Jan 21
Katherine BossFrom Our Guest Bloggers
Thinking more about libraries and design – graphic designer Michael Bierut gave a presentation a while back about the Library Initiative, a project to build new school libraries in elementary schools throughout the five boroughs of New York City, and I think this presentation is one that a lot of librarians will appreciate. So far the initiative has built more than 60 new school libraries in NYC, all of which look absolutely beautiful, and incorporate Bierut’s logo for the project:
He’s kind of disparaging about the logo in his presentation, but I just love it! L!brary. Anywho, it’s a very funny talk and also underscores some of the important aspects of library design and who it’s for (bit of a spoiler: it’s for us!).
Jan 20
Sarah MurphyBibliobeat, Events from Other Orgs
Greetings from the Bibliobeat, here today with news from our friends at Books Through Bars:
Books Through Bars Annual Bingo Fundraiser (!!!)
Join Books Through Bars NYC for our annual Bingo Fundraiser.
WHEN: Saturday Jan. 28th. Doors open @ 7pm
WHERE: The Brecht Forum – 451 West Street (that’s the West Side Highway) between Bank & Bethune Streets
Featuring SISTER LOUD MELISSA and DJ Lena
__________________
Prizes include gift certificates and treats from: Angelika Cinema, Anthology film archives, Babycakes, Book Thug Nation, Bluestockings, Criterion Films, Earth First Journal!, the IFC Center, the Feminist Press, the New Press, and many more!
Free entry; $1 per card to play. Beverages will be available. ALL PROCEEDS used to buy postage to send free books to prisoners.
http://booksthroughbarsnyc.org/
The Brecht Forum is accessible by A, C, E, 1, 2, 3 trains.
Jan 15
Katherine BossFrom Our Guest Bloggers
Ah, library signage. A quick image search confirms, signage-wise, libraries are the worst. We are the place where Comic Sans and clip art goes to die, and where one mark of punctuation is seen as far too polite, or too timid, to really get a message across.
This BuzzFeed article from a year ago on passive aggressive library signs pretty much sums it up. I do not think any other institution has succeeded in being so offensive to graphic design. But the underlying frustration for librarians, and especially public librarians, is that people actually do chew on their headphone cords. Signage like “Do not put trash or food in the book drop” is sadly warranted.
But the worst part is that for all of our all-caps, bold, overly punctuated efforts, computer generated signs are largely ignored and ineffective.
So what do we do about our signage design issues? I think one best practice would be to never use scotch tape to affix a sign to anything ever again. It looks awful and leaves so much moldering, tape-y residue when the sign is inevitably taken down.
Plus there are so many better options available. At the New School’s Fogelman Library, for instance, where I currently spend a good deal of time, information is painted directly onto the walls, like so:
It looks great and professional, and most importantly, seems to be effective at reducing directional library questions. Other options are magnetized signs, wall decals, foam core, or at the very least plastic information holders.
Another consideration is sign placement – what is the flow of traffic through the library, and where will signage be most visible? I think a lot of our signage is ineffective because we have not addressed the flow of traffic and the sight lines of our patrons.
This study by the Metropolitan Library System in Chicago addresses some of these problems and more, and has some great summaries in their key findings, including one fundamental concept that I believe a lot of librarians have trouble accepting – “Don’t try to change people’s behavior: identify it and design for it.”
In a user-centered library, this is key. Attempting to get users to change their behavior is a waste of energy and often does not work. It is much more effective to identify how our patrons are already using the library and then build around that.
And lastly, it would be great if most library signage had a graphic identity or theme, created by a person who knows at least a little bit about graphic design. Some library signage is absolutely painful to look at, and we are better than Comic Sans!
Jan 07
Katherine BossFrom Our Guest Bloggers
Hello and Happy New Year, Desksetters! My name is Katherine Boss, Reference and Instruction Librarian at Long Island University Brooklyn, and I will be your guest blogger for January.
