Museum staff Kiri Stone, museum intern Anna Killian, and museum docent Stephen Deutsch dance behind Lindsay and me during our museum dance off.

This is why we (occasionally) dance in museums.

Once upon a time, a blog was formed by a museum professional as an inside joke about things that happen in museums. The blog denoted the humor, joys, and frustrations of museum life, and became well-known to many individuals working and interested in museums. “When you work at a museum” continues to educate people in so many amusing ways that museums and their staff are not stodgy or static, but are vibrant and alive.

Through that blog, the official Museum Dance Off became a thing. It started with just a handful of videos of museum workers dancing. This year, we joined the 4th annual Museum Dance Off, along with 40 other museums from across the world (that’s right—this is an international competition)!

We didn’t make it out of the first round, but we still love our video. If you haven’t viewed it yet, you can take a peek on YouTube here.

We had so much fun making our submission that I thought the readers of our blog might enjoy a taste of the behind-the-scenes action that led to our beloved film.

The song chosen for our video was Stereo Hearts by Gym Class Hero and Adam Levine. New Media Specialist Jessica Rockeman, our mastermind behind most of the Dance Off video, felt strongly that we needed a song that we (especially she) wouldn’t get sick of. This one fit the bill.

Many of us who work here have long been hoping that we might take part in it. I love dancing in all of its forms, and combining that passion with the idea of showcasing our awesome museum is just too exciting. Once I heard that we were going to try to submit for this year, I peppered Jess with questions as to where we were in the process. When she told me the song title, I exclaimed, “I love that song! I know it really well!”

“Great. You’re hired,” she proclaimed.

There is a difference between knowing a song and performing it, though. Every clip was filmed multiple times, and sometimes it took a few takes until I had the right words.

“It’s always easy until the camera is on you,” Jess quipped.

We used this video to highlight the galleries and spaces available at our museum. Staff from all of our divisions joined in—in fact, Lindsay and I, the two “lead vocalists,” are both archives staff, and many others who participated or helped were from other divisions. It became a starting point for future endeavors of this type and more, the type of project that both promoted our place of work in many different ways and also showed what fun our jobs are. Claudia Berg, our agency director, even has a cameo in the video. How awesome to see leadership supporting a fun project that showcases our facility!

Our agency director, Claudia Berg, takes part.

Jess made sure that we all wore black and white throughout the film. The reason for this, she said, is that the camera loves black and white. Since I was in so many scenes, I picked out one black and white number (a very comfortable dress that was easy to pull on) and changed into it when we were shooting. I was very concerned about maintaining continuity, to the point that I kept worrying about whether my shoes (which sometimes were boots rather than the shoes you see at the opening of the song) would show on camera, or whether people would notice that I wasn’t wearing my Fitbit Alta on my wrist, or that I was wearing an additional ring during the filming. Jess laughed at this.

“No one will notice,” she said.

It’s true. You have to look really closely to notice many of the things I was concerned about—including that my hair grew probably 1-2 inches from the beginning of the filming to the end. After all, we started in about September, grabbing time whenever we could. All of the outdoor scenes were shot in the fall. We ended the filming a week or two before our deadline in March. Thank goodness we started early!

Oh. There is so much I can say about this video. I literally shed blood and sweat for this project (dancing around in the atrium got pretty warm that afternoon, and I cut my hands up at least once during the filming process). Probably tears, too, from laughing so hard. But it was SO MUCH FUN. From Wendi suggesting that she would push me through a collections area in the bottom of a cart to Becky letting us use the mosasaur puppet she crafted for use with children’s programs, we really took this little film to a level we could be proud of.

We didn’t win this year. (Congratulations, Herman Otto Muzeum of Miskolc, Hungary, for your success in the Museum Dance Off 4: A New Hope! You can watch their video here.) But we did come away with a great experience and ideas for the next dance off.

We’re fun. We’ve got it.

Next year will be our year!

