Kenneth Spencer Research Library

Check the blog each Friday for a new “That’s Distinctive!” post. I created the series because I genuinely believe there is something in our collections for everyone, whether you’re writing a paper or just want to have a look. “That’s Distinctive!” will provide a more lighthearted glimpse into the diverse and unique materials at Spencer – including items that many people may not realize the library holds. If you have suggested topics for a future item feature or questions about the collections, feel free to leave a comment at the bottom of this page.

This week on That’s Distinctive! we celebrate Women’s History Month. As described on the Library of Congress’s website on the topic,

“Women’s History Month had its origins as a national celebration in 1981 when Congress passed Pub. L. 97-28 which authorized and requested the President to proclaim the week beginning March 7, 1982, as ‘Women’s History Week’…Between 1988 and 1994, Congress passed additional resolutions requesting and authorizing the President to proclaim March of each year as Women’s History Month. Since 1995, presidents have issued a series of annual proclamations designating the month of March as ‘Women’s History Month.’ These proclamations celebrate the contributions women have made to the United States and recognize the specific achievements women have made over the course of American history in a variety of fields.”

The National Women’s History Alliance designates a yearly theme for Women’s History Month. The 2023 theme is “Celebrating Women Who Tell Our Stories.”

The item I chose to highlight this week is the Constitution of the Woman Suffrage Association of New Jersey. The constitution is believed to have been released around 1898. It belongs to the Gerritsen Women’s History Collection of Aletta H. Jacobs, a diverse collection of women’s archival materials and feminist records covering fifteen languages and over 4,700 volumes. Acquired by the John Crerar Library of Chicago in 1903, the Gerritsen Collection was subsequently sold to the University of Kansas in 1954. It has been digitized and is now widely available through libraries’ database subscriptions. The Gerritsen Collection is part of the Howey Collection within Special Collections at Spencer.

According to History, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony founded a group called the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) in 1869. They began to fight for a universal-suffrage amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The women’s suffrage movement was a “decades-long fight to win the right to vote for women in the United States. It took activists and reformers nearly 100 years to win that right, and the campaign was not easy: Disagreements over strategy threatened to cripple the movement more than once. But on August 18, 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution was finally ratified, enfranchising all American women and declaring for the first time that they, like men, deserve all the rights and responsibilities of citizenship.” Spencer Research Library houses many other items that document women’s history and their fight for liberation and equality. Items can be found through our finding aids and the KU Libraries online catalog.

Tiffany McIntosh
Public Services

Check the blog each Friday for a new “That’s Distinctive!” post. I created the series because I genuinely believe there is something in our collections for everyone, whether you’re writing a paper or just want to have a look. “That’s Distinctive!” will provide a more lighthearted glimpse into the diverse and unique materials at Spencer – including items that many people may not realize the library holds. If you have suggested topics for a future item feature or questions about the collections, feel free to leave a comment at the bottom of this page.

This week on That’s Distinctive! we are highlighting some animation stills from the John C. Tibbetts collection housed here at the library. The collection – which spans 18 boxes and two oversize folders – contains Hollywood press kits from various movies released between 1978 and 2004. The kits generally consist of production information, biographical information on the actors, story information, and press release information. Most kits contain some form of visual materials, such as stills, slides, or digital press kits; the digital files are on CD-ROM and contain a variety of items including images, video clips, and production information. The collection includes movies like Back to the Future, A Bug’s Life, Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, and Jeepers Creepers.

Dr. Tibbets, a now retired professor with KU’s Department of Film and Media Studies, donated the collection to Spencer in 2010. Tibbetts worked as a full-time broadcaster from 1980 to 1996. He hosted his own television show in Kansas City, Missouri, and worked as an Arts and Entertainment Editor and Producer for a variety of radio and television outlets, including KCTV (Kansas City’s CBS affiliate), KMBC Radio, and KXTR-FM Radio. During that time, he also contributed many broadcast stories about musicians, painters, writers, and filmmakers to CBS Television, the Christian Science Monitor Radio Network, Voice of America, and National Public Radio. He has produced two radio series about music, The World of Robert Schumann and Piano Portraits.

While there are a wide range of films in the collection, this week we are sharing stills from the 2000 animated movie Dinosaur. The movie, which was released May 19, 2000, follows Aladar, an iguanodon, and his family of prehistoric lemurs as they join a herd of dinosaurs heading to the safety of the nesting grounds after a meteor strike. The movie portrays the hardship and happiness that comes along through Aladar’s life and teaches that perseverance can go a long way. The collection includes both stills and a press kit with production notes on the film.

The John C. Tibbetts collection, along with all items in the library, can be viewed in the Reading Room from 10am to 4pm Monday through Friday. The library is open to the public and welcomes researchers of all types.

Tiffany McIntosh
Public Services

The Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH) founded the annual February celebration of Black History in 1926 and identified Black Resistance as the theme for 2023.

From Spencer’s African American Experience Collections, I selected the following items to highlight how Black Resistance is an integral part of Kansas history.

With their baby, William, Mr. David and Mrs. Rebecca (Brooks) Harvey escaped from chattel slavery in Van Buren, Arkansas, by joining a unit of Union soldiers who were going to Kansas. Although the family experienced being separated by accident for two months, they successfully reunited in Lawrence, Kansas, and found employment as tenant farmers on land owned by the state’s Douglas County Sheriff. Within five years, the family saved enough money to buy fifteen acres of land in Douglas County. There they built a home and established their farm. Eventually their farm covered more than two hundred acres.

