What’s in a File Name?

Digital creators could take a page from expectant parents who carefully weigh names for their babies. File names can convey a great deal of meaning and are often the only clue to the contents of a digital file. A few collections of photographs at the Hoover Institution Archives show both missed opportunities and powerful names.

Douglas Smith, an American historian, was in Moscow during the attempted coup in August 1991. He took some photographs, which are part of the Douglas Smith miscellaneous papers, but their equipment-generated file names provide no information. Here’s an example:

DIA_0144.jpg

We know the photos depict the attempted coup because he told us, but a viewer must be familiar with both the place and the events to identify the content of each image. I’m reminded of the decades-old photos in a box in my mom’s closet; we assume they depict various ancestors but, because they don’t have captions, the people remain unnamed and unknown.

Giles Udy gave some thought to the file names for his photographs, which depict structures in the former gulag camps of Noril’sk in Russia. Some names are of the machine-generated variety, but he renamed others, as follows:

Admin block - ext (cell window far right) DSCN7527.pdf

This file name functions like a caption describing the image. Udy also retained the original file name, DSCN7527, which was smart because it connects the PDF version of the image that he gave to Hoover to the original image in its native format, which Udy chose to retain. Udy also arranged his photographs into digital folders so that all the images of the Alevrolitnaya penal camp are in one folder bearing the name of the camp.

John Bruning, who took thousands of photographs while embedded with a National Guard unit posted to Afghanistan in 2010, built on this descriptive naming by adding dates to many folder names in MMDDYY format:

Mission 02 090710 swing set

In addition, Bruning wrote accounts of the events that he photographed. This Mission 02 folder contains a Word document that describes the mission, which was intended to “pick up some U.S. Army engineers and a swing set. We would then air assault them into a landing zone next to Manny’s Bazaar so they could install the swing set at the local school.” Bruning’s story wraps his images in context and color.

But Bruning and Udy both failed in some technical aspects of file naming. First, they included many deprecated characters, such as spaces, parentheses, and other punctuation marks. In addition, some lengthy folder and file names exceeded the directory path limitations of our software system, causing the file names to be automatically truncated. For example, when copied, the file name

Unfinished building - piles in permafrost then bldg above 3558.JPG

 became

UNFINI~1.JPG

All these small problems take time to locate and correct. Somewhat like expectant godparents, we’re still waiting for our first born-digital collection to arrive with perfect file names.

Data Recovery: To Delete or Not?

By applying technology to works of art, historians are discovering previously unknown masterpieces. Beneath a Goya painting is a work that the artist painted over for political reasons. Van Gogh’s Patch of Grass hides an underlying masterpiece. Because so many artists painted over their canvases so as to reuse them, more discoveries will come. Turning to the world of manuscripts, digital imaging tools can reveal written-over text or words obliterated by stains. When the focus is the oeuvre of the Old Masters or the authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls, who would object? But what if the focus is modern writings--maybe even yours?

With born-digital materials, archivists have the opportunity to resurrect digital files deleted by their creators. One such route involves forensic tools and techniques, similar to those used by police, including analyzing computers that may hold evidence of criminal activity. Such forensic software is gaining currency among archivists. There’s an entire report called Digital Forensics and Born-Digital Content in Cultural Heritage Collections, and our colleagues at Stanford University Libraries use a Forensic Recovery of Evidence Devices (FRED) setup to process incoming digital collections.

Hoover’s processing workflow for born-digital materials closely follows the steps outlined by OCLC Research in its latest publication; indeed, Hoover was one of the models for it. We omit the forensic software layer for a leaner workflow that maximizes resources. But even without forensic technology, while processing the Jude Wanniski papers, we found ourselves in the position of those art historians: Should we recover the e-mail messages we found in Wanniski’s digital trash bin? If Wanniski deleted them--much like an artist who paints over his own work--is it appropriate for us to preserve and reveal them to researchers?

Cinderella Story

Letestan? This place name stopped me in my tracks as I was consulting our poster database. Although I have kept up with all the new countries of Central Asia, such as Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, Letestan didn't ring any bells. I searched few standard sources, including the Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names, GeoNames, and the authority files of the Library of Congress, but found no mention of Letestan. I then searched the Internet, using Google and a few other search engines. Google produced about 1,770 results, very few for Google, only one of which was an exact match of "Letestan" and which turned out to be the Facebook page of someone with that surname. After my search seemed to have pushed the Internet beyond its limits, I tried a pre-Internet source, Webster's New Geographical Dictionary, which was standard issue at every desk at the National Geographic Society when I interned there long ago. No luck.

Some philatelists specialize in Cinderellas: postage-stamp-like labels produced by unrecognized countries. Some Cinderellas are playful fantasies; others represent serious political statements and secessionist movements. Was Letestan some sort of Cinderella country?

I then examined the poster, which was of World War I vintage, more closely. It bore a simple text message urging British men to join the Leicestershire Regiment: "If you want Honour and Glory, join the Regiment that has made History, the Regiment that has Gained the Honours." In the lower right corner was a small imprint: Willsons, Printers, Letestan. But why would Willsons, which was undoubtedly advertising its work, list a false location? Then I noticed the seal at the top of the poster, a tiger wrapped in the banner "Hindoostan/Leicestershire," which was the Royal Tiger Badge awarded the regiment for its service in India in the early 1800s. The name Hindustan has at times been applied to India and does share a "stan" with Letestan.

