The latest additions to the Online Archive of California (OAC) and Calisphere provide a new dimension to this trove of tasty images, transporting us to an earlier “golden era” of food photography: the mid-twentieth century. The Milton “Hal” Halberstadt (1919-2000) papers at UC Davis Library Department of Special Collections document the life and work of a skilled photographer most famous for his depictions of food. From the 1950s through the early 1970s, Halberstadt operated a studio in San Francisco and made his reputation working with big-name industry clients like Del Monte, Spice Islands, and Dole. In those years, the City by the Bay was a mecca for print advertising, and Halberstadt’s 8×10 inch, full-color photographs appeared in leading magazines such as Life and Sunset.

Halberstadt’s sons lovingly preserved the collection and donated it to UC Davis to provide an historic record of the photographer’s legacy and to allow students and researchers to learn from his techniques. So far, the library has digitized 215 prints and negatives from the collection—mostly Halberstadt’s advertising work, but also some examples of his fine art photography. As you can see, the food images in particular are colorful, bold, and just a lot of fun to look at.

View Hal’s photos on Calisphere

View Hal’s photos on the OAC

The composition

Halberstadt developed unique compositions that both highlighted the products and put them in conversation with other foods and objects—a “collage” style for which he became famous. Some of these compositions seem to suggest that canned and frozen products, depicted alongside fresh ingredients, are wholesome, essential components of the home cooked meal. Halberstadt also incorporated tableware and found objects into many of his images. His 7,500 square foot studio on Vallejo Street contained darkrooms, a kitchen, and a “prop loft” with thousands of items collected on his travels: “shelf after shelf of dishes, long-stem crystal glasses, battered decoy ducks, apple corers, a cigarette vending machine, receipts from the Gold Rush days.”[1] He arranged these accouterments in creative ways to evoke a mood or occasion. For example, this photograph immediately brings to mind backyard living on a hot summer day—perfect for soda. The ambiance is very different in this portrait. Who knew fruit cocktail could be so romantic?

The technique

If the food looks good enough to eat, it is because of the photographer’s exceptional command of technique. Once described as “an alchemist with his camera and in the darkroom,” Halberstadt was exacting and meticulous at every stage of his process, from shooting to developing to proofing the images [2]. As one of his colleagues reflected, “He could make ice cream glisten at just the right moment. Or capture beer pouring into a glass with the perfect drop coursing down the side. Usually after forty or fifty attempts”[3]. His visual feats are all the more impressive considering the long exposure time required and the fact that Halberstadt had to train his non-dominant hand to use the large equipment. (He lost three fingers on his right hand during World War II—but earned a Purple Heart in the process.)

The selections

I spoke with UC Davis Head of Special Collections Daryl Morrison and Photo Archivist Patsy Inouye to learn more about how the images were selected for digitization. They speculate that the images they chose to digitize were Halberstadt’s favorite outtakes, rather than the published images, which the photographer sold to his clients along with the rights. As Patsy was processing the collection, she found a piece of paper entitled “Hal’s greatest hits” in the photographer’s handwriting, with numbers along the edge. Later, while looking through another part of the collection, she discovered a set of slides with what appeared to be corresponding numbers. These are the images the library chose to make available on the OAC and Calisphere.

Read more

Photo by Lee Boltin.

More information about Halberstadt and his artwork can be found at the references listed below. Additionally, the Community of Creatives website provides a nice biography of Halberstadt, as well as information about other San Francisco artists, 1945-1970. Of particular interest there are some great photos of Hal working in his studio, made available by the Halberstadt Family Trust.

To learn more about the Halberstadt Papers and Photographs, visit the UC Davis Special Collections website.

CDL is pleased to announce the recent addition of 33 digitized sound and video recordings to the Online Archive of California (OAC) and Calisphere, as part of a pilot project to investigate hosting and providing access to A/V media.

Browse the recordings on Calisphere: video | audio

These recordings were digitized by the California AudioVisual Preservation Project (CAVPP), which has been rescuing important A/V materials in need of preservation and developing best practices for continued progress in this area. Recordings generally are some of the most at-risk historical materials in archives, because they are threatened by fragile physical condition, obsolescence, and a lack of playback equipment.

