All right everybody I'm going to turn on the recordings. So from a housekeeping perspective, just know that we're going to be recording to.
Okay, great. Alright, thank you for joining us today for the newest session in our series. Not everything is online.
Consult your local archives. Sponsored by the Iowa Genealogical Society. Today we are welcoming Daily Porters Special Collections Librarian with the Council Buffs Public Library in Council Bluffs, Iowa.
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And so with that, I'm going to turn it over to Daily.
Okay, thank you, Sheriff. Give me 1 s here to share. Set up here.
Okay, so Hello, everyone. My name is David Porter. I am the special collections like for the Council of Public Library.
Just a bit about my background. I started in libraries, during college. I did work study at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln.
Love library which is their main library on campus. It's just a student worker just most of the shelving and shifting but every once in a while it'd be called to do special projects like handling special reflection items and you know, doing inventory and, shelf space assessments.
After I graduated, I much later I was hired at Omaha Public Library just across the river here.
Okay, from council bus. I work there for Oh, about 5 years and during that time I also started working here at the Council Blush Library and in 2017.
And it's all I was got a full time position in 2020. As a reference assistant and just recently that my.
MLS degree from Emporia. State University. And That was basically what got me.
The option to get this job here, getting that training. So let's go ahead and look at an overview.
Again, this will be mostly focusing on what is in our collection, time and overview, and then we'll talk about what is.
Items that are ones you can access outside the library and you can access outside the library so let's get started here.
So what does the library, the special questions of the council's public library, collect and preserve?
Well, it contains historical records and cultural artifacts. That are mainly concerning Council Bluffs and this is from our administrative policy.
This is the mission statement of the special collections and as you can see there it was started this was kind of laid out in 1907 when they kind of decided we should probably start collecting items and arranging and preserving them.
So that's kinda where the, our collection. Collecting started. This is, this is a Slide with a lot of words, but this is basically just our.
Policy for using the special so kind of briefly go over this. So if you visit in person, this would be kind of some of the rules you would want to follow.
This covers how staff. The patrons alive are expected to interact with the archival materials.
The special extent is actually only available to staff and trained volunteers. So, patrons request items, which then staff will go and retrieve.
And they have to make an appointment in order to do so as well. So. I think with most special questions or archives, if digital copies or reproductions are available, those are prioritize over using any of the master copies.
Don't they wanna preserve the items, the physical items that we have in our special collections. So, the patrons want to view the materials, they have, we're gonna valid form of ID and then staff will basically, there's an extra sheet we fill out and it just notes what items has been.
What items have been taken out, special questions for the patron to use. One, I mean, this is probably pretty common in special collections as well is, there's no food or drink near the records and it's a pencils only.
And in some situations, pictures may be asked to wear. Archival gloss mostly in the handling of photos.
And to the right here you'll see this is kind of a guide I made of the special questions.
This is more for, my mind's sake, knowing where things are at. Also other staff too.
So you can, this is kind of a brief overview. We'll kinda, I have some pictures on the next slide and we'll kind of look at that I'll kind of contextualize this.
But the ones that I have highlights, so the green, the red, the blue and the.
Yellow there or Probably, I would say the your books and the city directories are probably the most often used.
And then behind that is probably photographs. That's probably the most requested items that we get for those special questions.
So, we'll take a look at what this looks like here. So this is viewing the special plugins as soon as you come out of the reference office. It's connected.
It's in a back room. Is not accessible to the public and it's attached to the reference office.
This is the view from the reference office to order. So, on the left hand photo, you can see this is that table is basically where when we get items that are donated, that's where they're going to be, we're going to kind of unpack them, describe what's in there, kind of assess the quality of the items.
You'll notice that cardboard box that's Not so, you know, that's not a archival container.
We don't want to keep them in there, but for the time being, we Basically, these are items that are, waiting to be put into our collection.
So this was taken a while back. Some of these had moving around here, but, The point being we always have stuff that we are adding to our collection.
To the point where maybe it's too many things and we have kind of a backlog, which is what you're seeing here.
Those wooden cabinets along the wall are what we call, our vertical files. So we have various items in there.
Artifacts, photos. Just, large collections of records. We'll go over those in a little bit here because I have slides that cover what's inside of those.
The photo on the right hand side. So that photo shows you kinda how long the room is all the way down there at the end is as far as the special Excellent.
So in front of us here, you'll see all those boxes. So we kind of have the, we're a little lucky in that the local area newspaper the daily non pro.
Has donated a lot of their photos to us. So what that is, those are 35 Photo negatives from the, And we'll kinda go over what years and what it contains, but those are A very large collection of photos I would probably say hundreds of thousands worth of.
Amount of. 35, So let's move a little further into the special collection.
So this one on the left is
The other side of that range so that range is completely filled with photos. You'll notice in the far left corner of that left photo.
