Litterst Dixon Collection, Old Vault Letters - Elaine Patton, 4/29/2013

Today I entered metadata into ContentDM for photos from the Litterst Dixon Collection MSS1248. Several of the photos had two entries (one in each of the two databases/spreadsheets associated with the collection), but they generally supplemented each other. A couple initially seemed to have conflicts but were easily resolves: e.g., a building was said in one to be at Main and Franklin while the other said Main and Travis. Both street sets frame the same block, so it wasn't the conflict it initially seemed to be.

Neat photos! I can't get over how...small Houston appears to be/is in this one:

MSS1248-3652

For comparison, a modern picture with 2 of the recognizable buildings pointed out (the Gulf Building, now JP Morgan Chase Building, just right of center (orange arrow below), and the domed Courthouse, at left above (green arrow below):

What was the tallest (apparently) building on the skyline is dwarfed and scarcely stands out.

Also of note: a photo of people at Luna Park, an amusement park that opened in 1924 (nowadays part of its property is occupied by I-10 and I-45), and based on fashion alone, I would have never guessed the picture was taken in 1925.

MSS1248-2988 (cropped)

Today's Old Vault Letters: MSS0113-b01f12-08, -b01f15-01, and -b01f15-05. All were pretty clearly written and there weren't any particularly mysterious bits, save for a name here and there, though there are a few tears that obscure some words in the second two. The first letter is largely one big run-on listing of properties being transferred with very little in the way of punctuation, either between individual lots (e.g. ...one two three four six eleven...) or to connect numbers like 'fifty-five.' Whew. Easy to read and write, but also easy to lose your place.

Old Vault Letters, Michelle Godfrey - April 24, 2013

This week, I worked on MSS0113-b01f13-01, -b01f15-02 , and -b01f15-03.

The first letter contained a long list of properties that were sold for the incredibly low price of only one dollar.  It got a bit messy keeping up with all the block and lot numbers. The writer had an odd way of writing the letter ‘d’ and it could be different at the beginning or end of the word.
A word ending in ‘d’ would look like this,

and

He also had the tendency to split a word apart. Combining the two patterns made some words appear like this,

discribed[?]

declare

The writer of the second letter did not seem to have a very steady hand and had several spelling errors. To make matters worse, there were many places marked to insert omitted words. It looks like this should have been the draft of the letter rather than the final version.

The final document  was written in 1830 and had a few condition problems but not so much that it distracted from the letter. The quality was outstanding especially when compared to the previous two letters. The writer clearly had excellent writing skills and it must have been a delight for her "Dear Parents" to receive a letter from her.

Old Vault Letters, Franklin Beauty School - Elaine Patton, 4/22/13

Finished box 53 (photos 1091-1119) of Franklin Beauty School photos. There was an even larger portion of color group photos in this set (as opposed to black and white headshots). One photo had a well-worn index card stapled to it. The back of the photo and the index card had statistics/pricing/? info for various services, from nails to pin curl sets to permanent color.

I reviewed a couple of Michelle's letters, MSS0113-B01f18-01 and -b01f18-02. I wasn't able to add much, though thankfully Michelle did get most of it. Same problem: itemized bill = challenge. I tried to research what some of the recurring terms/abbreviations were, but no luck.

I also transcribed MSS0113-b01f08-01 and -b01f22-01.

The first is a handwritten letter in Spanish, followed on the second page by a typewritten translation. I don't speak Spanish, but the handwriting was largely clearly enough to transcribe, and Google Translate was able to help me get the right word in a few places. (A few others I'm either reading wrong or have fallen out of use in the language, as I wasn't able to find anything to verify/correct them, e.g. the opening word "obsequiandy." Or so it looks like, anyway: obsequiando is a word, but the last letter in the original doesn't look like an O.)

The second letter is apparently written by Andrew Jackson and is a horrible mess. The text is just messy and the lines tend to start angling downward in the last couple inches, which made it a little difficult in a few places to keep track of my place in reading. Some parts of it, though messy, just stand out as perfectly understandable; other parts I get hardly anything out of. It gets progressively messier as you read towards the end. Oh, and the page is a little wrinkled on the left side (torn in some places), which obscures parts of some letters, so there's also that.

As a sample:

Pretty sure this is "it would," but other times that's how he writes just lower-case Ts.

"is [received]," with the latter apparently being spelled rec'seved or ree'sived or thereabouts. Or maybe it actually is spelled received and it's just badly written.

"... I am sure about that ..." Note that the S in sure looks more like an L, as well as the similarity of the As and Os in "about" or "that."

In the middle: "administration" (I believe). Note how it rolls downwards and scrunches together in the last few letters, despite the availability of another inch or two of paper.

