An afternoon at Historic Cherry Hill

Historic Cherry Hill is one of Albany's gems. It sits at the southern edge of my neighborhood, the "beautiful and historic South End," and it's all too often overlooked . . . despite sitting almost directly opposite an interstate off-ramp.  Given its rich history and its mind-boggling collections of historic objects and historical records, this neglect is shameful.

Those of you who live in New York's Capital District know that the Historic Cherry Hill Association has just averted disaster: last week, the Albany Times-Union reported that if it could not raise $152,000 before July 31, it would be forced to forfeit $736,000 in state and federal grant funding and might be compelled to cease operations altogether.  Fortunately, the story prompted an outpouring of support, and the Historic Cherry Hill Association is out of the red -- at least for now.  As glad as I am not to have to write a desperate plea for immediate donations, I must emphasize that the Historic Cherry Hill Association, which has a phenomenally talented and dedicated (they voluntarily took a 20 percent pay cut!) staff, still needs your help. Please consider donating to this fine institution and helping to ensure that it attains long-term fiscal stability.

Cherry Hill was built in 1787 by Colonel Philip Kiliaen van Rensselaer, a scion of one of New York's oldest and wealthiest Dutch families, for his new bride, Maria Sanders, who was the granddaughter of colonial governor Peter Schuyler.  Van Rensselaer's forebears were all Dutch, but Sanders's father was the well-to-do descendant of Scots who came to Albany after the English took control of what was formerly New Netherland.  The house itself bears evidence of the melding of the region's Dutch and English colonial elites: its body is Georgian, but its gambrel roof is thoroughly Dutch.

The house was occupied by Van Rensselaer descendants until 1963, when it became a house museum. And what a house museum!  All five generations of the family were collectors, and they kept everything: the 16th-century Dutch furniture their forebears brought to New Netherland, the silver they purchased before the American Revolution, the vast collection of Chinese antiques assembled by a family member who did missionary work in the 19th century, the magazines and tins of tooth powder they bought in the 1920s, the Tupperware they used in the 1960s, and tons -- literally -- of other stuff. They also kept a vast number of letters, diaries, detailed records of their furniture and other purchases, and a wide array of other family papers. As a result, Historic Cherry Hill's collections are an invaluable resource for anyone studying the colonial and early republican era, the evolution of American material culture, or the rise and fall of America's colonial elite.

Cherry Hill was originally the centerpiece of a vast working farm. By 1790, the farm occupied over 1,000 acres of land and was home to a brewery and a tannery.  However, financial pressures forced Philip van Rensselaer's descendants to sell off many parcels of farmland in the 1880s and the lowlands adjoining the Hudson River were filled in and in 1925 became the site of the mammoth Port of Albany facility.  The streets surrounding the mansion are now occupied by industrial facilities and 19th-century working-class homes, and the filled-in riverfront features not only the port but also a rail line and a six-lane interstate loathed by my landlord and almost everyone else who lives in the South End, myself included.  However, the house is built on a hillside looking over South Pearl Street, the centuries-old road that connects the South End to Albany's downtown.  When viewed from South Pearl Street, the house's pastoral past remains quite apparent -- despite the constant hum of interstate traffic in the background.

At present, the house is undergoing extensive reconstruction: the family's incessant amassing of furniture and other heavy objects ultimately compromised the house's foundation, and the bulk of the objects in the museum's collections had to be moved to a purpose-built collections storage facility.  Once the reconstruction is complete, some of the collections will be moved back into the house and it will look as it did when the last Van Rensselaer descendant, Emily Putnam Rankin, lived there; Rankin was extremely proud of her family's heritage and made extensive use of its 18th-century furniture decorative object collections.

The Historic Cherry Hill Association is currently giving tours of the house that focus on the reconstruction, and the experience is both fascinating and, owing to the presence of visible water and structural damage in several rooms, a bit discomfiting at times.  However, progress is being made and -- thanks to the recent fund-raising effort -- even more progress will soon be made, and you can tell that this house is going to be a masterwork once it's restored.  Just look at those 18th-century floorboards. They don't make 'em like that anymore.

(Incidentally, the second-floor bedroom pictured above was the site of one of Albany's most notorious crimes.  In 1827, John Whipple, a successful businessman who had married into the Van Rensselaer family and was living at Cherry Hill, was murdered in this room. His wife, Elsie Lansing Whipple, was having an affair with Jesse Strang, a drifter who was employed as a servant at Cherry Hill, and the two of them plotted to kill her husband. After a poisoning attempt went awry, Strang shot Whipple in this bedroom. After a trial that fell far short of current standards of fairness -- the district attorney was related to the van Rensselaers and the Lansings -- Strang was convicted of murder and became the last person who was hanged publicly in Albany.  Elsie Lansing Whipple was tried as an accomplice and found not guilty -- in large part, many people throughout the city and the nation believed, because the city's elite could not believe that a woman who moved within their own social circles could do such appalling things.)