You'll see those boxes there. That is actually a card catalog and we still use that.
It's not necessarily updated. As frequently as it was in the past, but that kinda, helps us find items because, you know, previous librarians would go through and know where things are located.
So that's kind of my go to for if I'm trying to find a piece of information that I'm not finding right away.
So. The thought on the right is gonna be. We have some large metal cabinets that hold on the oversized photos and to the right of that you can't really see it but it's that lower cabinet to the very far right is we have a map collection.
So that's down there. These brown cavities in front of us. They hold various, non-probly sorted the non-crowel by subject and that's what these all these brand candidates contain.
We'll go over that as well, because that's later in the presentation. So the left photo is just the other side of what we're just looking at.
So that again we have another little cabinet that is going to be oversized photographs as well. And then that other cabinet is kind of just miscellaneous stuff that we have.
Just needed extra space. I think that's one thing that the whole archives need is more space.
So we're kinda making deal with what we have here, so. Let me go back.
So this is the one on the right is gonna be we have several ranges as well in the special collection so these contain just these are arranged from, according to doing desktop system.
So it goes from 0 to 9 hundreds. With biographies mixed in there and this is just kind of a shot of what the ranges look like.
This photo here is. The one on the left is just from the opposite end. Still showing the ranges.
The photo on the right is these are our kind of boxes containing newspapers. So for the most part it's going to be newspapers that were fragile and we don't there's not any more copies of these as far as we know these are kind of these are pretty Rare and that's why we're preserving them this way laying them flat they contain the, it comes with the globe
and Kosovo's Google. And then there's also you know, special editions of the non pro.
So like the e-day, we kept the paper for that the golden spike ceremonies we kept the papers for that so those now Most of these are digitized or the non, so we kinda keep these back here just as, for safekeeping for preserving.
So that's the extent of kind of the overview of the space itself. Now it's kind of get into what we actually have in the Okay, so What is in our collection?
We have, so the pictures up at the top are just those vertical cabinets, those vertical files that we showed in the first photos.
We store various types materials in here and that includes correspondence, a prominent, couple of citizens.
For example, Dexter and Amelia Bloomberg, we have letters from them in this collection here.
We have documents from the Gospel of Chamber of Commerce. We have documents from, General Grendel Dodge, who is another prominent, citizen of we also have documents from various council businesses, ledgers, invoices, it's kind of a random assortment and it's not necessarily all for one business it's it's kind of what we've got.
Over the years here. There's also materials covering the history of the library. So that would include correspondence with Andrew Carnegie, regarding the construction of the free public library.
In Council, which is actually in a different building. And it was completed in 1905. The building still exists and it's used as an Union Pacific Museum.
And we also documents detailing the construction of this building, which was the new building we moved out of, from the Carnegie Library.
And this building was built in 1998. Other items that are in these, cabinets are camplets from various clubs throughout the years.
So for example the Council of Woman's Club, there's also literary clubs that met in the library.
We have pamphlets over the years of what they read, what they discussed that I'm an interesting view of like a snapshot in time of what people were reading.
And of course we got the photographs arranged by subject, which again, are probably the most.
Popular or most requested items that we have. So you'll notice, these bottom, the photos on the bottom.
So left to right, it shows that the cabinets. Depending on what is in them, it gets more organized.
So the ones on the left are organized at a general level, meaning we have we have a gone through and looked at every single specific piece of the piece of paper and described it just because the collection is large and It would, we just don't have a staff time at the moment to do that.
So the world left is actually, we had the council plus food dealers association donate their administrative paperwork and, correspondence to us.
So that's kind of sitting in the cabinet there. Again, it's not described out of the details where we could tell you exactly what years, or well, not what years, what specific information is in there, but it is available if someone wanted to go through that.
And research it. Photo in the middle is going to be those are our photos there and you'll see you can see fire department floods, genealogy.
There's, it's different subjects that the libraries in the past kind of, and you'll notice each photo isn't a and it also has some more detailed information on there about the subject.
What the photo is about, the year, if available. So these are They're not cataloged.
They're just described. So we have kind of a good idea. What we have in there and most of these pictures are scanned and available on our digital archive.
To the very far right you'll see these are. Items that actually have been cataloged.
So anytime you search our online public access catalog, you're gonna find these items in here and they'll probably say vertical files for the location.
So that's essentially where these items would be in. There you know these are again the you know the invoices from various businesses.
Maybe like a church history or something like that. These are all in in our cabinet as well and arranged, by subject.
Alright, so the next slide here, let's talk about the oversized collection. So we do have a question of maps so that one on the photo on the far left there is gonna be our map collection.
We, The maps cover the city of Council Bluffs. Power of the County, Iowa State Maps, and there's also some Nebraska maps as well, because of our proximity, and so the way this is range each shelf is kind of the way I just described it.