So let’s talk about academic library instruction. It seems that instruction is becoming more of a focus for both public and academic libraries, which makes sense, as databases continue to be intimidating megamalls of information that few of our students can navigate. Yet a lot of undergraduates approach library instruction as a waste of their time, since obviously they plan on Googling the answers to all of their research questions on their smartphones one day before their assignment is due.
I assume you are all properly horrified. As librarians, we strive to turn this ship around – there is so much information in the world that is not available on Google! Information that students are already paying for, via their tuition. Yet engaging a group of unresponsive Business Management 101 freshmen can be a daunting challenge – especially when most of them are vastly more interested in liking things on Instagram than learning about the (many!) ways to create company lists and sort them by sales in LexisNexis. So how do we get the attention of our students, and stuff them full of as much information literacy as possible?
Well, I do not pretend to have all the answers, since I have not been teaching all that long, but I am very, very interested in this question, and have some thoughts. First off, I advise lecturing as little as possible. “Wait- WHAT?” you are perhaps saying. “Don’t most students straight-up love lectures?”
Evidence suggests the answer is: no. I say this based on failed instruction sessions that I will refrain from re-living here, and also, studies. This report on NPR, summarizing a study by a pair of physicists at Arizona State, confirms what many teachers have known for a long time: active and engaging teaching styles result in higher information retention. Lectures reinforce passive learning, and while a bit of lecturing is usually necessary at some point during a 50-min instruction session, I try to avoid it.
Instead, I like to consider ways to get students to implement the research methods I want them to learn. Often this requires a good bit of advance planning, group activities, games, and what not, but once you’ve done enough preparation and have a general structure, the sessions themselves can be very unstructured, since so much of it is up to the students. And here I will plug my favorite, FAVORITE podcast, “Adventures in Library Instruction,” available for free on the web and through iTunes.
I have gotten so many great ideas from this podcast, which is produced by the very talented and hilarious librarians Rachel Borchardt, Jason Puckett, and Anna Van Scoyoc. One workshop in particular I like to use is a version of MythBusters, wherein each student or pair of students pulls a statement or question from a hat, and spends 15 minutes on Academic Search Premier or some such database determining whether the statement is confirmed, plausible, or busted. It’s usually a good idea to gather your myths or questions from the same database, to keep the focus narrow, and also to demo a myth in front of the class first, to give them an idea of how they might approach it. Then, toward the end of the class, each group of students can talk briefly about their findings, how they got there, what worked, what didn’t, and so on. This format can easily be adapted to any academic discipline – business, history, science, etc.
So if you’re interested in instruction I highly recommend the Adventures in Library Instruction podcast, you will come away with so many great ideas and a renewed enthusiasm for teaching. Also, Anna Van Scoyoc if you ever come across this blog post – thank you forever for your stories about the senior center. Those seniors will appreciate Twitter someday!!
Dec 30
Haley & EmilyFrom Our Guest Bloggers
"Merrymakers in New Year Saturnalia" Courtesy of the Museum of the City of New York
As the year draws to an end, we devote our last installment here at the Desk Set to a look back at some of our favorite aural discoveries made since our project began. Last week, Haley highlighted our very beloved Mayor La Guardia, and this week I will point you to some of our other gems.
We start with the very first audio we posted to our blog, Annotations. This post, titled “Eisenhower Salutes!” features two short excerpts from the three-hour coverage of the Eisenhower Day Parade celebrating General Eisenhower’s return to the United States following the May 7 surrender of German forces. On June 19, 1945, four million New Yorkers gathered in the rain to welcome General Eisenhower to New York. Listen to the palpable excitement of the crowds gathered along Fifth Avenue waiting to catch a glimpse of the American hero.
Many of our favorite pieces brought to light important historical figures and movements we previously didn’t know about. The heroic story of the Four Chaplains of the USAT Dorchester, and the successful passing of the landmark Ives-Quinn Anti-Discrimination Bill are just two such examples.
Not all of our favorites are serious. In fact, many of our most loved artifacts are rather silly. Thanks to the youth-oriented radio featured on WNYC in the 1940s and 50s we have such hits as “Television (In My House)” from The Junior Journal program and “Please No Squeeze the Banana” courtesy of the Pals of the P.A.L., not to mention our very favorite water conservation jingle, which reminds listeners that “Water is precious as gold today, and no one ever throws gold away!”
