Oral history questions for Richard Polt on typewriter collecting:

Over the years Joe Van Cleave has done a handful of videos on selectivity and downsizing of one's typewriter collection including: <br /> - The Minimal Complete Typewriter Collection https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Ej6kd1FsnE <br /> - Culling the Herd https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_ueHE3Whjk <br /> - Downsizing Your Typewriter Collection https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eic4lNE0l3Y

And Sarah Everett has one "what's your deserted island typewriter?" (if I had to pick 5 typewriters....) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFqJa9kD-v0

All this to ask Richard: what your downsizing experience has been? What were the criteria by which you chose what to keep? Did you more closely focus your collection into an area, era, style, other? Are you primarily keeping the things you tend to use more frequently? Things in better condition? You started out with how many to end up with how many? If you could start your collecting over from scratch what would you change? Are there things you wouldn't get the second time around? Things you would have spent more time focusing on? What will you continue to collect and at what rate? Naturally, collecting is a very personal thing with respect to individual's specific tastes and experiences (and frequently space!), but I suspect answers to some of these may help others, especially those who are just starting into collecting, or who have a dozen or two machines but who might find value on where and how to potentially focus their efforts. It may also help other collectors and their families who are dealing with appropriately disposing of significant collections, especially in cases where a deceased collector was very passionate and the family just wants to be rid of them quickly (i.e. ideas like Swedish death cleaning and related).

I'm sure reflections on these would be an interesting typecast, but if it's easier to do something like an oral history interview, I'm happy to collect these and a few dozen more questions into an interview format if you've got 30-60 minutes in the coming months to devote to a remote audio/video interviews/mini-podcast or YouTube episode or something similar?

I guess this might be rooted in Plampers generation, as somebody born much later this identity was nothing but a myth to me -- and I do not know a lot in my generation that would share the idea of a homogeneous identity.

Class 2, Does Memory Matter? Why Are Universities Studying Slavery and Their Pasts? by David Blight for [[YaleCourses]]

[[Mark Lawrence Schrad]] in Why the World of Typewriter Collectors Splits Down the Middle When These Machines Come Up for Sale<br /> at 2024-03-16 12:00 PM <br /> (accessed:: 2024-03-19 10:23:08)

Read [[Martha S. Jones]] in A New Face for an Old Library Catalog

Discussion on harmful content in library card catalogs and finding aids.

The methods used to describe archive material can not only be harmful to those using them, but they also provide a useful historical record of what cataloguers may have been thinking contemporaneously as they classified and organized materials.

This is another potentially useful set of information to have while reading into historical topics from library card catalogs compared to modern-day digital methods.

Is anyone using version control on their catalogs?

How do we better distinguish the margins between histories, biographies, and hagiographies and the motivations of the writers who produce them?

How do we better underline these subtleties to the broader publics outside of historians and other specialists?

When Academic Historians Tackle Hard Histories by [[Martha S. Jones]]

https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Creating_Oral_Histories

https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/2488/zettel-feedback-podcast-with-children?

To extend, it could be an interesting exercise to have the kids call up grandmother and grandfather to interview them with questions about when they were growing up, about their parents, and their grandparents. Then you're also getting some of the family oral history together not only for yourself, but for your children as well as future generations.

I have a nascent card very much like yours, but not as well fleshed out yet.

https://catalog.altadenalibrary.org/cgi-bin/koha/opac-detail.pl?biblionumber=162348&query_desc=

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Martha S. Jones</span> in An Unexpected Connection - by Martha S. Jones (<time class='dt-published'>04/14/2022 09:17:10</time>)</cite></small>

https://hardhistoriesjhu.substack.com/p/a-colonization-connection

There are now enough colleges and universities looking into the overlap of their own histories and that of slavery and its effects on their development that there is now a consortium of them (the Universities Studying Slavery (USS)) and two day long conference.

Star knowledge is guarded by family lineages in the Lakota cultures with the name Lúta.

https://hardhistoriesjhu.substack.com/

Taking a moment to send a warm thank you to all the work (both visible and invisible) that Dr. Martha S. Jones and her lab are doing for the Johns Hopkins Community and far beyond. Where ever you live, I heartily recommend their newsletter Hard Histories at Hopkins.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silva_rerum

Presumably these are the same sylvae mentioned by Earle Havens on page 10 of his book Commonplace Books (Yale, 2001).

Where do these fit into a historical commonplace tradition? From a timing and logical perspective they certainly could be a transplant from other parts of Europe in modified forms.

I'll note that some of the pattern is similar to printed bibles in the 1900's (and perhaps going back earlier) in the United States which held pre-printed pages for adding this sort of historical personal family data that would likely be handed down from generation to generation.

Compare and contrast this form to the idea of the Relatio chronicle in Jennifer Paxton's essay Forging Communities: Memory and Identity in Post-Conquest England.