Oral History Remote Access and Update

Full disclosure: the author of these COVID-19 blogs is Dr. Elissa Stroman, the Audio/Visual Unit Manager. And so this week, she wanted to take a moment to explain what her department is doing during our work from home times, as well as provide an expanded explanation of oral history remote accessibility.

Overview of Our Oral Histories

The Southwest Collection’s oral history collection of over 6,500 recordings has traditionally been abstracted only, wherein our staff listens to interviews and generates a list of topics and keywords. Thousands of these abstracts have been placed on our oral history wiki. In 2013, the Audio/Visual department shifted to create full-text transcripts of all new interviews conducted, and since that time, over 1,000 interviews have been transcribed, many of which are available on our dspace.

In 2013, this blog featured a three-part overview of our oral history holdings, discussing the collection generally, our shift to transcripts, and the various recording formats of our interviews. Since those blogs were published, in Fall 2018, the A/V department completed digitizing all SWC oral history interviews in our holdings. This was especially advantageous in COVID-19 times, because mp3 copies of the entire collection can be backed up to a portable hard drive and easily worked on remotely.

Working from Home and Expanding Operation

In early March 2020, as the Southwest Collection realized that remote work was a matter of “when” not “if,” the A/V department began making arrangements for remote oral history transcription work. We recognized early that transcription was a task any employee could take with them, whether or not they had an internet connection. It is also work that can be soothing—the act of transcribing allows transcribers to focus on the interview at hand and tune everything else out. But more importantly, our researchers frequently ask for transcripts from older interviews, and we have been unable to keep up with the demands—until now. Because of all this, the Texas Tech libraries administration realized this opportunity and made this a priority project of our building: let’s see how many transcripts can be created in this time.

Typically, the A/V department consists of three or four part-time student transcribers and one staff member editor. In the days leading up to the Texas Tech campus shutting down, more and more USB drives with mp3s were disseminated, as were links to a shared onedrive folder. At last count, almost thirty Texas Tech library and SWC employees have been assigned to remote oral history transcription work (whether it be their only assigned task or just an extra project). The interviews prioritized for remote transcription work are interview series with release forms, under-represented voice projects, important themes/collections from the SWC’s holdings, and some of the earliest oral history recordings in our collection that document pioneers of the South Plains region.

What This Means for Our Researchers

The first thing researchers will notice is a wave of new transcripts put onto our dspace. Our department had a backlog of hundreds of transcripts that needed final edits and uploading. We now have the staff and time to do that. These transcripts are more recent interview series and projects that were transcribed by our students over the last few years. We also plan to expand our oral history wiki, which at this time only has about half of our interviews represented.

The interviews that are being transcribed remotely will not go on dspace immediately. They will still need to go through our editing queue, which takes time. Further, many of these older interviews have release restrictions that means they are only available in-house. But in the long term, it is notable that while we transcribed 1,000 interviews in about seven years, we have over 2,500 interviews queued to be transcribed during this quarantine time. Consequently, potentially in the post-COVID-19 world, over half of the Southwest Collection’s oral history collection will be transcribed (and with potential for more to be done if there’s time and people needing more work).

Our oral history transcripts can be found on the SWC’s digital repository: http://collections.swco.ttu.edu , scroll down to “oral history interviews.”

Accessing Oral Histories Online NOW

Many people ask about accessing our oral histories online, right now, today, from home. Here is the short response:

• No audio is available to stream or listen to online.
• In “normal” times, we can provide audio copies of interviews to family members ONLY. However, because our building is closed, we cannot fulfill patron requests for physical media at this time. We can put your request on file and fulfill it when we are back in the office.
• If you are working on an immediate research project, we highly suggest you look to our dspace transcripts first, as that will provide you full-text versions of our interviews that you can cite directly.
• If you are planning a future research trip, then look to our wiki for other interviews and research topics that may only be available for listening in our Reading Room.
• If you find a particular interview you are interested in that does not have a transcript, feel free to contact us, and we can look into release restrictions. If the interview is from the 1990s onward, there is a good chance that its transcript can be placed online. You can make a request for it to be transcribed, and it will be prioritized it in our transcription queue. I anticipate that it will take about six weeks to get the transcript onto dspace.
• See previous blogs for more information generally about digital holdings and our policies during our COVID-19 closure.