The top one is kind of bluffs, which we have the most maps upon. The next is going to be Carl into County and so on.
So so on and so forth there. One of the earliest customers we have is an original plot of the city from 1854.
And it was conducted by a county surveyor, Thomas Tosteta. We also have an 1851 township map of the state of Iowa and an 1852 plot book of power becoming townships.
So that's kind of just a general idea of some of the items that we haven't. The photo in the middle is gonna be our oversized photograph.
Cabinet. So these are obviously ones that would not fit in the vertical files we just saw and wouldn't have.
These photos are mainly group photos, which would include like class reunions from high schools.
They would have the long rolled out, photos. So they, some of those are in here.
There's photos of like military camps and the roster of, soldiers. There's also fire department photos that show the roster of the fire department in given years.
There's also some landscape photos of most accounts of bluffs. And there's also photos from businesses as well in there.
So the one on the phone on the far right is going to be our Plat books. So, and Atlas is a Pot County.
So these range from late nineteenth century to late twentieth century. And we do have the fire. The Sam on fire insurance maps as well as there's an 1896 one there.
And but since we subscribe to Digital Sandborns, we prioritize access to that digital platform rather than using this physically.
Okay, so photographs. Again, these are widely requested. And thankfully the David for all donated a lot of these to us.
So we do have access to I would say all but a lot of the photos that were featured in them.
The, for all newspaper if it was taken by an opera photographer, there's There's a decent chance we may have it in this question.
So again, those the boxes that we looked at. On those the overview of the special collections.
Are gonna be the 35 film. And this generally covers the 19 seventies through the nineties.
Obviously there's some gaps in there, but, that's the main range of those photos there.
We also have some 4 by 5 negatives for the Nonpro photographers. And these kinda have a different ranger, so they go from the late forties to the fifties and then if there's a small gap and then it's the late sixties through the seventies.
We also have some stereograph images and Also portraits of early Council as well.
So, along here, go to the city directories. So the library has Sandy Gretter's dating back to 1866.
We do have gaps in the question, so it is not complete, but for the most part we have the majority of them.
We also have telephone books at the library too. And these go from 1906 to present.
But again, with some gaps. We always rely, especially for the city, the patron donations.
To fill those gaps. If so, we ask anyone that has. Some of the years we don't have, we try to get them from them, scan them, we'll give them back to you.
We are perfectly fine with. Borrowing them for a little bit, scanning them and returning them.
So nearly all of these. And above the telephone books and the city directories are microfilmed.
So we do have that. As a access point as well. And again, this is to ensure that.
You know, we preserve the physical. Materials and prioritize using the digital or the microfilm.
A version there. So along with city directories, that's a very popular tool for, at least in my research, looking up where a certain business was a certain time, trying to verify that information.
It's also great for genealogist too because you could see, you know, if grandfather had a a shoe shop somewhere in Castle Bluff, she can, theoretically narrow it down using these directories here.
The next collection is the, which is also another very, very popular. So we collect them from various schools in the area and we have your books for Abraham Lincoln High School.
Which originally was the concept bus high school, which was the first school in town. And then they renamed when they rebuilt when they built a new Abraham, like in high school.
And those date ranges are 1897 to present. So anytime you see present, that means that we are still collecting the most recent issues that they're putting out or most reason your books that they're putting in digitizing.
Thomas Jefferson High School, 1924 to presence, St. Albert Cabot School, 1867 at present.
Lewis Central High School in 1970 to present. 1955 the present underwood high school election 42 the 1994 try center high school of 1958 to 2,006.
So I would say most of this collection. Has been donated to us. For the more recent years when I was talking about the ones that go to present for though more recent years the library just purchases the copy copy straight from the school.
And this avoids any scenarios where Maybe, you know, if, you know, at the end of the school year you had your buddies, their friends sign it or maybe you cut out pictures of people you liked or didn't like in your, in your class.
Then it kind of avoids asking, because we have had your books donated to us where they're missing certain photos or maybe there's some personalized messages and the heck that People don't want, public.
So we try to do investment to include that too. So this is one instance of. This is probably one of the collections where the collection on our digital platform is actually larger than what we actually have physically.
And that is because, patrons will sometimes lend their copies of their new books to us and then we'll digitize them and then we'll return.
So there's a good chance that we might not be holding everything that we have on a digital platform.
As a physical book here. And my philosophy behind that is we would rather have a digital copy rather than nothing at all.
So we are welcome people to just L their copies to us, we can digitize them and get them back to them.
Generally there is a About a 10 year wait period until the library will upload the most recent your books.
This is kind of an agreement we have with the school district kind of at the behest of the school district to not put those up right away.
So in general, anything that says to present is gonna be more like t020-13-2014 in that range.
Alright, so here are the non, the daily number of subject files that we were speaking about earlier. So, forward thinking library into the past decided to arrange daily nonprofit articles by subject.
