Strauss and LA

Eric's final recital at the Colburn School of Performing Arts was Monday the 25th. The recital was a fitting conclusion to Eric's two years in residency at Colburn.

I got started on the Strauss research after the recital. Ted Baldwin's friend at the LA Times, Peter Johnson, supplied me with an obituary. It told that Strauss' residence when he died in 1938 was on Wilshire Blvd. It named the chapel where services were held and the mausoleum at Forest Lawn Memorial Park (largest in the U.S. I believe) where Strauss was laid to rest. I was able to take pictures at Forest Lawn of the chapel and mausoleum.

The obituary named Ernest Holmes, founder of the Institute of Religious Science, as the person to preside at the services. Since Strauss had a Jewish heritage, I thought this curious. But secondhand stories tell that Strauss met with family disfavor when in 1895 he married a Cincinnati girl who was not Jewish. Perhaps he strayed from his heritage. During the 1920s Ernest Holmes was developing as a religious speaker. In 1926 he spoke Sundays at the Ambassador Hotel, the very hotel where Strauss stayed in 1933 when he "disappeared" for a while. That is also the year he supposedly remarried. In 1934 Holmes moved to the Wiltern Theatre on Wilshire Blvd, not far from Strauss' final residence. I would love to learn more about the connection between Strauss and Holmes, if any.

What's happening?

Here I am back in LA - for a quick visit to hear son Eric play a cello recital and do a little research on Strauss. He died here and according to the obituary lived on Wilshire Blvd. I have to check that out! Also his burial place, if I can get a car to go see it. So it's a quiet Sunday morning, film crews are set up in a few places on the street below doing their usual Sunday morning thing. The Cathedral bells ring the start of the Spanish language service. And then I notice the shouting. I thought it was the film crews shouting directions. But eventually, as the din escalates, I go to the balcony to look out. A parade! about 4 blocks long. Heading south on Grand from somewhere north of the Disney building, past Colburn School of Performing Arts, past MOCA (Museum of Contemporary Art) to the plaza in front of Deloitte & Touche. Well-dressed people shouting and chanting.

It's not a parade. They are shouting angrily, they are carrying red flags and banners in Chinese. They must have marched from Chinatown, just over the 101. Some signs are in English. Something about Japan. They are angry with the Japanese. Are they part of the recent Japan bashing, harking back to WWII and China's bad treatment by the Japanese? Mounting tensions have been reported in the news. Or has there been an incident? I wish I could understand their chants, songs and rally speeches, now taking place.

Film crews are busy shooting from trucks and cherry pickers, and interviewing people in the street. Is this a real rally? or part of a movie? In LA you are never sure what's happening.

The OhioLINK saga

Back on October 25 I mentioned vaguely my raison d'etre for working at USC in the fall. They invested in a software called Documentum, to which they are migrating their digital archives. OhioLINK was interested in this process, as OhioLINK used Bulldog to build the Digital Media Center (DMC) and Bulldog was bought by Documentum to enable them to enter the digital/media arena.

I tracked progress at USC as they grappled with the various aspects of migration: database structure, metadata, ingest forms, search capabilities, etc. It wasn't an easy task, and I supplied reports to that effect to Anita and to Peter Murray, newly appointed but not on duty until January 2005. Peter was hired to turn the DMC into the new, expanded Digital Resource Commons or DRC. I put Peter in touch with people at USC so he could query them about Documentum.

Meantime with OhioLINK's budget growing lean, the powers-that-be researched the possibility of open access software in lieu of the very expensive Documentum software. I was hoping for DSpace, as I have a little familiarity with it. But it looks like the choice will be Fedora, developed at Cornell and University of Virginia. Needless to say this OhioLINK decision takes me in new directions. Time to learn about Fedora!

Back to IR

IR = institutional repository. I haven't forgotten my original mission, to create a repository for the College of Engineering. I visited Hal Carter, Head of the ECECS Department, armed with my knowledge from Cal Tech, Harvard, and MIT. I was scouting for potential material to begin a pilot. Turns out ECECS was just in the process of developing its own little repository. And Hal liked the appeal of the material eventually being part of a larger, possibly state-wide engineering repository at OhioLINK.

We put our heads together and created a project proposal following OhioLINK's guidelines for submissions to the Digital Media Center (DMC), with the last version of the draft dated today. It will go under review by UC's Digital Department and advisory committee.

Short time out

My sister Fran came to visit Wednesday. Thursday we drove all the way to Beckley WV to hear the Calder Q play in concert there. The concert was an excuse to get out and enjoy beautiful weather and the countryside. We drove east through Ohio and back home through northern Kentucky on Friday. We caught a snack with Eric after the concert, and Friday visited Tamarack in Beckley before heading home. Tamarack is an interesting facility where artists to perform their crafts and for onlookers to watch the process as well as purchase the products. It's the kind of place Fran loves.

Saturday we had dinner with Dean Shupe and family (Dean is a retired engineering faculty member and brother-in-law of Fran). Today we heard the CSO's concert with Sarah Chang performing. Tomorrow Fran heads back to Milwaukee.

Strauss web site

Armed with goodies from my research in Cincinnati and San Francisco, I began working with Sudha, our graduate assistant, to build the web site about Strauss. Sudha created a basic design with areas to serve as placeholders for what could be a future full-blown archive. But right now the focus is on setting the story straight. Mike Baseheart will be contributing an introductory piece to explain the purpose. For what it's worth, these meager beginnings can be viewed in the Strauss directory on the Engineering Library web site.

I have discovered in my research that secondary sources are frustrating. They perpetuate stories that might have been mere imagination, or they build on facts that aren't exactly right. Thus I have focused as much as possible on primary sources. My dream would be to get a huge grant to digitize all the primary material and some secondary material I was working with, plus the treasures I haven't even seen yet. Among the latter would be material at the GGBHD, or even Strauss' own company files. Where are they?

Partners in such an enterprise would include for starters:
University of Cincinnati Archives (Kevin Grace)
Cincinnati Historical Society (Ann
American Jewish Archive (Kevin Profitt)
Environmental Design Archives, UC Berkeley
Transportation Archives, UC Berkeley
Water Resources Center Archives, UC Berkeley (Paul Atwood)
Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley
Stanford Special Collections and Archives (Margaret Kimball)
GGBHD (Mary Currrie)
San Francisco Public Library History Room
CalTrans Archive, Sacramento
Chicago Public Library
Newberry Library
University of Chicago Library
Purdue University Archives
Purdue University

I notice that the American Experience "Golden Gate Bridge" production was funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, dedicated to enhancing public understanding of technology. Perhaps they would be interested....