A Semester at the Boston City Archives

Officers from the Boston Police Department standing beside school buses. Photo from the 1975 Hyde Park High School yearbook

I decided to complete my internship at the Boston City Archives (BCA) in West Roxbury thanks in part to the experience I had there during our Digital Archives class last semester. In that class we worked with Marta Crilly, the archivist for reference and outreach, to create exhibits for the class’s Omeka site on the desegregation of the Boston Public Schools. The main project for my internship was digitizing materials from the desegregation collections housed at the City Archives, and inputting metadata onto their digital repository, Preservica, for future use. This project is a continuation of the work of Lauren Prescott, a recently graduated student from our program.

I started off in September digitizing materials from the Mayor Kevin H. White records, specifically feedback notes from the various “coffee klatches” the Mayor held throughout the city. Some of these notes mentioned the residents’ concerns about the busing situation, while many did not. I then moved onto some materials from the Louise Day Hicks papers and the Fran Johnnene collection, two ardent opponents of forced busing.

A map of neighborhood schools with accompanying geocodes found in the Louise Day Hicks papers

The Louise Day Hicks material was especially interesting and featured a lot of content that Marta thought researchers would love.

I was really hoping that I would have the chance to work with scanning some images while at the BCA. I am familiar with digitizing still and moving images from my internship in the audiovisual archives at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, and I really enjoy working with that medium. So when I heard that there were some negatives in the Kevin H. White records that needed scanning, I immediately jumped at the opportunity. There were some setbacks and I ended up only scanning a few negatives, which in hindsight is a good thing since there was much for me to do.

After working there a few weeks, Marta mentioned that some of the materials from the Cocoanut Grove Night Club fire needed scanning. This detour turned into one of my favorite projects of the

A sample of fabric that caught fire at the Cocoanut Grove Nigh Club Fire

semester, and I learned a lot about the privacy restrictions of some collections. The biggest issue with this material was the names of patients on the medical records, something that HIPAA strictly regulated. After consulting with an attorney for the City of Boston, we were cleared to publish the names and other information about the victims online. We got

A page from the Boston Post featuring names of the victims of the Cocoanut Grove Night Club fire

clearance based on a few legalities, but a main reason was that a newspaper already published the names. The materials pertaining to the Cocoanut Grove Night Club fire included legal documents, transcriptions of court hearings, and even fabric samples. These were found in the Law Department records and the Boston City Hospital collection.

After finishing scanning materials related to the Cocoanut Grove Night Club fire I set my sights back on desegregation, this time focusing on yearbooks. I focused on two high schools in neighborhoods of Boston which busing significantly impacted; Charlestown High School and Hyde Park High School. I soon found out, to my

A Hyde Park High School Senior sporting some groovy hair

surprise, that Hyde Park High School already enrolled a number of non-white students before busing started in the Fall of 1974. Charlestown High School, on the other hand, enrolled very few non-white students prior to the Fall of 1974. This began a troubling trend of white Charlestown residents sending their children elsewhere for school. In total, I scanned twenty-three yearbooks between the two high schools. Needless to say, the fashion trends of the 1960s and 1970s puzzle me after going through the yearbooks.

Some lovely metadata using a MODS template by yours truly

For each object I scanned, I needed to complete the metadata on that object as well. Metadata is the descriptive information embedded in a particular object, so in my case the metadata was information about the digitized content. Marta set up a Google spreadsheet to organize all of my metadata, which was a huge help since I scanned almost 350 objects. The metadata I was responsible for were–Title, Record Identifier, Date Created, Creator Name, City, Neighborhood, Description, Collection Name and Number, Location of Originals, Type, Language, Conditions Governing Access, Conditions Governing Reproductions, Library of Congress Subject Headings, Description Standard, Pages. Thankfully, the Boston City Archives has a set of controlled vocabulary to help with the process. I also found that a lot of the Library of Congress Subject Headings, dates, creators, and locations were repeated. I estimate that it took me around 15 hours to complete all of the metadata alone during my internship.

I benefited a lot from my semester at the Boston City Archives. I learned technical skills that I will use in my future career and also got a view of how a municipal archive operates. Some of these skills include redacting documents, digitizing documents, different metadata formats, and working with a digital repository. There are many more that I probably do not realize I acquired yet as well. I am excited to take the valuable experience and these skills with me as I begin my career!