And I will say that this is. It's one of the best tools for doing research.
In my position, It would help people coming in and looking for information. Cause all of that is kind of combined in one single file.
It's not to say that everything on a subject is included there, but it's a nice starting point for people kind of looking for information on a certain the subject could include people, businesses, government organizations, celebrations, it kind of runs the game.
There there's a lot of different subjects in there. They mostly cover calcium bluffs, but there is also information on other towns within a lot of Wanna be county, smaller towns.
So these we have 5 of these steel candidates. And I believe they are 4 drawers each so you can kind of get an idea for how much we have of this.
There's a lot of information in here. And so what happens is we, you'll see the little tags there, each of those attached to a vanilla folder, all the materials on a given subject are put into one folder and then they're just already alphabetically down the line.
Usually these will include newspaper clippings. But sometimes if we, if we have it, the photo negative will be in there and generally what that is is the photo negative is the one that it is of the photo that is included in the market.
So we kind of all probably know that newspaper doesn't last forever. And the quality can kinda.
Be interesting to work with sometimes even if it's scanned. They, they can look kinda rough.
So having these, these photo negatives are great for reproduction. People have conquered this for, You know they want to find an article that showed dad in the paper and they kind of want it just for personal use other times we have people asking them to be, you know, we used in reproduction in a publication, which there is a process for that we do that do allow that as long as it's an opera that took the photos
there. Some of these also include, extra materials like pamphlets or handouts or publications.
Kind of like the one off the photo right there. That that's not necessarily from the day when up for all it's just an extra.
I guess handout that was that was included in this file. And again, like I said, this, these materials are very useful for researching both for staff and patrons.
And they do get a lot of use.
Okay, so what is the digitized? At the library. We've kind of looked at what we have.
Let's talk about what is actually digitized and what you had access to. By from home.
Now, we'll talk about this for the newspapers. We have the full daily knockout, which is 1857 to present.
We have the Frontier Guardian, 1849 to 1852, and the Council bus bugle, aging 55 to 1861.
All of that is didn't ties. However, you do need a library card. To access those because those are available on Newsweek.
So we have a Good through donors, been able to. Put these on digitize them and put them on so again, you need a library card to use them, but.
Extremely valuable. Tool resource for researching information. But a good genie. The other things that we have are going to be the city directories up to about 19 to about 1,866 to 1,950 are all on our council bloss digital archive which that QR code on the right hand side of the screen you can point your phone at it with your camera and you
should be able to go straight to that website using that. That will take you straight to the digital archive and the digital art, the nice thing about that is the digital archive is free.
You don't need a library card or anything to access it. You just go to our website, find that.
Find that link and then you have full access to what we put up there. And some of the other things we have on there is the yearbook.
So everything we talked about, about digitizing all those years for the yearbooks. Those are all on the digital archive as well.
And we can, I'll go into this after the presentation or after I conclude the PowerPoint, we can kind of take a look at the website and see what this looks like.
And I could show you how to access some of these. These files here.
So, Many of the daily non-profit negatives. So, I would say a lot of the 4 by 5 negatives are digitized.
A lot of the photos that were in the vertical files early on are digitized. The one thing we do not have to digitize are those, 35 photo negatives.
Because that is going to be a massive project to do that massive So we don't quite have a we had quite not quite have started that we've got to the phase where we're kind of describing what's the contents of some of those boxes.
But we have not actually digitized. We also have, death records. This is mostly late 19 to early twentieth century.
We have the general Dodge papers digitized as well. We have letters from, from a that focus on women's suffrage and higher up.
We have the newsletters of the historical society of Potomi County digitized. We also have the newsletter of the Poto, On the, genealogical, which is called the Frontier Chronicle.
We have those digitized as well. And we have a couple other collections here like the,
I, as a promised citizen that donated their postcard collection to us in the past.
And that is the in your Pavich postcard collection. We also have the George Simons Frontier sketches.
George Simon is a company, General Dodge, when they were serving for railroads and he would sketch you know different encampments that they would set up.
I just kind of the overall landscape, a scenery. So very interesting to look at. And those are from like the, I would say, But mid the late 18 fifties, early 18 sixties.
And we also have digitized the Customals Armed Forces roster. So again, some forward thinking librarians in 1949 decided we are going to collect all newspaper articles and all information of.
Customo citizens that served in the service. So we have you know, the date that they were.
They were in. They also have if they have it, we have the obituary too if they passed the land as well.
So that's a Nice to watch you for people doing research on maybe the family members that were in the armed forces kinda get an idea of a quick at a glance of view of of what we had, what would you look at?
Alright, so what are some of the projects we're working on then? As you can see, city directories and your books are ongoing and they will be ongoing for this foreseeable future as long as they keep putting out your books and city directory.
