University Libraries

In honor of African American History Month, DLS will be highlighting the stories of African Americans featured in the Iowa Digital Library. First up is Digital Librarianship Fellow Shawn Averkamp on Dora Martin Berry, campus queen of the UI (then State University of Iowa), 1955.

Though segregation was never a matter of official policy at The University of Iowa, African American students were routinely shut out from housing, student organizations, hair salons, restaurants, and social activities, and were left to form their own student communities outside of The University. As a result, there is little documentation of these African American fraternities, sororities, literary societies, and other student clubs in University publications, such as yearbooks and newspapers, or within the Libraries’ archives. Following the trail left by researchers Richard M. Breaux and Madgetta Thornton Dungy, we gathered artifacts scattered across the Libraries and outside repositories to create a digital collection that would highlight the experiences and achievements of African American women students at The University.

Among the many stories in this digital collection is that of Dora Martin Berry, the first African American woman to win the title of Miss State University of Iowa. Berry came to Iowa City from Houston, Texas, in 1955, a “wide-eyed and excited” seventeen-year-old. Though she was only a freshman, Berry was selected by the women in her dormitory to proceed to the semifinals of the pageant. With overwhelming support from the African American student community, she earned the majority of votes needed from the male student electorate to win the title of Miss SUI. The national news broke the story before Berry was even crowned queen, and she immediately was inundated with calls from reporters across the country. In the midst of school desegregation, the press attention continued for months with many news services heralding Berry’s victory as a testament to Northern racial tolerance. Back at The University of Iowa, however, Berry found a less than tolerant response to her success. The University politely denied her the duties and appearances traditionally held by the campus queen, and she quickly faded back into the student body, never officially recognized by University administration.

In addition to the news clippings, photos, and oral history excerpts that frame the story of Dora Martin Berry, there is a wide variety of artifacts in this collection offering glimpses into the lives of other African American university women. Iowa Bystander newspaper articles circa 1919 chronicle the activities of the fledgling Iowa City chapter of the Delta Sigma Theta sorority. Snapshots from the Althea Beatrice Moore Smith scrapbook capture student life in the mid-1920s. Dance cards from the Esther Walls collection at the Iowa Women’s Archives commemorate formal dances attended in the 1940s by one of the first African American women to live in the dorms.

Please visit the African American Women Students at The University of Iowa Digital Collection to learn more about these students who overcame racism and discrimination to receive their education at the UI.

–Shawn Averkamp
Digital Librarianship Fellow

With his expertise in video art, Bryan Stusse was a natural fit to digitize selections from the Artists’ Television Network, a subset of Special Collections’ Alternative Traditions in the Contemporary Arts materials. But although equipped for the curatorial tasks of selecting from hundreds of original works by visual and performing artists broadcast on New York public access stations in the late 1970s and early 1980s, he wasn’t prepared for the many and varied technical problems involved in digitizing a variety of obsolete media formats. Thanks to his persistence and creative thinking, as well as assistance from the Libraries’ Preservation Department, these issues have mostly been resolved. We’re pleased that Bryan will be able to extend his time in DLS next semester to build on his progress towards making these artworks available online.

Name: Bryan Stusse
Hometown:  Cedar Rapids, Iowa
Pre-SLIS education: University of Iowa – B.F.A. in Intermedia;  School of the Art Institute of Chicago – M.F.A. in Visual Art
DLS Project: Artists’ Television Network
Why did you choose this project?  I wanted to work on the ATN project because it allowed me to pursue my interests in preservation and digital libraries, while making use of my knowledge of the content subject.
Most enjoyable project experience?  Watching back-to-back episodes of the Golden Girls on Lifetime at midnight every weeknight.  Also, knowing that the work towards the ATN Digital Collection focused enough attention on the collection to generate funding for preservation of the content.
Most difficult/challenging experience?  The most challenging part of the project was overcoming the technical and preservation needs for digitization of the ATN collection.
What did you learn about digital library work that surprised you? I had no idea how complex and difficult the development of a digital collection project could be.  Orchestrating resources and efforts across departments requires much greater and more focused efforts than I had anticipated.
Favorite item in the collection? My favorite object currently online is an excerpt from a performance at the Nayatt School.  We know very little about the performance.  This small excerpt is incredible, with subtle gestures it offers a poetic encounter with human frailty and the emltional and psychological barriers we build.

