>> Hello, everyone.
I'm Corina Black [phonetic],
and I work in the Learning
and Innovation Office at
the Library of Congress.
And welcome to today's online office
hours for the Library of Congress.
We will be exploring STEM resources in the
Manuscript Division, the Manuscript Collection.
This event will be recorded.
And any questions or other participant
contributions may be made publicly available
as part of the library's archives.
We're really glad that you can join us
today, whether that's live or by recording.
And if this is your first
time joining us, welcome.
And if you've been with us before, welcome back.
These office hours, those of
you, if it's your first time,
these are meant to be short informal sessions.
We're going to get started with a 20 minute
presentation followed by Q&A and conversation,
anything that comes up as
our presenters are speaking.
And you'll have an opportunity to talk with
each other and our presenters via the chat.
So, let's get started with the chat.
Michelle, if you can go to the next slide.
I would love it if those of you who are here
with us today could just tell us your name,
where you're joining us from,
and the grade level and subjects
that you teach, if you're teachers.
So, it's just great to know who is here and
just be thinking about the kinds of questions
that you may have for our presenters.
So, as I said, today's episode
is focused on STEM resources
from the Manuscript Division
of the Library of Congress.
And we're joined today by
Michelle Krowl and Josh Levy.
They are both specialists and
historians from the Manuscript Division.
If you have questions or comments
for them, or for our team,
please feel free to post them in the chat box.
We'll be monitoring that for
the duration of the session.
We'll also be posting links there
as Michelle and Josh are speaking.
And we can answer any questions
or concerns that come up
and pose them to our presenters during Q&A.
So, now I'm happy to pass things over
to our presenters, Michelle and Josh.
>> All right, well, welcome to the
Manuscript Division's participation
in the teaching of primary sources office hours.
And so we've got STEM primary
resources in the Manuscript Division.
And with the little tag line,
expect the unexpected.
And we hope that we can introduce
you today to some things
that you might not have anticipated
would be good for STEM learning.
So, our aim today is to introduce you to those
STEM resources in the Manuscript Division,
but also some ways that ensure
primary source documents
and introduce students not only relevant,
to not only relevant STEM concepts,
but also how those lessons can incorporate
history and historical context at the same time.
And today's PowerPoint and the handout of
a selection of primary resource materials
that lend themselves to STEM curricula will be
available in PDF format on the teacher's page.
So, don't worry if you miss anything
as we go through the presentation.
So, there are many Manuscript Division
collections in which you would expect
to find STEM related primary resources.
And we've just listed a few of those
here on this introductory slide,
but they include the papers of Alexander
Graham Bell, Orville and Wilbur Wright,
Samuel F.B. Morse, a lot of kind of
familiar names that where you would think
to find some STEM related materials.
But had you ever considered looking at the
papers of George Washington or Thomas Jefferson
or Civil War mapmaker Jedediah Hotchkiss or the
Olmsted Associates who are landscape architects,
or even the American Colony in Jerusalem?
All of these materials can lend
themselves to STEM related education.
And these all will be in that handout
I referenced a little bit earlier.
So, let's take a closer look at three
documents in the Manuscript Division
that might be incorporated into STEM lessons
in unexpected ways, or in collections
or from collections that
you wouldn't anticipate.
So, first we'll start with penny farthing
bicycles in the Charles Wellington Reed Papers.
Charles Wellington Reed was a
Civil War soldier and an artist.
And most of his collection is
comprised of Civil War related sketches.
But after the war, he became an avid bicyclist,
which may be why there's a couple of sketches
of these high wheeled penny farthing
bicycles among his many Civil War sketches.
But then the question becomes, how
are these STEM related resources?
Well, it depends on the kind of questions
that you ask of these, of these sketches.
So, you might talk to the students about what
are the physics involved in such a bicycle?
What is the advantage of having a large wheel
in the front and a small one in the back?
And with that one, you can look at the bicycle
or the large wheel in terms of how much faster
and farther that you can
go with fewer revolutions.
How does the rider even get
on a bicycle like this?
You might ask what kind of challenges
someone would encounter in riding it.
What happens if you encounter an obstruction,
or all sorts of things about getting on it,
how you ride it, the physics
involved, if you have to stop quickly.
In looking at some research, this may be
where we get the phrase you take a header,
because if you have to stop quickly on
the penny farthing bicycle because you're,
because of the center of gravity, you tend
to be pitched forward over the handlebars,
and literally you kind of take a
header when you fall on your head.
The students might want to calculate
how fast a penny farthing can do,
ask questions about how do you
stop it, was it prone to crashing
as the sketches down here would suggest?
You can also get into issues
of design and engineering.
So, if you were a woman in a long skirt from the
1870s and 80s when these bicycles were popular,
could you ride a penny farthing safely?
So, are fashion and engineering
compatible in this kind of bicycle design?
And here we actually have
a guide from newspaper,
the chronicling American newspaper
site about early bicycle fashion.