Keep your eyes on our dspace and wiki sites in the upcoming weeks/months, as we continue to expand our digital holdings of our oral histories.

Our oral history wiki will also be expanded while we are working from home. The site contains general information and abstracts of our interviews. http://swco.ttu.edu/ohc

Southwest Collection Digital Remote Resources Overview

Since our Reading Room is closed, we wanted to take a moment to provide an anchoring blog post for researchers interested in continuing their work remotely. Below are some links and general guidelines for accessing Southwest Collection materials from the comfort of your home.

Though our Reading Room may be closed, many archival materials can still be accessed on our digital repository.

Digital Collections:

Our digital repository contains materials from all special collections in our building: Southwest, University Archives, Crossroads of Music, Rare Books, the Sowell Family Collection, and Oral History. Click on any “community” to browse collections generally, and then there is the option to browse “sub-communities.”  https://collections.swco.ttu.edu

Specifically regarding newspapers: Our dspace contains over 126 different newspaper titles from across West Texas that encompasses 264,000 text-searchable issues, with more added daily. The direct link for these newspapers is: https://newspapers.swco.ttu.edu (click the community “newspapers” for a full list of titles).

Tips for navigating dspace:

• Each community will display the most recent submissions first at the bottom.
• Sub-communities allow our departments to group archival material by collection or topic. They are incredibly helpful if you are trying to find specific thematic materials.
• For more general research, the search bar on the right side allows you to search the entire digital repository. Once you click on any community, you can further narrow your search to the specific community you are currently browsing.
• The search function crawls titles of files, as well as any text-searchable documents.
• Further, the tool bar on the right allows you to filter or narrow the material you are viewing by author, subject, and date within the community.
• Because of the variety of ways to describe archival materials, we highly recommend searching utilizing different keywords and terms. Alternative phrases might allow you to find information in multiple collections that you would not have anticipated. Also, sometimes it is helpful to just browse entire collections—with extra time at home, you never know what gems may be lurking in our digital repository!
• Once you click on an item, click on the “view/open” link below the thumbnail to access the file. Most materials are either .pdf or .jpg format, and your browser setting will determine if the file opens in a new window or if you are prompted to download.
• For more information and metadata on each file, scroll down on the page and click on “show full item record.”
• The URI link on each item page provides a permanent web link if you need to access the file again. We recommend you use that link for any research citations.

Many empty tables await researchers for when our building reopens!

Digital Resources for Collections Accessible Only In-Person

If you want to jump-start your next research trip to Lubbock, here are a few places you’ll want to check out to get started.

TARO Finding Aids

The Texas Archival Resources Online provides finding aids for collections throughout the SWC/SCL. These materials will not necessarily have been digitized, but they do provide detailed inventories and general information on collections housed in our building.

More information on how to use finding aids can be found in this previous blog post.

Manuscript Guide

The Southwest Collection also has many collections without TARO finding aids at this time. More general information about those collections can be found here.

Reference Files

The Reading Room has over 14,000 files with general information about West Texas and the greater Southwest region. These reference files contain news clippings, brochures, inventories, and oral history information. They can normally be photocopied in-house, and provide an excellent starting point for researchers.

Oral Histories

More information on the Southwest Collection’s prodigious oral history collection of over 6,500 interviews can be found on our oral history wiki. These recordings have traditionally been abstracted, which are included on this site. If an interview has been transcribed, it will be housed on dspace.

The SWC also has donated oral history collections (with thousands of recordings); a preliminary list is found here. Any links to finding aids or other information are given when available.

Catalog Generally

If a more traditional card catalog is your preferred method of research, here is the direct link to the Texas Tech University Libraries online catalog.

Tip: if you want to search for just SWC/SCL materials, click the “advanced search” link to the right of the search bar. It will allow you to limit the scope of your search, and from there you can choose either “Southwest Collection/Special Collections” which focuses on physical materials in house (books, collections, oral histories) or “Southwest/Special Collections Digital Content” which focuses on our dspace holdings.

 

As always, our Reference Staff is a phone call or email away with any questions researchers have. Feel free to reach out to them, as well as any employee of the Southwest Collection. Our contact information can be found here.