Fellow Shawn Averkamp got more than she bargained for when she signed on for our African American student history project. Unlike other DLS fellows who were culling from only one archival collection, Shawn was working from a scholarly article listing primary source materials in a variety of collections drawn from the Iowa Women’s Archives and the University Archives, as well as borrowed from the Iowa City and Des Moines branches of the state historical society. The result of her hard work and perseverence was both a rich digital collection of interconnected materials documenting an important part of the University’s past, as well as a more accurate experience of the multi-tasking nature of digital librarianship.

Name: Shawn Averkamp
Hometown: Dubuque, Iowa
Pre-SLIS education: Luther College – B.A. in Music
DLS Project: African American Women Students at the University of Iowa, 1910-1960
Why did you choose this project? I’m interested in women’s history and wanted to work with artifacts from the Iowa Women’s Archives.
Most enjoyable project experience? The trust and support from the DLS staff.  Everyone was always willing to help with any problems, no matter how trivial.
Most difficult/challenging experience? Learning the metadata rules for the different types of artifacts.
What did you learn about digital library work that surprised you? The fact that “digital library work” is still not a clearly defined field.
Favorite item in the collection?
This dance card is one of a collection from Esther Walls’ college days. Besides being one of the only artifacts in this digital collection that actually belonged to one of the subjects, it references a Daily Iowan photo that I found in the University Archives vertical files. Also, the black ink on black paper [pages 2-3] is intriguing. Was it a secret message or a poor choice of pen?  We may never know…

Digital library fellow Jane Monson channeled her inner foodie to create the Recipe Pamphlets from the Szathmary Culinary Arts Digital Collection. Bravely wading through a physical collection of over 4000 pamphlets, Jane selected a representative sampling of several dozen items for digitization, resulting in over 1300 scanned and full text searchable pages from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Collectively, they illustrate changes in the American diet as industrialization gave rise to the modern food industry.  

Name: Jane Monson
Hometown: Iowa City, Iowa
Pre-SLIS education: University of Iowa – B.A. in Comparative Literature
DLS Project: Recipe Pamphlets from the Szathmary Culinary Arts Collection
Why did you choose this project? I thought it looked like a good way to combine my interests in history and food.
Most enjoyable project experience? Selecting pamphlets for the collection and designing the web interface.
Most difficult/challenging experience? Working around copyright limitations and the slow pace of production work.
What did you learn that surprised you? I hadn’t realized how significant an issue copyright could be in collection planning.
Favorite item in the collection? Wrigley’s “Mother Goose”: Introducing the Sprightly Spearmen – This pamphlet combines silly rhymes and puns with colorful illustrations to create the most engaging advertising artifact in the collection.  It’s fun to read, and provides a window into the early 20th-century American sense of humor.  Plus, who knew Wrigley’s spearmint gum has been around so long?

This week marks the 101^st anniversary of the publication of Jay Norwood ‘Ding’ Darling’s first cartoon for the Des Moines Register.  To commemorate, UI Libraries has launched The Editorial Cartoons of J.N. ‘Ding’ Darling Digital Collection. The expanded collection now includes more than 10,000 Darling cartoons, a robust Web site contextualizing the collection, and audio recordings of Darling’s dictations that document his voice, vigor, and attitudes about issues ranging from politics to the environment. The collection was spearheaded by the UI Libraries Special Collections Department, which is home to the majority of Darling’s papers.

The Ding Darling Digital Collection is the latest enhancement to the Iowa Digital Library, which contains more than 95,000 digital objects —photographs, maps, sound recordings, and documents—from the holdings of the UI Libraries and numerous collaborators.

To commemorate the anniversary, Des Moines Register columnist Richard Doak wrote a piece in the Sunday newspaper highlighting Darling’s life and encouraging Iowan to make the state a place that Darling would have liked—”open, friendly, clean, teeming with wildlife—and they will come.”  Access the article at http://www.desmoinesregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2007712090315

University News Services Press release:
http://news-releases.uiowa.edu/2007/december/120707ding_darling_library.html

–Nicole Saylor, Head, Digital Library Services

While we’re sad that our initial cohort of digital library fellows will soon be leaving DLS, we’re proud of the excellent work they’ve done and the high quality digital collections they’ll be leaving behind. This week, we’re profiling Jill Wehrheim, who digitized almost 1600 pages from over a dozen items drawn from the Libraries’ holdings of Civil War diaries written by Iowa soldiers. Thanks to Jill’s efforts, these fragile, unique materials are now globally accessible, full-text searchable, and at decreased risk of damage from handling of the originals.