Here, we are in Archaeology’s collections and work area, with Meagan Schoenfelder (right) and Brooke Morgan (left) making this scene amazing. They were so into this portion. It was hilarious and remains one of my favorite shots.

SHSND D0692. World War I Draftees shown in front of a building.

These past few months, we have seen an uptick of researchers in the Archives looking for information on World War I. This is at least partially because we are currently a century out from the Great War, as it was known at the time. An event that is so widespread and life-altering across the world evokes curiosity, reminders, and memorials.

You might think we would not have a ton from World War I in our archives, and in the grand scheme of things, it’s true that it is not our largest grouping of collections. However, we are a state entity archiving North Dakota history, and many North Dakotans served and saw battle, or pinched and saved and donated for the cause. The Great War impacted everyone, including North Dakota. Therefore, we have some collections related to it.

SHSND 10935 P014, 10935 P345, 10935 P149. Several posters from our WWI collection.

One of our most popular World War I collections, #10327, consists of four scrapbooks of letters from soldiers that were printed in various newspapers from 1918 to 1919. These oversized books contain a plethora of snapshots into a different past, allowing soldiers to share details of their daily lives and experiences in their own words.

We also have collections that deal partially with World War I. Collection #10107, for example, contains some correspondence to and from Hazel Nielson o ver several decades. This includes letters from Hazel to her family and friends while she stayed in Europe during World War I.

We also have one of the largest collection of WWI and WWII propaganda posters in the country. This is because one of our past curators, Melvin Gilmore, felt that the war posters documented such an important piece of our history, he needed to save them. He sent out a call for these documents, and received them from all corners of the world. As a result, we have war posters that are in multiple languages and in different conditions. Some are pristine, some are well-used, and all paint an interesting picture of the attitudes at the time of the war.

A screen shot of the WWI page on our website.

More books, documents, and photos can be found searching our website through ODIN, our online database. You can also venture off our website, looking through Digital Horizons, or even skimming through collections we have earmarked as related to World War I on this web page.

This year, as part of the curriculum of Dr. Joseph Stuart’s Great War class at the University of Mary, we were lucky enough to have about 20 interested and excited young men and women visit the Heritage Center and the Archives to research different facets of World War I. The class was composed of college students of different ages and interests, and developed into a cross-discipline event. Some researched war propaganda; some researched specific individuals who served; some researched the components of the mustard gas used in warfare.

Many of the students in the Great War Class at the University of Mary had never been inside an Archives before, and did not know what to expect. They came as a class multiple times, and some continued to come individually. We showed them around our Reading Room and showed them how to use our websites to locate these collections, and then they were free to discover their truths. They were kind and courteous and so excited! Their instructor informed me that at the start of every class, they started talking about what they were researching, what they were learning.

This sort of collaboration is a really cool and different way that we can help new and continuing researchers. It was incredible to watch these eager young adults work, learn, and grow as they developed their research, and as they began to understand what people went through just a century ago.

The Great War was terrible in many ways, but it is helpful to study it and learn from it, for all generations. We are lucky to be able to provide that service, and to see students use our collections to bring new knowledge and perspectives to an old story.

KFYR photo. One of the students worked at our local news station, and put together a report that aired on local news channels of the work they were doing, still available to read on this page.

Many of the students in the Great War Class at the University of Mary had never been inside an Archives before, and did not know what to expect. They came as a class multiple times, and some continued to come individually. We showed them around our Reading Room and showed them how to use our websites to locate these collections, and then they were free to discover their truths. They were kind and courteous and so excited! Their instructor informed me that at the start of every class, they started talking about what they were researching, what they were learning.

This sort of collaboration is a really cool and different way that we can help new and continuing researchers. It was incredible to watch these eager young adults work, learn, and grow as they developed their research, and as they began to understand what people went through just a century ago.

The Great War was terrible in many ways, but it is helpful to study it and learn from it, for all generations. We are lucky to be able to provide that service, and to see students use our collections to bring new knowledge and perspectives to an old story.

