Did you notice that 2023 was the year of physical media? It seems like almost overnight everyone was talking about the importance of having access to physical media. This conversation was mostly started when our favorite shows and films started leaving streaming platforms. At Pitts, we’ve always known that physical media was important. In fact, that’s why we work not only to provide access to our collections, but maintain them too (check out the latest issue of Reformation Notes to read about how we partner with Emory’s Conservation department to do this!).
The cover of the inaugural Pitts Zine
During the 2023-2024 academic year, though, Pitts librarians who work in Reference, Instruction, Outreach, and Digital Initiatives took the commitment to physical media to a new level. First we produced the inaugural (as far as we know) Pitts Zine to share with incoming students. For a long time, zines have been an important form of informal and self-published knowledge. You can learn more about the history of zines and even see examples in the Barnard Zine Library. We hope that our zine will inspire patrons to think differently about how they use the library!
The limited-edition sticker that Pitts sent to Candler’s hybrid students
Our second physical media project was to send out custom-made cards to all enrolled hybrid MDiv students. Hybrid MDiv students also received a special edition “hybrid student only” sticker. We hope that these cards and stickers remind you that the library is here for you even if you can’t walk through the doors!
Some of our favorite physical media from the last year include books (obviously), but also films and music and even street art. Check out the library staff recommendations below.
4K restoration of The Trial available in the Criterion Collection.
The Pitts staff and student workers are well-versed in magic, but magic isn’t how we find books when they go missing from the stacks.
A Pitts reshelving cart on the first floor, where patrons have (properly!) placed books when they were finished with them.
When a patron cannot find a book where the online catalog says it should be, the Pitts staff and student workers undertake four official searches, spaced across varying time intervals – one, seven, twenty-eight, and fifty-six days – to find the missing book. Over time, we have learned the most common reasons a book ends up somewhere it shouldn’t be, and we use that knowledge to search efficiently. Often an item is missing due to its being misshelved in the wrong place. Someone may have stashed away material for their work, or someone may have misread a call number when putting a book back. We assume the latter when first searching the stacks, and we try to reconstruct the error in a logical way. For example, errors in shelving might result from swapping an s for a 5, reading HC as HG or HQ, dropping numbers from long sequences of numbers in the case of BS1575.568, or some other understandable mistake. So, for example, if we can’t find a book with a call number HM851 .B3645, we may start our search in the HN851 section.
Student workers use charts to report the progress in searching for books reported missing.
To maintain shelving accuracy and catch misplaced books before our patrons do, our circulation student workers are perpetually checking the order of the material on the shelves, and they are regularly reviewing the shelving done by their peers. As a library patron, you can help too! Please support our efforts to keep books where they belong by putting items you remove from the shelves on a reshelving cart, which are spread throughout the library, rather than returning it to the shelf. It’s always possible that the book may not belong in the gap you found. By leaving the books on the reshelving carts you provide staff with material to hone our shelving skills, and you also provide us with accurate data on the use of our materials. So even though you may want to help us out by reshelving the books, you actually help us more by placing them on the reshelving carts and letting the Pitts experts take it from there!
Describing archival materials isn’t often glamorous or exciting. For the most part, it’s just you, an Excel spreadsheet, and the Archival Box Of The Day. Wikipedia quickly becomes your best friend, followed closely by the selection of relevant (but out-of-print) books you’re lucky enough to find on Internet Archive. Every so often, though, you come across something a little bit different, a little bit unexpected, that you just need to research a little more to give full context to the document you’re describing.