So. We have volunteers that will scan those. And digitize them. And then they get put up on the digital archive.
The daily non-profit files. So all those cabinets for all that information I was talking about, we have volunteers going through and what they're doing is creating a record in our digital archive.
And they will list all article titles and dates. On a given subject in there. So that people have a pretty quick at a glance.
They they can see what is available on a given subject. This again is another way that We have all these as physical items and this helps.
Make it so we can preserve the physical items, but still get access to these, to this information to Patriots.
That can't come to the library or can't visit the special breakfast. What other project that we're working on?
And I'll actually say that we're kind of just, playing a Supporting role, the taskless libraries.
But we're digitizing rural, probably county school records. So in conjunction with the Parolo County, Geneological Society.
We have a volunteer there that was wanting to work on a project that and she needed these records and we worked with.
University of Northern Iowa. To because they're the ones that hold these records and they were kind of to send us the microfiche of all those and she is currently in the process of digitizing everything.
So at some point we'll have that finished and it's going to, be a a collection that's highlighted both here in Council Blost and you and I as well.
So some future projects we're looking towards. There's many more.
Yes, but this is on my short term here. We are going to try digitizing other pot on the county newspapers.
So this list, the Journal, Herald from a Voca, the Constable Bl Blow, Trainer Record, the Farmer, Labor Press, and the, is that are all papers that we have on microfilm at the library here.
So they are accessible if you come in person. Well, we're gonna try to get the digitized so that we could put them online and make it even more easily accessible.
Again, there's much more, many more projects than just these here. We, you know, I talked about the 35 photo negatives.
That's a huge project to the future. And then the Royal Potomac County school records is kind of an only one as well.
So we kinda this is kind of What we're hoping to accomplish here in the near future.
Alright, so Let's talk about the genealogy resource. So. Oh, what we talked about can include genuinely resources, but we do actually have a specific genealogy room in the Kosovo library called the Iowa Room.
And this is accessible to the public. At any time the library is open 7 days a week.
So, I mean, as long as you're here and we have staff at the desk, you, you can access these records.
What is nice about this? Is that a contains Microphone, so in this photo on the left, you'll see those brown cabinets against the wall.
Those are all of our microphone that we have. That's available to view. Most of it is gonna be the day when on pro, but we do have the newspapers I mentioned in the last slide.
And we also have we also have the city directories, the telephone books. Late, nineteenth century to early twentieth century death records, probate records, land transfer records.
As well as state and federal census records. All on microphone. And so we have 2 microphone readers.
You can see it in the. Foreground, of this left photo. Which this is actually being set up.
Because the volunteer from the Ottawa County, GEEological study was actually here this day working on the the school records, you can kind of see in the trade that.
She is, all that was set on microfiche. So you can, if you have microfiche that you wanna read, you can use our machines to do that as well.
What is nice about these machines is that you're able to crop information. You can straighten it up.
You know, so let's say if it's, if it was scan cricket you could straighten it up a little bit you can print it you can transfer it to a flash drive you can email it to yourselves there's plenty of different methods of obtaining these records.
So that you can, you know, obviously use them, review them outside of the context of using these microphone readers.
This room also has, as you can see, many books and most of those are focused on counts and loves and but we also have materials that cover neighboring counties.
And that's when I include Harrison, Mills, Montgomery, Shelby and Cast.
There's also a few items that cover Omaha history. As well, again, since we're so close to on the phone on the right, I mean, other than you can see the rest of the books there.
You know, can't really see the shelving range, but right to the right of the photo, there is a We have a collection of these include the annals of Iowa, the Palo Cest and in successor Iowa Heritage Illustrated.
It includes the Iowa magazine, Iowa History Journal, Hockey Heritage, and the Goldfinch newsletter, which was for young adults.
So we have all those available to view in this room as well. So, and again, so this that door and the left photo is the door to special collections but Iowa room is accessible to the public.
So anything in this room you could potentially use to research or make scans or have what have you.
So another thing that we probably is probably useful to genealogist is our cemetery records.
So we have records that cover cemeteries in Potomac County but there's also a handful of cemetery records from other counties as well.
I would say the Potomac County is probably your goto in terms of, how completed is the other counties are kind of We don't have a complete record of everything.
We just have some available records for those. And of course if you're in the library you can you have access to Ancestry which is always a plus.
Because the industry is expensive. So, if you wanted to come use that, you have to, you have to use the libraries or the library's computers.
And we give generally give 2 h sessions if you're doing research, we can extend that session.
But Access to answer is always great, especially if it's free for you. So we encourage people to use that as well.
So that is the end of the presentation. Again, my name is Daily Porter. If you want to contact me, the email up there, we'll get to.
Will be my email. That phone number also goes straight to my office as well. These QR codes, the one on the right is the one that had been on the previous pages to take you straight to the digital archive.