The recordings now on OAC and Calisphere span various topics and capture various events, people, and places in California history. They include oral histories and interviews with notable public figures, recorded speeches, marketing videos, and home movies. Some interesting examples include:

• A demo of “Lisa,” an early personal computer developed by Apple (screenshots above)
• Film footage of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915
• A 1963 interview with Malcolm X

CDL partnered with the CAVPP to provide access to the recordings integrated with the more than 230,000 images and texts already on the OAC and Calisphere. The pilot project also provided an opportunity for CDL to investigate the processes and technical frameworks needed to host and stream a test bed of diverse A/V resources. Using the results of this pilot project, the CDL is continuing to investigate the scalability of A/V hosting.

Above: screenshots from a video demo of “Lisa,” an early Apple personal computer. Contributed by Stanford University, Manuscripts Division.

He went on to say that these collections create a platform that supports not only the collection itself but also other connections.  He quoted Roy Rosenzweig, founder of the Center for History and New Media, who believed in creating ” a generative platform for undefined future uses”.  Such platforms must be open and support APIs. They must also be able to disclose their metadata as another means of exploring the collection that can “enable or disable” forms of inquiry.

These observations certainly ring true with CDL’s experience in aggregating collections and supporting platforms for their use, such as for eScholarship or Calisphere.  While these services may have once been focused on becoming portals, now they are more aligned with being platforms supporting a range of uses.  We know that most users arrive not through the front door but from a referral in another source or from a web search engine.  Objects need to be able to stand on their own rather than relying on an organized pathway to their place in the collection.  They must provide context to reveal the larger collection or their related associates within it.  But there is more to be done to enable those “undefined future uses” if we think about how the text (in the case of eScholarship) and the metadata could be mined, or how to take advantage of commentary and corrections from users.  We should focus on other ways to make these services function “at the network level” or to think about the web first, something Cohen noted as a principle when designing new services.  The problem to solve these days is not discovery but how to provide context and the means to select and filter, either within the service itself or to allow others to do so.  Search facets have been used for this purpose, but there are other methods to reveal the peaks and valleys within a collection and to enable deeper exploration.  Part of our curatorial role is to analyze collections and be open to having others analyze them, to help shape them for future scholarship.

The 2013 National Medal finalists exemplify the great diversity of libraries and museums and include a school library, county library systems, individual libraries, children’s museums, conservancy and botanical gardens and more, and hail from across the country.

The National Medal winners will be named later this spring, and representatives from winning institutions will travel to Washington, D.C. and be honored at the National Medal award ceremony. Winning institutions also receive a visit from StoryCorps, a national nonprofit organization dedicated to recording, preserving, and sharing the stories of Americans from all backgrounds and beliefs.

Because the National Medal celebrates institutions that are committed to community service, IMLS will feature this year’s finalists on social media platforms and provide an opportunity for users of Calisphere to share their stories on the IMLS Facebook page.   If you or a colleague has used Calisphere in the path of your research or teaching, please post a story about the value Calisphere has brought you. 

Museums and libraries serve as community gathering places and centers for lifelong learning, and we are very proud to announce the California Digital Library as a finalist for the 2013 National Medal,” said Susan Hildreth, director, Institute of Museum and Library Services.  “This year’s finalists exemplify the many wonderful ways museums and libraries can respond to the needs and wants of the communities they serve.”

CDL’s executive director, Laine Farley stated, “Calisphere exemplifies the University of California – California Digital Library’s public service mission.  It is a free, public website of more than 230,000 primary sources including historical photographs, letters, drawings and other artifacts with an emphasis on California’s storied history.  These materials have been digitized and contributed by more than 115 libraries, archives and museums in California, representing the distinctiveness of cultures and communities throughout the state.  The result is a treasure trove of materials from California’s most venerable institutions, free and open to online exploration from anywhere in the world.”

We have been recognized for Calisphere, a service that contributes positively to all levels of researchers seeking primary sources materials.  We are grateful for IMLS’s support and are honored to be recognized as a finalist for the 2013 National Medal for Museum and Library Service.

Visit the IMLS Facebook page and Share Your Story today!