So, that's another way that you can
get into this particular subject.
And then you might want to talk to the students
about what ways the technologies a bicycle
today are different than the Penny farthings,
and when did those start to occur?
And just as an aside, they're called
penny farthing bicycles because the penny
and farthing were two types of British coins,
one being the larger, so that's the penny,
the farthing, farthing being the smaller,
and those refer to the size of the wheels.
So, they look like British coins.
If you, if you get into the subject, you
could also pair the penny farthing images
in the Charles Wellington Reed papers with
images from the prints and photographs division
and from the chronicling American
newspapers site to add to that lesson.
So, if you're talking about how you actually
mount a penny farthing bicycle based on height,
the relative height of the
bicycle, and the rider,
you might be able to include
one of these images.
And so this shows a somewhat
precarious mounting.
But this would also help because
this shows the little bar in the back
where you put your foot while the bicycle
starts to move before you pitch yourself forward
onto the, onto the seat, and be able to ride.
And there are YouTube videos of people actually
mounting a penny farthing bicycle if you want
to show your students the dynamics of that.
Then, of course, towards the 1880s and
1890s, these safety bicycles are introduced.
And they're gear driven by chains.
They're less dangerous, obviously,
because you're not falling as much.
And it's a change of technology in
terms of, because the pneumatic tubes
on a penny farthing made for a smoother ride.
Well, when you start getting
more rubberized tires,
then the safety bicycle is more comfortable.
So, there are many ways that you could get into
the subject of bicycles and bicycle technology
that involve both the physics, the
physical physics of the bicycle themselves
and the riding surfaces, as well as when
did they come into, why are they popular
at various times, and who was riding them, and
so that way you can get into a little bit more
of the historical context
of these particular items.
So, I'm going to turn it over to my
colleague Josh who's going to talk
to you about a map in Marietta, Ohio.
[ Inaudible ]
>> Okay, so, the next slide,
which is a map of Marietta, Ohio,
this map may seem a little bit more
obscure than Michelle's bicycle.
It's a map that was drawn in 1837
by an Ohio based genealogist,
a geologist named Charles Whittlesey.
The map was later published in an
1848 book called Ancient Monuments
of the Mississippi Valley, which was
the first scientific study ever produced
by the Smithsonian Institution,
which already tells us
that this was a marquis project at the time.
And so what we have here is a
map of Marietta's street grid,
superimposed on two ancient Hopewell mound
complexes with some more detailed sketches
and measurements of each mound
at the bottom left of the image.
So, we normally think of maps as being
straightforward reflections of reality.
But as I used to like to tell my
students, maps make arguments.
And sometimes they reveal a lot
more than the mapmaker intended.
So, going back to the map of
Marietta, what do we need to know
about this map before we can start
to interpret it and work with it?
Well, we need to know that between
roughly 80 BCE and between 300 and 400 CE,
Hopewell people designed and built some of
the largest indigenous urban architecture
in the country across a vast area of the
Midwest, that their mounds included artifacts
from raw materials, they manufactured
some items that came from long distances,
and that those mounds served as ritual centers
for small dispersed sedentary
agricultural communities.
We would want to know that the land ordinance
of 1785 created a survey system for Ohio
and the rest of what they called
the Northwest Territory at the time.
We would need to know that after 1785,
land surveyors began to fan out across
that Northwest Territory, which
covered more than 260,000 square miles.
And we might want to know
about the tools that they used.
They used portable clocks paired with magnetic
compasses in order to determine the solar noon,
to calculate longitude, and then to record
the angles that stars made as they passed
that long attitude in order
to determine latitude.
They used chains called Gunter's chains,
which are made up of 100 different links.
They measured 66 feet total, and they
were divided into four 25 link sections.
In order to measure and mark lines
on the ground, they used [inaudible]
for measuring horizontal and vertical angles as
the little scopes that surveyors look through.
And we'd want to know that they used those
tools to transform all of that vast land
into uniform squares of property
that fit neatly into a national grid.
In theory, unless the topography
prevented them from doing it,
then in practice sometimes they did it anyway.
And we'd want to know that this map was drawn at
a time when there was both a heightened interest
in the Hopewell people in the
United States and a lingering sense
of anxiety among many Americans
that Western Europe had a historical
and cultural heritage United States
might not ever measure up to.
So, in Marietta, which the Ohio
company flattened out in 1788,
the surveyors had the same
guidelines as other surveyors did.
But they didn't quite transform
Marietta into a grid.
In fact, they bent the rules a little bit.
One of the company surveyors
wrote at the time, quote,
the situation of the city flat is the
most delightful of any I ever saw.
And those traces of ancient walls
mound, et cetera, are truly surprising.
Another one wrote, quote, the old ruins are
a masterly piece of work of great extent.
So, these don't really sound like people
who were eager to jam all of the landscape
of Marietta into an artificial national grid.
So, Michelle, can you go to the next slide?
