Corey Fitzpatrick Blog #1: A Contract Job Handling the FDA’s Artifacts

For the last few months, I have worked as a contractor at the History Office at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

As stated on its website, the mission of the FDA History Office is to increase knowledge of the history and activities of the FDA and its predecessor, the Bureau of Chemistry of the U. S. Department of Agriculture. In general, the History Office’s activities involve the research of the historical background of the agency’s legislative initiatives, the documentation of oral history interviews and museum objects illustrating the history of the agency, and the promotion of an accurate account within the agency and to the public, while meant to increase an informed understanding of the FDA's purpose and function.

During the summer of 2021, I began volunteering at the FDA History Office, using my video editing background to create the video elements of upcoming historical exhibits at FDA’s White Oak campus. Before my volunteer work, I (as I’m sure as many others) had little understanding of the historical background of the FDA and how many facets of everyday life it regulates. It was only later in the summer that I was approached by two of the agency’s historians, Dr. John Swann, who specializes in the history of drugs, biologics, and their regulation, and Dr. Vanessa Burrows, who specializes in the history of medicine and public health, with a focus on medical consumerism and regulatory policy, and asked if I was interested in a contract job involving the artifact collection of the History Office. 

Since its founding, the FDA History Office has collected artifacts that physically represent the story of the agency's history. These artifacts, which total several thousand individual items, are meant to illustrate the products that the various offices within the FDA regulate. Examples of the kinds of artifacts can be seen on display in the hallways of the White Oak campus. The collection also includes about 4000 reference samples of pharmaceuticals from the 1950s to the 1980s, including products that accompanied new drug applications and reference standards issued for the United States Pharmacopeia.

My job, officially titled Administrative Specialist II, involves the accessioning of over 1500 uncatalogued artifacts. These artifacts were collected or donated throughout the previous decades and range in type of artifact, size of artifact, and overall condition of the artifact, from bulky laboratory equipment from the 1970s to fragile pharmaceutical bottles from the 1920s. My duties involve the direct handling of the artifacts while I research their historical background before labeling the artifacts with a unique numbered code. The FDA History Office had only recently transitioned from inputting the artifacts’ information in spreadsheet form into using the EMu Collections Management System, a program designed to seamlessly store and group all needed information about the artifact in a more organized manner. The transition has run into a few bumps, as later blog posts will show. 

 

For my next post, I will explain the process involved (not to mention some of the difficulties I have encountered) in researching the historical importance, cataloging, and then organization of the artifacts, as well as provide photographs of interesting artifacts worth mentioning.  

Maryland Center for History and Culture Internship Part 2: A Look Into Baltimore Civil Rights

 

A Look Into Baltimore Civil Rights

Maxwell Fore

During my time at the Maryland Center for History and Culture, I had worked with the interviews of many different people who had been a part of the civil rights movement in Baltimore. Each of these interviews gave a detailed look into the experiences and accomplishments of those who had helped fight for civil rights. Each interview provided different perspectives on the issues of 1960s Baltimore, as well as providing insight into how significant people at the time were viewed.

Much of the discussion on public figures in the interviews had focused on the two people the McKeldin-Jackson project had been named after: Theodore McKeldin and Lillie May Jackson. Both of these people were thought of highly by interviewees who discussed their accomplishments and personalities. To many, Theodore McKeldin was a man deserving of respect. Of all the interviews I had listened to, there had been little to no disdain for Theodore McKeldin during his time as mayor. From the interviews it is clear that McKeldin was a man who loved his city and the people in it. A major aspect of his time as mayor was his advocacy for civil rights, being one of few politicians who had truly wished to support the black community and their causes.