I then searched a rack of geographic and historical British databases available at Stanford's library, but none yielded any results for Letestan.

There's no neat ending to this puzzle, but it got me thinking about how libraries and archives view place names and the controlled vocabularies that govern their use. How do these rules accommodate fictional places? How are such places distinguished from real places? I'm left with more questions than answers. But the next time someone types "Letestan" in Google's search box, they will find a link to this blog--maybe in the coveted number one spot.

Leicestershire Regiment recruiting poster, UK 425, Poster collection, Hoover Institution Archives

Floppy Diskography

Recently three researchers sought access to the contents of 3.5-inch floppy disks in three archival collections at Hoover. You might think that responding to these requests is routine, but, after activating the write-protection tab and scanning for viruses, the process can take many turns.

Three disks in the Roger Mansell collection were labeled as containing the unpublished memoir of Robert Bjoring, a prisoner of war in the Philippines during World War II. A number of the files on the three disks had the same file name and were the same size, a common occurrence when files are repeatedly backed up. For each file we always generate a checksum, a digital "fingerprint" that serves as a unique identifier. By comparing the checksums of all the files, we were able to confirm the existence of duplicate copies and eliminate the duplicates, saving time for researchers using the files and conserving space in our storage system.

The papers of A. L. Adamishin, a Soviet and Russian diplomat, contained eleven disks with dates written on the labels. We were able to open ten of them; the last one was corrupted and unreadable. Once we viewed the contents (diaries for 1990 and 1991), we found that they matched up to paper diaries in the collection. Evidently, someone printed out the contents of the disks and placed both the printouts and the disks in the boxes shipped to Hoover. Given the many hundreds--perhaps thousands--of computer media in our archival collections, we decided that the paper printouts were sufficient for research and preservation purposes and ceased work on the digital files.

The thirty-two disks in the David Fowler collection proved to be the most exotic. The curator who acquired the collection was told that the disks contained newswire stories, a rather vague description. The few disks with labels were handwritten in an incomprehensible scrawl. Our standard software could not read the disks and reported that they had not been formatted. We are still hoping to recover at least some data from the disks by using specialized software running in a Linux environment, which requires more staff time. Who knows what we'll find?

After activating the write-protection tab (at the tip of the pencil), files on the disk cannot be altered or deleted.

Is This Bit Rot?

The term "bit rot" gets batted around a lot, but its definition isn't so easy to nail down. ComputerUser's dictionary describes it as "gradual decay of storage media" while the Free On-Line Dictionary of Computing states that it is "a hypothetical disease the existence of which has been deduced from the observation that unused programs or features will often stop working after sufficient time has passed, even if 'nothing has changed.'" Some online technical dictionaries do not include the term. Meanwhile, Wikipedia's bit rot entry is surprisingly short and contains multiple definitions: decay of storage media, decay of data on storage media, and degradation of software programs. (The entry is flagged as needing citations to reliable sources.)

So maybe I'm not alone in wondering what bit rot looks like in a word-processing file. Some of our archival collections, such as the Marshall Green papers and Notgemeinschaft für eine freie Universität records, contain 5.25-inch floppy disks, which often present problems. Today I'm looking at a disk containing files that open on a PC. They suffer from some malady, as indicated by this sample from a letter dated January 21, 1986:

<<<<<>>>>

Thankó verù mucè foò á lovelù luncheoî anä somå splendiä views® Wå 

imaginå yoõ no÷ iî Indiá anä wondeò iæ yoõ arå listeninç tï somå oæ thå 

samå Indianó witè whoí wå talkeä yearó ago® Thå artistó anä economistó 

werå quitå remarkable¬ buô thå politicaì scientistó useä tï talë abouô 

atomiã bombó foò Indiá witè eager¬ burninç eyeó whilå beinç verù carefuì 

noô tï kilì anù insects® (Severaì haä theiò beardó covereä iî whitå 

silk so that no insect would get caught and be stifled there.)

<<<<<>>>>>

The file name, Enid, has no file extension, so it is difficult to determine what software was used to create it. The sample above is from the rendering in MS Word with Windows character encoding, but no matter what software I open the file in, I get some gibberish. But it isn't all gibberish--the last line is completely legible. Sometimes a letter displays correctly, like the "n" in "insect," but not in other cases, like the "n" that should end "luncheoî" in the first line. Is this bit rot?

Regardless of the diagnosis, the next question is what to do. Because we can infer what many of the corrupted characters should be, we can match them to their actual counterpart, as in this sample:

Corrupted version True character

ë k

ì l

í m

î n

ï o

ð p

Then we could use the find-and-replace feature to fix all the corrupted characters. But it is more difficult to infer the correct characters for corrupted numbers. In addition, I assume that matching corrupted to true characters also varies from one file to the next--after all, this decay probably doesn't occur in the same, predictable manner and at a steady rate. Furthermore, we've got to deal with thousands of corrupted files on hundreds of disks. Lastly, if we did restore all the files, how can we ensure that the researchers studying them understand our restoration process and its implications for the authenticity and reliability of the content?

If you have answers to any of the above problems, I think Wikipedia needs you to enhance its bit rot entry.

