Accessing Accessions

Now that encoding is complete and clean-up/quality control well underway, members of the Adams Papers slip file staff have been working on enriching the information in the database in a variety of ways. One way is by providing links to the many other Adams resources already available online. I recently added links in the Accessions Database to collection guides online at the MHS website.

The papers described in the slip file represent all known Adams documents held by institutions around the world. Included are Adams-related items in many different collections at the MHS that have come to us over the years. In the Accessions Database, these documents are listed by accession number, along with the name of the collection in which they can be found. So, for example, if a collection of John Doe papers was given to the MHS, and those papers contained some letters from, say, Abigail Adams to Mrs. Doe, each Adams letter would be assigned a unique number in the Accessions Database, and the name "John Doe papers" would appear alongside those numbers.

Since they were acquired, guides to many of our collections have been encoded and posted on our website. (We currently have over 330 guides to manuscript collections online.) My task consisted of searching the Accessions Database for MHS collections with online guides and adding links to those entries. This information can now be pulled into the Adams Papers catalog. When an individual record is retrieved, a sidebar with the heading "More about this slip" includes the name of the institution holding that item and, if that institution is the MHS, a handy-dandy link to the relevant online guide. Adams Papers editors can then use the guide to pinpoint an item's specific location, down to box and folder.

For those papers in collections without online guides, I added the manuscript call number to the notes field, just to make it a little easier to track down an item in our stacks.

Now, this job turned out to be fairly challenging because: 1) many collection names have changed over the years, 2) Adams editors often abbreviated the names they were familiar with, and 3) collections can have very similar names. (Just by way of illustration, the MHS holds separate collections called: the Henry Cabot Lodge collection, the Henry Cabot Lodge papers, the Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. papers, and the Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. papers II!) Not having the time to search through so many boxes by hand, I did the best I could to identify which items belonged to which collections. If a specific author or recipient wasn't listed in a catalog record or collection guide, I used other clues for confirmation, like bulk dates, subject headings, or acquisition, as well as the information on the slip itself.

And so we press on....

Conjectural Dates

Assigning the document types concluded about a week ago. The last document type tackled was JQA's poems, which were many. Some late decisions were made as we did this; the original slips for some document types - like JQA's poems - were filed in two ways: both chronologically and alphabetically. In the digital control file, there is no need for this kind of dual-classification. The headings were brought over verbatim and we realized that we could get rid of one altogether and rename the other so that the document type, for JQA's poetry, reads just simply "JQA-Poems, Hymns, Prayers, &c." You can see the "before" of this in the image below in the "Document Types & Names" post from 11 March 2011.

We'll continue to fine tune some of the Document Types as we go along but it feels great to have that part of the paper slips behind us. The web developer added to the search feature a way to narrow your search to each Document Type, so this is an added way of getting at the information which you will enjoy once it is rolled out.

For now, we're working through the conjectural dates of which there are 6,338 records. What this entails is reviewing each entry to make sure that the most up-to-date and accurate information is listed in the date field. Dates were reviewed in Level 1 encoding along with many other things. Unfortunately, some of the dates that needed updating based on the proofing were skipped and now it falls on my shoulders to review the records, fixing them up right. There are other reasons why the dates came over from the XML but won't get into for fear of seeming too defensive. It's a combination, I think, of human and technological reasons though. I've gone through 1,900 as of this post so while it doesn't seem like I'm making progress I am. It feels very "corporate" as I'm moving papers from one pile into another.

The conjectural dates exist for a number of reasons including undated papers, mis-dated papers, etc. For these items the ace staff of the Adams Papers do their level best to assign as accurate a date as possible based on research, expertise, etc. Over the generations of editorial staff, some slips have gone through several updates and now, now is the time for correcting it all so that when you get access to it you can be confident you're looking at great, solid, right information.

There are not 6,338 errors, mind you, and fortunately I do go through pages at a time where everything is synced up.

Document Types & Names

At the moment, we are working on entering "Document Types" into the database. This is a hybrid part of the project where we are working both with the slips and interface. See images below. We have completed JA's document types and are working now on JQA. I skipped AA as I couldn't find her slips.














At the same time, the good people in the Adams papers are doing preliminary work on cleaning up the names database. This involved printing out the entire list of names and looking particularly at the Adamses, Smiths, etc. for duplicates and then seeing which can be merged or which can be better identified. Of course our by now classic example is Thomas Baker Johnson who had at least three entries (johnson-t-b; johnson-thomas-b; and johnson-thomas-baker). They have all been fixed in that the attributes are all "johnson-thomas-baker" now. For now, "Johnson, T. B." and "Johnson, Thomas B." still appear in the drop down list of names when searching slips as these forms of his name do appear on the physical slips. However if one were to select these options they would get a return of 0 results. Perhaps it will be worth it to remove them altogether?

I Killed John Quincy Adams, or, I was only doing my job

In September 2010, while performing encoding level 2 tasks on reel 33 (covering the years 1846-1851) I killed John Quincy Adams. I was only doing my job! His passing was solemnly marked with a beer after work. We remember JQA in part for his voluminous diaries and correspondence; his poetry; and his service to the United States. This post will look at some milestones and metrics including JQA's first letters to his parents and wife and the last letters he sent and received. Please keep in mind it relates only to those items present in the Adams Control File; and some of the numbers might change a bit as we clean up the data.