The windows have already been repaired or, when needed, replaced, and many of them offer pleasing views of the surrounding grounds. This view from one of the front rooms on the first floor is one of my favorites.

One of the windows in the second-floor guest bedroom overlooks a tree that, like the house, has seen some hard times yet carries on gracefully.  Standing in this room, you would never guess that an interstate highway is approximately five hundred feet away.

Even though most of the object collections have been moved out of the house for the time being, the Van Rensselaer family's habits are still evident: in some (but by no means all) instances, older objects were augmented and supplemented but not replaced.

As noted above, Cherry Hill will ultimately look as it did when Emily Rankin lived in the house.  Rankin's diaries detail how her dog repeatedly scratched the wallpaper in one of the first-floor rooms, and as a result this section of paper will remain in place; all of the other wallpaper in all of the other rooms will be replaced with historically accurate reproductions.

One of Cherry Hill's volunteers is a dedicated gardener.  Thanks to her efforts, the landscaping around the house looks fantastic. This charming small garden sits just outside the dining room.

I also like the large garden southwest of the house. It looks understated and uncontrived, which means that no small amount of planning went into it.

If you ever get the chance to visit New York's fair capital city, I hope that Historic Cherry Hill will earn a spot on your itinerary.  And if you live around here but haven't visited it yet, what on earth are you waiting for?

An archival tidbit for 26 June 2013

Gay wedding ceremony, Philadelphia, ca. 1957. The grooms never got to see the above photograph or any of the twenty other pictures that one of the guests took: the photo shop that processed the film deemed the images inappropriate and never returned them to the customer who dropped off the film. The photos somehow made their way into the collections of the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, which has digitized six of them and made the resulting surrogates available online.

Spontaneous Scholarships for SAA/CoSA joint annual meeting: June 30 deadline

In 2011, Kate Theimer, who comes up with more good ideas in a single week than I typically manage in an entire year, started the Spontaneous Scholarships, an informal program that helps to defray the cost of attending the annual meeting of the Society of American Archivists (SAA).  The scholarship pays only the conference registration fee -- applicants must pay their own travel, lodging, and meal costs -- and anyone who feels the need to ask for this form of support is welcome to do so. Kate collects the donations and awards the scholarships by drawing applicants' names out of a hat.  Spontaneous Scholarships helped make it possible for 26 students, new professionals, and other archivists in need to attend SAA's 2011 meeting in Chicago and for 34 people to attend the 2012 meeting in San Diego.

The deadline for applying for a Spontaneous Scholarship or donating to the Spontaneous Scholarship fund is June 30.  If you need a little help getting to the annual meeting this year, simply contact Kate, state that you're applying for a Spontaneous Scholarship, and let her know whether you're a regular or student member of SAA (NB: only SAA members may receive Spontaneous Scholarships). If you're interested in donating to the Spontaneous Scholarship fund, you have multiple options for doing so.  If you can donate only $5.00 or $10.00, that's okay. Every little bit helps.

And if you're going to the joint 2013 annual meeting of SAA and the Council of State Archivists (CoSA), which will be held in New Orleans on 11-17 August, here's a friendly reminder: Friday, 5 July is the deadline for registering at the Early Bird rate.  If you're a full member of SAA or CoSA and fail to register by 5 July, you'll have to pay an additional $50.00.  If you wait until after 15 July, you'll be on the hook for an additional $110.00.

Image: "Renascence" (1998) by Enrique Alferez, New Orleans Botanical Garden, New Orleans, Louisiana, 24 March 2010.

New York Archives Conference 2013 recap

Earlier this month, I had the privilege of attending the joint 2013 meeting of the New York Archives Conference and the Archivists Roundtable of Metropolitan New York, which was held at the C.W. Post campus of Long Island University. I was initially scheduled to give one presentation and agreed at the last minute to speak twice, so I didn't get the chance to attend as many sessions or explore the surrounding area as much as I would have liked. However, I did learn a few interesting things:

• I attended the Society of American Archivists' Privacy and Confidentiality Issues in Digital Archives workshop, which was held the day before the conference began, and I'm pleased to report that both the workshop and instructor Heather Briston (University of California, Los Angeles) are fantastic. I've a substantial amount of time working with records that contain information that is restricted in accordance with various state and federal laws, and I still learned quite a bit. If you get the chance to take this workshop, by all means do so. 

