Smithsonian Libraries

Happy Birthday Theodore Roosevelt!

Theodore Roosevelt—African game trails Scrapbook. More photos of the album can be viewed on the Libraries' Flickr.

In honor of Theodore Roosevelt’s birthday 152 years ago today, we’re happy to announce that a scrapbook documenting his public career, made on the pages of his book African game trails (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1910) has just been sent for conservation treatment.

The book itself is Roosevelt’s own description of the Smithsonian/Roosevelt African Expedition of 1909-1910, which resulted in thousands of specimens for the National Museum of Natural History. This copy was presented by Roosevelt in 1910 to his secretary at the Outlook Company, Stuart Hill, who then turned it into a scrapbook containing more than 2,000 pasted-in items relating to Roosevelt’s public career.

This unique copy of the book came to us in the Russell E. Train Africana Collection, and as you can see, it’s stuffed to the gills with newspaper clippings, photographs, drawings, letters, invitations, and miscellaneous ephemera from the early 1900s, attached to the pages of the text.

Because the glues are failing and the paper of the inserted materials is acidic and brittle, any handling causes damage, and the volume has been off-limits to readers since we acquired it. But now we have special funding from the Smithsonian’s Collection Care and Preservation Fund to give it a full conservation treatment. This involves photographing the volume in its current state to document every single page and all of the inserts; labeling each scrap as the book is taken apart; removing glues, de-acidifying the paper of the inserts, and cleaning the text pages; mounting all of the inserts on acid-free leaves; and then putting the printed text and the insert leaves back together in 3 more-reasonably sized volumes. It is estimated that this pains-taking process will take the better part of a year.

When it has been preserved in this way researchers will be able to read all of the inserted materials and form a complete picture of the book and its contents. The book and the Train Africana Collection are available for consultation in the Joseph F. Cullman 3rd Library of Natural History, one of the Libraries' rare-book rooms, located in the National Museum of Natural History.

—Leslie K. Overstreet, Curator of Natural-History Rare Books

Related articles

• The Heat Wave Of 1896 And The Rise Of Roosevelt (npr.org)

SIL staff attend meetings on new book technologies

Nancy Gwinn, Martin Kalfatovic and Suzanne Pilsk attended two meetings sponsored and hosted by the Internet Archive. Held at the facilities of the Internet Archive in San Francisco, the gatherings focused on providing content and the future of books and reading in an online, and increasingly mobile, environment.

The Internet Archive Leaders' Forum brought together representatives from a number of institutions that digitize or share content through the Internet Archive. Participants shared where they were with their current projects and explored possibilities for future work and collaborations.

Books in Browsers, organized by the Internet Archive's Peter Brantley, brought together creators, libraries, publishers and technologists (attendee list) for a fast-paced two day meeting on the latest in presentation of text in the on-screen environment. 

These meetings highlighted the increasing pace in which technology is affecting the industries that revolve around the written word. In the information ecology, looking at the entire picture, from the creation of content to its ultimate consumption is important. Disruptive elements anywhere in the information ecology can have ramifications for participants far removed from the points of disruption.

As readers of this blog know, Smithsonian Libraries is actively engaged in digitization projects and also exploring conversion of these digital texts for on-screen and mobile reading.

Some of the presentations and other information can be found here:

• Brewster Kahle's Presentation
• Slide show of moving the 2.88 petabytes at the Internet Archive
• Photo flip books from boths days and the evening event (Day 1; Day 1 gala; Day 2)
• Tom Blake's (BPL) video used in the evening presentation
• Blog post of the evening presentation
  
  

- Martin R. Kalfatovic

(Brewster Kahle orchestrates group photo of participants)

Clara Barton's Ambulance

National Museum of American History, Landmark Object: Clara Barton’s Red Cross Ambulance, 1898.

After the [Spanish-American War] war, the Red Cross sent this ambulance to Clara Barton for use at her home in Glen Echo, Maryland, the organization’s headquarters and distribution center for relief supplies.

