Blue Electrode Lite

We are excited to announce the launch of our new Digital Library public interface!

We welcome any comments about or problems with the new interface — please direct them to digitallibrary@villanova.edu. We hope you enjoy the new features!

laphamsquarterly:

Way to spoil the party, National Archives. Looks like Presidents’ Day was developed by advertisers, just like every other holiday we hold near and dear. ALL HAIL THREE-DAY WEEKEND SALES. 

usnatarchives:

There is no such thing as Presidents Day. Or President’s Day.

There is such a thing as Washington’s Birthday, and the National Archives Research Rooms in DC (but not the museum side) will be closed on Monday, February 19, in observance of this holiday.

“Before 1971, Washington’s Birthday was one of nine federal holidays celebrated on specific dates, which fell on different days of the week (the exception being Labor Day—the original Monday holiday). Then came the tinkering of the Ninetieth Congress in 1968. Determined to create a uniform system of federal Monday holidays, Congress voted to shift three existing holidays to Mondays and expanded the number further by creating one new Monday holiday.

Washington’s Birthday was uprooted from its fixed February 22 date and transplanted to the third Monday in February, followed by Memorial Day being relocated from the last day in May to the last Monday in May.

When a new federal law was implemented in 1971, only two days separated Abraham Lincoln’s Friday birthday of February 12 from the Washington’s Birthday holiday that fell on February 15—the third Monday in February.

For advertisers, the Monday holiday change was the goose that laid the golden “promotional” egg. Using Labor Day marketing as a guide, three-day weekend sales were expanded to include the new Monday holidays. Once the “Uniform Monday Holiday Law” was implemented, it took just under a decade to build a head of national promotional sales steam.

Local advertisers morphed both “Abraham Lincoln’s Birthday” and “George Washington’s Birthday” into the sales sound bite “President’s Day,” expanding the traditional three-day sales to begin before Lincoln’s birth date and end after Washington’s February 22 birth. In some instances, advertisers promoted the sales campaign through the entire month of February. To the unsuspecting public, the term linking both presidential birthdays seemed to explain the repositioning of the holiday between two high-profile presidential birthdays.”

For the full story, go to http://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2004/winter/gw-birthday-1.html

Image: S. 623, A bill to make the 22nd day of February George Washington’s Birthday, RG 46, Records of the United States Senate. Text via the Center for Legislative Archives.

Help Solve A Special Collections Musical Mystery

The first thing that struck me about the papers that were being pulled out of a pile from the special collections department was the artwork. Shapes with gold and silver metallic color, green leaves, and an orange face all decorated the first pages of each of the three thin booklets…. [Read the full article.]

Laughter & Lepracauns — check out these recent blog posts on our main Blue Electrode blog!

Atchoo! available for proofreading

Summer Project: Bishops and Lepracauns

Check out our new online exhibit, “Joseph McGarrity: Man of Action, Man of Letters”!

The exhibit was curated by Brian J. McDonald, PhD, one of our 2012 Digital Library Interns. Joseph McGarrity was a notable figure in late 19th- & early 20th-century Irish history. For more on the background of the exhibit, read Brian’s post on the Blue Electrode blog.

Transit of Venus, 1882.

Click to see the full set of photos (and a neat etching of a 1639 observation) at the Public Domain Review.

Check out this website from NASA for lots of info about today’s Transit of Venus. Remember to use safe viewing options if you’re planning on watching. You can watch a live webcast from Mauna Kea, Hawaii if you can’t make it to any live parties or if you’re not in the viewing path. The webcast will begin at 9:45pm UTC (11:45am local Hawaiian time or 5:45pm EST).

museumsandstuff:

What a Physics Student Can Teach us About How Visitors Walk Around an Exhibition

From the Smithsonian blog which highlights some of the limitations of how we assess the successes and failures of exhibition layout and route design and suggests ways to improve/expand how we evaluate. 

This is a fascinating look at how people move through museum exhibits and their different ways of looking at/interacting with the exhibit. (I am really tempted to do some tracking doodles myself, even though our tiny exhibit space (within a library) doesn’t really warrant it. But we’re getting new cases in a new location, so maybe I’ll just sit for a few minutes on random days and do some people-watching and doodling…)

(Source: museumsandstuff)

It’s a rainy day here, so here’s a child’s rhyme about rain. Transcription below:

A DRop of Rain (child rhyme)

I knew a little drop of rain
It broke its nose on a window pane
And all the other little drops
They stood around like City Cops
And Tried to fix the rain drop’s nose
And dress it up in its Sunday clothes

From the Joseph McGarrity Papers.

Letter, To: “My gentle unknown friend” From: Henry O. Nightingale, April 30, 1865.

In this letter to an unnamed friend, Henry O. Nightingale, a soldier in the Union Army, reflects on the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln in April 1865.

We know not the virtues of a friend, or do not prize them as we should until that friend is gone. I agree with you entirely. I had learned to love him, for he was eminently the Soldiers friend. So just, forgiving, unsuspecting. When the sad news of his Assassination reached us, we had all retired. It seemed like an the sudden opening of a musket battery, we could not believe it. But morning came, bells sounded forth the solemn toll for his departed spirit, + sadness, grief, frenzy, seized us all. Men who had stood before the enemy, their comrads falling around them without shedding a tear wept. Great tears coursed down the cheeks of all. Then for the first time did I understand my comrads. Then I knew who were true. Then I discovered the great affection for “good Old Abe” concealed in the hearts of my fellow Soldiers.

Nightingale was actually one of the last people to see President Lincoln alive. He obtained Lincoln’s autograph on the afternoon of April 14:

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. I looked in admiration upon the man whose energy, had preserved us, little thinking that before morning he would be a bleeding corpse. One week ago Thursday last I looked upon all that remained of him, as he lay in State in the Capitol. I will not attempt to describe my feelings. You can imagine what they were. I felt as though my best friend had gone, and turned away to weep.

Click through to view the full letter. For easier reading, you can access a transcription of the letter under the “Docs” tab to the left of the images.

This image is an example of a crossed letter. A crossed letter is one in which the writer first writes across the page in one direction, then rotates the page (usually 90 degrees) to continue the letter. This was done to save on postage and conserve paper, both of which were relatively expensive back in the day.

We haven’t transcribed this document yet — we’ve been saving these more difficult items for later!

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Letter, To: “Mama” (Ellen Ewing Sherman) From: Ellie, March 14, 1878.