• Jason Kuscma, the executive director of the Metropolitan New York Library Council, delivered a thought-provoking plenary address, "(Re)Building: Opportunities for Collaboration for New York's Cultural Heritage Institutions," in which he used post-Hurricane Sandy recovery efforts as an entry point for discussing the concept of collaboration. I was particularly struck by his analysis of why collaboration, which involves sharing of risk, is so difficult: it forces us to admit what we don't know, it makes us confront ambiguity and fluidity, it requires discussion and deliberation, it compels us to share information that we may view as proprietary, it has the potential to expose us to even more conflict than we currently experience, and it makes us worry about who's going to get credit for the successes and blame for the failures. I've been involved in a number of collaborative projects over the years, and some of them went belly-up as a result of some or all of the problems that Kucsma identified. The successful ones worked because people were willing get out of what he referred to as "emotional, cultural, and institutional silos," embrace uncertainty, define achievable goals, and entertain the possibility of working with unconventional partners.  As Kucsma pointed out, Hurricane Sandy is merely a dramatic example of a problem that's too large and too complex for any one organization to take on by itself. Archivists and librarians face a growing number of such problems, and we need to figure out how to tackle them together.

• Kucsma also highlighted the existence of a recent report that somehow escaped my attention. I2NY: Envisioning an Information Infrastructure for New York State was prepared at the behest of New York's regional library associations, and it assesses the state's current library information landscape, which already features some collaborative initiatives, and outlines how the library associations can move toward building a fully comprehensive, fully collaborative information infrastructure.  The report doesn't discuss born-digital archival records, but it does envision the expansion of the collaborative archival digitization efforts led by the regional library associations (which are now exploring how to incorporate digital surrogates or archival materials into the Digital Public Library of America). It calls for creating innovative professional development opportunities. 

• I do not envy curators seeking to preserve born-digital works of art. In addition to worrying about all of the hardware and software, data integrity, storage, metadata, information security, and other technical concerns that anyone seeking to preserve digital resources must address, they also have the unenviable task of sussing out the artist's intent and preserving significant properties that may be unique to each viewer/listener or dependent upon external resources.  The interactive (and very cool) short film The Wilderness Downtown requires that each viewer enter an address and then pulls data from Google Street View to create visual content. Static and distortions present on an analog recording of an experimental television show may be the result of media degradation . . . or may be the result of the creator's deliberate manipulations. 

• Cornell University's Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art holds a host of analog video, old CDs and DVDs that require Mac OS 9 or other obsolete software or hardware, and Internet art.  At present, the archive maintains an array of older hardware and software and focuses on documenting playback requirements, digitizing analog content, archiving Web sites, and developing emulation software. It's also using National Endowment for the Humanities grant funding to preserve CD-ROM-based works of art.  This grant project should allow Cornell to identify how to conduct technical analyses of digital artworks, develop generalizable user profiles for new media art, create a viable data object model and associated PREMIS or RDF metadata profile, and identify a Submission Information Package structure that will support long-term preservation.

• The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is developing a Digital Repository for Museum Collections that currently houses 60 TB of artwork that was originally stored on floppy disks, CDs, and other portable media.  Archivematica will supply this repository's core processing services, and a conservation management application will be created to house descriptive information and document software and other dependencies.  MoMA is also exploring using emulation to make digital artworks accessible not only to people who visit MoMA's physical exhibit spaces but also to people who access MoMA's website.  MoMA is also in the midst of completing a formal study that compares the fidelity of emulation vs. native hardware and software, and I'm really looking forward to seeing the findings arising from this study.

• Documentary filmmaker Jonathan Minard, whose work in progress Archive examines the future of long-term digital storage, the development of the Internet, and Internet preservation efforts, highlighted an essential but frequently overlooked truth:  the Internet is a utility, not a library, and its operations are governed chiefly by market considerations. Cultural heritage professionals disregard this truth at their peril. (BTW, part one of Archive, which focuses on the work of the Internet Archive, is available online.)

• The National Digital Stewardship Alliance (NDSA), a Library of Congress-led membership organization of individuals and organizations seeking to preserve digital cultural heritage materials, is developing Levels of Digital Preservation, a simple, tiered set of guidelines that will allow institutions to assess how well they're caring for their digital holdings. It addresses storage and geographical redundancy, file fixity and data integrity, information security, metadata, and file format issues, and the NDSA group developing it would appreciate your feedback.

• If you want a DSpace-powered institutional repository but lack the IT resources needed to maintain your own DSpace installation, you're in luck:  DuraSpace, the non-profit organization that guides the development of DSpace and several other digital access and preservation tools, is now offering DSpace Direct, a hosted DSpace service. For approximately $4,000 a year, you can quickly set up your own DSpace institutional repository, select the language customization and other features that meet your needs, and allow DuraSpace to take care of storing and backing up your data (via Amazon Web Services) and upgrading your DSpace software.

Image: This building, now known as Winnick House, was formerly Hillwood, the house that anchored the Gold Coast estate of Post cereal heiress Marjorie Meriweather Post and her second husband, financier E.F. Hutton. The estate was sold to Long Island University in 1951. Winnick House, which is by far the grandest structure on Long Island University's C.W. Post campus, houses the university's administrative offices. This photograph was taken on 4 June 2013.