 

Neighborhood schools

A few weeks back I was going through the Louise Day Hicks papers looking for things to scan that did not need redacting. Ms. Hicks is an interesting character and played an important role in the desegregation of the Boston Public Schools as one of the the loudest anti-busing voices in the city.

Louise Day Hicks-not a fan of busing.

One issue with the materials in her collection is that some of the people who’s names appear on some of the documents in one manner or another may still be alive. Given Hick’s polarizing views, it is possible that some of the living people named have different views from the ones they held in the 1970s. In order to prevent any third-party conflict, some of her collection is not put up online.

So back to finding interesting materials that I can put up without much issue. I came across a packet with information about each of the schools in the different neighborhoods of Boston. Two pages were dedicated to each section of the city: page one contained a physical map of each neighborhood with geocodes for each section of the neighborhood; page two listed each of the schools within the neighborhood and gave their corresponding geocodes. Here is the information about some of the schools in Jamaica Plain:

There is a total of 51 pages of information like this for schools across the city. You can find the complete PDF at this web page.

When I told Marta about this, she was very excited–she said that geocodes are something that researchers are always looking for. While in the digital class I kept hearing the term “neighborhood schools” and, while I knew what the term meant, I never could form an image of them in my head. After seeing these maps and corresponding information, I am finally able to paint an accurate picture of them in my head.

Redact for Privacy’s Sake!

In my last post I talked about how Marta got the OK to make the documents with the names of victims of the Cocoanut Grove Night Club fire public. This week, I am revisiting my first few weeks at the Boston City Archives to talk about an instance where Marta could not make the names public.

According to what Marta told me, Mayor Kevin H. White would occasionally hold a “coffee klatch” with residents of a specific neighborhood in Boston at one member of the

A fully redacted document

neighborhood’s home. He did this in order to let the citizens participate in an “airing of grievances” about certain things that they thought were important within the neighborhood. During these “coffee klatches” aides to the Mayor would take down notes about each attendee and what they contributed to the conversation.

In the Mayor Kevin H. White records, there are several folders full of these sheets from each neighborhood in the city at different dates throughout his stay in office. At first I assumed that the content would mainly consist of neighborhood gossip, petty arguments, and demands to fix the roads or the T. My attitude changed once I came across a folder of a “coffee klatch” held in Dorchester on August 20, 1974. Dorchester in that particular moment in time was only two weeks away from experiencing the implementation of forced busing across the city’s public schools. I will admit that most of the notes from that “coffee klatch” was not very entertaining, there were some that made references to busing.

A redacted document of a host or hostess

The larger problem at hand was that personal information (name, address, phone number, family members) about each attendee was clearly written on each note. Marta thought it best to redact any personal information with the exception of the zip code for most of the notes. We did, however, choose to not redact the name of the hosts of each “coffee klatch”, but the addresses and any other family members were redacted in those instances too.

Given the controversial content of some of the notes (i.e. busing) and the fact that some of these people could be alive today, it was an easy decision to redact the names to maintain the privacy of each individual.

Archivist’s note: Making adjustments to originals

The material at the Boston City Archives pertaining to the Cocoanut Grove Night Club fire presents some major issues concerning confidentiality and HIPAA regulations. After consulting the lawyer for the City of Boston, Marta got the okay to make the documents public without redacting the names of the victims.

One of the reasons that we did not need to redact the names is because the Boston Post featured a series of articles in November and December of 1942 which published the names of victims. The Boston City Archives has these articles in their Boston City Hospital collection, but they are not from the original newspaper. Instead, they have eleven xerox copies which make up the articles. In the folder they are located, these copies are not in any particular order and many of the page numbers are missing.

We decided to sit and brainstorm the best way to scan and present these for web viewing. I suggested to Marta that if I correctly arrange the copies I could then use Adobe Photoshop to stitch the images together. Once she agreed to see what I could do, I went out into the research room with the eleven copies and tried to correctly assemble this puzzle. Using my outside research skills (including finding a specific Boston Bruins game from November 28, 1942) and some name matching I was able to put together everything in about an hour.

