Category: CCEPS

Hello!
Time grows short and my summer CCEPS projects edge closer to completion. It has been a very productive and satisfying week working with the Finkle maps and blueprints — pieces from all states but California have been organized into folders and their data entered into Archivists’ Toolkit. Now I am slowly distributing the giant California pile into smaller piles around the room. I have been trying to stick to my inventory categories in deciding where to place the items, but in many cases I have seen new patterns emerge in the papers themselves that have led me to rename an existing inventory entry or regroup items according to different criteria as I go.

To accommodate my many California piles I have had to take advantage of every available surface, and have also improvised several new flat areas using the office chairs-

Hello!
This week I finally have some end results that I can share – the Padua Hills Theatre Collection is now uploaded to the CCDL’s City of Claremont History Collection page! You can search for ‘Mexican Players’ or ‘Padua Hills’ and the playbills and fliers will come up along with a few postcards and photographs. Please visit and explore. It was difficult choosing which pieces to digitize, but I think I have a good selection that represents the large span of time, and you can see the lettering and design element changes corresponding to larger cultural design shifts over the decades.

After uploading the Padua Hills material, I returned to the 24 folders of Finkle papers, and began sorting material according to state (with moving help from the Special Collections staff – thanks, Ayat, Tanya, and Lisa!). Now I have the CCEPS room tables covered with piles of maps and blueprints, with California’s pile being the highest by far. I’ll look forward to continuing with this next week, when I will have to come up with a more comprehensive and detailed plan to refine the collection sorting even further. It will be very satisfying and wonderful to get these into a workable order!

I have been taking more photos as I sort through the piles this time – many of the blueprints are striking as works of industrial engineering art, although (to me) incomprehensible as work plans. And some of the maps are just stunning. I’m including my favorites below, as well as my favorite placename – Get There Ditch, in Boulder County, Colorado.

Hello! This week feels like it went by very fast, probably because I fit a lot of different steps of the archival process into just a few days. The Padua Hills Theatre Collection is now well on its way to digitized completion!

The first accomplishment of the week was creating a finding aid in Archivists’ Toolkit, which was even more gratifying when I got to see a copy printed out for proofreading. I also got started with scanning, beginning with some of the photos and postcards featuring images of the theater and the Mexican Players and then moving on to the advertisement fliers. Then we went over metadata entry for items as they will be cataloged in the City of Claremont History Collection at the Claremont Colleges Digital Library. I took a lot of notes on what information to put where, and with the help of a few templates I was able to get a majority of the fliers and their metadata uploaded on Thursday. Next week I will get finish with the fliers and also get the playbills and newsletters scanned and uploaded.

Many of the steps will have to be revisited when I finally have a completed folder count and numbering system in place, and then I will add the final numbers into each record on both Archivists’ Toolkit and the metadata fields in the digitized records. I have been hesitant to move forward with the numbering part until we know exactly how many additional newsletters from Carpe Diem we will end up with. There are 23 total that could be coming in, which could be divided into several folders depending on the years represented. It will just be easier to wait for the items to be in hand than to build around them, but it is very unsatisfying to leave information out of all the cataloging entries knowing that I will have to go back through every one later! Especially since I only have about three weeks left to work, and a lot of Finkle maps to move around!

Hello! I had a very productive week on the Finkle Papers and the Padua Hills collection, with a few good surprises to make it even sweeter. While the Finkle Papers project only moved ahead on the planning side of things, I was able to begin physically re-housing the Padua Hills material into new folders and removing the many duplicate copies of some of the playbills. The former arrangement had placed items in folders organized by theatrical season, so that even if a folder contained only two fliers from July 1949, the folder – and the fliers – were labeled “1948-49,” which became confusing when the fliers did not have printed years on them. I rearranged the item by the year the production actually took place so each piece will be easier to find. It was very satisfying to make real changes with results I could see!

I also had my first in-depth encounter with Archivists’ Toolkit, and hope I will be able to keep my children and siblings straight when I get into it for real with my big plans.

And now for some nice surprises!
A bookseller at Carpe Diem in Walnut has some copies of Padua Hills News Notes she said she would be willing to exchange for some of the extra Padua Hills materials we will be weeding out, and it sounds like they will be a nice addition to the collection with some missing years represented.

Additionally, there was another file here in Special Collections containing many more items relating to Padua Hills, including clippings, printed brochures, and several more advertisement fliers including one from 1938 – the earliest in the collection – and two larger lobby card-sized items. Lisa Crane helped me come up with an additional series to my completed arrangement that could accommodate the added material, and I was able to complete re-housing the entire contents of the box with the exception of the News Notes, which will wait until we see what comes in from the bookseller.

I was also glad to find in the file a copy of a  very good 1995 article by historian Matt Garcia about the Mexican Players, which has proved very enlightening and helpful in writing the biographical/historical context for the finding aid –“‘Just Put on That Padua Hills Smile”: The Mexican Players and the Padua Hills Theatre, 1931-1974″. California History 74 (3): 244-261. I recommend it to anyone interested in the theatre and local history.