Lilie May Jackson had similarly been a highly respected figure in Baltimore civil rights. Jackson was a dedicated civil rights activist who had been truly loved by her community. She had served as the organizer for the Baltimore branch of the NAACP and had been a pioneer in non-violent resistance to racial segregation. She had been a fundamental figure in campaigning against businesses with discriminatory hiring practiices, as well as in the desegrigation of Baltimore city schools. Despite not having wished to become a public leader, Jackson had become a beacon of Baltimore’s civil rights movement. From the interviews it is clear how significant she was towards progress in Baltimore, and how revered she was by those around her.

Spring 2022 Internship: UMBC Special Collections, Part II

The Covid-19 pandemic has been a strange time to pursue a graduate degree. For the past several years, students' ability to travel for research (or any other reason) has been severely limited, due to public health needs and concerns. In addition to impacting my ability to conduct in-person research for my degree, the pandemic of course has had a staggering effect on the world at large, including the global supply chain. Items as commonplace as paper towels, or as complicated as the microchips needed to manufacture almost any modern automobile, have sometimes become scarce or altogether impossible to find. 

My internship with Special Collections has faced this hurdle, too. Part of my work with the Lewis Hine collection will involve rehousing the fragile old photographs in new, safer enclosures. The prints are currently kept in mylar sleeves, ten sleeves per file folder in archive-safe boxes: imagine a highly-specialized sort of baseball card collection, and you've got the right general idea. 

The current enclosures, however, used adhesive to create a pocket in the mylar sleeve for the photograph, and the adhesive has started to break down over time. This sometimes leads to the adhesive wandering out from its original location and "attacking" the photograph, trapping it along a sticky seam. Unfortunately, I have already found several photographs whose rescue from these enclosures will require the specialist experience of a photographs conservator.  

Lewis Hine, School #9 and #12: Some of the boys who work in the glass works at night and go to school in day time, October 1908 (acc. no. P214). The Photography Collections, University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

The image above is one of the "stuck" photographs. If you look carefully along the bottom edge of the print in this old digital copy, particularly above the "Ind." notation in the caption, you can see the mylar sleeve's edges running right up to the print and the second copy of it which is also kept in this sleeve, and the slightly more opaque areas where the adhesive is breaking down with age. Despite gentle efforts, I was unable to free this print today; however, as the copy was not stuck, I was still able to photograph the reverse of each print. The staff and I are hopeful that the new enclosures will help to protect those prints which currently are free and unstuck, and will be safe new homes for stuck prints once a specialist helps to free them safely. 

Because of Covid-19, supplies for this rehousing project took more than four months to arrive to campus from the specialty vendors that Special Collections uses. This is an extraordinary amount of time! It has been extremely rewarding to contribute to the overarching goal of digitizing these photographs and making them more accessible for scholars and interested members of the public. Additionally, I have enjoyed being "behind the scenes" in Special Collections and learning about all of the unexpected, occasionally complicated or fraught, processes involved in digitizing and storing unusual materials. Whether it's something internal like wandering adhesive in archival storage, or something external like a global pandemic's effect on the timeline for receiving orders and supplies, protecting valuable and unique resources like the Hine Collection takes considerable planning, dedication, and special skills. I look forward to continuing my work for the remainder of the semester! 

(As a quick note, I do want to clarify that the existing enclosures for the Hine Collection are generally safe for the prints, and were designed and implemented by professionals with training in caring for and storing photographic materials. Even the best and most groundbreaking storage solutions will deteriorate over time and need to be updated or replaced - this is true for the storage of all art and historic materials. By undertaking this work now, Special Collections is ensuring that the photographs will be safe and protected for a long time into the future.) 

Tuning Into Baltimore: Internship at the Maryland Center for History and Culture II

 Tuning Into Baltimore II: Internship at the Maryland Center for History and Culture

By: Wyatt Lindsey

From the politically established to the average Baltimorean, the people behind the oral histories I listened to came from a variety of backgrounds. This provided me with a multifaceted perspective of Baltimore in the 1960s, with three main categories of conversation: politics, race/racial tensions, and development of Baltimore.