Okay, so, as the 1837 map shows, and
as we can see a little bit more clearly
in the Google version, it was a street grid that
was changed to accommodate Marietta's mound.
And not the mounds themselves.
The mounds were built into public
squares, even into a cemetery,
and the mounds were given Latin names.
You can see them just a little bit
in that image on the bottom right.
So, at this point, we might
ask our students to speculate.
Why? Why are these grids
adapted into the mounds?
Why are these streets given Latin names?
And we might show them some other images.
Michelle, can you go to the next slide?
These images are also from the Library of
Congress, and they might offer some clues.
They might help students to imagine these
mounds as the surveyors might have seen them.
So, and one more slide, Michelle.
What questions can this map help us answer?
Well, we can think about the intersection
of indigenous and settler technologies.
So, on the one hand, there's the
vast river base transportation system
that enabled Hopewell people to build a
trade network across the entire Midwest.
And on the other hand, there are the surveyor's
tools that helped settlers to map out hundreds
of thousands of square miles of land.
We can use this map to calculate the scale
of Marietta's mounds as they were in 1837,
and to determine the percentage of
those mounds that have been lost
to the town's various development
projects, and also to erosion.
We can talk about the land surveying instruments
that the Ohio company had available to them
in 1788, the measurements and calculations
that they had to make, and how those differ
from the tools that land surveyors
use today, sometimes quite radically,
sometimes they're really not that different.
And we can use the map to speculate about the
final two questions that I put on the list here,
which I'll just offer my answers to,
because [inaudible] a little bit obscure.
They're not necessarily obvious.
So, why the Latin names?
Because the 18th and 19th century Americans
who fell in love with these mounds,
they saw them as their country's
version of Ancient Roman ruins.
The mounds represented the heritage
of a great lost civilization
which they wanted to claim for themselves.
Why were they celebrating the mounds
in the midst of the Indian wars
which in Ohio were particularly violent?
Because claiming the mounds built by Indians
could be a way for settlers to claim possession
over America's land from Indians.
And what did the mounds tell Ohioans
about what it meant to be an Ohioan?
As the state's population grew, claiming
local expertise over these mounds,
which were becoming this critical imagined part
of America's cultural heritage became a way
to defend the State of Ohio and its colleges
and intellectual institutions
against east coast elites.
And it also became a not always effective
way to try to shame other Ohioans
who were damaging the mounds in different
ways, building things on them, and so forth.
So, Michelle?
>> All right, so, for most
people, it would be logical to look
in the Alexander Graham Bell papers
for documentation of Bell's experiments
with the telephone, such as his
1875, 1876 scientific notebook,
which is in the subject series in the
Alexander Graham Bell family papers.
And this is a view of that, that first
successful experiment with the telephone,
which he recorded in his notebook on
March 10th, 1876, recording that he said
through the telephone Mr. Watson,
come here, I want to see you.
To my delight, he came and declared that he
had heard and understood what I had said.
So, again, people would definitely look
at the Bell papers for the telephone.
But did you know that Bell's scientific
notebooks available online also document his
extensive experimentation
with propulsion and flight?
Particularly the 1891 to 1893
laboratory notebook is very rich
with experimentation and data.
And you can see the link to it right there.
And these are just a few images from that
particular, that particular notebook.
And I always like to show people this particular
image up here, because they remind me so much
of some of the drone technology that's being
developed now of using various, you know,
mechanisms of flight and propulsion
to carry weight from place to place.
The one down on the lower right hand
side is more, again, with propulsion.
But in this instance, as actually
a Bell descendent explained to me,
that they decided to put sulfuric acid in these
and light them on fire and see what happened.
And what you can see happened
is the thing exploded,
and the two guys are hiding behind the
trees, one of which it taking data on this.
But you can also look at just single
pages and get and ask questions
that would be very useful
for, for some lesson plans.
So, on this page, you can see that Alexander
Graham Bell is looking to nature to solve some
of his questions and mysteries of
flight by examining bird wings.
And here you can see in his
notebook that he says,
we killed a turkey today, use turkey wings.
So, that's what's being depicted here is the,
is Bell's use of actual turkey wings to try
to understand how, how birds
fly and how flight works.
So, on just this particular page, you could ask,
how did the natural world influence
Bell in his pursuit of flight?
Well, it's right here.
He's using turkeys and other birds as
a way to understand how flight works.
And you can ask the students what type of data
did Bell record based on his observations?
And he's got a lot of different data points here
of how the left and the right wings are working.
But we have other aviation
collections online as well.
So, for example, the Orville and
Wilbur Wright papers, or they could,
the students could do some
investigation on their own and look
to see whether other early aviators
were similarly inspired by nature.
And I think that you'll find that
the answer is yes, throughout time,
that people's terrestrial beings
have always looked to the skies
to understand how flight is possible.
Then you could also take that
a little further and ask,
does nature continue to inspire invention?