We’d like to extend a special thanks to The Desk Set for letting us share the WNYC collection with you and wish everyone a very happy New Year! Follow our finds over at Annotations and don’t miss out on Mayor La Guardia’s wisdom on Twitter. Also, keep an eye out for our forthcoming WNYC online collections portal!
Audio courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives WNYC Collection.
Dec 21
Haley & EmilyFrom Our Guest Bloggers
For this week’s installment, Emily and I decided we would take a break from talking about the nitty-gritty of our epic digitization project and focus instead on our very favorite character from the WNYC collection: Fiorello H. La Guardia, perhaps best known as the mayor of New York City from 1934 – 1945 (okay, so maybe he’s best known as the namesake of La Guardia Airport).
Mayor La Guardia reading the funnies over WNYC.
Not being New Yorkers ourselves, Emily and I came to this project with little-to-no knowledge of Mayor La Guardia, but we learned quickly just how charismatic he was. From his heartfelt tribute to inventor Nikola Tesla, to annual Christmas Tree lightings around the city, La Guardia brought to the WNYC airwaves a dynamism and strength of character that has made him a stand-out in the collection.
Fiorello H. La Guardia was born in December, 1882 in New York City, but the family moved out West soon after his birth so that his father could pursue a career as a bandleader with the U.S. Army.
He studied law at New York University and, in 1916, became the first Italian-American Congressman, a position he held while commanding American air forces during the First World War. After a brief stint as the president of the Board of Aldermen in 1920, La Guardia was again elected to Congress in 1922.
During the Depression Era, his progressive stances against racism, laissez-faire economics and prohibition, as well as his support for federal recovery and relief programs, earned him increased approval, but he lost his seat in 1932 to Democrat James Lanzetta.
In 1933, La Guardia was elected Mayor of New York City as a Fusion Party candidate. In this position, he modernized several municipal departments and procedures and brought in billions of dollars in federal grants to improve city services. In 1941, President Roosevelt named the mayor Director of Civilian Defense, a position he had to vacate as the Second World War began to add pressure to his mayoral duties.
It was during this time, 1938 – 1945, that Mayor La Guardia addressed all of New York City on a regular basis via WNYC. In addition to the numerous receptions for visiting dignitaries, municipal-building groundbreaking ceremonies, and other public events broadcast on the city’s municipal station, Mayor La Guardia recorded “Talk to the People,” a weekly thirty-minute program broadcast every Sunday afternoon.
During these programs, the mayor addressed the concerns and questions of citizens directly. As the war effort began to take its toll on the city’s supply of food and fuel, and as the threat of domestic attack became more real, residents of New York City began to rely more heavily upon the mayor’s weekly announcements and advice.
Of the more than 200 “Talk to the People” programs that were broadcast, only about 100 still exist, both in the WNYC collection at the NYC Municipal Archives and at the G. Robert Vincent Voice Library at Michigan State University. Contemporary transcripts, typed by one of the mayor’s secretaries as he was speaking, are currently available, thanks to the Municipal Archives, for about 90% of the broadcasts.
We can tell, through the audio and transcripts, that each broadcast covered a consistent set of issues: social problems like gambling, juvenile delinquency, and crime; shortages of fresh fruits and vegetables and rationing of fuel oil; and of course, updates on the war in Europe and Asia.
The immediacy of these broadcasts makes these primary sources incredibly vivid logs of the daily lives of New Yorkers – and other Americans – dealing with the strains and conflict of a nation going through profound and painful change. And the fact that the person telling of this story is an impassioned, charismatic and empathetic figure like Fiorello La Guardia only makes the content more valuable.
Mayor La Guardia poses with a 300-pound halibut at the new Fulton Market. Image courtesy Library of Congress.
As of today, Emily and I have listened to and cataloged over 50 hours of “Talk to the People” broadcasts, and while choosing a few favorites was perhaps the hardest task we’ve encountered during this project, we’ve selected a few we think you will enjoy. Take a listen!
