Long island Archives
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March/April 2022
Volume 29 Issue 2
This year LILRC is awarding an unprecedented number of projects to an extremely diverse group of applicants. We are pleased to announce that almost all of the recipients will receive the full amount requested for their projects, funded by the Regional Bibliographic Data Bases and Interlibrary Resources Sharing Program. For anyone wondering if their future project ideas are a good fit for the grant, read on to learn the types of projects LILRC received. The Adelphi University Archives and Special Collections (UASC) is seeking support from LILRC to digitize the Maria Kraus-Boelté letters. The Maria Kraus-Boelté Letters Collection contains 145 multi-page letters written by Maria Kraus-Boelté to her former pupil, Carrie Coit Meleney, from 1896 to 1916. The letters detail the development of kindergarten education in New York City and in the United States. Maria Kraus-Boelté (1836-1918) was one of the earliest and most influential apostles of the kindergarten in America, implementing Friedrich Fröbel’s educational philosophy. The intended audience would include scholars researching the development of early learning education in the New York City region. The Bellmore Memorial Library will be hosting "Digitization Day: Preserving the History of the Bellmores at BML,†an all-day event at the library where members of the Bellmore and North Bellmore communities will be given an opportunity to share family photos or other materials that document 20th century life in the Bellmores. Participants willing to share their items (digitally) with the community will be welcome to bring their photos and documents to the library that day. The current local history librarian will oversee the digitization of the various collections, seeking only to obtain digital rights of the items, then return the items back to the donors along with a courtesy copy and appropriate archival sleeves and folders to help with their preservation. Island Trees Public Library asked for equipment to outfit a digitization station for the purpose of scanning binders containing Island Trees history. The equipment they will receive is an Epson Expression 12000XL Scanner, two My Passport Hard Drives at 2TB each, and a Dell laptop. There are twenty binders that include photographs, newspaper clippings, correspondences, leaflets, flyers, newsletters, and documents. Funding will allow the library to scan the binder items, which would total approximately 1,955 images, and make the history of Island Trees more accessible and valued. A collaboration between the Lynbrook Public Library and The Historical Society of East Rockaway and Lynbrook will outsource their collection of local newspapers to be digitized and later uploaded to the New York State Historic Newspapers website. These newspapers represent an account of the history of people, places and events that must be preserved. Continued on page 5
LILRC Congratulates the 2022 Digitization Grant Recipients By Nicole Menchise
Receive Member rates on all LILRC programs, workshops, and conferences! Access to the Regional Archival Services including virtual and socially distanced site visits and letters of support for grant applications! Technical support with your participation of the regional digitization projects (New York Heritage and NYS Historic Newspapers)!
Accessing Archives with Robert Anen Updates from LILRC's Project Archivist My work at the Southold Historical Museum (SHM) marks the inaugural partnership of LILRC’s Accessing Archives Pilot Project (AAPP). AAPP is a new pilot program designed to provide historical societies and museums across Long Island with an opportunity to improve access to archival collections. Member historical societies, museums, and libraries can apply for the services of the project archivist. SHM was one of those institutions. I began working with SHM on January 10th. The goal was to digitize as many photographs in the Charles H. Meredith Collection as possible to increase accessibility of the collection. The collection holds more than 30,000 photographs and negatives and is a cornerstone of SHM’s archival holdings. A portion of the scanned images were then to be selected and uploaded to the New York Heritage website. Some context to the collection: Charles Harper Meredith was a photographer originally based out of Cutchogue, L.I. His career, which spanned from the 1930's through the 1960's, led to the creation of an archive containing thousands of images of daily life, including parades, accidents, funerals, and locales, covering all parts of Southold Township. Over the course of six weeks, I scanned over 1,400 photographs from the collection which were then subsequently uploaded to SHM’s Past Perfect Museum Software located at the Prince-Bjerknes Archives Center. Together with Deanna Witte-Walker, Executive Director and Amy Folk, Manager of Collections, we selected 50 images that can now be seen on the museum’s New York Heritage page: https://nyheritage.org/organizations/southold-historical-museum What's next for Robert? Stay tuned for the May/June issue of the Long Island Archives Newsletter.
Go to LILRC.org/membership-form and join as "Historical Societies & Museums" Already a member? Make an Appointment and let us help you be the super hero of your archives!
Do you (or know someone who does) work for a Historical Society, Museum, or other Cultural Institution with a Special Collection? Then join LILRC as a Special Library Member!
