct a Google search which would show (a few hits down in the results) the Langdale Library Special Collections’ website. We also have a collection-level entry in ourlibrary catalog that will show as a result in searching WorldCat.org. This points to collection-level finding aids, which then points to that particular collection on the Special Collections’ website.

Our website has inventories online that describes many item-level objects for these two collections--although not everything that we have is mentioned online. For the WMAR-TV Series I film reels, we inherited old paper-filled log books where most of the films are described with key subjects and terms, chronologically. Large portions of these have been electronically transcribed and are in word-searchable HTML tables that are also searched by Google (here is an example of one). For the rest of the collection, the logs are either not online or scanned but not searchable (and in cursive, which many people these days cannot read). The WJZ-TV inventory is a list of the titles on the videocassettes containers in word-searchable PDFs—just CTRL-F and type in the term you are looking for.

Binders full of films: the WMAR-TV Collection Log Books

Once you know what you want, we have a location register in Excel for me to easily find the boxes in our storage areas. The film reels take a bit more time to find as their locations are not in the register: they are not stored in boxes so they need to be entered into the Excel at the item-level and there are about 4,000 of these reels (we are slowly working on this, but, like many libraries and archives, we have limited time and resources).

After I physically find the item, if it is a Umatic, VHS, or Betacam tape, I then can make a digitized copy for you pending some restrictions. However if it is any other AV format it must be sent out to a vendor at cost to the patron. If it is one of our 4,000 16mm films, I can only send a photo of a pertinent frame for whatever subject you are looking for. We cannot project the film as this will irreparably damage the film and as archivists we are bound to “do no harm” to our collections. 

Recent film frame sent to a patron: Eubie Blake playing the piano in 1973.

If you see the photo I send to you and absolutely must have a digitized copy of the film, you must pay to have it sent to a professional preservation vendor to have the whole reel or video digitized (we must approve of the vendor as there are many qualifications they must meet). We initially provide 1 hour of work for free (please read more about our services here). These charges help us to maintain our expensive obsolete AV equipment, purchase preservation supplies and containers, and to overall better care for and provide access to these collections.

As tapes and films are digitized, we take any information we can find about that item and upload them to the InternetArchive collection for viewing and downloading for non-commercial purposes. There are several hours uploaded per week of unique Baltimore-area history, so please stay tuned for more!

The Internet Arcade

For you gamers out there, the Library would like to introduce you to the recently launched Internet Arcade! The Internet Arcade is an Internet browser-based library of emulated video arcade games from the 1970s up through the 1990s. It has hundreds of games ranging across many different genres that you can play for fun, to study, or to test your eye-keyboard coordination! Before you start, though, I recommend reading this blog post by the Internet Arcade operator, Jason Scott, walking you step-by-step through instructions to have a better playing experience.

 The Langsdale Library also has its own Game Collection for students, researchers and faculty use. Video game conservation is an important part of preserving our cultural heritage, but can be extremely difficult due to copyright issues and software and hardware obsolescence. Read more about this endeavor in the Library of Congress' 2010 "Preserving Virtual Worlds Final Report". 

Upcoming Local (Un)Conference

Image credit: View of the Battle Monument, John Rubens Smith (1775-1849), 1828. Library of Congress, LC-DIG-ds-01545.

Love Baltimore? Interested in local history and culture? If so, check out the upcoming Bmore Historic Unconference, October 10th at the Maryland Historical Society. Registration opens soon and is just ten dollars for students.

According to the unconference website:

Bmore Historic is an annual participant-led unconference for scholars, students, professionals and volunteers who care about public history, historic preservation and cultural heritage in the Baltimore region. Bmore Historic is an opportunity to connect with local historians, humanities scholars, preservation advocates, museum professionals, archivists, and anyone interested in exploring the vital intersections between people, places and the past in Baltimore and Maryland. We’re bringing people together and you set the agenda.

Space, Size, and Videotapes

The Langsdale Library Special Collections Department has finished our move from the library's previous building to our current location in the University of Baltimore’s Learning Commons. We were scheduled after the rest of the library and took over twice as long. This was due to the vastness of our collections: we have thousands of boxes of unique, historical primary sources that we care for and provide access to.

After the move we have about 40% less physical space. While we have been able to weed a few items and boxes here and there, the collections are extremely cramped. The majority of the collections that I manage consist of videocassette tapes: the WJZ collection itself has over 20,000 videos! Now that I have a video reformatting station set up (not fully operational yet), I can begin transferring the content from these tapes to digital files. This needs to begin as soon as possible as videotape does not have a long life expectancy. In fact, it may already be too late to digitize some of the older and more problematic tapes. 

Audiovisual Preservation 101

Click here for details

Bmore Historic Unconference

Now's your chance to register for this year's Bmore Historic unconference, which will be held Friday, October 11th at the Maryland Historical Society.

What is Bmore Historic? According to the event website, it's "a participant-led unconference for scholars, students, professionals and volunteers who care about public history, historic preservation and cultural heritage in the Baltimore region."

The event website has all the details you'll need, including:

• What's an unconference?
• How much does it cost?
• Who are the event sponsors?
• What happened last year?

As a participant last year, I found it to be a fun and affordable way to participate in the local dialogue around historical and cultural issues. Lots of great thinkers, creators, and collaborators sharing their projects and ideas.