Discussion of Baltimore’s politics centered around the second mayoral term of Theodore McKeldin from 1963-1967, as well as the immediate effects of his term. From listening to McKeldin’s son, staff members, and advisors, an image of McKeldin as an honest man who got into politics to be among people. Many who knew McKeldin saw him as a rock, holding together Baltimore through his affable demeanor and through his image as someone who listened to whoever entered his office door. Behind closed doors, he was a big-picture thinker who often yearned to spend more time with his family, with a rage that occasionally got the best of him, causing him to act out. It was rare to hear anyone speak ill of McKeldin, and any criticism was often followed by numerous statements of how great of a person and leader he was, leading one to believe that his reciprocated love for Baltimore was genuine.

One of McKeldin’s proudest accomplishments was the development of Baltimore’s inner harbor. The establishment of the Charles Center saw the area rejuvenated under his successor, Mayor Thomas D’Alesandro III. The inner harbor remained an area that McKeldin was involved with until his death in 1974.

Listening to political actors of the time gives a large-scale view of the changes that were occuring in Baltimore, but a more intimate perspective lay in the oral histories of everyday people. Stories about racial tensions from those who witnessed the era of the Baltimore and Cambridge Riots, including efforts at police reform and the struggle of experiencing integration in public schools. Hearing from many members of the NAACP was also fascinating, especially concerning their retrospective views on the rise of black militancy in the civil rights movement. Throughout all, Lillie Mae Jackson remained a powerful influence, being brought up repeatedly by anyone who talked at any length about the NAACP or its efforts. The admiration demonstrated by those interviewed, even if they had once faced pressure from Jackson in the past, was indicative of her influence in the Baltimore community, especially in regards to race or religion.

Tuning into Baltimore: Internship at the Maryland Center for History and Culture I

 Tuning Into Baltimore: Internship at the Maryland Center for History and Culture I

By: Wyatt Lindsey

Though I was a history student attending college next door to Baltimore for nearly three years, I hadn’t taken an opportunity to dig deep into an area of Baltimore’s history. I got a chance to do so when I received an email from Professor Meringolo, offering me an opportunity to join a public history “boot camp'' in the form of an internship with the Maryland Center for History and Culture. There, I worked with the Collections department to digitize oral histories for the McKeldin-Jackson project, examining Baltimore politics and the civil rights movement during the 1960’s. My work included summarizing and transcribing oral histories.

The project is centered around Governor Theodore McKeldin and civil rights activist Lillie May Carroll Jackson: their work in Baltimore, their contributions to the civil rights movement, as well as firsthand accounts of how McKeldin and Jackson were as individuals. The project also touches on many other influential leaders of civil rights in Baltimore, such as Furman Templeton. Interview subjects included members of the Jackson-Mitchell family, members of McKeldin’s staff during his mayoral term, as well as citizens of Baltimore who lived through the era. Issues of the time are brought up, including the rise of militancy in the civil rights movement, as well as the passing of an omnibus Maryland Civil Rights bill in 1963.

COVID-19 inevitably left an impact on my internship, reducing my time onsite to one day a week. This did not create any significant issues however; the recordings of the interviews were hosted online, allowing myself and other interns to summarize and transcribe from home. To be frank, the weather created more issues over the course of the internship than COVID did; a delayed opening one day, as well as being snowed in on what was going to be the first day.

Spring 2022 Internship: UMBC Special Collections

Hello! My name is Meredith; I am an alumna of UMBC's undergraduate History program (2021) and began in their Historical Studies MA this past fall. Most of my research is focused on medieval Europe, but I also have an interest in art and art history. This secondary interest led me to an internship in the Special Collections department of the Albin O. Kuhn Library on campus, which I started earlier this month. My work for this internship will focus on the library's extraordinary Lewis Hine collection of photographs. 