An example of bit rot. Hoover Institution Archives

Operation "Overboard"

Diplomats were not the only ones to fall victim to the pen of an anonymous parodist in the mid-1940s. Military officials were casualties too. A mimeograph identified as draft 5432 and 1/2, found among the William Henry Baumer papers, telegraphs its jest with the national-security classification US Stupid/British Most Stupid.

The document, dated May 32, 1944, lays out the plan for Operation "Overboard." It establishes, in military precision, a series of logical impossibilities designed to prevent any action whatsoever. For starters, it states that "in the interests of security this operation should not be divulged to any person inside Norfolk House and should not be taken outside Norfolk House." Norfolk House, of course, is where the Allied military brass had their offices.

"Overboard" had many objectives, among them to "re-establish the N.A.A.F.I. firmly on the continent of Europe." N.A.A.F.I., the Navy, Army and Air Force Institutes, operated recreational facilities for the British Armed Forces. Another major object was "to assist the Russians and prevent the situation deteriorating so much that the Russians find themselves in Berlin unprotected by the Allies."

Paralysis cycles recursively through the plan. For example, the cardinal principle for the assault was "that any length of beach is too short to take the number of vehicles belonging to the number of divisions that will be necessary to assault such a length of beach," thus concluding, "Unless immediate steps are taken to construct sufficient beaches in this country which can be towed across the channel already assaulted no assault can take place."

The army, navy and air forces all take hits in the plan, which ultimately determines that the only suitable areas for assault are the Zuyder Zee, Lake Constance, or Holy Island. They meet the criteria of not including a port "to avoid any trouble over port capacities" and not having a hinterland to prevent "any trouble over subsequent deployment."

Annexure 6 to Appendix HHH of the document lists the planning data used, including a list of planners that could almost be sung to the tune "The Twelve Days of Christmas": "1 planner working, 2 planners chatting, 3 planners (2 Naval) arguing,” et cetera. It ends on a note that sounds amazingly modern, but undercuts the fundamental notion of war: "All data is subject to Naval, Military and Air Force advice and no references are made or harm meant to any living thing."

Hoover Wikipedians

The archival community has been slow to embrace Wikipedia, whereas the Hoover Archives staff have been adding information about Hoover's archival collections to Wikipedia for more than two years. Usually a simple entry is made in the "External links" section, which refers readers to the Hoover Archives, such as the following example in Wikipedia's Firing Line entry: "The Firing Line collection (with a program list and RealVideo clips) from the Hoover Institution Archives." We've added a lot of these links, from the entry about Boris Pasternak to one about Chiang Kai-shek so as to connect Wikipedia users to our collections.

Adding such links makes sense. Wikipedia entries rise to the top of the results of most search engine queries, with Wikipedia referring a chunk of traffic to the Hoover website. In addition, college students are frequent users of Wikipedia, according to an article in First Monday, which says that a majority of students always or frequently consult it for course-related research, usually for background information about a topic and to get started with research. The article was based on a study of how college students seek information. To reach out to students, then, there's no better place for the Hoover Archive's presence than this go-to source for those commencing their research.

Excerpt from Wikipedia's Firing Line entry (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firing_Line)

The Ubiquitous Mr. Hoover

There it was, nested in a notebook between Miss Anna R. Elderkin in Coeur d'Alene and Miss Frances Hoyt of Los Angeles: "Herbert Hoover, 623 Mirada, Stanford University." And I wasn't even looking for it.

Working at the Hoover Institution, I'm often amazed at the number of stories I hear from visitors about their connection to the Institution's namesake. Although the story might be as simple as a dedication written by Herbert Hoover in a book found in their grandparent's library, they all resonate to make this historical figure human. Looking at pages of this little notebook that listed not only names and addresses but ranch expenditures and the number of lemons picked in 1935, I realized I had stumbled across another such story.

Few people understand that archivists don't do research as part of their daily work; sometimes I do it at home after hours. Lately I've been studying a largely overlooked federal Indian agent named Kelsey who worked out of San Jose in the early 1900s. Although Kelsey and Hoover were contemporaries, Republicans, and lived just 15 miles apart, there was no reason that they would know one another.

In pursuit of Kelsey's seemingly lost papers, I tracked down his descendants, who shared with me scanned copies of his few surviving materials. The notebook was among them. When I found Hoover's name, I went back to them for an explanation, and they told me their Hoover story: Hoover's sister and Kelsey were neighbors, and when Hoover visited his sister, Kelsey's young daughter liked to call to him, "Mistah Hoovah! See me t'un ovah!" while playing on her swing.

Although the story is too inconsequential for a published biography, it's the kind of anecdote that makes Hoover human, a brother, a neighbor. And I'm not sure whether it's a Kelsey family story or now my own Hoover story.

Excerpt from notebook in private collection

Diplomatic Horseplay

After a hard day of high-level talks and shuttle diplomacy, how do diplomats unwind? More than fifty years ago, one did so by spoofing his colleagues on all sides of the table. His account of the 445th meeting of the European Advisory Council, on April 1, 1945, is written in the dry, reportorial style typical of meeting minutes, and is in the John Marshall Raymond papers at the Hoover Archives.

The minutes begin with a review of the minutes of the previous meeting. After a series of amendments to change "will" to "shall" and "labour" to "labor" (with the British representative dissenting), the group moved on the future organization of the Tripartite Council in Berlin. As the chair, the USSR representative opened by announcing that his government had decided to be represented on the council by one member from each state in the Soviet Republic. Because there were sixteen states, he proposed that the council be called in future the Unumdevigintipartite Council.