Left: Expansion phase pictured here is of the Treehouse children’s exhibit, now fully finished and ready to go. Each phase seemed like a new gift to unwrap. (Photo by Brian Austin)

Right: This photo is of my supervisor and me at the Legislative Reception, where we were allowed into the construction areas. I had to wear a hard hat and a vest. Other staff here (Becky Barnes) decorated my hard hat so I could feel more myself.

When the State Historical Society’s expansion occurred, a lot of planning went into the exhibits that would populate the new and existing spaces. While I was uninvolved with that process in my role here, I really was eager to see what would be used. Staff who were not part of the installation process were not given ready access to the areas (understandably, or they may have had a few of us—okay, me—underfoot). So whenever we were given permission to sneak over and watch construction going on, or see a hint of what was going to be installed, it was exciting.

But I admit, as excited as I was for everything else, I really was looking to see what audio resources might be used from the State Archives.

I’ve talked about audio and video resources several times before; I wrote about conducting oral history interviews in my second blog post, and discussed the idea of transcripts of these interviews (or lack thereof), in my third blog post. I often group audio and video resources together, because there are some similarities between the two, and because they do go together in many ways. However, I primarily work with the audio files of these types of collections.While both are very important, the audio files are a little more dear to my heart.

We have various types of audio formats housed at the State Historical Society. Reel-to-reel, audio cassettes, microcassettes, records, and CDs are typical items in our collections. We also have some files that are formed or created as digital files. Just as is the case with any other collection, all of these must be stored specifically and properly in cooler conditions, and monitored for breakdown of materials.

Unlike some other items, however, the intrinsic historic value of the item has little to do with the structure of the format (which does admittedly still provide us with history and a timeline, showing the technology at the time). The value comes from accessing what is on the cassette, or record, or CD. Which means, we really need to find ways to preserve it so we can continue to use it.

When I was a very little girl, cassettes were all the rage. (It was the 1980s and 1990s, after all.) I loved listening to all sorts of things, including music, and books on tape. I had one book on tape (A Sesame Street Christmas) that I listened to so many times, I wore the tape out. My mother actually purchased several more copies for me, because I kept wearing them out. I had other cassettes that I listened to so frequently that the tape pulled off of the reels, or wrinkled, or just jammed up in the tape player.

Obviously, the act of playing something so you can listen to it can cause wear or damage. But historic interviews and moments captured in time—those can’t be repurchased or reproduced. People want to interact with their past, and as archivists, we also want people to interact with their past. If we have an item here, we want to keep it here for the future—but we also want you to be able to hear the voice of your great-grandmother who settled in Minto in 1900.

Since around 2009, I have been increasingly working with these various audio components, transferring them to digital audio files. We did these only on request before I began working with these collections, and we did not store the files, or even have procedures set to name the files. In the years since, I have learned a ton about how to work with these formats.

Today, I have a set-up that allows me to plug different types of audio equipment into my computers and run the content through the software we use, the free program Audacity, transferring old audio to the very new digital formats. I save each file as an MP3, which is more compressed and easily accessed, as well as WAV, which is a more standardized, uncompressed file.

Fast forward to the opening of the exhibits of the State Historical Society’s expanded museum.

Our museum space is a treasure trove of items from all across the agency. I am pleased to say that both video and audio files from the Archives did appear in the exhibits, along with maps, photos, and other documents. But nothing quite made me feel the same as when I found one of the hubs that had on it, among other things, oral interviews of a few veterans that I had both interviewed and digitized.

Occasionally, I hear other bits of interviews that I have digitized, or recognize names from interviews I have worked with. Some of them are from interviews I have done myself, but many more are ones that I simply worked with years after the fact. For me, it has become a point of personal pride. You start to become protective of these files. You want to make them their best and help them find their way into the world. You have made these items ready for the future. It’s the coolest thing.