About the Institute of Museum and Library Services

The Institute of Museum and Library Services is the primary source of federal support for the nation’s 123,000 libraries and 17,500 museums. Our mission is to inspire libraries and museums to advance innovation, lifelong learning, and cultural and civic engagement. Our grant making, policy development, and research help libraries and museums deliver valuable services that make it possible for communities and individuals to thrive.  To learn more, visit www.imls.gov and follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

About the California Digital Library
The California Digital Library (CDL) supports the University of California libraries in their mission of providing access to the world’s knowledge for the UC campuses and the communities they serve through the development and management of digital collections, innovation in scholarly publishing and the long-term preservation of digital information. The University of California library system, which includes more than 100 libraries on the 10 UC campuses, collectively is the largest research/academic library in the world. More information about CDL is available at www.cdlib.org.

Visitors to the Online Archive of California (OAC) and Calisphere can now explore more than 530 photographs of Southern California in the first part of the 20^thCentury. The images were taken by Edward W. Cochems, a self-taught photographer based in Santa Ana from 1915 until around 1945. They were contributed to the OAC and Calisphere by the UC Irvine Libraries Special Collections and Archives.

Explore contributor showcases now!

The images were produced during the 2011-2012 Local History Digital Resources Project (LHDRP), a training and digitization program for libraries with local history materials. Over the past year, ten libraries each selected, scanned, and catalogued approximately 200 items for inclusion in OAC, Calisphere, and local websites. They are now broadly available to the UC community and the general public.

The new material spans an array of interesting topics and regions, from photographs of minority communities along the California coast, to records documenting the history of community colleges in the state, to letters penned by students incarcerated in Japanese American internment camps. The following is a summary of collections by institution:

• Beaumont Library District: images depicting historical buildings, structures, railroads, public institutions, ranches, and topography of the Beaumont and Cherry Valley communities.
• Black Gold Cooperative Library System: photographs portraying life on the California Central Coast from 1853 through the 1970s among four major ethnic minority groups: African, Asian, Hispanic, and Native Americans.
• California State University Channel Islands Library: photographs capturing the history of the Filipino community in Ventura County from the ­1900s through the 1990s.
• California State University East Bay Library: Images from various archival record collections, showing the history of the university and student, faculty, and staff life there.
• California State University Fullerton Library: prints and negatives spanning the long history of a leading photography studio and depicting various people and scenes in Orange County, 1882-1853.
• Glendale Public Library: promotional brochures from the early 1900s describing the towns of Glendale and Tropico as idyllic places to live, work, and visit.
• Citrus College, Hayden Memorial Library: papers and photographs documenting the history of Citrus College, originally a high school and later the first community college in Los Angeles County.
• Japanese American National Museum: letters written by Japanese American students who were incarcerated in American internment camps during World War II, addressed to their pre-war teacher.
• Santa Cruz Public library: photographs depicting the first settlers to Scotts Valley and the development of the farming and dairy industries there.

Congratulations to this year’s LHDRP participants!

The LHDRP is supported by the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act, administered in California by the State Librarian.  Learn more.

Images (left-right) courtesy of: Black Gold Cooperative Library System; CSU Channel Islands Library; Citrus College, Hayden Memorial Library.

• “Pop-up” user survey: a multiple choice question placed on the OAC and Calisphere for one week asking users to describe themselves.
• Usage statistics analysis: collection and analysis of four months of web analytics data, cross-analyzed with pop-up survey data where relevant.
• Contributor interviews: in-person and phone interviews with contributors from ten UC campuses and two non-UC institutions, focused on their motivations for and needs with respect to contributing digital objects.

Read the assessment report.

The assessment uncovered immensely valuable information about the OAC and Calisphere platforms. Key findings included the following:

• Calisphere had a much broader user base for the survey period than its defined audience of K-12 teachers. College and graduate students, in particular, comprised the largest user group in this survey period.
• Many users of Calisphere arrive at digital objects from the open web and may not explore the site further. This trend suggests that more could be done to connect objects to other relevant content.
• Contributors to the OAC and Calisphere cite many benefits for doing so. However, there are some barriers, namely a lack of steady digitization funding, an ingest system that is “downstream” from current workflows, and lack of a user-facing destination that showcases contributors’ unique collections.
• There may be additional ways of expanding the contextual information available for digital objects through user tagging, subject access, and curated collections.