I then made scans of each copy and noted which copies went with one another. Using my version of Adobe Photoshop, I was able to stitch together the eleven copies into six coherent pages.

When it came time to do the metadata for the images, I was unsure how to communicate that these were not the original form of the documents. Upon asking Marta, she immediately told me that I could provide a disclaimer in the “Processing Information”, or an archivist’s note, in the metadata to clarify any changes that were made to the originals.

Just like that the original publisher of the victim’s names went from a folder of eleven unorganized documents into six coherent documents ready for public display!

Flight from Charlestown High School

As I continue to scan yearbooks, I cannot help but notice that the physical size of the Charlestown High School yearbooks are getting smaller and smaller. They number of scanned pages from 1975 to 1979 are as follows:

1974 : 168 pages, 1975: 162 pages, 1976: 180 pages, 1977: 112 pages, 1978: 82 pages, 1979: 79 pages

So what gives? There must be a reason why the yearbooks are becoming shorter and shorter; Less advertisements? Less sports teams? Less faculty? All of the above?

After doing a little bit of research, I discovered that the Senior class was getting smaller and smaller each year–

1974: 236 students, 1975: 187 students, 1976: 151 students, 1977: 120 students, 1978: 84 students, 1979: 69 students.

Charlestown during this time was a predominately white-Irish neighborhood, so it is no surprise that Charlestown High School was one of the most predominantly white high schools in Boston up until desegregation. The desegregation of the Boston Public Schools went into effect for the 1974-1975 school year, so there I am not surprised about the drastic drop-off from 1974 to 1975. What does surprise me is the rate at which students-especially white students-stopped attending the high school later in the decade. To lose almost 70% of the senior class over a span of six years is remarkable.

So where did all of the students go- The suburbs? Parochial schools? Private schools? It is more than likely that a combination of all of the above occurred, making way for a Charlestown diaspora as the 1980s approached. Something I would like to learn more about is the actual extent of students who left the Boston Public Schools, where they went, and in what numbers. Unfortunately, the Boston City Archives does not have materials from the private schools or parochial schools these students may have gone to. So this looks like something that will be on the back burner for now!

Metadata, metadata, metadata

I thoroughly enjoy scanning materials. Whether it is documents, objects, or images [between you me and the walls, I LOVE scanning images] there is something about making

Some lovely metadata using a MODS template by yours truly

a document accessible to the public, or making a negative seemingly come to life that I cannot get enough of. However, scanning is only one of the steps in making digitized materials available to the public.

For the past week or so, I have been occupied with embedding metadata into the objects I have scanned. Metadata is, literally, data that describes data. In the case of the scans, they help identify the objects with information such as title, accession number, copyright status, dates, locations, etc. Different institutions use different metadata templates. The Boston City Archives uses a template called Metadata Object Description Schema (MODS for short). Metadata is used to identify objects, and to help search queries. Search engines and web crawlers can assess items more easily with the help of the keywords, names, dates, and geographic locations to name a few.

Filling out the metadata for every object scanned is a monotonous procedure, but is made easier thanks to the templates and the various programs which feature spreadsheets (think Excel and Google Docs). Once all the information is put on the spreadsheet, it is just a matter of copying and pasting into the template. It does take some time though, I find that I can complete the metadata on about 20 scanned objects per hour. Thus far, I have finished the metadata on 300 scanned items, so I’ve spent around 15 hours just inputting the metadata on the digital repository over the course of the semester.

For those who have not yet taken the digital class, I leave you with some advice. Do not forget to do your metadata! The last thing you want is to finish all your scanning and not have any metadata done.

-Insert Profound Yearbook Quote Here-

Here is a question for you. What makes a good yearbook quote? Can anyone really sum up four years of high school in one or two sentences? As I was scanning yearbooks, I came across thousands of students who tried to do just that. These ranged from cliche phrases, song lyrics, famous quotes, and other profound sayings in an attempt to perfectly describe their experience in high school. Some chose to say a thing or two about their future goals and aspirations, or mention some inside jokes they shared with friends. All of these seem fitting for seniors leaving everything they have known behind and beginning a new chapter in their lives.