So, could the students look at examples
of how you can look to nature to find ways
of solving problems or look for various
sort of scientific observations?
Another aspect to this, and it's not as visible
on this page, but it's very visible in other
of those notebooks, is particularly if they're
looking for pages before and after this one,
is ask them why they think Bell initialed and
dated many of the entries in his notebook.
And there can be various
answers to this question in terms
of knowing what day you had data on and
just keeping track of it for yourself.
But one reason, a hint for one of the reasons,
is patent, because as Bell discovered,
that you really needed to have your
scientific inquiry and progress noted
in case you were involved in
a patent lawsuit later on,
which he definitely was with the telephone.
So, that's another thing that students can
pay attention to with various scientific data
and notes in the various collections is
that often they're signed and dated as a way
of being able to prove where they were in
the scientific process at various times
so that they can prove whether
they were in advance
of someone else in terms of their inquiry.
Another thing that I like to point out with
the Bell notebooks is science is messy.
And it's okay.
His notebooks are very, are very messy.
And this page is fairly clean
by Bell's standards.
But when you look through other ones, things
are dropped on it, and he's crossing things out,
and you can kind of see the fever
of experimentation in his books.
So, it's okay to be messy.
And students can do that as well.
It's just important to be cleaner with your,
with your documentation if you're turning
in a patent application or you're turning in a
final assignment, but the process can be messy.
I also want to note that not all of
Alexander Graham Bell's scientific
and laboratory notebooks are
currently available online.
And because of the nature of
the collection, they are all,
they're not all in one place
in the collection as well.
So, if you're interested in
the scientific notebooks,
you can keyword search the word notebook in the
this collection bar in the search mechanism.
And when you're working with manuscript
division collections, and particularly,
you're going to want to note that this
collection, because if you get too far
into looking at materials, this often
turns into, just by default, everything.
And so if you're sort of deep in the process
and you want to search something else,
if you don't pay attention that you're not
on everything, it will search everything
on the Library of Congress website.
So, you're going to get a lot of, a lot of
false results for what you're looking for.
But if you see this collection, that means
that word will just be searched
in that particular collection.
And so if you want to see
Alexander Graham Bell notebooks
in this collection, that's the way to do it.
And you get several different
ones to choose from.
And so you can see a full range of
the kind of things that he was working
on that may be applicable for
lesson plans with your students.
So, let's just kind of finish off this talk
with how do you find STEM materials
in the Manuscript Division?
Well, Manuscript Division collections
are not usually described as the level
of individual items the way a
photograph or a map often is.
So, if you're looking for photos and maps,
often you can just put in a keyword search
on the website, and individual things will come
up that are there to catalog to that level.
Our collections tend to be much broader.
So, you may be searching at the
level of finding the metadata,
and it's going to be correspondence or notebooks
or diaries or something along those lines.
It's not necessarily going
to be every single item
in a collection can be searched to that level.
So, this is where sometimes you
have to put a little bit of,
you have to put the search and research.
You can also search the online catalog
for relevant names and subjects.
So, if you put in, so, for example, if
you go to the online catalog and you put
in the subject term, or the keyword search
for inventor, then you'll get a lot of things
that come up, because inventors
in the catalog record.
But if you sort the results
by date, oldest to newest,
often manuscript material
will then come to the top.
So, if you look for the icon
for manuscript or mixed format,
that often will reflect manuscript
division material.
And that catalog record will provide
links to any online presentations
that might be available, the
online collection finding aid,
and it usually includes a good collection
summary, which may help you determine whether
that collection is relevant to your project.
You can also look at a list of online
manuscript division pointing aids for names
and organizations that look promising for you.
Now, unfortunately, only a very small percentage
of manuscript materials are
currently available online.
So, you may be able to find the
finding aid for the collection,
but not be able to access it off site.
You can also browse digital collections on the
Library of Congress website by clicking on,
clicking on digital collections
from the homepage,
and then clicking on Manuscript
Division in the left navigation bar,
that's a facet that we'll drill down just
two collections for the Manuscript Division,
and then you'll be able to see
what's available to you off site.
Additionally, you may also want
to browse the words and deeds
in American history presentation,
and it's a grouping of a variety
of Manuscript Division materials from all sorts
of time periods and subject matter and people,
but it gives you a larger sense of about 100
years' worth of Manuscript Division offerings.
But within that, there are many individual
items that may be useful for you in terms
of STEM material, including Alexander
Graham Bell's first sketch of the telephone.
You can also look at current and past
exhibits that have representation online.
And we've given you the link there as well.
So, sometimes manuscript material
is included in those exhibits,
and those items may not be available
anywhere else online because they were,
they were scanned maybe just
a page or two or an image
that they were scanned specifically
for that, that exhibition.
So, for example, I think it's with American
treasures, you can see the Sikorsky,
Igor Sikorsky notebook, showing
the design for a helicopter.
The Sikorsky papers are not available
online, but that particular image is.
