 |
Titian Ramsay Peale's Mole |
Another distance user contacted the Library after finding a description of a journal apparently authored by his ancestor. The journal had long languished barely noticed in the APS vault until the advent of web technology brought a description of the journal from its faded catalog card to the visually appealing and user-friendly web site of the APS Library.
Over the past few years, the APS web site has metamorphosed from a rudimentary site featuring basic information on institutional holdings to a rich resource for researchers, staff, and the general public. The site now features not only the expected collection level descriptions and rights and reproduction information, but also includes everything from electronic versions of finding aids for manuscript collections to full-color images from the Library's extensive graphics collection.
One of these images, a sketch of a mole by Benjamin Smith Barton, serves as an appropriate symbol for the new online manuscripts catalog, known as MOLE (Manuscripts OnLinE). MOLE serves as the primary means by which readers can burrow through the APS website to gather more detailed information on subjects of interest. Alphabetical links on the introductory MOLE page lead to collection level descriptions, many of which contain links to electronic versions of finding aids. Encoded in EAD (Encoded Archival Description, a markup language similar to HTML) the finding aids include links that allow users to browse through descriptions of each series, folder, and in some cases, item in particular collections.
The 124 finding aids that appear online contain all information provided in the original paper finding aids, many of which had consisted only of typewritten inventory lists prior to the inception of MOLE, supplemented with newly written biographical information and scope and content notes. The number of online finding aids increases continually, as staff revises, updates, and encodes existing finding aids and processes new collections. The traditional typewritten inventory lists and catalog cards have yielded to new cataloguing procedures in which staff enters descriptive information into databases for export into encoded finding aids.
MOLE has grown largely through the efforts of Robert S. Cox, the Library's curator of manuscripts. After encoding the Library's existing collections guide, Stephen Catlett's A New Guide to the Collections in the Library of the American Philosophical Society into HTML, Cox used "the Catlett guide" as the foundation for MOLE, modifying and rewriting several collection descriptions and writing descriptions for collections accessioned after its publication. MOLE also now features a search engine that digs through the many layers of the APS website to displays all pages on which a given search term appears.
And the site does indeed have many layers. A series of drop-down menus allows users to navigate the APS website and explore the resources available with ease. Instead of paging through endless lists of links, one can view each topic in context and browse through related topics simply by moving the computer mouse over the drop-down menu before clicking on the topic of interest.
Sources to which these links lead include the Library's printed materials catalog, guides to some of the library's most popular graphic collections, and subject guides that direct readers to specific groups of collections.
The printed materials catalog, the counterpart to MOLE, is VOLE (Vaughan OnLinE, named in honor of John Vaughan, former librarian and one of the Society's most dedicated members). VOLE includes not only the library's vast holdings of printed materials, but also catalog records for approximately 2500 of its prints and photographs. Several of these records have thumbnail images on which researchers can click to view larger versions of the images.
The guide to graphic materials leads researchers through a gallery of images drawn from seven of the Library's most significant and extensive collections of prints, fine arts, and photographs. These include the Franz Boas collection, portraits, eugenics, images of and related to Benjamin Franklin, genetics and Geneticists, the journals of Lewis and Clark, Titian Ramsey Peale, and Benjamin Smith Barton.
The Franz Boas collection represents a veritable photographic timeline of Boas life from age four through his work as the foremost anthropologist of his time to his later years.
The portraits section contains classic images of America's most influential early scientists, natural historians, philosophers, and statesmen, including Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Paine, Benjamin Rush, David Rittenhouse, Joseph Priestley, Alexander Humboldt, Louis Agassiz, Daniel Garrison Brinton, Peter Stephen DuPonceau. Artists represented include Thomas Sully, Charles Willson Peale, Rembrandt Peale, Gilbert Stuart, Thomas Eakins, Daniel Huntington, Charles Nicholas Cochin, Charles Van Loo, James Reid Lambdin, James L. Wood, George W. Pettit, Gustav Anton von Senckendorff (alias Patrick Peale).
As one might expect, Benjamin Franklin, as founder of the APS, continues to occupy a place of prominence not only in the Society's history, but on its web page, where over three hundred images grace the Franklin and Frankliniana pages. Images range from the classic Franklin portraits and engravings to ephemera bearing likenesses of Franklin. The pages also include images of manuscripts written by and sketches drawn by Franklin, along with images of objects and items associated with Franklin.
With images from one of the Library's major collecting interests, the History of Genetics pages features links to photographs from several major genetics collections including the Columbia University Department of Genetics, the Charles B. Davenport, Theodosius Dobzhansky, Barbara McClintock, and Curt Stern.
The Library's collection of photographs from the related field of eugenics is represented on the website with a complete inventory of the American Eugenics Society Scrapbook, one of the most significant visual archives documenting the eugenics movement in America. The page features not only descriptions of all photographs, but also includes, for most of them, thumbnail images on which researchers can click to view a full-size image of the original photographs.
Among the most popular images from the APS graphics collections are those associated with the Lewis and Clark Expedition and the Titian Ramsay Peale sketches. Particularly in demand with the approach of the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial celebration, the images featured on the website include some of the most significant journal entries and all of the journal pages on which sketches appear. On the pages devoted to Peale, researchers may view descriptions of all sketches, arranged in the order in which they appear in the collection, and thumbnails of most images, which link to larger versions of the images.
The image gallery also features classic views of Philadelphia by William Birch, Thomas Birch, William Strickland, and Thomas Kelly.
The site features not only guides to visual materials, but general guides to manuscript materials as well. Several guides, now out of print, served as the basis for a series of online guides to eleven subject areas covered by the Library's manuscript collections. They include not only major collecting interests of the APS, such as American Indians, anthropology, genetics, and physiology/biochemistry but also more specialized areas, such as African-American history and naval history, for which staff almost surgically extracted information from collections. Others include European science and technology, medical history, natural history, quantum physics, and scientific exploration.
The guides range in descriptive detail from brief summaries with collection level descriptions to the elaborately structured guide to Manuscript Materials Relating to American Indians, organized by nations, languages, and tribes. Cox constructed this guide in a manner similar to that which he used for MOLE, using existing guides by John F. Freeman and Murphy D. Smith and a supplement by Daythal Kendall. Cox then revised and updated the entries, added descriptions of several collections and items accessioned since the publication of the "Indian guides," and encoded them all for ease of use on the web.
These and many other resources available on the APS web page allow researchers to research from a distance, beginning their work even before entering the Library doors and thus making more productive use of their time. The site also benefits Library staff, who can use the site not only as a quick and easy reference tool, but also as a source for long-distance researchers, who may view everything from selected images to descriptions of material in manuscript collections prior to contacting reference staff.
Although some still lament the decline of the card catalog and printed collections guides (to which, incidentally, the Library still provides access), the continually expanding APS website provides tangible evidence that the "useful knowledge" promoted by the visionaries among the early APS membership lives on in spirit.