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The Long Ago Literary Corner Recently released and upcoming books about Long Island history
Q&A with Christopher Verga and Karl Grossman, co-authors of Cold War Long Island What was your initial inspiration? Christopher Verga: My motivation in writing the book "Cold War Long Island" was a perfect follow-up to my last book, "World War II and the Long Island Home Front." The World War II Home Front book detailed the rapid modernization of Long Island from a rural appendage of New York City to 20th-century suburbia. The Cold War will take our modern suburbia to a more cynical middle age. Retelling this history also provided me with an excellent opportunity to work with veteran journalist Karl Grossman. How did you find the research experience, and where did you look? Christopher Verga: The research experience, like my other books, is exhilarating. The bulk of my research came from local historical collections, Library's special collections, ProQuest for old new papers, FBI declassified files, local DEC records, and memories of people that lived through this time frame. The biggest asset to all the research on this book was Karl since he wrote and broke these stories as a reporter decades ago. Karl Grossman: Indeed, I started as a journalist on Long Island in 1962, and so many of these issues I wrote about and/or did television programs on. These included the placement of nuclear-tipped missiles at bases set up on Long Island—Nike Hercules and BOMARC missiles with warheads with the firepower, and even more, of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. This was the first generation of ground-to-air missiles so they could not make a direct hit on an airplane. Thus, the strategy was to fire the missiles at a formation of feared Soviet bombers heading to New York City and detonate the nuclear warheads. However, these were short-range missiles and the detonations close to Long Island would, depending on in which direction the wind was blowing, cause major radioactive fall-out on Long Island. My WVVH-TV program on this was broadcast on Long Island’s WVVH-TV and titled “Avoiding Nuclear Destruction: By The Skin of Our Teeth†and can be viewed now on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLb_8FuH-8M%3Fversion%3D3 As a journalist I have written hundreds of pieces about radiation issues at Brookhaven National Laboratory, and about the Plum Island Animal Disease Center and its original mission to develop biological warfare to poison livestock in the Soviet Union. Some of the materials must have been sensitive. How did you approach this? Karl Grossman: Indeed, issues such as the placement of nuclear-tipped missile bases around Long Island were sensitive—and even today most Long Islanders didn’t know about that having happened and the consequences if the missiles were fired as planned. That’s why it was important to me to go to two of these bases, a Nike Hercules base in Rocky Point, and report from on top of one of the missile silos still there, and a BOMARC base in Westhampton, and get inside one of the 56 buildings at it, each of which had contained a BOMARC nuclear-tipped missile. Providing details in a book form was very important. A book can transmit many times the information of a TV program. I know this having previously authored six books of an investigative nature. In either case—TV or books—when dealing with a subject considered sensitive, it is inevitable that one will encounter resistance and an effort to cover up what went on—or is going on. Indeed, that was why my first book was titled “Cover Up: What You Are Not Supposed to Know About Nuclear Power†(and includes a good deal of material involving Brookhaven National Laboratory including several pages from its safety manual in which the impacts of radioactivity are minimized.) One must thus utilize the techniques of investigative reporting to uncover what went on—or is still going on. What were your unexpected finds? Christopher Verga: The biggest surprise was the connection between Plum Island Animal Disease Center and Operation Paper Clip. Erich Traub, one of Plum Island's founders, worked under Heinrich Himmler to develop the Nazi biological warfare program. Nazi officials recruited Traub before working for Himmler during the many German Bund rallies held at Camp Siegfried in Yaphank Long Island. After the war, the United States government program Operation Paper Clip gave Traub immunity in exchange for biowarfare research. What were your frustrations? Christopher Verga: My frustration, like other works, is the lack of historical awareness we have, which forces us to repeat the same mistakes. The Cold War book details our regions' civil rights struggles and environmental disasters, which slipped our collective memory. Much of this history should be common knowledge and included in local history curricula. The most prominent civil rights struggles throughout Long Island were racial covenants clauses in real estate and segregated schools. But 60 years later, we struggle with educational and housing inequalities. One of the most significant environmental disasters is Brookhaven National Laboratory's shuttered graphite nuclear reactor and other nuclear operations. The reactor and other nuclear operations leaked radioactive waste into the Peconic River and drinking water table for decades. Despite the devastation from the reactor, many locals will still debate that nuclear energy is safe and clean. Karl Grossman: A frustration of mine is that even though as my TV documentary titled “Avoiding Nuclear Destruction: By The Skin of Our Teeth†related how we avoided nuclear destruction on Long Island in terms of those nuclear-tipped missiles not being fired as planned, we—indeed the world—is still facing nuclear destruction. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in 2020 put its “Doomsday Clock†at 100 seconds to midnight with midnight standing for what the atomic scientists describe as “nuclear annihilation.†Last year and this year, the “Doomsday Clock†was kept at 100 seconds to midnight, the closest it has been to “nuclear annihilation†since the clock was established in 1947. We need to put the atomic genie back in the bottle, as was done regarding chemical warfare after its horrific consequences were recognized after World War I and by international treaty chemical warfare was outlawed. Nuclear weapons, too, must be outlawed as nuclear war would be unwinnable, indeed suicidal. Instead, now a trillion dollars is being spent on “modernizing†the U.S. nuclear “arsenal.†And with the continued push to build nuclear power plants, plutonium, a waste product for them which is also potential fuel for nuclear weapons, is being proliferated throughout the world. The entire world must be designated a “Nuclear Free Zone†as the UN has designated certain areas. It frustrates me investigating and understanding this terrible direction the world has taken. The insanity of Cold War Long Island continues. Cold War Long Island can be purchased online at ArcadiaPublishing.com or Amazon.com.