Hine (1874-1940), who worked as a teacher in the New York City area before picking up his camera full-time, traveled across the United States in the early twentieth century. His employer, the National Child Labor Committee, asked him to document the working conditions that children endured in factories, mills, mines, and other businesses around the country. The NCLC hoped that Hine's photographs would cause enough of a shift in public opinion that legislation prohibiting child labor could pass.  

For more than ten years, Hine criss-crossed the country, stopping in at tenement apartments, furniture factories, newspaper offices, and other places where children worked. He brought not just his camera but also an arresting, innate sense of photographic composition. Though he did not sugar-coat or overplay his subjects' circumstances, he also did not try to sugarcoat or exaggerate them. Children - some not more than five years old, some in their teens - gaze out of the thousands of images Hine produced, caught in a moment of rest in their day. Some of the images are joyful or whimsical. Some are heart-wrenching. Hine's work for the NCLC constitutes one of the first times that photography was put to work for reformers' causes. 

Lewis Hine, Young Chicken Venders [sic], Sixth St. Market, Cincinnati, 1908 (acc. no. P33).
The Photography Collections, University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

UMBC's collection of approximately five thousand of Hine's NCLC prints is unique among other collections, because the back of the prints are visible and accessible. My work for this internship will involve using a copy stand to take photographs of the back of each print, notating the relevant digital metadata, and perhaps, eventually, also assisting with rehousing some of the prints in new storage containers. Covid-related supply chain issues mean that the project is off to a slower start than the Special Collections staff and I had hoped, but I found my rhythm last week and made it through approximately sixty of the photographs! 

Each unique photograph must be carefully removed from its archival folder, transported to the copy stand's platform, and arranged so that the camera can see it in its entirety. For many of these, that is a fairly straightforward task, but a notable number of the photographs have multiple prints - copies - of the image in their sleeves. In this case, I also document the back of each copy. It is work that requires significant attention to detail and concentration, both to ensure that the fragile photographs are handled safely and to prevent any mistakes in the digital data entry. I am enjoying it so far and look forward to continuing through the semester and beyond. My work will not only increase public access to this important collection of early twentieth century photographs, but also will help to preserve them for future scholars and others with an interest in photography and history. 

For more information about Lewis Hine, visit the Library's Hine Collection page and online database.

Maryland Center for History and Culture Internship Part 1: An Introduction to the MCHC

 

https://www.mdhistory.org/about/

An Introduction to the MCHC

Maxwell Fore 

 

Over the winter I participated in a short internship "boot camp" over the period of about a month at the Maryland center for History and Culture. The MCHC is a non-profit organization dedicated to the collection, preservation, and interpretation of materials which reflect the history and heritage of Maryland. It contains both a museum and a library which are open to the public for free use. The MCHC houses hundreds of thousands of objects within its museum, and in its library a collection of 7 million books, documents, manuscripts, and photographs. Located in Mount Vernon, Baltimore, the organization itself serves as apart of Maryland's history and culture as one of the oldest cultural institutions in Maryland, having been founded in 1844.

At the time of writing, the MCHC has nine exhibitions housed in its museum. Of those nine there were a few that were particularly notable to me: Flickering Treasures, an exhibit which explores the history of movie theaters within Maryland and the culture surrounding them; Intimate Expressions, which contains highlights from the diaries of several Maryland residents from between the 18th-20th centuries in order to document the personal experiences of Marylanders from the past; and finally the Unfinished Revolution, which ties together the French and Indian War, the American Revolutionary War, the Quasi-War, and the War of 1812, and connects how these conflicts affected Maryland.

During my time as an intern I assisted through transcribing and writing descriptions for the oral history interviews of several people involved with the civil rights movement in Baltimore. The interviews are a part of the McKeldin-Jackson Project Oral History Collection containing interviews recorded from between 1969-1977. The interviews were incredibly fascinating and without a doubt extremely important pieces of Maryland and Baltimore history. Assisting in a project dealing with such invaluable pieces of history was very enjoyable and fulfilling, despite the short time I had.