And then sometimes a little serendipity is
involved in coming across STEM materials
and Manuscript Division collections
where you wouldn't expect them.
Again, finding penny farthings in a collection
that's primarily Civil War correspondence
and images, whereas George Washington's
papers, you might not necessarily think of that
as a STEM related collection, but he has,
we have notebooks when he was studying
geometry problems as a student.
He was a surveyor for a time.
So, as Josh was indicating
with the map of Marietta,
you may be able to find some
things related to surveying.
Another thing about George Washington
is that, like many of his time,
he was incredibly interested in the weather.
And many of his diaries will
contain reports about the weather.
And because, for those people who didn't
have air conditioning and all of the things
that we have now that shield us a little
bit more from the weather, he is a farmer,
and he needs to know what the weather
is, and keeps a good log of that.
So, that could also be an exercise where you
look at, to see where George Washington was
when he was keeping weather reports.
And check what the weather is today
in those, in those, those same places.
And then be able to speculate
maybe about the differences
or the commonalities between the two.
So, with a little research,
and some imagination,
there's all sorts of STEM related materials
in the Manuscript Division just
waiting for you to explore.
So, I'm going to go ahead and stop sharing oh,
the other, I almost forgot, and at the very end
of both the PowerPoint that you'll see online
and here, we've got e mail addresses for Josh,
for me, for the Manuscript Division generally,
so you can always e mail the Manuscript Division
if you have a question about
collections of any sort.
You can visit us on the Manuscript Division
homepage, which has additional information
on the Manuscript Division,
links to online collections,
links to other guides that we have available.
And you can put in an ask a
librarian question as well.
So, there are multiple ways of getting
ahold of us, and we're always happy to help.
So, I'll go ahead and stop
sharing that for, for, well,
let me just go ahead and keep that up.
And if Calina [phonetic] and Janna
[phonetic] want to let us know
if people have questions,
happy to, happy to answer.
[ Inaudible ]
Can you all hear me?
I hope there's great.
If you could just turn down
your volume a little bit
or mute yourself, just so
we don't get that echo.
There we go.
Thanks so much, Michelle, and Josh, for that.
That was just really interesting
how you talked about kind
of the interdisciplinary nature of the work.
And we had quite a few questions
and comments that I'm going
to just make sure I didn't miss anything, so
I'll just, just, just see what I, what I find.
Anyone who asked a question
that I missed, please repose it.
So, I think Peter was referring to one of the
penny farthing drawings that you showed earlier.
So, if you could go back to those sketches,
I think he was just brainstorming a possible
question for students, and had he asked,
how fast does the back wheel turn
in relation to the front wheel?
So, this is another question
for, for students to consider.
And then on that same drawing,
Gay asked, are those sketches
of helmet drawings or helmet
designs at the bottom?
>> You know, it's a, it's a good question,
because most of the penny farthing research
that you don't see a lot of people
wearing helmets, but it probably could be,
because obviously this, this guy's taken
a tumble, or alternatively if there's,
if there's sketches that Reed was
intending to do for something else,
they might be prototype sketches instead.
But, so you do see this individual
here, hopefully you can see my cursor,
that he is wearing a hat that
looks somewhat like a helmet.
So, they're either, they're either normal hats
or helmets, because obviously this sort of dandy
over here is not wearing
anything that resembles a helmet.
And part of it is that whether they were,
whether they necessarily had the fabrication
to do, you know, helmets that would
actually help, because when you do see some
of the accidents with penny farthings, I mean,
because of your center of gravity being so high,
and you're rights over, that when you
stop, that you literally get pitched over.
And so you've got quite a ways to fall.
And that could also be something that
students would be able to calculate as well,
that if you're going a certain, a
certain speed, and you stop immediately,
what are the physics of going over?
Another thing that I came across in the research
is that sometimes when the riders were going
at quite a speed, because, you know, they were
racing them, and you could go downhill and pick
up some speed, but if you had any anxiety,
that you'd have to stop immediately
and be pitched forward, you might actually put
your legs around the handlebars in such a way
that it might kind of instead of pitching you on
your head, you might fall a different direction.
Didn't seem to work very well.
But, again, that's where these
are kind of nice drawings
in that it gives the student some
indication of not only what it looks
like when you're just pedaling along,
but also what some of the pitfalls are
with these particular transportation devices.
>> Very interesting.
Peter just asked the question,
to say another question
to students is, why is the front wheel so big?
[ Inaudible ]
So, that's very true.
Sara asked, this is in reference to one of
your later slides, you mentioned the sort
of differences between how manuscripts
catalogs their collections compared
to the photographs in map divisions.
And so she wondered why that was.
I think you're on mute.
>> Okay, there we go.
That, the reason why is that we
present things at a collection level.
And so the way that we tend
to process collections,
whereas if you're processing
say a map or a photograph,
it might be part of another
collection, but the way it tends
to appear online is an individual item.