Daniel J. Witek charged with stealing documents from the Buffalo History Museum

A few days ago, federal authorities arrested Daniel Jude Witek, 50, and charged him with stealing approximately forty letters and postcards from the Buffalo History Museum's A. Conger Goodyear Papers collection and attempting to sell them to a New York City autograph dealer.  The theft came to light when the dealer contacted the Buffalo History Museum in an effort to verify that the sale was aboveboard.

Witek was a Buffalo History Museum volunteer, and the complaint against him filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of New York indicates that he also had ties to several Buffalo-area public libraries. He is known to have used two aliases:  Daniel Mountbatten-Witeck and Walter Payne.

Witek has been released on his own recognizance pending trial.  One of the conditions of his release is that he must not visit the Buffalo History Museum, several other Buffalo-area cultural heritage institutions, or "any public or private establishment where rare books are."

Private collectors and cultural heritage professionals who suspect that Witek may have stolen items from their collections should contact the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation at 716-856-7800.

For your convenience, here's the criminal complaint against Witek.  It's an interesting little document.

Criminal Complaint Against Daniel Jude Witek 2013-05-23 by blweddle

And here's the document outlining the conditions of Witek's pretrial release:

Daniel Jude Witek Conditions of Release 2013-05-24 by blweddle

SAA Records Management Roundtable hangout

On Friday, the Society of American Archivists' Records Management Roundtable (RMRT) sponsored a Google Hangout focusing on records management training and outreach.  Given that 2013 seems to be The Year l'Archivista Can't Get Her Act Together, it's probably not surprising that I neglected to post about this event in advance.  However, a recording of the hangout is readily available on YouTube -- and embedded above.

As is so often the case with Web-based training, the hosts ran into some technical difficulties.  Two of the people who were scheduled to take part in this hangout -- Dan Noonan (Ohio State) and Joanne Kaczmarek (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) -- were unable to participate and there were a few other hiccups along the way.  However, moderator Brad Houston (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee) and panelists Peg Eusch (University of Wisconsin-Madison) and Tom Wellman (Michigan State University) persevered and in the process shared some interesting information about creating and sustaining records management in sprawling, decentralized institutions.  Their insights will be of particular interest to records managers employed by public colleges and universities, but other archivists and records managers may also find them useful.

The participants also shared some resources that may be helpful to other archivists and records managers seeking to create records management training materials. Peg Eusch created the video above in order to convey basic records management information to University of Wisconsin-Madison employees who worked in distant offices or didn't have the time to attend in-person training.

Joanne Kaczmarek wasn't able to take part in the hangout, but Brad Houston shared the video she created to explain the basics of e-mail management to University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign staff (unfortunately, this video is not embeddable).

RMRT is planning to host future Google Hangouts and will publicize them via the RMRT blog. And in the unlikely event that I manage to get my act together, I'll post about them here.

Well played, Ms. Sanford

Many people destroy the deeply personal papers that chronicle their broken relationships. Jenny Sanford, the former First Lady of South Carolina, seems to be made of sterner stuff.

In June 2009, South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford, who had told aides that he was planning an Appalachian Trail hiking trip and would be out of touch for a few days, tearfully admitted that he had been having an extramarital affair and that he had actually been visiting his mistress in Argentina.  Sanford's marriage fell apart, and in 2010 Jenny Sanford published a best-selling memoir detailing her former husband's stinginess, emotional tone-deafness, and other defects.  The book -- at least according to the reviews I've read -- also makes it plain that, politically, the two were well-matched. Both Sanfords are staunch conservatives, and she was his closest adviser and his phenomenally effective congressional and gubernatorial campaign manager.

Mark and Jenny Sanford's post-divorce relationship is apparently pretty contentious.  Nevertheless, when Mark Sanford decided earlier this year that he would run in a special election for a congressional seat, he asked Jenny Sanford -- who is now an adviser to South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley -- to serve as his campaign manager.  She said no.

Much to everyone's surprise, a few weeks ago Mark Sanford -- who is now engaged to his former mistress -- won the special election.  And earlier this week, the College of Charleston made available to the public the Jenny Sanford Papers.  Sanford said that she donated her personal papers to the college in summer 2012 because she was moving and needed to downsize and because she thought they would be of interest to scholars of political campaigns and, in future years, her sons.

In addition to political materials, the Jenny Sanford Papers include letters that the Sanfords wrote to each other, a scrapbook that she created to celebrate their fifteenth wedding anniversary, and photographs and other materials documenting their public and private lives.

Jenny Sanford has not restricted access to any of this material. Every item in the collection is open to anyone who wishes to see it.