The SWC Staff, Working from Home

With our archival work all being done from home during the COVID-19 pandemic, we have asked our staff members to reflect on their work and the role of archives in this time. They are supplying with their response a photo of their new coworker(s), a laptop selfie, and other photos of their WFH set up.

This blog post will be updated weekly, aggregating our staff profile posts.

• April 1, 2020: Katelin Dixon, Special Projects Curator
• April 8, 2020: Weston Marshall, Reference Archival Associate
• April 15, 2020: John Perrin, Registrar
• April 22, 2020: Rob King, Assistant Archivist in cataloging/technical processing
• April 29, 2020: Robert Weaver, Southwest Collection Manuscript Archivist
• May 6, 2020: Elissa Stroman, Audio/Visual Unit Manager
• May 20, 2020: Elizabeth Moore, Archival Associate for University Archives
• May 27, 2020: TBD

WFH [Work from Home] Archives Edition

We hope this blog finds you feeling safe and healthy. We have broken into our already-scheduled social media posts to bring this update from the Southwest Collection regarding how our archive is continuing to work during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library on a sunny spring day, March 26, 2020.

The South Plains of Texas was operating under cautious but somewhat normal circumstances in early March. A handful of our Southwest Collection employees judged area schools’ history day projects on March 7^th. However, the next week, with conditions worsening across the United States, our administration began to ask department heads to prepare contingency plans for working from home. All of this was done in hypotheticals until late on Monday March 16^th. We received an email from the President of Texas Tech University, who told all employees that starting at the end of the day March 17, as many employees as possible should start working from home. This was implementing Phase III of the university’s COVID-19 response plan (for more on this, see http://www.texastech.edu/downloads/ttus-memorandum-operational-phases-march-16-2020.pdf ). The rest of the week was spent methodically ensuring that all of our full-time employees had plenty of work to do at home and the resources with which they could work successfully. Friday March 20^th was always a staff holiday, but it was also a time for us to catch our breath. The vast majority of our building was now working remotely.

We write this on the week of March 30; our archive is now officially closed. On the week of March 23, only a skeleton crew remained at the Southwest Collection. Our registrar worked fervently to get all accessions and paperwork sent out. Our Associate Dean, along with our reference staff, remained on duty to handle last minute patrons to our Reading Room by appointment only. A few of our staff popped in and out of the building as needed for technical support that could not be done remotely. Phase IV of the university’s plans began Friday March 27. And so we will begin the month of April with our entire building working from home.

With that in mind, we wanted to make our patrons, donors, and virtual community aware of some of the projects we’ll be working on while we are home. We will be posting photos our staff members share of their home office set up (and, of course, highlighting their furry coworkers).

A few of the projects we are currently working on remotely (and that our staff will explain more about in future posts):

• Uploading EAD finding aids to Texas Archival Resources Online (TARO).
• Categorizing reference file materials and updating comprehensive lists.
• Transcribing oral history interviews and uploading transcripts to dspace.
• Cataloging books.
• Expanding metadata on our dspace holdings.
• Cleaning up and organizing our digital file systems.

A couple of housekeeping notes for interested individuals:

• The Reading Room will be closed to researchers until the campus reopens. Phase IV of Texas Tech’s operational phases designates our department (and the main library) as non-essential.
• Our reference department can still field queries and requests, but no duplications can be completed at this time (since we lack an infrastructure for payment or physical copies to be made and mailed). Please be aware that our reference staff has very limited digital resources and does not have ready access to any physical manuscript materials. They will keep a running list of duplication requests to complete when we return to campus. Patrons should feel free to email regarding our digital holdings, finding aids, or oral history abstracts. Contact information can be found here: https://swco.ttu.edu/Reference/policies.php
• The West Texas Historical Association annual conference (April 4-5) has been cancelled, as well as the 50th anniversary Lubbock tornado symposium (May 8-9).
• Our exhibit commemorating Texas Tech and the 1970 Lubbock tornado has been delayed but will be completed and on display once we return to campus.
• We are still available to connect with researchers remotely—you can still call or email individuals directly with questions. Fortunately, our phone systems are tied to our computers now, and so even working on laptops and at home, staff members can answer calls as needed. If you are unsure who to contact, our main lines are 806-742-3749 and 806-742-9070.