Unfortunately, I still have not come across any clues about the identity of the person who created the collection, but I suppose something could still turn up.

Next week I will continue working on the description for the collection to be added to the finding aids for both collections, and will also get back into Archivists’ Toolkit to practice navigating and updating the pages for Finkle. Until then, a happy Fourth of July holiday to all.

Hello again! This week, I delved into the details of Fred C. Finkle’s professional life to create a new biography for the finding aid, researched place names to identify untitled maps and blueprints, and cracked open the box containing my next project – playbills and newsletters for the Padua Hills Theatre, featuring productions by the Mexican Players. Reading the CCEPS processing manual and description templates got me thinking and plotting my strategy for organizing these collections – I foresee some challenges, but

First, thanks to Special Collections Librarian emerita Jean Beckner for locating several folders with Finkle-related clippings and notes. One particularly delightful factoid I was pleased to learn is that Fred Finkle built a Finkle Building in downtown Los Angeles to house his offices, and which was also home to the Hotel Snow (see photo). He also built several apartment buildings, including the Finkle Arms at 9th and Figueroa and Finkle Manor. What wonderful names!

Finkle’s reputation as an expert engineer and geologist is reflected in these stacks of disorganized blueprints; while working mainly for Edison Electric Co., Finkle designed and built seven hydroelectric projects while consulting for companies in Colorado, Oregon, and Washington, as well as other companies in Central and Southern California. The dates on the blueprints for these projects often overlap or run closely together, evidence his skills were widely respected and in high demand.

Finkle started his own consulting firm in 1911 in Los Angeles, which he continued until his death in 1949, and served as an expert witness in many trials litigating water rights and supply issues. He was also an outspoken opponent of several high profile water projects he determined to be defective or impracticable, including the poorly designed and constructed  St. Francis Dam (a Mulholland venture) which Finkle condemned four years before its catastrophic failure resulting in the loss of 631 lives and $20 million in property.

The folders also revealed several past inventories of Finkle’s maps and
blueprints; there is one typewritten
copy, a handwritten copy on yellow legal paper, and a printed copy that
looks like it was made on a computer from the 1980s or early 1990s. It
seems plenty of people looked at the papers, but they still were put
back into the same folders in no particular order each time. I am sure organizing the papers seemed so daunting a task that it was easier to just put them away again, even if disorganized. I cannot really blame them!

I mentioned my next project – a small
collection of playbills, fliers, and newsletters for the Mexican Players at the Padua Hills
Theatre. Next week I hope to get closer to devising a schema to arrange and describe the material with the
CCEPS description template. I also checked out a 1961 book called Mexican Serenade: the Story of the Mexican Players and Padua Hills Theatre, written by Pauline B. Deuel and published by the Padua Institute.
 
Below is a playbill from 1943 and a newsletter from 1940 – the hand drawn images and lettering are very charming. I also include a photo of Fred C. Finkle’s Finkle Building – one of several structures bearing his name that have sadly been demolished – it seems the apartment buildings are gone, too. (Photo LAPL)

So as it would turn out, digitizing media is really, really handy. For
one thing, it allows you to search for terms such as “Shakespeare”
across hundreds of archived items at once, with nearly instantaneous
results. This is particularly handy, for example, if you want to get
that broader picture I was talking about in my last post. Because the
Claremont Colleges Digital Library (CCDL) has archived many letters,
playbills, programs, photographs and even sheet music from the
Philbrick Collection and beyond, the term “Shakespeare” came up quite
frequently. It was through this simple search that I found out about
David Garrick, Sarah Siddons, and William Poel.

For one thing, these names did not appear very often in the Philbrick Collection, specifically in the corner of the massive collection in which I was digging. There are many subseries – to use the archivist’s term – within the broader picture. After looking in metadata (the data about the item, such as its name, medium, date, where it is shelved) about many Henry Irving and Ellen Terry items, I found other useful tags that led me to the Dr. Walter Lindley Scrapbooks, and the Autograph Letter series within the Philbrick. Dr. Walter Lindley, as it would turn out, was a resident of Los Angeles and physician at the turn of the 20th century who had a penchant for collection items about Shakespeare, as well as travel and California health. The entire collection is on view on CCDL if you are curious!

As it would turn out, Lindley has not only David Garrick’s will and testament, but plenty of newspaper clippings, programs and illustrations about Garrick’s role as a Shakespearean actor in the mid-18th century. It was particularly exciting to open up a box and find an enormous ribbon-bound collection of papers written in some 400 year old lawyer’s hand, transcribing the will and testament of David Garrick, who I was about to learn was the big name in reviving Shakespeare. But it was even more thrilling to keep going, and to find folders upon folders of newspaper clippings that described a “Shakespeare Jubilee” and poetry mourning the loss of a bard (Garrick) as great and wonderful as the Bard himself!

My hypothesis, it seemed, continued to be correct: the collections here focus on people, networks of people and correspondences. The items here documenting their accomplishments throughout their life. But since part of each person’s achievements in life included performing Shakespeare, then the history of Shakespearean performance was present, too! This meant that the exhibit would focus around these people, and their roles as performers that revived Shakespeare from century to century.