Name: Jill Wehrheim
Hometown: Red Bud, Illinois
Pre-SLIS education: Southeast Missouri State University – B.A. in Interdisciplinary Studies with emphases in English, history, and mass communications
DLS project: Civil War Diaries Digital Collection
Why did you choose this project? I have always been interested in history, especially the American Civil War, so this project matched my interests in history and digital libraries perfectly.
Most enjoyable project experience? I really enjoyed learning the basic process of how items go from sitting in boxes in Special Collections to being digitized and available online for anyone to view. I love the idea that by digitizing collections, we can make local items available for long-distance users.
Most difficult/challenging experience? The most challenging part of working on this project was beginning. It was difficult to narrow the scope to a manageable size for this semester.
What did you learn that surprised you? It was a little surprising to realize that digital library work is never truly finished. New items can always be added to the collection. This makes it harder to move on to other projects.
Favorite item in the collection? My current favorite digital object in my collection is Jacob Harrison Allspaugh’s 1862-1863 diary. On the last few pages of the diary, he had drawn four pictures.

 

As Iowa City continues to recover from last weekend’s ice storm, we thought we’d feature scenes from winters past on the Iowa Digital Library home page, drawn from the Iowa City Town and Campus Digital Collection. Included are images such as an 1869 photograph of a sparsely populated Pentacrest, shown below along with a few bonus wintry items from other IDL collections.

 Inside the library, things are warming up as we work hard to finish the last of our big projects for the year. For DLS, that means the official debut of the Ding Darling collection; for our IMLS Fellows, that means wrapping up their projects before moving on to new assignments next semester. Stay tuned for more info as we launch these collections in the coming weeks.

–Jen Wolfe
Metadata Librarian, Digital Library Services

View of the University of Iowa Pentacrest (Tricrest?) in 1869, before Schaeffer Hall and Macbride Hall were built

 

     

UI student Margaret Hall making a snowball, late 1920s

An attractive centerpiece and an enjoyable time at the Prescott, Iowa, Rainbow Girls 4-H Club meeting, Dec. 31, 1931

Cover of 1949 children’s novel by UI alum and Nancy Drew author Mildred Wirt Benson

No love for Santa at the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) Christmas party, Davenport, Iowa, 1960s

“Winter Wonderland” by Christine Buckton, UI MFA in Painting and Drawing, 2002

Although it’s recently been declared that the day after Halloween marks the first day of Christmas, we’re taking some time in DLS to fit in a celebration of Thanksgiving. Currently featured on the Iowa Digital Library home page are cartoons depicting the holiday from the ever-topical Ding Darling collection, alongside our newest and most gratifying digital collection: The Iowa Gallery.

Over 14 months in the making, The Iowa Gallery provides integrated access to more than 16,000 digital objects from the University of Iowa Museum of Art, the School of Art and Art History Graduate Archive, and the Daily Palette public art project. Migrating these large-scale legacy collections to the Libraries’ systems and manipulating their disparate sets of metadata to conform to library standards took an enormous amount of time and effort. A variety of staff both in and outside of the Libraries provided invaluable assistance, including Les Finken at Information Technology Services for referrals and consultation; Laura Riskedahl, former assistant in both UIMA and DLS, for expertise in art and library science; John Osborne for advanced data massage; Scott Fiddelke and Linda Roth for designing the site’s attractive interfaces (and for tolerating our many edit requests); and our content providers at UIMA and the School of Art and Art History, especially Jeff Martin, Eric Dean, Jon Winet, Craig Dietrich and Christina McClelland, for entrusting us with their collections and for their patience as we climbed some steep learning curves. We’re extremely grateful for all the hard work everybody put into this project.

Finally, we’re also thankful for the Libraries’ strong support of digital initiatives that has enabled such efforts and allowed our staff to grow to five dedicated full-time positions, up from two at the beginning of the year. With the recent addition of systems librarian Wendy Robertson and library assistant Bobby Duncan, we look forward to tackling even more ambitious projects in the coming year.

For more information on The Iowa Gallery, please see our University of Iowa News Release and the Des Moines Register article “Art online: Iowa institutions go high-tech to display, discuss works in new ways”

–Jen Wolfe
Metadata Librarian, Digital Library Services