But there's also a QR code that will take you to the the local history page, which is the central world of special collections information is.
So I will leave this up for a little bit. We could maybe do some questions and I will jump to the website.
We can take a look at that. Take a look at these pages here.
Thank you.
Okay, thank you, Daily. We have one question in the chat from Bill. He asked, can we get a library card if we don't live in your county?
You can. So if you live in Iowa. Through open access, which I'm Kind of venturing in territory, right?
I don't know the details of this is more circulation department question, but. If you live in Iowa.
You can get a card with us. Through your, Basically, you can get a card with us for free.
Now there's kind of some stipulations on that. About access, but again, I can direct you to question the circulation and they can answer some of these questions too.
But if that's on option if you don't live in Iowa, you can also purchase a, which is, I believe it's $15 for 3 months or $60 for a year and that will give you a library card that you could use to access our databases, which would include news bank and the daily not for all.
Sure.
Okay, great. Thank you. Diane is asking, when you say you need an appointment to view the special collections, do you make an appointment on the library website and can you make it, you know, like within a day of your wanting to be there?
So the way, let's actually, I'm gonna jump out of this here and we'll go to the website and I can show you where to access that because there is a contact us form.
Perfect.
For the special questions. So let me jump to that real quick. So this is the local history page.
Here is the contact special collections. Option and it just has you fill out some information. It just kind of gives me an idea of what you're looking to accomplish with your research.
I prefer a little bit of lead time. That way I can prepare and get the items. Kind of gathered that you want to look at.
If, if you're gonna do it, you know, if you're just coming down for the day, I can give you a little tour of special reflections and I can kind of show you what we have.
Maybe we could talk about what. What records, what items could potentially help you in doing your research, but.
This is the help me. Kind of do some pre research before the person shows up. I could maybe find out.
If that person, how long they live in council boss, what kind of items we have on them. It kinda just gives me some, preparation time.
Super. I think that's the end of the questions that we have right now. So let's go ahead and do your demo.
Yeah. Sure. So this is the local history page, which is essentially the special questions page.
You can access it by going to our website and then we actually just have a local history tab right here from the Discover and Learn.
So it's pretty easy to get to. We have a section here for requesting obituary.
Obituary bus are common for us. So we get a lot of these. So we have a button specifically for that because we get so much.
So because it's so popular essentially. And what we'll do, if I can show you what it looks like here, it basically just asks.
Your name, email, and then the subject name. So whoever you're looking for. We
Their information, the more information you can provide in this, request is the better because that will help us kind of narrow down what to look for.
If you know their date of birth or day to death, go ahead and include that. Another important thing.
You can always hit no, it will still search, but, if they didn't live a council bus, there's maybe not a great chance we're gonna find an arbitrary form unless it was a smaller town within by county that happened to have that you know the news was picked up on the that way.
So Along with the arbitrary question of the contact special questions which we went over there, early citizens of council bluffs.
This is we have a blog that goes out once a month. The early Citizens was kind of a series in our previous special collections librarian did.
So it mainly covers. As it name implies, really citizens of council plus and she kinda goes through and you know, talk about where they're born, what brought them to kinds of bluffs, where they didn't cancel bluffs and you know, where, you know, if we have that information, it where they died or if, if they're buried in So, various.
oh, and here's Thomas Toasted. He was the county survey error that we talked about for the early plot.
So you'll kind of get various citizens like that that play a prominent role in along with that is a little bit about itself.
Which I write once a month. So for Right now I'm focusing on. There is a article, they will now, from the August, 20 first, 1958 that.
Kind of just listed a bunch of company logos and said. It's kind of, you know, like a nice little quiz for systems like how many of the logos, does everyone recognize?
And so I kinda took that ran with it and basically just. You know, grab some of these.
These are this is the photo from the newspaper. So these are all industries and businesses that were in Council Bluffs around the 19 mid 19 fifties.
And so what I decided to do for this, it's kind of a multi park series, but I'll go through and.
Look up that business. Again, using the city directories and then David non-profit files and kind of get an idea, when the, when it was founded, who founded it.
What date if I if that's available and then I kind of talk about what they did. Again most of this is from the non-profit report on you know, AI room company, they would, sometimes even demonstrate the process to the, and they would print the entire thing in the paper, which is kind of interesting to read about.
But yeah, as you can see, there's various businesses. So I'm like the, did not last very long.
It was about a year, but they included it in the, in that article in the West.
Some of them are more well established companies. And it kind of just depends on. Yeah, the fate of the company.
After the after this article was written, they continued afterwards. So yeah, try to put these together once a month and it's just a nice little snapshot of K's history there.
We also have Go back here again. This is just gonna give you a brief description of, well, not those local history in general, the Iowa room, which we talked about and the special collections.