The meeting quickly recessed so that the U.S. representative could get a Latin dictionary. On reassembling, a counterproposal, that "Novededemipartite" be substituted for "Unumdevigintipartite," generated "a lively but indeterminate discussion" that lasted until noon, when they adjourned for lunch.

At 2:30 "the U.S. representative, being the first back from lunch, took the chair." During the recess, he had consulted both his government and the adviser to the U.S. embassy on ancient languages. The United States was prepared to accept the USSR proposal, he announced, "on condition that his country be represented by one member from each of the United States. There were forty-eight of these (at this point the Br. Representative expressed his surprise and stated that according to his records held in the Foreign Office there were only thirteen). Continuing, after some reference to a schoolroom atlas, the U.S. representative proposed that the Tripartite Council should be called in future the Septemet Sexagintapartite Council. He was also understood to say 'Check,' but since none of the Central European countries was represented at the meeting this remark was considered irrelevant."

At this point the British representative left to make an urgent call, so the meeting adjourned for tea, coffee, and vodka. When the U.S. and USSR representatives returned at 4:30, they found the British representative in the chair making calculations. Resuming the meeting, he announced that his government would accept both proposals on condition that each of the dominions, colonies, crown colonies, and dependencies in the British Commonwealth also be represented, which he figured totaled forty-nine. He therefore proposed that the council be called the Centumestsedecempartite Council. "He expressed his warm feelings of friendship for the other members of the Council and their Governments by saying to the USSR representative 'Mate,' and the U.S. representatives 'Mate to you, too."

Before discussion could continue, a "considerable commotion outside… made further work impossible. On inquiry it was discovered that a foreigner calling himself 'de Gaulle' had attempted to get in but had been overpowered and removed to safe custody." Because it was 5:00, the meeting was adjourned.

Icing the cake, the author classified these meeting minutes Top Secret.

Is Firing Line the New Sex? (with apologies to Mary Eberstadt)

Since its publication in Policy Review last year, Mary Eberstadt's exploration of the effects of unlimited sex and food on advanced nations, "Is Food the New Sex?" has been a perennial favorite on the web. In a shameless effort to transmit that success to our blog, I posit here that Eberstadt's observations about food also apply to William F. Buckley's Firing Line television series. After all, with more than one hundred Firing Line programs available on Amazon.com, additional titles available directly from the Hoover Archives, and just about any transcript available through the Hoover website, Firing Line fans now enjoy a previously unimagined level of abundance. As Eberstadt observes with food and sex, the dramatic expansion in access to Firing Line is due to technology, in this case the Internet, digital copying, and DVD on demand.

Where Eberstadt takes us to the kitchens of Betty and Jennifer, I suggest visiting their living rooms. Thirty years ago, Betty's living room was equipped with only a television to enjoy live broadcasts of Firing Line. No matter how much Betty loved the show, she was limited by the television schedule but was accustomed its enforced scarcity.

Betty's thirty-year-old granddaughter Jennifer pays far more attention to Firing Line and feels far more strongly about it than Betty ever did. Even though Firing Line ended in 1999, Jennifer can watch any title from her library of Firing Line DVDs at any time, and she even proselytizes; on occasion she'll rack up her current favorite episode when friends visit, and when gifts are exchanged a DVD featuring Malcolm Muggeridge is sure to be inside Jennifer's colorful wrapping. She argues the merits of the Allen Ginsberg show with her liberal coworkers and consistently asserts the moral authority epitomized in "Is It Possible to Be a Good Governor?" Jennifer's annual holiday tradition includes viewing "How Does One Find Faith?" Clearly, where Betty felt opinions about Firing Line were a matter of individual taste, Jennifer is certain that her opinions about Firing Line are not only politically correct but also morally correct: she feels that others ought to be as devoted to Firing Line as she is.

Deep down, there has been a revolution in how we now think about Firing Line--changes that allow Firing Line to become a way of life. Over breakfast you can watch program clips on You Tube; sneak a peek at the studio shots on Hoover's Firing Line slideshow when you're at work; during lunch, screen a show on DVD for your coworkers. When you ask someone a tough question, deliver it with your best impression of Buckley's winning smile. En route home on the train, read a PDF transcript and memorize Buckley's best lines to share at your next party. After dinner watch another DVD and then write a review of it on Amazon.com--be sure to match Buckley's elevated discourse and set a higher standard for the social Internet! Before you go to bed, peruse the list of Firing Line's 1,504 programs, send us a request for the next title you'd like to watch, and fall asleep dreaming of it.

What's in a Label?

The label said "General Stilwell's talk to Commonwealth Club of San Francisco, Feb. 13 1946," but could it be trusted? I've written about the problems with labels before. This one was attached to a compact sound cassette, which is at least one generation removed from the laquer disc on which a speech given in 1946 would have been recorded. So the person who originally recorded the speech--the most reliable source of information--probably did not write this label.

Any speech given at the Commonwealth Club would be documented in the club's records, which are at the Hoover Archives. (Even Herbert Hoover's nine off-the-record talks at the club show up in various ways in the club's publications and internal files, though the cursory information available lives up to their billing.) Searching this collection for a Stilwell speech yielded only one, by Joe Stilwell Jr. in 1966.