The way that the Manuscript Division
processes our papers is, I mean,
because we can have very large collections, and
they tend to be grouped by, by what makes sense
in terms of the organization, so it's often
you have a whole run of diaries or a whole run
of correspondence or financial
papers or what have you.
And depending when we did, so you're going to
get those groupings together that just the labor
to catalog everything individually would, would
be, it's just not sustainable for us at the,
at the volume that we're dealing with.
So, you know, we can have collections that
are one item and one folder all the way
up to millions of items in,
you know, hundreds of boxes.
And so that level of cataloging and detailed
description just isn't sustainable for us.
Also, when you're looking at things online,
that's where finding aids can be very,
very helpful in terms of figuring out how the
collection is organized, what might be in it,
always look at the scope and
content note of a finding aid,
because that is your executive summary
as to what's in the collection.
And sometimes what's not
in the collection as well.
But when we get some of the earlier online
collections, like Bell, and, and Morris and some
of those, they were done more selections
as part of the legacy websites.
When you get into more of our more
recently digitized collections,
we're really pulling the metadata from
the finding aid to groups of materials.
So, for example, if you get to
some of the presidential papers,
you may be dealing with reels of microfilm.
And so, again, you might be having hundreds
of images within one reel of microfilm.
So, it makes it a little bit more challenging to
find individual subjects or items very quickly.
But also with some of the online materials,
then if you can put it into a grid view
or something along those lines, it may
be easier for you to check through.
But that's basically, it's just that we're
dealing with such a volume of material
that things get organized by
those archival principles.
>> Great. Well, I was just interested in your,
you mentioned in one of your later slides,
just the idea that serendipity is sort
of part of I guess the research process,
or I guess the discovery process.
And so I was curious, for both of you, for both
you, Michelle, and Josh, any sort of moments
of serendipity, kind of exploring
the collections and kind
of what the most surprising
stories or sources that you found
that have really piqued your interest?
Josh, do you want to go ahead and take this one?
And also maybe you'll need to explain to
people how long you've been at the library.
>> Yeah, and this is difficult for me to answer,
because I've been working at
the library for two weeks.
So, I have not explored the collections in
person at all really, because [inaudible].
But if Michelle wants to answer, I'll
think about a moment of serendipity
in my prior research that
maybe would be helpful as well.
>> I think with, I mean, gosh, there's often
so much serendipity because when we're working
with collections, either online or in their
physical, their physical state, sometimes,
and this isn't just for STEM related
research, it's for, you know, any research,
is that you may go to a collection for
one thing, and then while you're looking
for that one thing, you stumble
across something else.
And but I was just, actually I was just
telling Josh the other day that, you know,
we had a wonderful kind of moment
of serendipity because research,
because our reference staff
talks to our researchers.
Sometimes the reference staff
know what we're interested in.
So, one of the notebooks in the Bell papers
that I wish had been digitized earlier, is,
is one from the, is from 1881, where
Alexander Graham Bell was actually trying
to perfect a metal detection device that
would allow him to try to help find the bullet
in President Garfield's body after
he had been shot at the train station
in Washington, D.C. in July of 1881.
And, you know, it's got great material.
He's trying to help save the
president's life, and he's doing all this,
but in a moment of serendipity, because some
of my colleagues are aware that I'm interested
in the Garfield assassination, because
the Garfield papers are under my purview,
actually one of the fellows that was working
at the library happened to be in a collection,
the Hubbard family, which is Bell's in
laws, and she came across the file related
to Alexander Graham Bell that had some
correspondence that appeared to be
about the Garfield assassination.
So, she took it up and showed
one of my colleagues.
And because he knew I was interested
in it, he mentioned it to me.
And while making a long story short,
the paper looked familiar to me
because I had seen something
very similar in the Bell papers.
And as we discovered, it turned out
that this one magnificent 16 page letter
that Alexander Graham Bell had written
to his wife about trying to experiment
with the induction balance machine on
Garfield, this 16 page letter had been separated
into different parts of two
different collections prior
to them ever coming to the Library of Congress.
So, half of the letter was in, I think
it was in the correspondence in Bell.
The sketch that goes along with
it ended up in the subject files
for the induction balance machine.
And the other half of this paper
ended up in the Hubbard family papers.
And it was just complete serendipity
that people talk to one another,
so we were able to make scans of the
complete document and place it with those,
in those three separate locations so
that if anybody else came across them,
so we're preserving the provenance of the
material, but we're allowing researchers
to now, this is the full context.
And so for me, what was a wonderful letter,
even though we only had every other page
in the Bell family papers, became
an even more extraordinary letter
when you got the full force of it.
So, you know, so sometimes that serendipity,
you know, maybe always look at the miscellany,
because that's where interesting things are
that are hard to categorize any other way.
So, again, sometimes it's, you're just in
one place, and you find something wonderful.
>> I forgot to mention that Leanne,
Leann mentioned the same thing.
She said, is it true that one
should never, oh, what did she say,
one should never avoid looking at files labeled?