July 4, 1943
In this special Independence Day broadcast smack dab in the middle of World War II, the mayor urged listeners to sign a “Unity Pledge” against fear and discrimination, calling it “a constant reminder of our desire to keep peace, tranquility and happiness in our city.” An update several months later reports that 96,000 New Yorkers had signed the pledge.
July 15, 1945
Without a doubt the most famous of all the “Talk to the People” broadcasts is the mayor’s reading of the funnies during the newspaper deliverymen’s strike in the summer of 1945. Why should the children suffer, he asked, because of “a squabble among grown-ups?” For the duration of the strike, well-known comedians were invited to do the same on a regular WNYC series called “Comic Parade.” Watch a video of La Guardia reading Dick Tracy and Little Orphan Annie on “Talk to the People.”
October 7, 1945
On the 300th anniversary of the Charter of Flushing (a thing Emily and I had never even heard of before) La Guardia delivers a heartfelt celebration of religious freedom and a surprising awareness of interior decorating.
December 23, 1945
Two days before Christmas and three months after the end of the Second World War, La Guardia plays to the religious and youthful sides of Christmas, somberly reciting the Nativity story as a warm-up to his energetic performance of the iconic Clement Clarke Moore poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas.”
Mayor La Guardia at an Italian-American Labor Council concert in Madison Square Garden on February 1, 1942. Courtesy The Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation and Archives.
And just because we can’t get enough of the “Little Flower,” here are a few bonus broadcasts that we love:
Dedication of the WNYC AM transmitter site, October 31, 1937
With underwriting from the federal Works Progress Administration (WPA) in the form of a $30,000 grant, “a dilapidated, discarded ferry slip gave place to this beautiful new building that houses your station’s transmitter,” in the words of Commissioner of Plant and Structures Frederick Kracke. La Guardia used the broadcast opportunity to anoint WNYC as “New York’s OWN station.”
The bombing of Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941
After news of the attack on Pearl Harbor was announced, New York City’s mayor took to the WNYC airwaves to assure residents of their continued safety while taking a cautious tone about citizens of Japanese descent.
Re-dedication of the Brooklyn Bridge, May 24, 1943
This one is a bit of a wildcard. While La Guardia does make a typically charming appearance, the real star of the show is the Brooklyn Bridge itself, which reminisces about its life up to that point, including its grand opening 60 years earlier.
All La Guardia bio information comes from “The Encyclopedia of New York City,” by Kenneth T. Jackson. La Guardia entry written by Thomas Kessner.
Dec 14
Haley & EmilyFrom Our Guest Bloggers
Hello Desk Setters! This is Emily of WNYC’s Haley and Emily. In last week’s post Haley described a little about the station’s history and today I’m going to describe our project, and talk about our historic audio formats and our workflow.
First a quick primer on formats: given the long history of the station, the Archives holds virtually every major audio format, save cylinder and wire. While a large variety of analog and digital formats have sprung up in radio in the past three decades or so, the earliest material in our collection is generally limited to discs and open reel acetate tape.
The bulk of the materials we are busy digitizing are 16” transcription discs, which usually consist of an aluminum core coated in nitrocellulose (often called lacquer) and recorded at 33 1/3 rpm. These discs, unlike those in your personal vinyl collection, were cut in real time at the studio or on site, are usually unique, and are played with needles much larger than those used on standard vinyl LP microgroove.
The recipe used to create the nitrocellulose layer varied from manufacturer to manufacturer, as did the application of it to the core, peculiarities which impact playback quality. There are several preservation concerns related to these discs. First, a not insignificant portion of the discs were made on glass during World War II as most aluminum was going into the war effort. These incredibly fragile artifacts require a delicate hand and prompt no small amount of anxiety. Furthermore, nitrocellulose is prone to degradation and may become brittle and flake over time or (as is very common in our collection) develop a greasy layer of palmitic acid which requires thorough cleaning using special solvents. Open reel tape also has some concerns: broken splices, tape cupping (which prevents the tape from laying flat against the playback head), and in the case of polyester-based back-coated tapes, stickiness which requires baking at a low temperature.