This you can also click This here that will I believe you email send an email to me. Although this is wrong, so don't call this number the number on the on the presentation was correct.
So I have to get this changed here. But yeah, we have, we have the manpower, video that was digitized with a grants under a previous librarian.
This is from the 19 from 1930 there. And also on this page it just kind of groups all of the history related databases together for kind of a nice to.
Few of these and again, visual sand. I use this all the time as well, which again is another one that is available with a library card.
I would say I think the only one on here that isn't is gonna be this one.
The visual archive is something you can access without a card. So will, was there any questions or when I'm going to move on to the digital archive?
There's no questions in the chat. Does anybody have a question? Go ahead and open up your mic.
Everybody's fumbling for their mute button.
It's okay. This might be a good sign if they answered all the questions. Okay, let's.
Yeah. Well, I'm not seeing anybody come on, so let's go ahead.
Switch to the digital archive. So this is where everything gets posted that we were talking about being digitized.
Recently add up items. This is just kind of a list of. Iems that are added by our volunteers.
So this is exactly what I was talking about where this is the non for all subject file. So we have a have a subject which is Ben Jensen.
And it lists. The article name plus the article date for the non-. So with access to the N, you could easily go find this article.
And read the entire thing if you're doing a report on Ben Jensen or There you know Benjamin or as part of your family.
This is a nice way to kind of have everything in the same area here. So as you can see this guy had quite a few, he was a conferenceman so he had quite a few articles written about him.
And generally the item market will kind of give you an idea of the date range that this covers.
And where these are coming from, which all of these are any of these daily known problems are obviously going to be newspaper.
If we go back, we can browse them into collections, which is going to include some of the things you're talking about here.
So I'm actually gonna scroll down to your books because this has all of them. There one umbrella.
So this is gonna be just kind of a snapshot of the record. And say we wanted to look at 2,005, high school for the death.
The yearbook for that year. So what we would do is click on this. You'll see a nice image of the cover.
Again, the record will include all the information. All the available information we have. Pertaining to the item but if you wanted to actually view this you click on this here and it will It will open up a PDF.
Just take a second because these files are kind of large. But now once this loads.
We have complete access to the 2,005 edition of the Iowa School for the yearbook.
And it's scan page at a time.
Are we even include the blank, we do all the pages, so. So if someone's looking for a classmate or you're looking, you know, whatever the case may be, these are great resources for.
Well, I would say a lot of people use it as a, they use it for reminiscing.
They might not have their your book anymore, so. This is.
A good spot because we have nearly all of them so people are able to kind of browse through and Hey, we jog some memories.
And again, these are. Let me go down to the collection tree here. So I still have yet to do.
I was go for the de and St. Albert School. But what I'm currently doing is making a collection tree all, all these.
So this is the parent collection. This is gonna include all of the different collections below it. So I have divided this up between when Transport High School was by itself and also when it was renamed Abraham Lincoln is it's split into a separate collection here.
So These are the ones that are currently done. I'm still working on a couple other ones, but it just basically.
Gathers everything into one location. It makes for easy browsing. We'll come, let's go back to the collections here.
One other one, we'll highlight is the city directories now GD on your resources and we'll take a look at that to actually so this is mostly going to be cemetery records or death records.
These are the ones that are on our microfilm in our. Room so you can you can access these through the digital archive too.
Especially if you're like me, looking at microfilm for hours at a time.
Just not necessarily the most fun thing, but so, but as an example, we'll just open this up and.
It's gonna be similar to the yearbook where you just click on the record and everything is laid out just like that.
So. Makes it pretty nice and need to look at it. Now I will say for some of the older, especially the non or some of the older newspapers.
Some of the scans were. A little rough, because they were pulled from the microphone. So at the time that they're a microphone, that's a page didn't go all the way down or if it was a fold or something weird like that happened.
It could sometimes make the article a little hard to read. So just be aware that we might run into some of those as well.
But going back, we'll go to the city directories because that's always a popular one here.
So randomly, will just pick 1876 here. So more thing, item record has all the information that we have available.
And if we click on the image. Good loads the file. That contains all the pages, even the white pages, the blank ones.
So what's fun about these early city directories is there was a lot of advertising. And, So it's actually a nice, nice tool for finding, business advertisements if that's something that you're looking for.
But yeah, basically this is a Just a nice snapshot of what it looks like we can expect.
Accessing the digital archive. I would scroll down a little further here because we'll get into the actual.
Addresses but you know it will look like pretty much any other city you've probably seen some of the older ones especially the 1866 one was let just list people by what word they lived in and maybe the street corner of where they lived.
So it makes it a little hard to find people were at or where a certain thing was located. But as, the city directories progressed in the years, it became more detailed and was more useful in
So yeah, I don't know if there's any questions after that little demonstration, but that is essentially all I have here.
Okay. Steven's got a question in the chat. It looks like the print and download features are active when you are viewing your book city directories.