Yeah, they've got some miscellaneous,
so great tip.
Sorry, Josh, what were you saying?
>> Yeah, I, I was thinking
about some serendipity that,
that I had in my prior research life.
My Ph.D. dissertation was about an
island in Micronesia called Pohnpei.
And it was a history of the U.S. presence there,
but also the Japanese and
German and Spanish presence.
And I had a research problem while I was working
on this project in Hawaii in the archives,
which was how to get a handle on the
kind of lived experience for islanders
and Japanese settlers during the
Japanese period on this island.
The Japanese government had produced
thousands and thousands of pages
of anonymous bureaucratic research reports
that all had the same kinds of categories.
And you could read as many of them as
you wanted, and you would never find
out simple things, like, you know,
what's the name of the, you know,
the person that owns this shop in
town, or what's it like on a holiday?
What do people do during the week?
What do they do during the weekend?
Where do they like to buy food?
And I was reading through some issues
of a magazine that was produced in,
in the Japanese territory with my
wife, who is a native Japanese speaker,
and realized that scattered in through this
publication were little poems and jokes
and cartoons that made fun of sort of the day to
day life of Japanese settlers in these islands,
and that if I could contextualize the
jokes and the cartoons and the poems
and the little stories within all
the other things that I already knew,
suddenly I could reveal kind of this
whole world that had been absent for me.
And so I don't, I didn't anticipate using
jokes as evidence for my dissertation,
but it ended up opening up,
opening up a lot of doors.
So, a point that I wasn't expected to look.
And material that I wasn't
expecting to find there.
But it really brings the material
to life in the final version.
>> That's interesting.
So, can you say a little bit more, Josh,
about, so you mentioned you're [inaudible]
and your background prior to
coming to the library too.
So, also, welcome.
But can you just say a little bit about
I guess your [inaudible] what the scope
of your work will be now?
>> Sure. So, I am the new specialist in
the history of science and technology.
And I will be responsible for
working with about 700 science
and technology collections that we have.
And we'll be looking for various ways to
research into those collections, promote them,
do outreach that's related to the collections,
and find ways to help students
and classes engage.
So, some of the things that I've been
thinking about are I have some interest
in transportation history and
the history of atomic warfare.
We have a wonderful collection by people
who are involved in the Manhattan project.
At this point, I am just kind of
getting a handle on what the collections
and the resources we have here,
because they are incredible.
But I anticipate doing various small research
projects, and then continuing to pursue work
that I've done in kind of food
history and history of the automobile.
>> Well, we're grateful to
be working with you today,
and look forward to working
with you more and collaborating.
And Michelle, can you just say
a little bit about your work
and I guess your [inaudible] to the library?
And I'll have another question for
you from Mike after you've done that.
>> Okay, well, as Josh was saying, our, our
roles have somewhat fundamental, you know, core,
core tasks, like outreach and
helping researchers and things.
With, with a circle specialist, if you
ask us what a typical day is for us,
we can't really answer because every day is so
different that for me I've been working on a lot
of digitization the last couple of
years, because we're getting quite a few
of our Civil War and presidential papers online.
So, digitization and trying to help
promote those has been a key part.
We deal also with acquisitions, so we're
on the lookout for collections or materials
that we can either complement what
we already have or fill some gaps.
So, we're recommending officers
for acquisitions.
We also, depending on the time and what's
going on, we can be curators of exhibits.
So, when I first started in 2010, I was one of
the three curators for a major Civil War exhibit
that we put on for about a little
over a year at the library.
You know, we also work with researchers, we
work with groups that are interested in topics
that come across our paths, you know,
but it's also a job where you get
to learn something new every day.
And as your colleague, Leanne knows, there
was, there was quite a few years there
where before we were fortunate
enough to get Josh onboard,
we didn't have a science specialist, so many
of us were filling in those gaps as needed.
And so for various reasons, I got to
know some of the aviation collections.
And, you know, Leanne's husband who teaches
down at the flight school, he brought a group
of flight trainers to the library, and so I did
a show and tell with them, and it was wonderful
because I got to learn some of
their [inaudible] collections
and they were also explaining
to me about some of the topics.
So, you know, you never know every day
what's going to, what's going to come
across your radar and what
you're going to learn.
And often that's very driven by questions
we get from the outside, from researchers.
But also things that, that we find
as we come across materials as well.
So, but, yeah, for me to tell you how I got to
the library, it's longer than anybody has time,
so, it was circuitous, but
I'm delighted to be here.
So, okay, so, what was the question?
>> Yeah, so, actually, Mike had
a question along those lines.
And he asked if you had a favorite
STEM resource related to the Civil War.
>> Yeah, and fortunately I did see that one
pop up, so I had a moment to think about that.
You know, obviously there's, there's a lot
of potential STEM materials in the Civil War,
because you're dealing with ammunitions
and fortifications, and, you know,
all sorts of things that can be used
for that cipher codes, for example,
if you want to get into some cryptology.