Transcription disc with uneven nitrocellulose layer. (Note the "WYNC" label!)
And now, on to our project. Haley and I were brought on board to head up a two-year National Endowment for the Humanities-funded grant to digitize and make available 660 hours of historic WNYC audio. We have been busily identifying broadcast materials aired from 1938 – 1970 and creating one of the most colorful spreadsheets ever made to keep track of the over 1,800 audio artifacts headed for digitization.
Unlike many archives, most of the station’s early recordings do not belong to the station – they are instead owned by the NYC Municipal Archives, who have been endlessly helpful in supplying original artifacts for digitization. We regularly head down to the Municipal building to retrieve boxes of discs still in their original sleeves now crumbling with age. After a thorough cleaning, needle selection and careful digitization in both Flat and EQ, the discs are re-housed and returned home. Open reel tapes are stored at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts and retrieved in the same fashion. Each recording results in a 96 kHz, 24 bit Broadcast Wave file as well as a surrogate gold CD. Additionally, both the Municipal Archives and NYPL will receive a hard drive containing the BWF files and catalog information of all shared collection materials.
Each recording is listened to in real time to ensure high quality transfers (we run into many issues: discs may skip or have other unexpected noises; tapes need azimuth adjustment and popped splices must be repaired), and occasionally we run into unexpected surprises. During transfer we create robust PBCore 2.0 compliant catalog records that fully describe the content, utilize a controlled taxonomy to allow faceted browsing, note contributors and capture pertinent technical metadata. These records will be exported to MARC for our cooperating archives. We make use of contemporary newspapers in order to properly identify dates and names, and consult transcripts when available.
In our free time we maintain a blog, Annotations, about some of our favorite finds and maintain our favorite mayor’s twitter account. The result of this ambitious project will be a website which will make accessible our catalog and associated audio.
Dec 09
Haley & EmilyFrom Our Guest Bloggers
Good afternoon, Information Professionals! Welcome to the first dispatch from your December guest bloggers. My name is Haley; I’m an Assistant Archivist at New York Public Radio, better known to radio audiences as the home of WNYC, WQXR and The Jerome L. Greene Performance Space. For the past 15 months, my colleague Emily and I have been working on an NEH-funded project to transfer 660 hours of audio originally recorded on to lacquer transcription discs and open reel tape from the New York City Municipal Archives WNYC Collection. For the next four weeks, Emily and I will be bringing you stories from this collection, which beautifully documents the experiences of New York City and its citizens through some of the century’s most tumultuous decades (1938 – 1970).
The first broadcast, July 8, 1924, photo by Eugene de Salignac
The History of WNYC
WNYC began broadcasting on July 8, 1924, under the auspices of Grover A. Whalen, New York City’s Commissioner for Bridges, Plant and Structures (pictured above, left, on the day of the first broadcast in a photo by Eugene de Salignac). Until its sale to the WNYC Foundation in 1997, WNYC was a direct line to the City’s mayors, many of whom addressed constituents in weekly programs. The station became the citizens’ main source of information pertaining to city services, local politics and cultural events, as well as a provider of entertainment and educational programming.
In the 32 years of history represented by the segments of the collection we’re working with, WNYC recorded a wide array of voices, including such cultural and political notables as Eleanor Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Henry Kissinger, and Joseph Papp, and the performances of Miles Davis, Lester Young and Leadbelly and Alan Lomax.
“The Voice of New York City”
Perhaps even more significant, however, is the volume of audio that showcases the zeitgeist of America at mid-century. Recordings of public events like hospital cornerstone ceremonies, playground dedications, and sewage plant openings; informational programs designed for housewives and mothers struggling to feed their families during wartime food rationing; and interviews with notable politicians, artists, scientists, and social thinkers about the rapidly changing American landscape, all transport us directly to the center of debates and events as they were occurring.