The letter from Bishop Early to Bishop Paine (May 25, 1860)
The Robert Paine letters (MSS 404), held at Pitts, include nineteen letters (and one lonely envelope) from Bishop John Early (1786-1873) of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, written to his colleague, Bishop Robert Paine (1799-1882). Most of these letters discuss the management of the various regional conferences for which Paine and Early were responsible, including disciplinary matters, preacher appointments, and annual meeting reports. One letter, however, dated May 25, 1860, includes something a little different: a glimpse at an important event in United States diplomatic history. In his letter, Bishop Early writes, “I came home two days ago and found that the commissioners from Japan had gotten [their] Treaty ratified, & Exchanged, & well nigh spent the time [allowed] them to stay [in Washington, D.C.] and would in less than a week leave here for New York…” These commissioners (read: diplomats) from Japan are Muragaki Norimasa (1813-1880), Oguri Tadamasa (1827-1868), and Masaoki Shinmi (1822-1869), who arrived in Washington, D.C., on May 14, 1860, with a retinue of samurai and retainers in order to formally ratify the 1858 Treaty of Amity and Commerce between Japan and the United States.[2,4,5] The treaty formalized the forced opening of Japanese borders to American trade following the arrival of Commodore Matthew Perry (1794-1858) in Tokyo Harbor on July 8, 1853, and marked the official start of U.S./Japan political and economic relations.[1] The Japanese delegation’s visit to Washington, D.C., reveals the American public’s burning interest in foreign visitors, despite the looming threat of Civil War. In fact, their arrival was marked by “…5,000 cheering spectators; [and] an additional 20,000 [who] climbed trees and hung out of windows for a look…”[5] Throughout their stay, the Japanese delegation attended numerous banquets and received many visitors, one of whom was Bishop John Early. In his letter, Early shares that John B. Floyd (1806-1863), the U.S. Secretary of War, arranged for Early and several other Christian leaders to meet with the Japanese delegation. His description of the visit, and of the delegates, reflects Early’s, and likely many Americans’, prejudiced perceptions, “They are small & evidently an inferior race – The Chiefs are [unobtrusive] & dignified – very little parade and no [great] extravagance in [dressing]- They are evidently [greatly] impressed with the magnificence of this Country & with the [great] attention showed them by great men…” The remainder of Early’s letter reveals that the Bishop was far more interested in Japan as a new ground for missionary work than in the Japanese people or their culture. Indeed, Early’s letter, particularly when contrasted with the various accounts of the Japanese diplomats themselves, demonstrates what Yasuhide Kawashima calls “a fundamental problem of intercultural relations: how people from one country look at another country.”[3] Where Early states with confidence that the delegates were “[greatly] impressed with the magnificence” of the U.S., detailed accounts by Muragaki indicate a resigned attitude towards Western foods (specifically the abundance of steak and butter) and noisy social events, which he describes as “a drinking bout of day laborers in Edo [Tokyo].”[3]
The 1860 Japanese Mission to the United States and host escorts. From the United States National Archives and Records Administration
Early’s letter is one part of a multifaceted collection of personal accounts of the Japanese delegation’s visits to the U.S. and Europe in 1860, offering a glimpse of a 19th Century, Southern Methodist view of foreign peoples and countries during a tumultuous period for international relations around the world.
Written by Brinna Michael, Cataloging & Metadata Librarian
2 Consulate General of Japan in New York. “Celebrating the 150th Anniversary of the First Japanese Delegation to New York City.” Japan-NYC 1860-2010: A Heritage of Friendship (2010): https://www.ny.us.emb-japan.go.jp/150JapanNY/en/about.html
3 Kawashima, Yasuhide. “America through Foreign Eyes: Reactions of the Delegates from Tokugawa Japan, 1860.” Journal of Social History 5, no. 4 (1972): 491–511.
Every summer, the Institute for Liberal Arts Digital Scholarship (ILiADS) brings together teams from around the country with expert liaisons for dedicated time working on their digital scholarship projects. At the institute held at Davidson College in July, Pitts Theology Library had three representatives at the institute, all of whom received high praise for their leadership and support of the organization and project teams.
Pitts has supported ILiADS since 2019, when Dr. Spencer Roberts, Head of Digital Initiatives and Technologies, served as a liaison for a team from Bryn Mawr College working on a 3D realization of an eighteenth-century raked stage. This year, Spencer served as chair of the steering committee responsible for organizing and running the institute.