Thinking the speech itself might have clues, I cued a digital copy of the recording on my computer. It begins with applause, and then a man addresses the mayor and friends of San Francisco. He mentions that the war with Japan ended seven months ago, and in closing he refers to the Sixth Army at the Presidio, all of which places the talk in San Francisco in March 1946. This meshes with Stilwell's assignment as commander of the Sixth Army, which was reactivated effective March 1, 1946, at the Presidio of San Francisco (he died there that October). But we still didn’t have a venue.

A speech by a big war hero like Stilwell was sure to get press attention, especially given Stilwell's frank and colorful style. A search for Stilwell in newspaper indexes for 1946 yielded a likely hit, on March 29, 1946. The San Francisco Chronicle's front page barked, "Gen. Stilwell Talks Back: 'Army Caste System Sounds Nasty, but Discipline Is Vital.'" The article reports that Stilwell "covered the caste system, Army brass hats, the atomic bomb, and charges of undemocratic procedures in the Army," which closely parallels the arc of the recorded speech. Stilwell's quotes in the newspaper synched with the phrases I heard, which is about as definitive an identification as we're ever likely to have for this sound recording. And the venue? San Francisco's Chamber of Commerce luncheon on March 28, 1946. So much for labels.

Joseph Stilwell in Burma. Oversize folder m*SSSS,
Joseph Warren Stilwell papers,
Hoover Institution Archives

Preserving History: The Strange Case of the Lakoba Papers

Hoover research fellow Paul Gregory, a specialist in Soviet economics, finds compelling the human aspects of life under the Soviet regime. Gregory, director of the annual Hoover Sino-Soviet Archives Workshop, is a seasoned researcher. In his book Politics, Murder, and Love in Stalin's Kremlin: The Story of Nikolai Bukharin and Anna Larina (Hoover Institution Press, 2010), he tells their tragic story. In this guest blog, he relates the story of a family's fearless actions to save a legacy that was subsequently entrusted to the Hoover Archives.

The N. A. Lakoba papers, one of the most fascinating collections at the Hoover Institution Archives, contain the personal papers of one of Stalin’s closest friends, Nestor Lakoba, the party boss of Abkhazia (now part of Russian-occupied Georgia) and Stalin’s host on his frequent visits to the Black Sea resort of Sukhumi. The crown jewel of the collection is Lakoba’s personal photo album, filled with candid pictures of Stalin and his retinue hunting and fishing; it also contains Lakoba’s personal papers, including his official health certificate, which indicates that he was almost completely deaf. Most documents are in Lakoba’s own hand, including his personal notebook containing his candid musings. Secret correspondence with and reports from his informers reveal his concern about encroachments on his authority by political rivals, including Georgian boss Lavrenty Beria [Lavrentii Beriia].

Shortly before Christmas 1936, Beria poisoned Lakoba during a dinner in Beria’s home. Lakoba’s body was returned from Tbilisi to Sukhumi by special train; he was buried with full honors in the Sukhumi botanical garden. Beria was among the mourners, somberly carrying a funeral banner in honor of his old friend. In the aftermath of the murder, Lakoba’s extended family was either executed or imprisoned, and those associated with him were accused of being part of his plots to kill Stalin and other Soviet leaders. Before their arrest, the family, having learned of Beria’s plan to burn the body to destroy evidence of the poisoning, secretly reburied his body in an undisclosed location, presumably near his home village. Despite torture, Lakoba’s wife took the secret to her grave.

In reading the autobiography of Lakoba’s sister-in-law (more than a quarter-century his junior), I came across the following account of how the Lakoba family saved his archives from Beria’s grasp and certain destruction:

“In this difficult time, Saria [Lakoba’s wife] and Musto [her younger brother] succeeded in saving Nestor’s archive. In the presence of witnesses, they burned in the courtyard letters from Trotsky and other dangerous letters. Other documents they placed in a box, which they packed in thick paper and then hid in a hiding place under the floor of their house. When Musto [one of the few to survive] returned from prison and exile in 1955, he found that their house had been turned into a dormitory of a technical institute. The package was not in the secret hiding place. Workers, who remodeled the floors, had found the box. Musto began a personal investigation of its whereabouts. He learned that it was in the possession of local authorities (who did not understand what it was), and to his astonishment the box was returned to him. To his surprise, the archives was remarkably well preserved. After Musto’s death, the archives went to his son.”

Lakoba’s sister-in-law thus provides us with one link in the chain of events that eventually brought the Lakoba archive to Hoover and tells us that the family burned documents that it felt would be incriminating, such as the correspondence with Trotsky. The candid photos of the vacationing Stalin have been widely reproduced in many books on Stalin. The collection is also a valuable source on the history of Abkhazia, which, even in Lakoba’s time, had separatist tendencies. Abkhazia and its capital city, Sukhumi, today have a government appointed by Putin and are occupied by Russian troops.

When I read through the Lakoba archive in July, it was in the hands of the capable Hoover Archives preservation staff, who were applying preventive care to the eighty-year-old photographs. It is fortunate that the Lakoba archive ended up at Hoover. In a poorly funded Russian state archive, there is no telling what its condition would be today (or if it would even be accessible).