SHSND 2009-P-012-012. The State Archives has multiple images of different cooking scenes throughout our collections. Here, Signa Hermanson Larsen, Burke County, peels potatoes in 1923.

Recently, the State Archives took in a large number of North-Dakota related cookbooks from the collection of Charlotte Hansen. Charlotte was born in Jamestown in 1922, and had a longtime interest in culinary delights. She even belonged to a potluck group in high school called “The Harpies.” She and her husband Gordon Hansen owned the Jamestown Sun for a number of years. Gordon served as publisher and Charlotte was Food and Travel editor. She often travelled with a group of other food editors, and she wrote travel-themed food articles that won a variety of state and national awards from the National Food Writers Association and the National Press Women. She also published four cookbooks of her own. Eventually she wrote a food column for “The Splash” in Arizona, where they lived during the winters.

SHSND 0270 Album p19-46. Frances Densmore is cooking at a camp.

Although Charlotte had cookbooks from many locations, only those related directly to the state of North Dakota have come to the State Archives. These selections of her cookbooks encompass churches and communities around the state from the 1950s to the 2000s.

These cookbooks add a unique new dimension to research. Many of our researchers come in looking to find specific hard facts about people or events, such as when an event happened, and where it was located, or how it came to pass, if possible. Books like these add color to the picture that these historians and genealogists are interested in. What people could and did eat during different times and in different places throughout history can highlight prosperity or poverty, describe populations of settlers, show advancements in cooking technology and changes in cooking techniques, and more.

Plus, the recipes are still viable for use. So, that’s a win-win.

SHSND 0086-0378. A child is alone with a dog and cooking pot in this image.

You can’t page through the books from Charlotte Hansen’s collection without locating rhubarb, pickles, desserts, hot dishes, jell-o, and salads…and don’t forget the lefse and sauerkraut! An increase in microwaveable recipes or various types of “healthy recipes” show different perceptions and technologies here in North Dakota.

For example, one of our new acquisitions from Hanson is a Community Cookbook out of Wimbledon from 1977. Compiled by the United Methodist Women, even the categories of foods that it is separated into are telling: Quick and Yeast Breads; Bars and Doughnuts; Cakes and Frostings; Cookies; Casseroles, Meats and Poultry; Desserts; Pies; Salads and Dressings; Pickles, Jams, and Relishes; and Miscellaneous, which includes a ten-page section on candy, and a section marked Lo Calorie (sic), which in turn is about 4 pages in length. This book includes some recipes that were in an older cookbook that had been compiled some years before.

SHSND 0075-0625. A cowboy is cooking outdoors. Photo by Leo Harris.

One of our oldest cookbooks in State Archives is the Butterick Pattern Cook Book from 1890; interested culinary historians may view this book through the Library of Congress: http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.gdc/scd0001.00144805045.

For your enjoyment, for your culinary delights, and for a historic flair, feel free to try one of these recipes. Copies can be made from any of these books and added to your own home cooking enjoyment. You can’t take the cookbooks home, but you can always take home a copy of a recipe—or try one of these salads as listed below!

From the Community Cookbook of Wimbledon.

Our cataloguer couldn’t help herself; she copied and made this butterscotch bar recipe from the Otter Tail Power Company Christmas Cooky Book (sic) Cookbook.

Here in the Archives, we get a lot of questions asking how researchers can access information. Specifically, we get a lot of requests for digital files, preferably accessible on the internet, searchable by keyword, easy to use, easy to find.

We live in an age of easily accessible research, so it is what is expected. It is not, however, something we are able to do at this time. We don’t have the staff, the time, the funding, or the storage space to host such massive collections online.

A lot of our information is readily and easily accessed, though the majority of our collections are not digitized, online or searchable by keyword. Many researchers get ideas of what they need when looking at an index of collections on our website. You do have to be present to access most of our collections, or at the least, pay a minimal fee for a search, borrow a reel of microfilm through our Interlibrary Loan program, or some other similar research.