Sheet Music collection Mary sommerfeld - April 17,2013

Working on the 5th floor with the cabinets containing the sheet music I was able to work through  a total of 20 entries.
The excitement of the day was  tracking down the sheet music which should have been in the folder for  "The Lords of Discipline". When first opened I found the song "My First Taste of Texas" inside. In tracking that folder down I was greeted by a copy of Tanya Tucker's "Feel Right" instead. After retrieving Tanya's two folders labelled for this song, inside one was the "Lords of Discipline" - finally.

Two covers to share today, both have different but nice art work.

 

Old Vault Letters, Michelle Godfrey - April 17, 2013

This week, I continued with the group of letters Elaine worked on this Monday:  MSS0113-b01f16, -b01f19-01, -02, and -03. No trouble spots to note and the content was interesting. The letter written by the 9 year old girl was really sweet and she had a way of squeezing in the last few letters of a word just above the main part.

each

I have

The last letter was written on the stationary that contained the letterhead of the newspaper, The Telegram. I wondered why someone would write a personal letter on that stationary versus plain paper. In 1880, the annual subscription rate for the daily copies of The Telegram was a whopping $8.00! According to an online inflation calculator, in today’s money that works out to $187 per year, what a bargain.

Old Vault Letter, Franklin Beauty School

Today's letters: MSS0113-b01f16-01, -b01f19-01, -02, and -03. All were very on the legible end of things, though the first one got more challenging towards the end. The first letter also had some ink bleeding through from the opposite side of the page, and the paper itself looked very textured. The third letter (-b01f19-02) was very interesting in that it contained more misspellings than I've seen in other letters, and one section of it was written by a 9 year old girl to her cousins, "what ever your name may be." So cute! The final letter was actually a telegram (a long telegram) and supremely legible.

The Franklin Beauty School photos (Box 52, 996-1090) tossed out a few oddballs this time. Several enveloped in a row contained multiple photos each, all underexposed (I think underexposed-- not developed properly, in any event). The last 50-ish photographs deviated from official headshots to casual photos of people at the school at a lunch or party and otherwise mostly just hanging out.

Sheet Music Collection - CONTENTdm and SmartScore

Today I was able to completely apply metadata to 12 additional compound objects. I worked on creating additional midi files as well, but a lot of the sheet music is in such poor condition that it is difficult for the software to scan and retrieve discernible notes from the files. As such, I continue working on the more difficult pieces in hopes of creating midi files for these objects.

Sheet Nusic Collection, Mary Sommerfeld Aplril10,2013

Back after nissing a week.

Completed 18 entries (140 to 158) & added in two addtional rows.

This made a grand total of 20 rows for the day.

Of note - there were a few "Not in cabinet" items today.

Old Vault Letters, Michelle Godfrey - April10, 2013

Today's batch of letters were from MSS0113-B01f18-01 and -b01f18-02.

Our first item was fairly straightforward and had only a few names that were hard to decipher. The second item was in fair condition even with the ink bleed through from the reverse side. It was not so easy to read and understand because it was another itemized bill with abbreviations and dollar amounts written with fractions. There were also a few numbers thrown in vertically on the side of the document that did not seem to be subtotals or related to the item next to it.

(12 dollars, 37 and 1/2 cents)

Old Vault Letters, Michelle Godfrey - April 3, 2013

This week I switched off to review the Thomas Bagby Legal Documents that Elaine completed last week, which were from MSS113-b01f12-07, -b01f13-04, and -b01f13-05. Fortunately, the documents were in decent condition and easy to read. No problems to report and I made only a few minor changes.

Old Vault Letters, Franklin Beauty School - Elaine Patton, 4/1/2013

This week I reviewed Michelle's letters from last week, MSS113-b01f13-02, -03, and -b01f17-03. I was able to fill in or confirm words in a few places, though I too had trouble with the names in the first document and the items listed in the final one (I muddied the waters a little by suggesting alternate words here and there, but none that I can be absolutely certain of, unfortunately.) The last document was rather blotchy and apparently written in pencil so the writing was pale; I took it over to Photoshop and played with the contrast/levels/saturation, which did make it overall more readable, but didn't really help to elucidate any of the questionable areas.

I recorded information from box 51 of the Franklin Beauty School photos. Nothing really perplexing or unusual in this set, though there was a long streak of photos without any names or other information recorded. C'est la vie. Two or three of the photos are actually in kind of poor shape currently and are stained/faded/washed out. One picture had actually had a bit of the top cut off after it had been labeled, so only the woman's last name remains.

A discovered benefit of labels firmly written on the photos with a ball-point pen: even when the ink has rubbed off, the impression of the words remain.