We thank you for your continued support during this time of uncertainty. We will be here virtually and back physically whenever it is safe to do so. In this time, we look forward to slowing down and expanding our digital offerings for our remote patrons. So look to this space as we update you on new developments from the Southwest Collection!

The Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library Reading Room is closed for the foreseeable future. Please contact us for further information. http://swco.ttu.edu

Women’s History Month – featuring Hermine Tobolowsky

It’s Women’s History Month, and we have few collections more appropriate to that celebration than the papers of Hermine Tobolowsky. Sometimes called the “Mother of the Texas Equal Rights Amendment,” Hermine Dalkowitz Tobolowsky, among many other accomplishments, successfully coordinated the Equal Legal Rights Amendment (ERA) passage to the Texas Constitution in 1972.

Hermine was born on January 13, 1921, in San Antonio, Texas, and after her primary education attended Incarnate Word College in San Antonio, and the University of San Antonio (now Trinity University.) She went on to obtain her law degree from the University of Texas School of Law. Soon after graduation, despite repeated instances of facing blatant discrimination, she opened a private law practice in San Antonio.

After marrying Hyman Tobolowsky, a Dallas retail executive in 1951, Hermine moved to Dallas where she had to re-establish her legal practice. By 1957, she had begun to craft her statewide legacy of activism, becoming the leader of Texas’ campaign for equal legal rights for men and women. This culminated in passage of the Texas Equal Legal Rights Amendment (ERA) fifteen years later in 1972.

She didn’t slow down there, remaining active in the Women’s Rights Movement, delivering innumerable speeches and workshops on women’s issues. She also served as a legal advisor for numerous women’s organizations up to the time of her death on July 25, 1995.

Tobolowsky’s collection is replete with materials about the ERA, as well as pamphlets and directories from women’s organizations throughout Texas. There are also curious ephemera in there, such as this handwritten musical excerpt endorsing a favored political candidate. If you want to see more of Tobolowsky’s accumulated material, here you go! And if you want to take the next step and see them in person, give our ever-helpful Reference Staff a call.

The Newcomb Diaries of the Anne Watts Baker Papers

In this blog entry, we’re taking a look at our Anne Watts Baker Papers, which you can find in their entirety over here: https://legacy.lib.utexas.edu/taro/ttusw/00458/tsw-00458.html. Baker principally collected diaries and other materials pertaining to the Reynolds and Matthews families of Shackelford County, Texas. But the choicest cuts come from the journals, letters, and scrapbooks of Samuel and Susan Newcomb, dating from the mid- to late-19^th century. For example, the page above is from a handwritten draft of “A Journal of a Trip from Clear Fork in Stephens Co. to the San Saba River” by the Newcombs. It was later published, and we have that printed version in our collection as well.

Not all of Newcomb’s items revolved around the “Journal.” The two halves of the letter above, dating from February 6^th, 1865, tell the tale of a hastily dashed off plan about a fort, an ‘indian rade’, and other events around the Fort Davis, Texas, area.

Here is another letter dating from around the beginning of the Civil War, which was not at all affecting the life of Mr. Newcomb. He was more into having dinner, then heading on out to hunt for more game, perhaps for a second dinner. The man was hungry, no question.

This letter is virtually impossible to read in this image (although you can get a larger version of it among our digital collections over here: http://hdl.handle.net/10605/352417) But what’s interesting about it is that the parts that are water stained have made the rapidly-fading ink more legible. The peculiarities of paper and ink could, and often do, make up entire college courses.

Susan E. Reynolds Newcomb left plenty of her materials in the collection as well. This is a diary entry from New Year’s Day, 1896. She expresses a positive outlook for the new year, despite the “perfect gale from the northwest” that was “very disagreeable.”

And to add something completely different to the collection, the Newcombs created a scrapbook full of poems and odd little cartoons like this one. There’s a 100% chance that the baby went ahead and at that food anyway, y’all.

 

Want more Newcomb books, letters, and diaries? Have at them over here among our digital collections: http://hdl.handle.net/10605/352417  And if you’d like to see the real deal, contact our ever helpful Reference Staff and they’ll see what they can arrange.