Yet this is nothing compared to what researchers encountered in the past. Digging in can be tough at times; daunting, even. Research can be challenging, and it can be rewarding—but it can also be arduous.

The State Historical Society of North Dakota has roots going back to the late 1800s.[i] For many years, it existed as a shadow of what was to come within other buildings on the capitol grounds. The Archives didn’t exist as a separate division within the society until 1971 and did not have a specific location where the public could easily access the collections. The move of this agency into a new building, its current home, offered opportunities to disseminate history in many different ways, including a public access area into the State Archives (our Orin G. Libby Memorial Reading Room).

On February 2, 1981, Jim Davis, current head of reference, opened the Reading Room of the State Archives for the first time. In doing so, he ushered North Dakotans into a new world of research possibilities.

Jim tells me many stories of how things were done differently in these early days, as he has been around this agency longer than I have been alive—as I kindly point out to him. Even if he didn’t tell me these things, the composition of the building itself would. For example, we have a startling lack of accessible outlets in our public research room. When the building was built in the 1970s and 1980s, people did not bring computers and cameras and phones in with them. They may not have even had all of these items at their homes. Outlets weren’t as much of a necessity then. Things have changed.

Case in point: In 1985, a state law was enacted that naturalization records had to be transferred from the counties to the State Archives. After they arrived here, if someone requested a copy, staff would have to go up into the stacks area, find the person in the index (if there was one), bring down the book, and copy it on our copier. These books were large and heavy, and you had to be careful not to tear the book in trying to get the correct spot copied.

When I started working here as an intern in 2006, the names were indexed alphabetically, and the books all microfilmed. This means that when I started here, I could locate a name in our alphabetical paper index, find the roll, and make a microfilm copy on one of these old (but much loved) clunkers of a machine and print out a page.

Today, I can go onto our website, link to the Institute of Regional Studies, search a name partially by typing in part of their name (great for those that often get misspelled), find the roll, pull it up, put it into one of our new microfilm scanners, and save it as a pdf or print out a page. I might even be able to find some article about the naturalization or some other life event of the individual by typing their name into Chronicling America through the Library of Congress and searching randomly through the available years/locations of newspapers. I might type their name into our searchable webpage and find an oral history or photograph collection linked to their name.

Or even look back at Wendi’s recent blog post, “Our Collections, Coming to a Computer Near You,” about how we are working to link different collections in the building. How cool is that? The concept is that we will be able to search everything in this building with a few keystrokes. Everything! (Insert evil laugh here.)

Of course, there are some trade-offs to this great excitement. It still won’t be as easy as typing a string of query words into a toolbar and accessing every document online. It is easy to admit that some of the burden of research has lifted…although still not everything is searchable, not everything is indexed, and we get more to add to our collections every day.

Isaac Newton is attributed with the quote: “If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants.”

I could point out that I found the exact wording of this quote by typing in “quote standing shoulders” and searching Google—but let’s cut to the point. We are all standing on the shoulders of those pioneers of the past, just as they stood on the shoulder of their predecessors. Just think of where we will be in the future.

Microfilm. Microfiche. If you work in a museum, archives, or library, or have researched in enough museums, archives, or libraries, you are most likely very familiar with different types of microform. However, you may also be part of an ever-growing group of people unfamiliar with the material or even the word(s). Microform may be an older format, but it is both historic in its own development and highly useful for documenting and preserving items for the future, and should not be underrated.

In very basic terms, microform is a miniaturized, reproduced image of an item. (Makes sense, right?) We take something flat, like newspaper or a journal, and photograph each page. Microfilm is developed on photographic film that wraps around reels (and is the form we typically use), and microfiche is developed on a flat sheet. These items can then be used on readers, printers, and scanners, which work by shining light on the image and projecting it out at a larger size.

Microfilm is reel-based, like this old roll. A roll of microfilm can hold a lot. One roll can hold a month’s worth of a daily newspaper, such as The Fargo Forum or The Bismarck Tribune; perhaps two years of a weekly paper; multiple small manuscript collections; or several volumes of naturalization or marriage records.

