Library Blog

A view of the now-empty shelves which previously held MARBL's book collections

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We at MARBL would like to thank everyone for their patience while we created a new space for our books and technical services teams. From the loud, sometimes disruptive, construction, to the recent, hectic book move, we appreciate everyone who came on board and made this whole process a great success! While this new area will remain unaccessible by the public, we wanted to include some during and after images to show you what an undertaking it was completely transforming a floor and making it a new, secure space for our important collections.

The very early stages of construction

You may be happy to learn that all of our books are now located on-site and we no longer have to make use of our off-site storage facility when it comes to our rare book collection. You also may not have known that previously the books which were located here were housed on two separate floors, and that our staff had offices scattered throughout the Woodruff Library. This new construction has given us the opportunity to bring all of our behind-the-scenes staff, as well as our book collection, to one unified space. We hope this process helps to make MARBL a more efficient, collaborative machine from which our patrons reap the benefits.

Sledgehammer used to demolish a concrete wall.

As you can see from the below image, we've upgraded to electronic compact shelving similar to that which is used throughout the stacks in the rest of the Woodruff Library.

Installation of the wiring for the compact shelving.

While our collections highlight the past, modern improvements to preserving and securing them are always positive steps forward. We hope these changes will help us to continue to guide our collections well into the future.

A newly occupied book shelf in MARBL's new space

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Emory’s African historians have had a great spring. Not only has the graduate program been recognized with a high ranking (No. 6 in the U.S.) but the library’s purchase of Adam Matthew’s digital collection, Confidential Print: Africa, has made the lives of anyone studying African history much easier. 

What are confidential prints? They are unpublished but printed internal documents of United Kingdom’s government departments. The confidential prints related to Africa are drawn from the Colonial (C.O.), Dominion (D.O.), and Foreign (F.O.) Offices files and are extremely important primary sources. The contents include a variety of reports, dispatches, analyses, and correspondence. There are also 300 maps. The originals are housed in the Public Record Office in Kew. 

While selected parts of these confidential prints have been printed or filmed, this digitized collection provides researchers unprecedented access to these materials which cover British interests in all of Africa, except Egypt. All documents are fully text-searchable once located by assigned headings or key words. Selections were made by a distinguished editorial board.

The time frame, 1834-1966, includes the early stages of imperial expansion and indigenous resistance in the interior of western and southern Africa, the European scramble for the continent in the late nineteenth century, and the expansion of settler colonialism in southern and eastern Africa, as well as the rising challenges to imperialism in the twentieth century that culminated in the rapid European withdrawal from the continent in the 1950s and 1960s.

Some sample contents: 

CO 879/1-190  Africa General, 1848-1861 reveals the spread of British sovereignty in west and South Africa, including the discovery and mining of diamonds. 

CO 885/1-140 Colonies general (selected files) covers the period from 1907 to 1929. These files concentrate on disease and medicine in Britain’s tropical African colonies, including sleeping sickness, hookworm, and leprosy.

FO 341/1-3 German Empire miscellaneous covers the years 1884 to 1900. These papers focus on the West Africa Conference (also known as the Berlin Conference and Congo Conference), which took place in Berlin in 1884-85 and marked the beginning of the European powers’ ‘Scramble for Africa.’

FO 403/1-482 Africa general spans the period from 1834 to 1959. Topics covered include the Activities of the Church Missionary Society in Lagos (1850s) and the establishments of the British East Africa Protectorate (modern Kenya) and Northern and Southern Rhodesia (1890s).

FO 458/1-157 and FO 485/1-3 Liberia cover British interests in Liberia during the years 1882 to 1950.

DO 201/1-53 Commonwealth Relations Office (selected files) covers the period between 1949 and 1966. Covers the independence of a number of colonies, including Nigeria.

For a fuller listing of contents, see the Nature and Scope page on the website.

Essays to give context to the collection will soon be included. 

Confidential Print: Africa is part of Adam Matthew’s Archives Direct program of digitizing selected contents of the British Public Record Office. Similar collections for the Middle East and Latin America are also available. All Adam Matthew digital collections can be cross searched through Adam Matthew Archive Explorer.

Bob Grantham Quickfall, Western Life and How I Became a Bronco Buster. 1891. Graff 4979.

From the Newberry Library Graff Collection. 

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In January, the Robert W. Woodruff Library acquired The American West Collection: Sources from the Everett D. Graff Collection of Western Americana at the Newberry Library, Chicago, 1722-1938, an extensive digital archive of manuscripts and printed materials on the history and culture of western America. Derived from the Newberry’s Everett D. Graff Collection, one of the premier collections of western Americana in the US, the database documents key people, events, and images related to the early American frontier and its borderlands. Students will find histories of Native Americans, pioneers, ranchers, hunters, explorers, outlaws, and vigilantes. They will uncover documents on mining and the gold rush, the Mormon exodus, travel and early settlement, the railroads, agricultural development and the environment. They will also encounter documents on the imagined west—popular representations of the region like Wild West shows.

To locate these materials, researchers should pay attention to several of the database’s features. Although the interface is somewhat dated (it is in the middle of being re-designed), it provides a good deal of useful information, especially if patrons take the time to explore beyond the home page. 