Kansas is where the family’s four children grew up. William attended business school before spending the remainder of his life working on his family’s farm. Sherman graduated from the University of Kansas in 1889; he then taught in Lawrence public schools and later earned a law degree from KU. Frederick established a medical practice in Kansas City, Kansas, after earning his medical degree from Meharry Medical School in Nashville, Tennessee. And, Edward graduated from KU, worked in Washington, D.C. as a clerk for Congressman J. D. Bowersock, and retired to the family farm while serving as an active leader in Douglas County farm organizations and other civic other civic groups.

In 1866, the 3rd Annual Convention of Colored Men convened in Lawrence, Kansas, as citizens and taxpayers to advocate for their civil rights, i.e. their right to vote and to serve in the state militia and on juries. The assembled men concluded:      

“We are among you. Here we must remain. We must be a constant trouble in the State until it extends to us equal and exact justice.”

Unwilling to be denied better economic and political opportunities, African Americans like the Saddler family shown below migrated from Kentucky, Tennessee, and throughout the nation to Nicodemus in Graham County, Kansas, the nation’s first African American town west of the Mississippi River.

George Williams – the son of Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Williams, a prominent farm family in Pratt County, Kansas – filed a racial discrimination lawsuit against the railroad after he was denied access to a train after presenting his ticket to the conductor. Agreeing with a lower court’s findings, the Kansas Supreme Court ruled in 1913 that the train conductor’s action was due to an honest misunderstanding, not racial discrimination. See Williams v. Chicago, R.I. & P. RY. Co. ET AL., 90 Kan. 478, 1913.

At the 1920 Kaw Valley Convention of the African American Baptist Church in Bonner Springs, Kansas, the Women’s Home and Foreign Mission Society delivered a written protest against a highly visible “For Whites Only” sign displayed in “a public place of business”:

“This unsightly inscription is one of the first things that greets the eyes of every self respecting citizen which is a disgrace to the good name of Kansas and its splendid citizenship.”

Deborah Dandridge
Field Archivist/Curator, African American Experience Collections
Kansas Collection

Check the blog each Friday for a new “That’s Distinctive!” post. I created the series because I genuinely believe there is something in our collections for everyone, whether you’re writing a paper or just want to have a look. “That’s Distinctive!” will provide a more lighthearted glimpse into the diverse and unique materials at Spencer – including items that many people may not realize the library holds. If you have suggested topics for a future item feature or questions about the collections, feel free to leave a comment at the bottom of this page.

This week we celebrate National Trading Card Day! It happens to be today, February 24th. According to National Today, trading cards (which are commonly made of cardboard or thick paper) originated in the late nineteenth century. Trading cards have a rich history and come with a variety of images depicting people, places, and things (real and fictional). Debuting in the 1860s, baseball cards have become the most popular among sports cards. Even today, baseball cards hold a high resale value and remain popular among people of all ages.

Coming from the Herd Family Papers, Spencer has trading cards that date to around 1962. The collection spans 1817-2013 and offers a wide array of items that members of the Herd family passed down over the years. An inventory of the collection – which includes 34 boxes – can be found in our finding aids.

The trading cards included highlight players from a range of popular teams along with batting records for the previous year. The cards, which were printed by Post, were printed on the backs of cereal boxes to help consumers limit costs of having to buy additional packs of cards. The cards themselves had information on the fronts with the backs being plain grey cardboard. Though they changed in format over the years, Post trading cards were included with cereal boxes from 1960 to 2003. More information on Post trading cards can be found on the Professional Sports Authenticator (PSA) website and the Love to Know website.

Tiffany McIntosh
Public Services

KU Libraries was awarded an implementation grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, under the Sustaining Cultural Heritage Collections program. The purpose of the grant is to act on the findings of environmental consultants from a planning grant under the same program, with the goal of improving the heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) system in collections storage areas of Spencer Research Library. The ultimate goal is to better preserve our collections while also finding ways to save energy.

While we have run into pandemic challenges, such as global shipping delays on key equipment, we are happy to report that the project is now in full-swing. Thirty-six heating units in the HVAC system that were identified as malfunctioning or underperforming are currently being replaced. Spencer Library’s HVAC system is largely still original to the building, which opened in 1968. The heating units are controlled pneumatically, which is not the standard today. Fewer and fewer HVAC technicians are trained to service pneumatic systems, so that when individual units break it is difficult and costly to fix them. This project upgrades the heating units to electrically-controlled, modern ones.

After walking the building with the contracted engineering firm, staff in Conservation Services covered collections storage shelving in areas near the heaters to be upgraded. Sometimes getting into the ceiling and removing equipment can result in emergent dust, so we wanted to preemptively protect the collections.

The contractors first removed ceiling tiles under the heating units to be upgraded in order to have the best clearance to de-install the old heaters and install the new.

The new heaters are currently being installed, with an engineering firm partnering with electricians to hook up the new heaters and update circuitry where necessary.

After the heaters are installed, we will conduct testing and balancing to confirm that air is flowing and the heaters functioning properly. We will continue to monitor the temperature and relative humidity in collections areas long-term to ensure that the equipment properly controls the environment in collection spaces.

Whitney Baker
Head, Conservation Services
KU Libraries

Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this blog post do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities. “Improving Energy Efficiency in Collection Storage in Spencer Research Library” has been made possible by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities: Sustaining Cultural Heritage Collections.