In this world of touch-screen, high-speed internet tech, this may seem old fashioned. Okay, so it kind of is. Microform was actually developed in the mid-1800s, and was considered something of a novelty at first. The State Historical Society of North Dakota only began microfilming newspapers and other frequently used and/or fragile items in the 1950s. We are still microfilming today. This is evident in our Reading Room, where we have more than 16,000 rolls available for public use. The majority of this number encompasses newspapers from around the state, naturalization records, small manuscript collections, and an ever-increasing count of marriage records from various counties, pre-1925. We have masters to most of this film and other microform within collections stored away in more controlled environments.

Microfiche like this is a flat sheet. Each square represents a frame of film, which will include one image—in this instance, a page of The Grand Forks and North Dakota Manual for 1885.

Microfilm is not going away anytime soon. There are many reasons why. Microfilming allows us to capture a copy of an original that likely is in the process of deteriorating without handling it and possibly making it worse. It is relatively low cost to produce, maintain, and store; equipment needed to access microfilm is simple enough to use (really, all you need is some light and a method of magnification); the material is supposed to last hundreds of years; and the format is stable. The alternative, a more up-to-date digital file, can indeed be easy to access on the technology so many use on a daily basis—but takes time and money to digitize and store, requires vigilance in the case of updates and reformatting, and has an unknown (and possibly, in some cases, short) shelf-life. Also, it is noteworthy that digital items are not automatically OCR (optical character recognition)-capable. (That means you can’t necessarily search documents by key word, just because they are scanned.) For all of these reasons and more, many agencies continue to use microform for storing and accessing their files. This includes, or perhaps is led by, the National Archives and Records Administration, which succinctly highlights these very comments on its site.

You can see by the condition of our microfilm boxes that they take a lot of use. Is microform the next Holy Grail?

Despite the fact that we use microfilm all the time, in my front-desk capacity at the State Archives, I meet a lot of people who don’t. They run the gamut of ages, but there is definitely an upward tick in the younger age groups. I like to try to explain things in terms that make sense to people. I got pretty excited when I saw Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull for the first time—for no other reason than our hero was trying to obtain microform in one of the scenes. It’s my overwhelming memory of the film, which perhaps says something about the film—I’ll allow you to draw your own conclusions there—and it has led me to reference the film with certain age groups who enter our building.

Me: Hello, students who were not yet born in time to remember Y2K or 9/11!
Students: (mumble, mumble, mumble)
Me: So, do any of you know what microfilm is?
Students: (blank stares)
Me: Have any of you seen Indiana Jones? (Pause as students raise hands.) The last one? With the Crystal Skull?
Students: The first one is my favorite!/I just saw (insert latest move here)!/I liked that one!/I didn’t like that one!/etc.
Me: Remember when he was in the library? (Trying to disguise the fact that I barely remember that scene anymore, except to use it for this purpose, and hold up a disheveled little box as if it’s the greatest treasure on Earth.) This is what he was after! Microfilm!
Students: (Mixed reactions…perhaps not as excited as I am.)

Then I show them how it works. Just like movie magic, it’s actually seeing the microfilm on screen (in this case, on a microfilm reader/printer/scanner) that produces the best response. Once the film is loaded, and people of all ages find their own birth announcements, their great-grandfather’s naturalization record, a picture of their mother or father on the front page of a newspaper… it’s worth it.

The old technology of microfilm printers like this one was cutting edge back in the day; it is still useful, but does not offer the same options as the new types of machines.

That’s the miracle. It’s not the microform itself, but that we have something that can offer us such stability, and that we thus have the capabilities of making these items so accessible. The miracle is being able to use this format.

We recently acquired these modern microfilm scanners. They work on the computer and provide the user with more flexibility in making copies. They also can scan to a USB drive, which some researchers prefer to the older ones, which only print out paper.