These windows into daily life can be found in virtually every document in the collection. In one recording, a remote broadcast from the cornerstone laying ceremony for the Gravesend Health Center in 1949, Brooklyn Borough President John Cashmore abandons his prepared remarks to respond to attendees protesting the condition of city schools. “When you talk of schools, there was nothing done during the war years. We don’t blame anybody for that, because the most important thing was the winning of the war,” he says. “I can remember what the Mayor [O'Dwyer] said: ‘children won’t wait; they’ll grow up. They’re entitled under the American form of government to the best school that this great city of ours can give them.’”
In another remote broadcast, from December 1942, the City’s annual “Tree of Light” ceremony at Madison Square is disrupted by stringent wartime dimout regulations. The City’s decision to follow these regulations by extinguishing the holiday lights a half-hour after sunset was apparently used as fodder for German propaganda, an attempt at morale-busting WNYC reporter Joe Fischler railed against on air: “in spite of what you may have heard from our enemy propagandists in Germany … we here in America still have Christmas trees and will keep on having Christmas trees as long as there is a United States of America.”
These recordings of New Yorkers can fill in the gaps of our understanding of American history and create a more robust vision of the past. The collection is a rich record of mid-20th Century trends, ideas and advances that will add context, nuance and texture to future radio features and documentaries produced by New York Public Radio.
WNYC Archives and Preservation Department
While the Archives and Preservation Department is a relatively recent addition to WNYC (it was created in 2000), the station and the New York City Municipal Archives Department have been responsible for holding on to thousands of transcription discs and tape reels since they were originally recorded. With our project, these materials will finally be easily accessible, through a new portal (still under development) which will allow any interested listener a chance to browse through and search these primary sources. Working with these materials has given us the opportunity to become familiar with pockets of New York City history that were utterly unknown to us before.
In addition to this NEH-funded project, the Archives and Preservation Department is responsible for caring for the stations’ analog audio of all formats (except for cylinder and wire recordings), digital audio and video, photographs, program guides, blueprints, posters, vintage recording equipment, and unsold pledge premiums. We also blog (at History Notes and Annotations) and tweet! Oh, and we’re big fans of interns!
Throughout December, Emily and I will be highlighting our favorite recordings and stories in an effort to prove that WNYC really is “the voice of New York City.”
Want to know more about the history of WNYC? Check out this amazing slideshow of photos and audio from the collection.
Image and audio courtesy NYC Municipal Archives.
Dec 03
Sarah MurphyDesk Set Sponsored Events
Announcing Three Great Reasons to Get to the Ball on Time
Doors are at 8:00PM, and you might as well join us nice and early.
- From 8:00 – 9:00 PM, your beer is on Happy Hour Sponsor Brooklyn Brewery! (while supplies last, of course)
- The more time you spend at the Biblioball, the more raffle tickets you can buy! The prizes are spectacular (see below). Bring a book to donate to the Uni Project, and get one free ticket! Purchase more before 11:15, and aim to win big! All proceeds go toward Literacy for Incacerated Teens.
For the complete Biblio Noir schedule click here.
Get Lucky in the Fancy Pants Raffle!
We’ve got some incredible prizes from some of the most generous and absolutely awesome businesses, restaurants, cultural organizations and artisans around. Please support our supporters!
Here’s what you can win:
And thanks to our Leather Bound VIP Sponsors:
And our additional event sponsors:
Nov 28
Sarah MurphyDesk Set Sponsored Events
Already have one?
Well, then win one for the friend you’re having trouble convincing to accompany you! There are two ways to win, and by entering you’ll help the Desk Set get the word out to every nerd in New York City. You can only win once, but you can enter as many times as you like! Here’s how:
On Facebook, please check out the Desk Set’s wall. See the link to the event, along with the rules of the contest? Simply share that link on your own wall, adding whatever comment you like, and you’re automatically entered to win! Be sure to share the link, don’t just copy and paste or post on your own. Sharing is the only way we’ll know that you’ve entered.
On Twitter, follow us and then @thedeskset regarding what you love about the Biblioball. Use #biblioball and remember to send your tweet our way (@thedeskset) in order to be eligible.
All posts must be shared or tweeted by 11:59PM on December 1st.
Thanks for helping us promote the Biblioball! Looking forward to seeing you on Saturday.
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