As the founding director of the American Red Cross, Clara Barton was no stranger to battle but she loathed it. “The war side of war could never have called me to the field,” she explained. “I hate it. Only the desire to soften some of its hardships and allay some of its miseries ever induced me . . . dare its pestilent and unholy breath.” —National Museum of American History

The International Red Cross was organized on this date in 1863, in Geneva, Switzerland. The Libraries has many interesting items in its collections, on Clara Barton and the history of the American Red Cross.

The Red Cross; a history of this remarkable international movement in the interest of humanity, , Washington, D.C., American national Red cross [c1898], by Clara Barton ...

Red Cross ambulance of 1898 in the Museum of History and Technology [by] Herbert R. Collins, Washington : Smithsonian Institution; [for sale by the Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Gov't Print. Off.], 1965.

History of the Red Cross. The treaty of Geneva, and its adoption by the United States. American Association of the Red Cross, 1883.

125 years of hope, humanity, compassion: selected treasures from the art collection of the American Red Cross, [Washington, D.C.?] : American Red Cross, c2006.

A story of the Red Cross: glimpses of field work, by Clara Barton. New York : D. Appleton and Company, 1918, c1904.

—Elizabeth Periale

A Lot of Bologna

Top: Giovanni Domenico Cassini, La meridiana del tempio di S. Petronio tirata, M.DC.XCV. Plan of the cathedral of San Petronio in Bologna showing the solar meridian on the floor.

Bottom: Piazza Maggiore, Bologna, Emilia-Romagna, Italy. South side of square, featuring from left to right: Palazzo dei Banchi, San Petronio Basilica, Palazzo dei Notai, Palazzo d'Accursio (now the Town Hall). Courtesy Tango7174, Wikimedia Commons.

Yesterday was National Bologna Day. I'm sure that conjures up schoolbox lunches for most, (and there are probably plenty of bologna sandwich lunches on their way to school at the moment), but we shouldn't forget the origins of this go-to sandwich for most harried parents—the fabulous city and gastronomic capital of Italy, Bologna. Plus, the Libraries didn't have many lucheon-meat images to share ...

If you are lucky enough to travel to Italy, and especially, Bologna, you will undoubtedly be served cured meats in an antipasto, among them mortadella, which is a far cry from Oscar Mayer, but is definitely the source material (as is, I'm afraid, olive loaf, a bane of my childhood).

Bologna sausage is an American sausage derived from and somewhat similar to the Italian mortadella (a finely hashed/ground pork sausage containing cubes of lard that originated in the Italian city of Bologna). It is commonly called baloney/boloney or more formally, bologna.—Wikipedia

Mortadella's origins are also interesting:

Mortadella is a large Italian sausage or cold cut made of finely hashed/ground heat-cured pork sausage which incorporates at least 15% small cubes of pork fat (principally the hard fat from the neck of the pig). It is delicately flavored with spices, including whole or ground black pepper, myrtle berries, nutmeg, coriander and pistachios, jalapeños and/or olives.

Traditionally the pork filling was ground to a paste using a large mortar (mortaio) and pestle. Two Roman funerary stele in the archaeological museum of Bologna show such mortars. Alternatively, according to Cortelazzo and Zolli Dizionario Etimologico della Lingua Italiana 1979-88, mortadella gets its name from a Roman sausage flavored with myrtle in place of pepper.

The Romans called the sausage "farcimen mirtatum" (myrtle sausage), because the sausage was flavored with myrtle berries. Anna Del Conte (The Gastronomy of Italy 2001) found a sausage mentioned in a document of the official body of meat preservers in Bologna dated 1376 that may be mortadella.—Wikipedia

You can get mortadella in most supermarkets in the U.S., and it invariably has pistachios in the filling. It is also thinly sliced, like American bologna, not like in Italy, where chunks are served up alongside cubes of salame and provolone and roasted peppers, eggplant, zucchini ...

—Elizabeth Periale

Related articles

• Spuma di Mortadella (nytimes.com)