Paul Gregory's blog

Guide to the N. A. Lakoba papers

Nestor Lakoba, circa 1930s. N. A. Lakoba papers, box 3, Hoover Institution Archives

Joseph Stalin (right) and Lavrentii Beriia on vacation in Abkhazia, circa 1930s. N. A. Lakoba papers, box 3, Hoover Institution Archives

Joseph Stalin (center) and Kliment Voroshilov (right), people's commissar for military and navy and people's commissar of defense, on vacation in Abkhazia, circa 1930s. N. A. Lakoba papers, box 3, Hoover Institution Archives

The Man Who Played with Fire

Might Stieg Larsson have taken a page from Theodore Abel? In The Girl Who Played with Fire, Larsson's best-selling detective novel, a reporter is stymied in trying to track down a retired police officer. He has the retiree's e-mail address but no town or street. Veteran reporter Mikael Blomkvist suggests a trick: notify the retiree that he's won a mobile phone that must be delivered to his home address. The reporter takes Blomkvist's suggestion, the retiree takes the bait, and the plot thickens.

An early implementer of a similar technique, Abel sought to track down followers of Adolf Hitler in 1934. As a sociologist at Columbia University, he thought that the life stories of early party members could help make sense of the National Socialist movement. How to locate those people? A contest, of course, in which Abel offered 400 German marks "for the best personal life history of an adherent of the Hitler movement." Limiting the contest to people who had joined the party before 1933, his announcement, distributed at all local headquarters of the party and published in the party press, stated that "contestants are to give accurate and detailed descriptions of their personal lives, particularly after World War I. Special attention should be given to accounts of family life, education, economic conditions, membership in associations, participation in the Hitler movement, and important experiences, thoughts, and feelings about events and ideas of the post-war period."

Abel paid the awards out of his own pocket. Had he been able to offer more money, he thought, he would have gotten more entries. Even so, he received 683 manuscripts, "a result as unexpected as it was gratifying. The wealth and variety of material contained in these life histories fully justified the undertaking." Many of these life histories are among the Theodore Abel papers at the Hoover Archives. If you can't visit to read the originals, try Abel's book, Why Hitler Came into Power: An Answer Based on the Original Life Stories of Six Hundred of His Followers (1938), from which these quotes were taken. I can't truly call Abel the man who played with fire, but he surely played a smart game.

Nazi Party Biography of Wilhelm Schmitz, Box 1, Folder 3, Theodore Abel papers, Hoover Institution Archives

Bulk Freezing

Although it's not cryogenics, freezing is a tool for archival preservation. Collection materials that are damaged by water in a disaster such as a flood or burst water pipe can be frozen to retard further deterioration. The frozen materials can then be thawed in small batches and treated. This is a job for preservation professionals, as you'll see from these leaflets about salvaging wet papers and wet photographs.

Freezing can also be used to eliminate insects and other pests from newly acquired collections. That's just what we did in December with a collection that had been stored in a barn. All magnetic media--audiotapes, videotapes, floppy disks--had to be removed first because they can be damaged by freezing. Each box of papers also had to be bagged in plastic, with excess air eliminated and the bag tightly sealed. By eliminating as much air as possible and freezing the materials very quickly, few ice crystals form. When the materials are gradually returned to room temperature while remaining in the bag, moisture condenses on the outside of the bag but not on the materials inside. This prevents any water damage to the materials that are frozen.

What I like about this use of freezing is the mass-treatment approach. Five pallets of boxed papers received preservation treatment as a big group--that's a cost-effective process! This is the way archivists approach many aspects of our work. It's when we have to deal with items individually, be it applying intensive conservation treatments to each or describing every single document individually, that our systems break down and our backlog grows exponentially. In archival work, we're always looking for an aggregate approach.

Supplies were at the ready as we prepared an archival collection for freezing.

Antiques Roadshow at the Hoover Archives

What's it like hosting a camera crew from a major television show? At Hoover we've dealt with them before, including a team from Phoenix TV in China who taped the Stilwell diaries at Hoover for a documentary about Joseph Stilwell. Even so, we were excited when a crew from PBS's Antiques Roadshow was scheduled to tape a segment at Hoover. The show highlighted a few political posters chosen from the more than one hundred thousand in Hoover's poster collection. The segment is scheduled to air on Monday, May 24th 2010 as part of three hours of programming from San Jose; nearly ten million people watch each episode.

As you might expect, many hours of staff time were invested in what will be a clip lasting just a few minutes. That process began months in advance, when we were initially contacted by Roadshow staff, who already knew they wanted to focus on our posters. After the go-ahead was given, our reference staff assisted the Roadshow people. A production scout team visited during the week of the shoot. They looked at possible taping locations in the archives and provided the final list of three posters for the shoot. Their focus was the "pointing finger" motif in World War I recruitment posters.

The day of the shoot was a long one, with the production team at Hoover from 8:30 to 4:30. Much of the morning was spent setting up; the final footage was taped just before lunch. After lunch a smaller Roadshow crew remained to shoot B-roll footage in the stacks and other locations. Two of our staff members signed waivers before being taped in action shots such as typing at a keyboard and opening a poster drawer. We had to deal with some last-minute changes, such as moving the shoot location to a different room. (If Roadshow ever visits your facility, you'll need a room where the air conditioning can be turned off so that its noise does not affect the sound quality.)

