Highlights from Bancroft's Web Resources
Those who drop in on The Bancroft Library's web site (http://www.lib. berkeley.edu/BANC) will find the basics —an overview of collection areas, address, phone number, hours of operation, etc. But in addition to the essential information are a host of guides, aids, and resources that are available to all, free of charge, 24 hours a day. There are a variety of online visitors who may be using Bancroft's web-based resources. A casual web surfer may make a brief stop at the California Heritage Collection to look at photographs from Charles Lindberg's trip to Monterey before cruising on. A scholar planning a visit to Bancroft from afar may use the finding aids online to arrive better prepared to delve into a large manuscript collection. Or a high school student may read a first-hand account of the struggle for women's suffrage as part of Oral History Online.
From BANC PIC 1962.019—ffALB, No. 47A view of Tenaya Lake by Eadweard Muybridge. Available via the California Heritage Collection. |
Finding aids
Finding aids are inventories, registers, indexes or guides to collections held by archives and manuscript repositories, libraries, and museums. Finding aids provide detailed descriptions of collections, their intellectual organization and, at varying levels of analysis, of individual items in the collections. A finding aid will typically contain a bit of history about the collection, biographical information about the collector (artist or photographer in the case of a pictorial finding aid), notes about how large the collection is, and perhaps a summary of the organization of the collection. Finally, there is the container list. The container list is just that—a rough summary of what is in which carton, box, or folder for the entire collection. Folder titles usually are something like: "Alameda County. Recorder's Office [Typed transcripts, relating to land transactions] 1852-1859". Over the last several years, Bancroft finding aids have been converted to an encoding scheme called EAD, or Encoded Archival Description. The EAD standard allows researchers not only to view finding aids online, but also facilitates complex searches. This allows researchers to conduct searches to determine if the material is housed in the Bancroft Library. Patrons may also browse the finding aids online to obtain an overview of the library's holdings in manuscript collections. Those who use the finding aids online may be able to arrive at the library better prepared to conduct their research.
The California Heritage Collection
One "virtual collection" of finding aids is of interest to the casual user and scholar alike: the California Heritage Digital Image Archive (http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/ CalHeritage). In this resource, digital facsimiles of photographs are linked directly to finding aids, allowing on-line researchers to find, select, and view collections of historical photographs from their home computers. The collection contains over 28,000 separate images from more than 160 separate collections. The user is presented with thumbnail images as part of the container list. Clicking on an image brings up a larger image in a separate window for closer examination. For those who are interested in a medley of Bancroft's pictorial holdings, check out the California Cornerstones collection.
Oral History Online
With increasing academic and public interest in first-hand accounts and personal perspectives on historical events, oral histories were a natural addition to the Bancroft Library's pioneering work in online access to collections. As with the finding aids, the oral histories are encoded according to a standard developed by the Text Encoding Initiative (or TEI). Researchers can read the oral histories online at their leisure, or may search across all of the oral histories at the push of a button to hone in on a key piece of desired information.
One of the highlights of the Oral Histories Online collection (http://www.lib. berkeley.edu/BANC/ROHO/ohonline) is the Suffragists Oral History Project. In the early 1970s this Project, under the auspices of Bancroft's Regional Oral History Office (ROHO), collected interviews with twelve leaders and participants in the woman's suffrage movement. Tape-recorded and transcribed oral histories preserve the memories of these remarkable women, born between the 1860s and the 1890s: their formative experiences; their activities to win the right to vote for women; and their careers as leaders of the movements for welfare and labor reform, world peace, and the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. In January of last year, the nineteenth century met the twenty-first, as the words of these activist women became the first ROHO oral histories made accessible for scholarly research and public information online via the Internet.
Other oral histories recently unveiled online document the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley. Future plans for expanding offerings online include oral histories on the disability rights and independent living movements; the Earl Warren gubernatorial era; the Black Alumni Series; the history of the Richmond Waterfront during World War II; and bioscience and biotechnology.
Looking At Rare Manuscripts
When considering Bancroft as a "rare book library" people often think of ancient texts. While California Heritage and Oral Histories Online deal with 20th Century materials, older collections have not been forgotten in this digital age. Two digital library projects which deal with very old manuscripts (and which have been detailed in previous issues of Bancroftiana) are the APIS (Advanced Papyrological Information System) and Digital Scriptorium projects. APIS, as the name implies, is a resource for ancient Greek papyri from Egypt, while the Digital Scriptorium caters to scholars of medieval manuscripts. Each of these projects has its own database; those who have never seen an Egyptian papyri or a medieval manuscript are hereby invited to do so.
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From the APIS web page (http:// sunsite.berkeley.edu/APIS), users may click the "database option." Once you have entered the database search screen, you may choose to search on the subject term "beer," which yields four results. One of these is a scrap of papyrus dating from approximately 132 B.C., an "Account of payments of beertax." Users can view not only the information about this rare item, but also the image. Those with a good connection to the web (or a lot of patience) can view the "medium- size" image at a whopping 504 kilobytes. While you may not be able to read the ancient Greek script, you will be able to see the individual fibers in the papyrus itself. The Digital Scriptorium web page (http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Scriptorium) also has a database link. My favorite search, the word "elephant" in the caption field (searched from the "text" portion of the database) currently yields two results. The images from Columbia's Plimpton MS 281 show a very unusual elephant. Actually, to me it looks more like an aardvark (note the paws)!
So whoever you are and wherever you may be, we invite you to put on your most comfortable clothes, even settle down with a cup of coffee and enter The Bancroft Library at a time that best suits your schedule — online.
Merrilee Proffitt
Director of Digital Archive Development
Volume 116
Spring 2000
Table of Contents
The Silent Multitude of Voices in the Reading Room
From the Director: Bancroft Goes Digital
Highlights from Bancroft's Web Resources
Paramount Theatre Archives at The Bancroft Library
Three Monuments in the History of Science Arrive at Bancroft
Ancient Lives: The Tebtunis Papyri in Context
From Mine to Natural Reserve: ROHO records the transition
Chemistry Symposium in Honor of Kenneth S. Pitzer Held January 9 to 13, 2000: Oral History Presented