These and other findings have pointed the way to many exciting possibilities for supporting access to digital special collections. The CDL is using the information gleaned from the assessment to define future development priorities for the OAC and Calisphere, in concert with the Next Generation Technical Services project to create a systemwide service for and access portal to a UC Libraries Digital Collection.

To read a more extensive discussion of methodologies, findings, and opportunities, download the report.

.       View the collection on the OAC

A soldier’s story

Henry O. Nightingale (1844-1919) was an abolitionist from Rochester, New York who at 18 years of age enlisted in the Northern army at the start of the Civil War. Nightingale fought in numerous battles, including the Battle of Gettysburg.

Nightingale’s account of the war is brought to life in the new digital collection, which comprises two handwritten diaries (1864-1865) and an undated portrait of the soldier with his sabre and Union hat. A majority of entries in both diaries describe the weather and Nightingale’s daily activities during his military service. The 1864 diary is notable for its descriptions of company and regimental movement, as well as a gunshot wound Nightingale suffered at the Battle of the Wilderness in Virginia.

The 1865 diary describes one of the most infamous events in American history. On April 14, Nightingale attended a performance at Ford’s Theatre. There, he witnessed the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth. Nightingale recounted the horrific scene, writing:

…in the last act, a most astonishing crime was committed the President.  Mr. Lincoln, shot through the head; the assassin then leaped out of the box on the stage and drew a large dagger and exclaimed “I have done it. Virginia is avenged. Hic [sic] semper tyrannis” and made his escape.

The outraged Union soldier went on to write, “God pity the rebellion now for Men will show no mercy; death to every Confederate, every Rebel sympathizer.”

.       Read Nightingale’s account of Lincoln’s assassination

If you find the handwriting difficult to read, don’t distress. Student assistants at the UC Merced Library have been transcribing the diaries, and the transcriptions will be added later this spring.

A missing autograph

The digitization of the diaries was actually part of an effort to uncover Lincoln’s signature and possible last written words. A historian and genealogist named Steve Nagy, along with his brother and a cousin, had inherited letters Nightingale wrote to their ancestor—probably as a “pen pal” during the war. In 2007, while transcribing the letters, a member of the Digital Library Team at Villanova University discovered a surprising passage:

I, the afternoon of the fatal day, had the pleasure of seeing the departed one, my object in going to see him was to get his Autograph in my Album. he, the President took it and wrote with his own hand several lines.

In other words, Nightingale claimed to have an autograph and inscription from Lincoln on the day he died.

Mr. Nagy, his curiosity piqued, undertook to find Nightingale’s heirs and see if they had additional materials where the autograph might be penned. The search took him to California, and eventually to Edith Denio, a great-granddaughter of Nightingale’s who was in possession of the diaries. Ms. Denio generously allowed UC Merced staff to digitize the diaries for public access and study.

And what of the autograph? Unfortunately it did not turn up in the diaries. Either it is in another volume, or—as Mr. Nagy conjectures—Nightingale embellished the story in the letter to his pen pal, and did not actually procure a signature from President Lincoln.

The making of a digital collection

The publication of this collection is the result of countless hours and hard work at the UC Merced Library. Since the diaries are physically fragile and quite long—together they contain several hundreds of pages—they presented a challenge to library staff.

Head of Digital Assets Emily Lin and a student assistant employed gentle, labor-intensive methods to scan the thin handwritten pages, as well as the many newspaper clippings and poems pasted into one of the diaries. Student assistants painstakingly cataloged and transcribed the diaries. Library Services Manager Mary Weppler-Selear took on the digital curation of the collection as a capstone project for a certificate in digital information management. She supervised the students, created metadata, and did all of the technical work required to contribute the collection to the CDL’s access and preservation repositories.

The Nightingale collection is available on the OAC and Calisphere, and has been deposited in the Merritt digital curation repository—thus ensuring both broad public access to and long-term preservation of these historically significant materials.

Explore other first-hand stories

Handwritten letters and diaries comprise some of the most engrossing material available on the OAC and Calisphere. If you like the Nightingale diary, you may also be interested in the diary of Patrick Breen, member of the Donner Party; the letters of John Muir, and words and writings from the Japanese American Relocation Digital Archive.