Of course, what you're really interested in is the appraisal. The appraiser, Nicholas Lowry, specializes in posters. He said that our poster of Lord Kitchener pointing his finger is the earliest instance of this motif in a recruiting poster. In all Lowry's years of work, he had only seen reproductions of this poster; ours was his first original. Its appraised value? Watch on May 24th.

Political Poster Collection, Italy 17,
Hoover Institution Archives

Working at Hoover: An Intern's View

Our student interns, often from San Jose State's library program, bring fresh perspectives and energy to the Hoover Archives. Some interns process archival collections, and others catalog audio recordings. This year Oanh Tran, a capable
and enthusiastic cataloger, has been working with us. She wrote this guest entry:

"If I ever conduct a survey asking my friends and relatives what they know about archival institutions, I am sure their answers would be very simple and short. How do I know that? I know that because I was one of them. I also had an extremely limited knowledge of what an archive really was. I knew the definition of the term ‘archive’ and that archives were where historical materials were stored. I did not know how the work was done on those materials in order for them to be usable. I did not know how archival materials were stored, and neither did I know there were archival collections in different languages. There were so many things I did not know about archives.

"Luckily for me, I was accepted to do my internship at the Hoover Institution Archives. It has been an eye-opening experience for me to be able to learn so many things I did not know about. On the first day of my internship, I was taken on a tour to be introduced to the staff. As I listened to the title of each person, I realized the survival of this archive not only depended on the administration but also on many people with different skill sets and specialties. I realized that everyone at the archives worked well together to create its current success. Then I was even more amazed to have a tour in the basement, where I could see how the archival collections were stored. It was a pleasure for me to look at the types of collections available, the types of materials and how they were carefully taken care of by the staff at the archives. I felt very happy after that tour because it helped broaden my knowledge.

"My main task as an intern at the archives is to catalog the audio recordings in the Commonwealth Club of California records, something I have enjoyed doing very much. By reading the summaries of the recordings, I am actually learning about the issues that were important to our country back in the 1980s. In addition, I have become more experienced with cataloging. Sometimes I would encounter certain small problems such as choosing the appropriate Library of Congress subject headings. That is when I turn to my supervisor and the archives’ cataloger for guidance. They have been a great resource in helping me do my job more successfully.

"I am still doing my internship at the Hoover Institution Archives. Each day of my internship is still as exciting and another great learning experience for me. I am proud of having finished cataloging the last half of the Commonwealth Club's audio recordings for 1980. I am currently working on the recordings for 1981, and I have set as my goal cataloging all of them before my internship ends. I am looking forward to achieving that goal and making my experience at the archives a great asset for my future career.”

Accessing the Catalog of the Commonwealth Club of California Records, Hoover Institution Archives

"Off the Record" and the Archival Record

It's no secret that Herbert Hoover talked to Commonwealth Club audiences at nine "off- the-record" events between 1936 and 1947. He also gave four formal speeches at the club, most of which were published. But wouldn't it be interesting to know what he said off the record?

Those talks consisted of informal question-and-answer sessions at the club’s dinner meetings. Only club members and their male guests could attend; all understood that Hoover was not to be quoted. The press was not invited, and the events were not recorded. Hoover "felt that second-hand statements of such informal opinions as he proposed to give were never satisfactory either to the one quoted or the one informed," as one reporter who was shut out of the 1936 event explained the blackout. This is where the Commonwealth Club records at the Hoover Archives come into the picture. Could they contain accounts of Hoover's comments?

The club's files certainly indicate that the conversational dinner meetings with Hoover were a big hit. Seven hundred and sixty-six people attended the 1936 dinner; another two hundred were turned away (the next most popular dinner meeting of that year, the club's annual evening of literature and music, drew just 233 people). Some of the other dinners with Hoover had even more attendees, peaking at 875 in 1947.

The club used a form to evaluate its speakers; one doting evaluator wrote of Hoover's 1945 appearance, "Tops in every way--Everybody said, 'What an evening!'" Not to be outdone, the same evaluator wrote of Hoover's next talk, "Probably the most successful meeting the Club ever held." Apparently Hoover was entertaining as well as knowledgeable; under the checkbox for "Humor" on the form, another evaluator checked "Yes" and then underlined it for good measure.

The club provided Hoover with a list of prospective questions a day or two in advance. A couple lists of questions have been preserved, but they are far too numerous to have all been covered in the ninety or so available minutes. Among those for 1945 were Can Europe feed herself this winter? What is the future of synthetic rubber? Will there be an effort to internationalize the Suez and Panama Canals?

Food for the dinner meeting was an issue in 1945. A note in the files indicates that it was 95 percent likely that the entrée would be fish (mutton was the alternative) but that nearly all fish, except salmon, as well as poultry and mutton, were only available on the black market. (It was hoped that barracuda or sea bass would be off the black market by the time of Hoover's talk.)

That's about all we know; because the club honored Hoover’s terms, we don't know what he said. Unfortunately, it's the kind of archival dead end that researchers often encounter in their work.


Announcement of Hoover's "off-the-record" talk for August 7, 1947. The Commonwealth, August 4, 1947 (box 624), Commonwealth Club of California records, Hoover Institution Archives.

What's in a Label?