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Karl Grossman
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Christopher Verga
LILRC Congratulates the 2022 Digitization Grant Recipients continued from page 1 Shelter Island Historical Society’s Oral History Collection consists of 181 unique audio cassettes which are vulnerable to destruction. Funds will be provided to outsource reformatting (via digitization) to "ensure that the content of these recordings is preserved, and in turn, will be made accessible to a broad network of researchers, educators, students and the general public....Examples of content includes history of local and state government, war, agriculture, invention, commerce, art and artifacts, weather events, genealogy, wildlife and conservation, Indigenous people, Black History, industrialization, fishing/whaling and piracy." The historical society plans to use the audio files to contribute to future projects. "We aim to create fully immersive exhibitions that include voices from the past to help people connect with history in a personal way. We also will share the digitized recordings on social media and via email as part of our weekly “Voices from the Vault" program. It is through broad, inclusive access that we will be able to reach the largest audience, and this can only be done if our oral history is preserved in digitized format." The final financial award will be given to the Suffolk County Vanderbilt Museum to have their staff digitize the Long Island Motor Parkway Collection, consisting of "correspondence, photographs, financial records, legal documents, and other administrative records of the Long Island Motor Parkway, dating from 1906 to 1942." As per the application narrative, "The history of the Parkway documents: the growth of ‘motoring’ as both a pleasure sport and a means of suburban transportation; the lifestyles of the wealthy and upper-middle class residents of Long Island who traveled on the Motor Parkway to their homes, estates, and clubs; and the development of the island as a suburban extension of the greater New York City metropolitan area...In academic circles, there has been resurgence in critical scholarship concerned with America’s roadways, interrogating the ways in which historical infrastructural policies and projects have shaped social life...Grant support of this project would greatly improve public awareness of Long Island’s significant contributions to the social history of “motoring†and automobile culture in the United States. It would also serve to support current preservation efforts across Long Island. Specifically, it would enable the Suffolk County Vanderbilt Museum to digitize the Long Island Motor Parkway Collection at a time when there is incredible interest not only in America’s roadways but in the Long Island Motor Parkway itself." LILRC is once again grateful for the opportunity to fund, wholly or in part, these important initiatives. As for the funded projects from 2021, sign up for the LILRC Annual Membership Meeting (https://lilrc.org/event-4707311) to see the presentations from last year's recipients. Thank you all for your continuing commitment to preservation and access of Long Island's remarkable history.