….then there are the others. There are always a few quotes that make you scratch your head and try to figure out just what in the hell that quote was supposed to mean. Others are just plain funny without any need for further examination. My plan for this post is to go outside the box for a bit and focus less on what I have to say, and let some photos do the talking for me. So, without further ado, I present to you a small gallery of some of my favorite quotes from the Seniors of the Hyde Park High School class of 1972.

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Back to Busing

After a short break digitizing materials related to the Cocoanut Grove fire, I am not back to digitizing materials on the desegregation of the Boston Public Schools. I started scanning yearbooks from the Hyde Park High School records (one of the schools where forced busing occurred) between 1973 and 1980. The reasoning behind this is simple: we are trying to show the change in the racial composition of the student body before busing and a few years after the implementation of busing.

The 1975 yearbook is one that has stood out the most so far. The 1974-1975 school year marked the beginning of forced busing in city’s public schools. There are two photographs in this yearbook that show police presence around the students. I am not sure if these were used already in the Omeka site for the digitization class, but these would make for a great addition for someone’s exhibit.

I just finished scanning the 1976 yearbook this past week, and I am now moving on to digitizing some images from the Mayor Kevin H. White records. I have to admit that I enjoy working with audiovisual materials over textual materials, so I am really looking forward to working on this. At the moment I am going through some of the negatives that another intern recently processed and looking for interesting folders for scanning. I noticed that there is a folder of Mayor Kevin H. White posing for photographs with the cast of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Although I have not yet looked at the negatives in that folder, I am optimistic that it is definitely worth scanning! More updates on this to come!

A Brief Update on Medical Records

I mentioned in my last blog post that I began digitizing materials related to the Cocoanut Grove Night Club fire in 1942. Some of these materials are medical records from the Boston City Hospital collection, which the city lawyers needed to look at. The reasoning behind this is straightforward; there are patient medical records in the files which may need to be redacted or kept closed in accordance with HIPAA regulations.

After consulting with the lawyers, Marta informed me that we can not only keep the records open, but we can post the documents on Boston City Archive’s digital repository without any redaction of information. There are two main reasons behind this. First is the age of the documents (most are from 1942 or 1943) and second that it is unlikely that the families still live at the listed addresses. The lists of the deceased also appear in several local newspapers, so their names are already out in the public.

I am excited that we got the go ahead to post the materials, there is a lot of good information about the victims and their stay in the Boston City Hospital. My goal now is to finish up the metadata so they can get posted!

Prioritizing: A Detour from Digitizing Desegregation

This is a priority right now. I am hearing this phrase more and more as I continue to gain experience in the archival field. You may think that you are there to do one specific task, but sometimes circumstances arise that cause you to veer away from your original responsibility and focus on a new, more urgent task. This is the situation I find myself in currently; desegregation takes a back seat for now while materials on the Cocoanut Grove fire come to the forefront. This detour came about when Marta Crilly informed me that a Cocoanut Grove fire coalition group planned to visit the BCA sometime next week, and they needed to get a head start on digitizing materials.

The Cocoanut Grove fire is a well-known tragedy in the history of Boston which claimed the lives of almost 500 people in November of 1942, making it the deadliest known nightclub fire in the world. The Boston City Archives has three collections which contain material about the fire: the Boston City Hospital collection, the Law Department records, and the William Arthur Reilly collection. The materials are fascinating, with items ranging from death certificates to samples of the fabric that caught ablaze. The Boston City Hospital (BCH) items alone help set the stage for the modern treatment of burn victims in hospitals, while the materials from the Law Department put in place new fire and safety codes for the city: both of which were adopted nationwide.

Despite this, there are serious ethical concerns about making the material available to the public at this time. The most glaring issues come from the BCH, where patient names, addresses, telephone numbers, and medical records are listed on many of the documents. In addition, much of the literature explaining the treatment of burn victims is under copyright, and cannot be placed on the BCA website. In the Law Department, personal information appears in the form of real estate evaluations, insurance forms, and, most notably, the death certificates. One possibility is to redact all names and addresses of patients who survived and may still be alive, but until the legal side of this is figured out, the digitizing I am doing is limited to documents without names or personal information on them.

I continue to learn more about how archives operate each day of my internship, and some of the challenges they face. Prioritizing tasks is only one facet of this, but I welcome this short-term change of direction for me. I think that a break from the norm is never a bad thing, especially when the material is so interesting!