In an earlier post I alluded to some issues in describing sound recordings. When you've got one hundred thousand recordings, as the Hoover Archives does, this is a big issue. The obvious answer is to use the label information, but that assumes that each recording is labeled, that the label is accurate and complete, and that we can interpret it. The photos here, taken from audio items in our holdings, show how difficult this can be. What do we do when we cannot read the language (or the handwriting), don't know which number to use, don't have a key to the meaning of the numbers, or have detailed recording notes without a title to give context to the notes?

We're approaching the description challenge from various directions. Sometimes the labels do provide useful information, which we're adding to our collection guides. For instance, Milton Friedman's Economics Cassette series, distributed by subscription and totaling 215 tapes, has labels indicating topics and date; we recently added all the label data to the guide to the Friedman papers.

For the thousands of sound recordings in the Commonwealth Club records, we are working from printed summaries to populate an extensive database of recordings with program titles, speaker names, Library of Congress subject headings, and descriptive summaries. Metadata cataloging interns from a local library school continue to contribute to this massive effort.

In our audio preservation lab, we digitize recordings one by one, which involves playing each at its listening speed ("real time"). When the recordings are in English, the audio engineer writes notes about their content, which is then added to the collection guide, such as we did with the lacquer discs in the Christopher T. Emmett Jr. papers (Emmett was an officer and organizer of anti-Nazi and anticommunist organizations in the United States). We publicized the completion of this project, and many similar digitization and description projects, on the Hoover Library and Archives web page.

We also ask visiting researchers to help. When one had listened to a number of tapes from box 1330 of the records of the American Council on Education, we asked her to make notes about speaker names and program titles, which we then added to the collection guide. (We're always looking for new ways to overcome labeling deficiencies and provide more descriptions of our sound recordings.)

A few labels from the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty broadcast records and the U.S. Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service miscellaneous records, Hoover Institution Archives.

How Does a Pie Thrown in the Face Sound?

Is it a thwack or more of a splat? You can decide for yourself if you come to the Hoover Archives and listen to the sound recording of Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling speaking at the Commonwealth Club on June 21, 2001, or listen to it on the club's website. The sound of a protester throwing a pie at Skilling, and the mild chaos that followed, is audible in the first few minutes of the recording.

I think about why sound recordings--and other audiovisual (AV) materials--are important for historical research; this recording gets at part of the answer. The club's transcript of the event does not mention the pie. Even if it did, does reading about it carry the same impact as hearing it happen? I don't think so. There's a visceral, emotional charge connected to sound and video that adds complex dimensions missing from the written word.

This is why, Martin and Annelise Anderson, the authors of Reagan, in His Own Hand, which focuses on Ronald Reagan's writings, also produced Reagan, in His Own Voice, an audiobook of his radio addresses. Listening to Reagan reveals aspects missed when simply reading his words on the page. Recordings bring personalities alive, adding nuanced layers to political messages and persuasive art.

The Culture and Emotion Research Laboratory in the Psychology Department at San Francisco State University specializes in analyzing the emotional content of videos. One of its projects involves analyzing videos of speeches given by leaders of nation- states or ideologically motivated groups that are at odds with other nations or groups that eventually engage in either acts of aggression or nonviolent resistance. Leaders such as Adolf Hitler, Winston Churchill, George W. Bush, Martin Luther King Jr., Mahatma Gandhi, and the Dalai Lama are on its list.

Many researchers, however, are reluctant to use AV materials, thinking it takes too much time to listen to or watch a recording. They also find it difficult to determine whether a recording will be useful, whereas they can quickly survey textual documents to evaluate their content. Nor were they trained to use AV materials in their graduate programs. When I ask professors about this, they usually acknowledge their own avoidance of AV materials. They do, however, see their successors coming up the ranks; this new cohort, they tell me, is media- savvy and comfortable analyzing AV materials as historical evidence. For them, we've got a good hundred thousand sound recordings and thousands of videos.

Reagan In His Own Voice, available through Amazon.com and in the Hoover Archives.

Tackling the Challenges of Audio Archives

Because archival materials are collected to be used (in this case, heard), we'd like to introduce you to the vast array of sound recordings housed at the Hoover Archives. We've got about 80,000 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty recordings of broadcasts to the nations behind the iron curtain and the newly independent states of the former Soviet Union and several thousand recordings of speeches on public policy issues at the Commonwealth Club of California beginning in 1944. Recordings in many other collections include the prepresidential radio addresses of Ronald Reagan and speeches and lectures by Milton Friedman, and that's only the beginning. Add them all up, and you get a good hundred thousand audio recordings.

A 2004 report by the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) discusses the issues involved in making sound recordings available, including having the requisite staff and equipment to access recordings in obsolete formats and
describing the recordings so that people can find them.

Hoover, having contributed that CLIR report, has since been working to overcome the problems. Most notably, we hired a recorded sound archivist and an audio engineer to begin preserving our audio collection. The audio engineer digitizes
decades-old audiotapes to preservation-quality specifications using Studer open-reel tape players and a sophisticated Quadriga digital audio workstation (a quadriga is a chariot drawn by four horses abreast, which is driven by our engineer).

Describing our sound recordings is important because that is how you find out what we have. How can we describe all of our recordings short of actually listening to them, which would take years of our time and require people fluent in dozens of
different languages? Where can we post the descriptions so that people who want recordings can find them? What can we do to encourage people to incorporate audio material in their research? More on these questions later.

Label on a 16-inch transcription disc, Commonwealth Club of California records, Box 1142, Hoover Institution Archives.