John Quincy Adams was born on 11 July 1767. Today, 23 February, is the anniversary of his death, 163 years ago in 1848.

The first letter he wrote held in the Adams Family Papers is to his cousin Elizabeth Cranch (Mrs. Jacob P. Norton), circa 1773.

The first letter to his father, John Adams, dates to 13 October 1774. The first letter to his mother Abigail Adams was written from Paris on 12 April 1778. The first letter JQA sent to his future wife Louisa Catherine Johnson (LCA) was from The Hague on 2 June 1796. In all, the MHS has (or knows about) 619 letters from JQA to LCA; and there were 451 the other way, from LCA to JQA.

The first letter JQA received was from his father, written from Philadelphia on 18 April 1776. The first letter JQA received from his mother was written from Braintree on 21 January 1781. The first letter JQA received from Louisa Catherine Johnson was from London, dated 4 July 1796: America's 20th birthday. In all, JQA received 18,475 letters.

His last dated poem was attributed to ca. 21 February 1848 as is titled "In days of yore the Poets pen ...." This poem was eventually published in Poems (New York, 1848, p. 108) under title of "Written in an Album." Indeed, his last dated documents seemed to have all been poetry.

The last letter he received whilst alive was a two page letter on 13 February 1848, from Willis Baldwin of Monroe Co., N. Y. JQA did receive one letter following his death, a four pager dated 29 February 1848 from Boston, co-authored by Edward Brooks and Dr. John Bigelow.

The last letters he is known to have sent were on 4 and 6 February 1848. On 4 February he sent a 1 page letter to Alexander Baring, the Lord Ashburton, from Washington; this is a letterbook copy. On 6 February, he sent a 1 page letter to Julia Raymond which included the poem "Fair Lady! when at thy request These fingers trace my name..."

The original slip files were scanned onto 42 "reels." JQA's attribute "adams-john-quincy1767" appears as an author, recipient or in the title field 47,581 times in 40 of the reels. He does not appear to be in reels 37 (the year 1863) and 40 (the years 1867-1870). This averages out to 1189.525 times his attribute appears per reel in one of the aforementioned fields.

JQA's initials - which can appear nearly anywhere, any number of times in a single record - appears 57,949 times in all 42 reels, or an average of 1379.7380952380952380952380952381 times per reel.

Supporting Databases, Part 2

A project as large and complicated as the Adams Papers slip file conversion requires vast amounts of documentation to run smoothly. On January 10, Peter Steinberg wrote about the People and Places databases--two of the supporting databases we've used to ensure our data is consistent, to reproduce the information currently available to Adams Papers editors, and to enhance the finished product. In addition to the People and Places databases, we've built Institutions and Accessions databases to track the physical locations of individual items in the catalog.

The Institutions database lists all institutions known to hold Adams family manuscripts. As you can imagine, it's a very diverse group of libraries, historical societies, archives, museums, and other institutions. In addition to the MHS, Adams family papers can be found at the Adams National Historic Park, the Boston Athenaeum, Harvard University, Yale University, the American Philosophical Society, the Library of Congress, the National Archives, the Public Record Office of the UK National Archives, the Nationaal Archief in the Hague, and many, many other places. Some institutions hold a large number of Adams-related manuscripts, others only a few.

I spent some time recently adding links in the database to each institution's website, which turned out to be both more challenging and more interesting that I expected. Many institutions have changed names and/or locations since the Adams Papers editorial project began decades ago, so finding the right URL sometimes took a little digging. Some of these changes are well known: for example, the British Library split from the British Museum in the 1970s. But did you know that the Hagley Museum and Library in Wilmington, De., used to be called the Eleutherian Mills Historical Library? Mystic Seaport (Mystic, Conn.) was founded as the Marine Historical Association; the Historical Society of Washington, D.C., was the Columbia Historical Society; the New Bedford Whaling Museum was the Kendall Whaling Museum; and the Cincinnati Historical Society was the Historical and Philosophical Society of Ohio.

The Adamses were a well-traveled family, so many international institutions hold Adams-related documents, including the Archives du Ministere des Affaires Etrangeres (Paris), Koninklijk Huisarchief (the Hague), Arkhiv vneshnei politiki Rossii (Moscow), and Kungliga Biblioteket (Stockholm). Obviously, these names were even trickier!

This URL search gave me a chance to look at the wide variety of websites institutions use to showcase their collections. Many universities, of course, have excellent sites, but other institutions surprised me. I found the British Library website confusing and difficult to use, but some small organizations, like the Connecticut Historical Society and the Oklahoma Historical Society, have very attractive and user-friendly websites.

The Accessions database complements the Institutions database by allowing Adams editors to search for the locations of specific items by accession code and item number, rather than by institution. One of our goals with these supporting databases has been to combine all the editors' documentation (now housed in several separate binders in the Adams Papers offices) into a more efficient one-stop shop. Links to online resources provide some added value that has been missing from the traditional paper file.