But the one that came to mind for me
is a collection which is an assembly
of various aviation materials that
an aeronautics and organization,
the name of which I never get right, so
I won't even try it, but it's a variety
of aviation materials that included things
from Charles Lindbergh and other places.
And in that collection is a small amount
of material relating to Thaddeus Lowe,
who was a balloonist during the
Civil War, and on the Union side.
And several early generals in the war were
very supportive of creating a Balloon Corps.
And so included in the collection is not only
correspondence about the Balloon Corp, and,
you know, calling themselves an aeronaut and
all of that, but there are a couple of notebooks
that when I think, I think they were
in, inside the balloon basket with him
as it was rising over, you know, the
territory where the Union Army was operating.
And so the Civil War ended up really
becoming one of the first wars that was able
to use aerial reconnaissance to direct battles
and have an idea of where the enemy lines were.
And so there are these little notebooks
where Will is obviously scribbling things
that might be telegraphed down to the ground
about what he's seeing while he's up in the air
about where, where enemy troops are, if
they've moved, or, you know, things like that.
And so for me that was a very cool thing.
And there's a couple of maps where, you know,
they were, I think there were [inaudible] maps
that where they were able to use that
balloon technology to be able to make maps
that were then helping, helping direct the war.
So, that's the one that comes to mind for me.
But, again, almost everywhere you look, you're
going to be able to find something STEM related.
And one thing that I wanted to mention,
and it was a word that Josh brought up,
that when you're dealing with STEM
materials that may not come to mind is
where I think our materials lend an added
element that you might not expect is that these,
these lessons can be made stories.
And for us, you know, I'm, I often see when
we're doing show and tells or displays,
you know, particularly when we're dealing
with the public, that may not have, you know,
an understanding of the material that we're
already looking at, that when you can put it
in the sense of the story, it's telling a story,
but you can still get those
essential points about it.
So, that's one thing where when I'm doing
things with the Garfield affixes sass in a case,
it's not only the political story of this
disgruntled officer seeker, you know,
shooting the president, but it's also a very
medical and scientific story because of the bill
of connections and because of the medical
care that Garfield did or didn't get.
And people are always fascinated by that the
same way I was when I first came across that.
So, with these, you can weave very concrete
discussions about science and technology
and mathematics into kind of a story that
may, that may appeal to students who,
particularly who aren't already, you know, very
interested, very, I don't want to say interested
in the subject, but, you know, may not have the
same natural affinity for it that others do.
So, you know, if you think of that sense of
story, that's where I think what Josh said
about the Marietta map is so powerful
is that it's a much larger story
that can be incorporated into it so
many different aspects of those STEM
and history and, and understanding.
>> Yes, totally.
I didn't think of that [inaudible].
I think you're totally right.
I mean, the idea of stories to provide
context can also, you know, to have us realize
that those few things that actually happen,
and someone, someone mentioned, you know,
that the scientists don't work in a vacuum.
Well, that [inaudible] didn't necessarily
happen in a vacuum, and that, that were at play.
Josh, did you want to add something?
Sorry, I didn't mean to cut you off.
>> No, no, I was, I was just thinking
about something I used to tell my students,
which is a quote from the First Nations
comedian author Thomas King, which is,
"the truth about stories is that's all we are."
So, a refrain that is repeated several times
on his, in his, one of his short stories.
And so, you know, the stories that we
tell about ourselves, the stories we tell
about other people, they're not just stories.
Right? Stories constitute who
we are and how we're remembered.
So, they are not only approachable for students,
for teaching, because we use stories to relate
to one another, but they are
powerful ways to, to frame materials,
and to frame our approach to historical figures.
>> Yeah, definitely, yeah,
that's a great reminder,
and also just a great, great
quote, great nugget.
Well, I don't see any other questions
[inaudible] comments, so hopefully Michelle
and Josh will both have a chance to
review the, the chat after the fact.
But thank you so much for participating with
us today, and for answering our questions,
and for shedding light on materials that,
you know, definitely new to me, many of them,
so I'm excited to explore, and I hope that folks
got the links that we posted in the chat box,
as well as the ask a librarian
links if you have other questions.
I'm not sure if it was posted here, but
Michelle wrote a blog post for our teaching
with the library [inaudible] blog,
with highlighting resources
from the Manuscript Division.
That could be of use to some classrooms.
So, we'll post that for you to take a look at.
If there are no other questions,
I will end the session
and just ask everyone to join us next week.
We'll be joined by specialists
from the Preservation, Research,
and Testing Division at the library.
We'll be talking about preservation
efforts the library is undertaking,
and more about their work.
So, I hope that you can join us, and thank
you so much, again, Michelle and Josh.
>> It was our pleasure for being here,
and please feel free to get in touch
with the Manuscript Division if
you have any other questions.
>> Yeah, absolutely.
>> Great. Well, take care,
everyone, and we'll talk to you soon.