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New! LILRC Special Collections Discussion Group Join other members of the archives community in guided discussions surrounding issues and challenges facing those charged with protecting the materials that make up our collective history. Our first meeting topic will be: Reconstructing Accessions - April 28, 2022, 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM Archives arranged by subject was common practice as a logical approach for answering reference questions about local history. As we strive to organize our archives by donor/donation, we find ourselves wishing we could go back to a time before collections were broken apart when initially accessioned. Special guest: Carol Clarke, Archivist for the Local History Collection at Bryant Library (Roslyn, NY). The program will be moderated by LILRC's Robert Anen, Project Archivist, and Nicole Menchise, Digitization and Archives Coordinator. All are welcome! To learn more and register, go to: https://lilrc.org/event-4723101
Documenting in Times of Crisis: A Resource Kit Best practices and sound advice from SAA (part 1) The recurrence of both human-made tragedies and disasters of weather combined with the great speed of technological development lead archivists to a new role in society—as stewards of contemporary information. To assist cultural heritage responders, this resource kit provides templates and documents that will assist archivists in collecting materials on tragedies within their communities. We hope that sharing the documents collated in the toolkit will help archivists and others responsible for archiving the aftermath of tragic events by providing templates that are ready for use without further burdening cultural heritage responders. The documents are designed to be a starting point and are meant to be customized for local use in consultation with communities, administrators, and legal counsel as necessary. The templates and documents are divided into broad categories linked below, or see the complete Google Drive folder here. Crisis Collecting Assistance Team The SAA Crisis Collecting Assistance Team (CCAT) offers remote assistance with identifying best practices or logistics for documentation, referrals to appropriate allied organizations, and general guidance on crisis collecting. CCAT volunteers include expert archivists who have all faced similar situations in leading and supporting their staff through processing and documenting tragedies great and small. To connect, send a message via this online form, and a member will respond by phone or email within 72 business hours. [The following topics will be explored] Immediate Response Collection Management Administrative Policies & Agreements Digital Content Emotional Support Oral Histories Manuals and Resources Immediate Response The following templates are designed for aiding in the collection and gathering of material. Although some of the files are volunteer focused, they contain useful information and strategies for acquiring material. Before you begin collecting, we highly recommend questioning whether or not collection response is appropriate. More information regarding decision making processes regarding collecting and policies can be found in the “Administrative Policies and Agreements†section. Contact Tracking - Suggested use is to track correspondence related to monetary, labor, and collection material donations. Inventory Guidelines - Instructions on suggested data to collect when packing physical material from memorial sites. Inventory Template - Spreadsheet template that can be used to collect data about material obtained from memorial sites. Tragedy Response Preparedness Checklist - A checklist of actions and questions to undertake when responding to a tragedy. Volunteer Agreement Form - Form for unpaid laborers to complete outlining responsibilities. Volunteer Checklist - Provides tips and things to bring for individuals to collect material from a memorial site. Can be used to share with volunteers or to prepare staff. Volunteer Procedures - Instructions and procedures for packing material collected from memorial sites. From Documenting in Times of Crisis: A Resource Kit, accessed March 4, 2022 at https://www2.archivists.org/advocacy/documenting-in-times-of-crisis-a-resource-kit. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Republished with permission.
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Professional Development: Upcoming Professional Meetings and Conferences New England Archivists Spring 2022 Unconference (link) https://newenglandarchivists.org/Current-and-Upcoming-Meetings To be held via Zoom the week of May 9, 2022 New York Archives Conference https://www.nyarchivists.org/nyac/ June 17, 2022 via Zoom Society of American Archivists ARCHIVES * RECORDS 2022 (link) https://www2.archivists.org/am2022 August 20-27, 2022 (Boston, MA - TBD) Mid Atlantic Regional Archives Conference Spring 2022 Conference (link) https://newenglandarchivists.org/Current-and-Upcoming-Meetings March 24-26, 2022 (Harrisonburg, VA) Museum Association of New York 2022 Annual Conference (link) https://nysmuseums.org/annualconference Envisioning Our Museums for the Seventh Generation April 9 - 12, 2022 (Corning, NY) American Association for State and Local History 2022 Annual Meeting (link) https://aaslh.org/annualmeeting/2022-annual-meeting/ September 14-17, 2022 (Buffalo, NY)
Consider the Source New York: Providing Access to the Diverse Historical Record A grant-funded collaboration between the New York State Archives Partnership Trust and the New York Council for History Education On Wednesday, April 13th, there will be a full-day workshop, the Long Island Diversity and Collaborative Knowledge Institute, designed to bring K-12 educators and those working in cultural institutions together to contribute ideas and participate in the process. It will be held at Huntington Town Hall, 100 Main Street, Huntington, New York. See the flyer on the next page or for details or go to https://www.considerthesourceny.org/professional-learning. Per the grant proposal narrative, the objective is to “dispel the assumptions and ambiguity surrounding educator needs and repository holdings to make diverse primary sources more widely available in K-12 classrooms.†Projects like this have been tried before, but what makes this collaboration different are the other agencies involved to help close the “knowledge gap between those who work with historical records and K-12 educators who use those records to teach crucial skills and historical content to their students.†Trained educators will create classroom resources, using guidelines from the C3 Social Studies Framework, and have them available on the Consider the Source New York website (considerthesourceny.org). If you have questions, please contact the Long Island Collections Coordinator, Nicole Menchise, at nmenchise@lilrc.org or 631-675-1570 x2004.
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Save the Date!
Long Island Archives - March/April 2022 Editor: Nicole Menchise, Digitization and Archives Coordinator LILRC - 627 N. Sunrise Service Rd., Bellport, NY 11713, www.lilrc.org.