New Mexico’s “Lincoln Independent” – 1890

Did you know we have over 200,000 digitized volumes of newspapers from throughout Texas and New Mexico available online? Well, you do now! And one of this author’s personal favorites is the Lincoln Independent from Lincoln, New Mexico. The paper was founded in 1880, but the only run we’ve got our hands on is the entirety of 1890, beginning with the issue above dating from January 3rd. The remaining issues can be found here, but here are a few of our favorites below.

With Halloween coming up, we chose the issue above from October 31, 1890. Sadly, although Halloween is a ‘holiday’ of sorts was celebrated in the 1890s, with pushes from various groups to make it a community-oriented celebration. But it didn’t resemble today’s celebrations, or even those of the 1920s and 30s. Also, Lincoln County was absolutely the U.S. frontier (New Mexico would not become a state until 1912), so costumed frivolity may not have been their top priority.

One thing we were excited to find here at the Southwest Collection was this ad for the Angus VV Ranch. We have an archival collection related to the owners of the ranch, Charles M. and James E. Cree. It has been digitized and placed online, and contains information that the Lincoln Independent doesn’t share: a rash of cattle rustling that was occurring at the time!

Another tidbit we enjoyed was this advertisement for the Agricultural College of New Mexico in Las Cruces. This would later become New Mexico State University. And we want you to know that, in our opinion, it still has a very good library.

This all ends, as it probably should, with the final issue in our possession, dating from December 12, 1890. A comparison between the first and final issue reveals only one significant difference: the paper was begging readers to subscribe to the Independent. Here’s to hoping that their please worked.

If you’d like to read more of these papers, the many others we have from Eastern New Mexico, or the hundreds of thousands of others from throughout Texas, head over to our digital collections and dig in!

The Adams Family Papers – No, not THAT Addams Family!

It is time once again to dig among our little-used collections to find something to share with y’all. This time it’s a handful of turn-of-the-century (nineteenth to twentieth centuries, that is!) photographs from Horace F. Adams and his family. Adams was a farmer, carpenter, and certified “public weigher,” as well as one of the first settlers of Terry County, Texas. If you’ve never been out that way, it’s the home of scenic Brownsville, cotton farms, and a good stretch of highway that points you toward New Mexico. The Adams family used a plain old “F” as its cattle brand, which it continued to use well after Horace’s death in 1925.

Papers include financial records such as promissory notes, bills of sale, deeds, and receipts, all filed alongside genealogies of the “Franklin and Hull families” from 1798 to 1883. But most interesting are its photo albums, where we found the man in military uniform that headlined this blog. It is unlabeled, so his identity remains a mystery, but the photo of a snowy home, above, has the words “My first yard a four of us! Feb. 6 1923” scrawled on the back.

Sadly, many of these photographs are mysterious. The family in the snow, below, are identified as “front of my home. My wife and Kiddies. Feb 6. 1923 – J. K. Knight.” Clearly they are the same folks from the other wintry photo. But the baby in a car, above? We have no caption or notes, even on nearby papers in the collection. The kiddos on the bull, below, are described as “Roy & Ethel, a bull, and Babie Ethel.” Are there two Ethels? Is that the same child from the car? We can’t tell, and they didn’t say.

 

Our final image is no mystery. Adams was a livestock weigher, so he had a large number of calendars provided, we assume, compliments of the cattle industry. This 1913 example extols the success of the National Live Stock Commission Co.  They just had just sold the highest priced drove of cattle ever shipped out of Washington County, Iowa!

We end with a bit of trivia that had us laughing. Before they moved to Brownfield, the Adams family lived in Gomez, Texas.  You can’t make that up. Anyway, this is a small collection, filling only one archival box, and it is infrequently used. But if you want to take a look at it, or any of the rest of our treasures, contact our Reference staff at randy.vance@ttu.edu and they’ll set you up.

Texas Tech University – History in Pictures

It’s that time of year again at Texas Tech University when students old and new make their pilgrimage back to campus. Because TTU is approaching its hundredth year (in 2025! So close!), we thought we’d share a few photographs from its early decades. The photo above, for example, is a shot of the laying of the cornerstone for Tech’s Administration Building in 1924.