Are there any restrictions on doing this?
So. We, let's take a look at one here because yes, we essentially. We have the right set to educational use.
So if someone wanted to use these for anything other than their own personal use or educational use. We would request that permission be.
So now for the year books, it's a little interesting because this is more gonna be through the schools rather than than us because we are not the copyright holders of these.
Same with the city directories. I frequently utilize those and I will, you know, print a page if I'm helping someone research something.
But if someone wanted it in a larger capacity than that, we would have to kinda talk about the details of use for that, for those cases.
But yes, essentially you can. It gives you the offer to save and rent and down a little, so.
Great. All right. Any other questions from anybody? Go ahead and open up your mics and
I'm not seeing any.
Okay.
So just a quick question I had is. So most of this. Digitization was done within your premises.
To my knowledge. Well, the newspaper digitization, the Daily Ni believe we used an outside company to do all of that.
But as far as these, the yearbooks and the city directories, these are volunteers that we have trained to scan these.
If it looks like this, if you know, if there's a little color in it, these are from the direct.
Sure.
Physical copy. Other times they are from the microfilm. So It just depends on where we were at the process of what that's gonna come from.
But as I was saying in the past, sometimes the microphones kind of poor. And so we will want to do the physical because we want a good scan of it.
That people can use. For years to come.
Sure. And it's great you've got that option.
Oh, right.
Yes, yes. Yeah, so we have a. Other than using the microfilm readers, which have the ability to capture.
Which is always nice. We also have a book scamer that I think the, I think the, dimensions go up to.
It's a pretty large trace. I think it's like, 12 by 16 or something like that.
But we have a book scanner that could be used for doing physical items as well. And that gets used quite a bit by, you know, people wanting to digitize or preserve their.
Family histories. Maybe books that were passed down. People use that quite a bit too.
To get a digital copy of something that they don't want to lose.
So does it take an appointment to reserve the equipment?
Yes. So the, well, the microfilm scanners are kind of a first come for service.
It's they're in Iowa room if they're available you can have staff will turn it over or log into it for you and then, staff will turn it over or log into it for you and then, well, and kind of give you a quick lesson, to use it and then you're free to go.
As far as the book scanner is concerned though, that is actually in our maker space, area of the library.
And there's various different, stations and equipment that could be used in there. That stuff we do requests that you.
Reserve it ahead of time just because there might be someone else. One,
Then in that maker space is there a list of the equipment that's available so people when they make a request they can say I'm looking for this Okay, perfect.
Yes, so under Books and more on the website. There's maker space equipment. And this is going to show you not only things that are available in M space, but we do have items that can check out as well.
So like you could check out the camera. The video, video camera there. But if we were gonna do.
I believe the book skinner is listed here. There we go, right there. So you would just do make reservation.
That kind of gives you a photo. So this is the actual scanner itself. We also have equipment that you can digitize media with.
Now if it's under copyright, we won't digitize that. We're not gonna convert all the Disney, VHS is the DVD.
But if you have a family, You know, from a camcorder or something, we, we can digitize that.
And this will give you a nice run out of what the equipment is. And what it, what, are capable of actually digitizing.
And then this is the calendar where you can choose what. Time you wanna come in, what range of time, so it's pretty nice and then we're pretty flexible.
We have a technology librarian who's on staff in the evenings. So we're usually new to close at 9 o'clock.
And anytime after that. The equipment is mostly available. Because he's kind of the goto person for running bus of this.
Running along these different stations.
Sure, great. All right. Well, we're coming up at one o'clock really close here.
If anybody have any other final questions?
I'm not seeing any. Daley has made his a copy of his slides available, so that'll send you out the link with that with the video.
I just really appreciate your time with us today daily, letting us take a peek inside your facility and Our brains are working on, okay, how can I get my hands on some of that stuff?
I'm sure.
Okay.
Yes.
Hey, Sherry. I have a question. How's the parking at the library?
So the parking, we were parking on the front of the library. It is metered. Please be aware of that.
It is metered. But there is parking. If you go a, I think a block to the east of the library.
Upon blustery, there's free parking on that street. So if you're willing to park and walk for block or so.
Okay.
There is free parking. But the lot itself is metered. And they, city does check those, so just be aware.
Okay.
I guess meters run 8 to 5 Monday through Friday and then they're free after 5. And on the weekends that we've.
Okay, thank you.
Sure.
Alright. And I've got a comment from Diane, she said, I'm gonna have to come over, and see your place sometime.
Sure. More than one.
Yes. Thank you.
Alright. Well, thanks again, Daily. We'll keep you, will loop you in when we send out the copy of the recording and so you'll know what we've got going on over here.
Okay. Okay, sounds good.
All right, thanks everybody. Enjoy the rest of your day.
Thank you.
Alright.