Liz Miller, Coordinator of Digital Initiatives, first served as a liaison at ILiADS 2022, providing expert advice for a team from Creighton University working to digitize, encode, and catalog sixteenth-century musical works. This summer, Liz guided a team from Guilford College through the process of planning a digital humanities course focused on digital storytelling and refugee narratives.
In their final presentation of the week, the Guilford team wrote, “Thanks so much to our amazing ILiADS liaison, Liz Miller, for sharing her wonderful expertise with us and being an all-around kind and thoughtful human.”
The Guilford College Team with their liaison. Pictured (L-R): Katy Farr, Sonalini Sapra, Liz Miller, Will Kelly, and Zhihong Chen
A record-breaking number of first-day yays
Brinna Michael, Cataloging and Metadata Librarian, joined the Pitts cohort at ILiADS for the first time to serve as a liaison for the team from Carleton College. Drawing on their experience on the development team for Pitts’ own Digital Collections site, Brinna led the team through a design thinking process to help them begin their own collections site dedicated to cataloging and presenting Japanese maps from various eras.
In a tradition at ILiADS called “Today’s Yays,” participants write down exciting and positive moments from each day. On day one of the institute, Brinna’s team shared, “We found a CSS resource (W3C) to help format vertical text, supporting languages such as Japanese, Chinese, and Mongolian.” By the end of the week, the team had implemented the tool, created their first items on the website, and were excited to keep up their momentum as they traveled home.
Organizing an institute like this is an exercise in adaptability and innovation. In true ILiADS fashion, the steering committee organized a mid-week community conversation to discuss topics raised in the first few days that were particularly important to the teams. Spencer dug into his Canadian roots to host a Jeopardy-inspired activity that facilitated brainstorming and conversation, complete with background imagery and sounds.
Jeopardy-inspired community conversations
Working with ILiADS has created an opportunity to share the expertise of librarians and staff at Pitts Theology Library with a wider community. Though the summer institute is finished, ILiADS is more than a week-long opportunity for teams to focus their efforts: it has become a network of expertise, colleagues, and projects that demonstrate the scholarly and pedagogical impact of the digital liberal arts.
By Spencer Roberts, Head of Digital Initiatives & Technologies
We’ve had a fun summer of sharing recommendations with staff and faculty at the Candler School of Theology and Pitts Theology Library, and we hope you’ve enjoyed reading along with us!
Our final summer reading recommendation post for this summer comes from Israel Díaz-Freytes, Candler’s Senior Instructional Designer. In that role, Israel works with both the Office of Digital Learning and the La Mesa Academy for Theological Studies. This week, let’s see how Israel is entertaining himself when he’s not busy supporting digital coursework.
First on Israel’s list is Engaging Technology in Theological Education: All That We Can’t Leave Behind by Mary Hess. About this influential book, he says,
“I came across Mary E. Hess’ work as I was working on my doctoral thesis. I appreciated that Hess not only offers a critical look at the challenges posed by digital technologies in theological education, but also recognizes the reality that we are to engage in its use.”
This book is a staple for religious educators, even many years after its publication. By encouraging teachers to incorporate new media and technology into their pedagogy, Hess explores the ways we can critically engage technology while still staying true to Christian teachings.
Next is The Church of God and Its Human Face: The Contribution of Joseph A. Komonchak to Ecclesiology by Martin Madar. Joseph Komonchak is an influential Catholic theologian and priest engaged in ecclesiology. About this book devoted to Komonchak, Israel says,
“I appreciated Martin Madar’s engagement of Joseph Komanchak’s work on the local church within the context of Catholic ecclesiology in the 20th century. I particularly found his chapter on Vatican II and the Shift in Catholic ecclesiology helpfully in tracing the different ecclesial ideologies leading to Vatican II and the challenges that followed.”
Finally, Israel recommends a podcast called The Bible for Normal People.
“I enjoy this podcast as it offers an eclectic cast of contributors to speak on contemporary critical issues relating to the Bible.”
The B4NP podcast is part of a larger organization that offers courses and publishes books and blogs, seeking to make Biblical scholarship more accessible to the general public.
The Bible for Normal People is available on their website and wherever you listen to podcasts.