This photo is not just a house on the Texas Technological College campus. You see, it was supposed to serve as the home of then-Texas Technological College (TTC) president, Paul W. Horn. But he rejected it, then removed it from campus to make way for a residence he found more suitable. The structure was removed to what is now 1611 Avenue Y where it stood until 2018, when it burned down.

Texas Technological College initially focused heavily on agriculture education. Some of its student body raised livestock (typically dairy cows) on campus to pay their way through school. And some of their beasts spent time in the Agriculture Livestock Pavilion–otherwise known as the Aggie Pavilion–seen above shortly after its opening in 1925. It now rests not a half-dozen yards from the Southwest Collection itself!

But you know what else went on in the Ag Pavilion? Basketball! There were no other facilities in which to play the game, so the 1927 basketball squad (seen here in a composite photo made for the La Ventana yearbook) had to handle their business Pavilion-style. Their first game, in 1926, ended in an 18-9 victory over West Texas State Teachers College (now West Texas A&M University, just up Interstate 27 in Canyon).

This bucolic scene dates from 1925, with cattle grazing in a fenced pen near the Dairy Barn and Silo. Also featured: the Administration Building, the Agricultural Pavilion, the Agriculture Building, and in the far distance the Home Economics Building.

In the spirit of the upcoming football season, we also dug out this photo of the University’s first football team in 1926. Then known as the “Matadors,” they had played their first game the previous year against McMurry College at the South Plains Fairgrounds in Lubbock. Final score? 0-0.

The Red Raiders only had to play across town for one season and one game before a small field and bleachers were built on campus. Then, in 1947, the Clifford B. and Audry Jones stadium was completed. Its first bleachers are seen in this photo. The stadium could seat 16,500 students, although it boasted that it could do a full 20,000 if portable bleachers where wheeled in.

The Jones wasn’t the only sports facility on campus in the 40s. Above you can see the TTC gymnasium and field house circa 1945. There was clearly something going on inside when this photo was taken, because these taxi drivers weren’t waiting around for nothing.

This aerial shot of the campus was taken in 1950. The photographer was looking northeast across Memorial Circle, with the Administration Building to the right and what was soon to be the West Texas Museum (and is now Holden Hall) on the center-left. It’s fair to say that things have changed just a little bit.

Our final photograph shows TTU President Grover Murray conferring honorary degrees upon President Lyndon B. Johnson and Mexican President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz. Congressman George Mahon, who represented the region in Congress for over forty years, is standing behind President Johnson.

These images are but the smallest sample of the treasure trove of Texas Tech history in our holdings. Need more? Then look no further than our University Archives digital collections or our other photograph collections!

Two Collections, Two Perspectives

Today we’re contemplating two new-ish, seemingly unrelated collections that each portray wildly opposite views on the same topics. In this case: socialism and communism. One collection–the papers of early 20^th-century activist Thomas Hickey–was chock full of cartoons like the one above, as well as pamphlets and letters advocating for labor unions, socialism, and similar propositions.

The other collection came from Texas women’s rights activist Hermine Tobolowsky. Her primary focus was on the Texas Equal Legal Rights Amendment for women. 99% of the boxes and folders in her collection are had nothing to do with Hickey’s raison d’etre. But that 1% was anti-communism through and through. Items such as the image above suggest she was dead-set on educating the population against the communists.

Hickey was the private secretary to Eugene V. Debs, who was a founder of the IWW, found himself before the Supreme Court on one occasion, and more than a few times ran for the office of U.S. President. As a result of their close connection, Hickey’s papers contain many pamphlets published by Debs, his family members, and others.

It’s a fairly safe bet that Tobolowsky would not have been a Debs fan. While socialism and communism are two distinctly different philosophies, Tobolowsky’s papers don’t bother with the distinction. Teaching materials for K-12 students, anti-communist mailings and pamphlets, and a host of other items testify to that fact. The above warning from J. Edgar Hoover is the most classic of its kind, however. Vintage Red Scare!

Both collections also contain a whole lot more about the rest of their lives and careers. You can find Tobolowsky’s finding aid here, while Hickey’s materials have been digitized in their entirety over here.  Take a look through them, and if you see something you want to see more of, give us a call!