Under the “documents” tab, for example, you can browse the entire collection alphabetically, or explore it by theme, region (ranging from Alabama and Ohio west to Mexico), or document type. Clicking on the “document type” link leads you to two broad categories, printed and manuscript, and thirteen additional document types: Brand Book, Broadside, Correspondence, Currency, Diary, Directory, Ephemera, Journal, Pamphlet, Periodical, Photograph, Poster, and Rare Book. Clicking on “currency” link yields early bank notes from Nebraska, Iowa, and Ohio; on “posters,” announcements for theater productions from 1860s Montana, advertisements for new gold fields in Wyoming, and stage company passenger routes; on diaries, records of fur traders in the Black Hills, cowboys in Kansas, and life among the Sioux. They are all well described, like this Idaho broadside seeking horses for winter herding:

For those who wish to browse by subject or perform particular key word searches, the “searching” tab is also a good place to start. It includes a list of “popular searches”—a place for students with little prior knowledge of the subject to begin. Clicking on the subject “Buffalo Bill,” for instance, brings up more than 500 results—rare books, correspondence, photographs, pamphlets, and broadsides. For those who wish to search by keyword, the site has a well-developed help page that explains the organization of search results and tips for finding useful materials. Some things to keep in mind: printed sources will appear first in results; up to 100 results can be viewed per page; enclosing search terms in double quotations allows patrons to search for specific phrases.

Finally, researchers interested in maps and images should explore the “map” tab and the database’s slideshow feature. The map tab includes over 400 maps organized by region, date and theme. (A detailed overview of how to work with maps is available on the help page.) The database's slideshow gallery, which can be found under the “additional resources” tab, also contains nearly 800 high-resolution photographs, bookplates, and sketches—including a number of Audubon illustrations.

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We invite you to attend and hear about the present and future of library- and university publishing from someone who is a leader in the field.

On April 1st, Shana Kimball (http://www.lib.umich.edu/users/kimballs) of MPublishing (http://www.lib.umich.edu/mpublishing), the publishing arm of the University of Michigan Library, will be visiting the Woodruff Library to consult on digital publishing efforts at Emory. She will also give a public presentation, "alt.pub.edu: New Directions for University Publishing," at 4:00pm in the Woodruff Library's Research Commons (3rd floor). We have asked her to speak on the following subject:

Taking university presses as a point of departure, can you please talk about the landscape of university-based publishing—digital and otherwise—at this moment? What sort of different models for publishing are coming into being, how are they being institutionalized and supported, and what efforts exist for coordination among campuses and libraries for this work?

Keep On Truckin' Poster, R. Crumb, 1967

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The Raymond Danowski and John Martin collection of R. Crumb material is a new addition to the manuscripts at MARBL and has recently been fully processed. Robert Dennis Crumb (R. Crumb) is the most prominent member of the underground comic book genre, or "comix," and is usually referred to as one of the "fathers" of the movement.

Crumb was born on August 30, 1943 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He was one of the five children of Charles and Beatrice Crumb. While Crumb developed his comics career outside of the mainstream comic publishing industry, he began his work in art as an illustrator for American Greeting Corporation in 1962, taking a job in Cleveland, Ohio after high school. In 1967, he left Cleveland, for San Francisco, California, and became involved with the counterculture whose members gravitated to his work. While he is probably most known for his "Keep Truckin'" comics, other popular characters include Mr. Natural, Devil Girl, and Fritz the Cat. In the 1980s, he created the magazine Weirdo to feature other graphic artists outside of the mainstream. Several years later, Crumb's friend Terry Zwigoff produced the documentary film Crumb, which received an Oscar nomination. In 1984, Crumb moved to the south of France with his second wife, Aline Kominsky Crumb.

The collection, itself, consists of materials collected by Raymond Danowski and John Martin, relating to R. Crumb and his work. Most of the records are published items--many are comics by Crumb -- but there are two unpublished versions of his graphic novel, Big Yum Yum Book: Oggie and the Beanstalk (1963), printed and spiral bound. In addition to his art, there are a number of articles about Crumb and also written by him. Many of these articles were published periodicals dedicated to comics and the culture, but there are a number of articles printed in popular magazines such as People, Esquire, Newsweek, GQ, and The New York Times Magazine.  There are also a number of foreign presses represented in the collections with Crumb's work being featured in El Vibora (Spain), Jymy-sarjat (Finland), and Ekstremisten (Norway).  Other printed material includes posters of Crumb's work as well as artwork by his second wife, Aline, and his younger brother, Maxon.

Danowski and Martin also collected a variety of memorabilia. Included in the collection are trading cards that Crumb created for the Topps Chewing Gum Company in 1965 as well as card packs he created with Yazoo Records, a company that used those images on many of the LP records also included in the collection. In addition, there are a number of assorted items -- a testament to the varied and erratic interests of Crumb -- including a box of Devil Girl chocolates, a bottle of "snake oil," a bicycle wheel patch kit, rubber stamps, figurines and statuettes, and t-shirts depicting Crumb's characters and artwork. There are also compact discs, VHS tapes, contact prints, and LP records. The VHS tapes are copies of the film, Crumb, produced by Terry Zwigoff, and the contact prints include images of Crumb and his wife, Aline. The compact discs and LPs are either musical contributions by Crumb's band, R. Crumb and his Cheap Suit Serenaders; music inspired by Crumb's work; or albums that feature Crumb's artwork on the cover, including Big Brother and the Holding Company's "Cheap Thrills" album.

The Raymond Danowski and John Martin collection of R. Crumb material is an interesting collection that will add to the continued research and interest in American literary culture. The work itself documents the underground comics genre and captures a view of this counterculture movement during the 1960s through the 1980s. Crumb's satire and distinct view of the world highlight a culture that was brought about by the sale of Zap! Magazine on the street corners of San Francisco in 1968, weird and disturbing and even offensive, but personal and autobiographical.