Kudos to Wellesley

I referred to the Harvard President's controversial statements in my entry for February 24, at the time of my Harvard visit. In the Spring 2005 issue of Wellesley (alumnae magazine), President Diane Chapman Walsh wrote a great essay about women in education. Wellesley College founder Henry Durant specifically hired female full professors, taking issue with his Harvard faculty friend Edward Clarke. Clarke authored a book in 1873 entitled Sex in Education, or a Fair Chance for the Girls in reaction to a social movement to make higher quality education available for girls. According to Walsh, Clarke "...warned that educating women would damage their health and their ability to conceive children."

Go Wellesley! Just had to insert this little item, irrelevant as it is to my sabbatical...

More Strauss materials

I've been reading Stephen Cassady's Spanning the Gate and have started John van der Zee's The Gate. van der Zee has managed to see and meet a lot of resources I will never get to know. I wish I had the time.

The recent UL announcement to faculty about library online resources featured the Facts on File History Reference Center. I decided to look up Strauss. They essentially digitized the contents of the Facts on File Encyclopedia of Bridges and Tunnels, 2002. This is where I saw more Strauss bashing. I would not expect an encyclopedia to publish such editorial "facts."

Johnson and Leon used language such as:
"one of the most eccentric bridge builders,"
"curiously" Strauss spent as much time publicizing his affiliation with the bridge as he did working to build it.
"Strauss seemed most intensely focused on making sure no one got credit for building the bridge but he. It was surprising that Strauss seemed so distant from the project after it started since he spent a dozen years lobbying, politicking, cajoling, and sweet-talking anyone in sight to encourage its construction."
"quintessential outsider"
"claiming to be an engineer, possessed neither an engineering degree nor a membership in the American Society of Civil Engineers"
"obsessed with obtaining acceptance and validation"
"since the school [University of Cincinnati] did not have an accredited engineering department, he earned a bachelor of arts degree in its liberal arts school. However one of his areas of study was engineering"
"would continue to write poetry for the balance of his life. Most of it ranged from bad to really bad, indicating Strauss was about as imaginative a poet as he was an innovative bridge designer"
"hogging as much of the limelight as he could"
"penned some of his tortured verse to celebrate the construction of the bridge"

This editorializing is not the usual type of factual encyclopedia entry. I am not impressed with Facts on File.

Back to ECECS

Not to drop the ball with ECECS, today I visited Hal Carter again to review our institutional repository idea in light of the OhioLINK delay. Hal introduced me to Chris Isbell, who has worked to mount the first reports locally. Chris told me that he used an open access content management software called Metadot to build the web site. For a small department it works fine. You can authenticate users with it, build your own "gizmos" etc, in PERL. Peter Murray at OhioLINK is aware of the software. Fine for what it does, but of course doesn't have the power for digital media that Fedora will provide for the DRC.

In discussing metadata and other preparations for eventual migration to OhioLINK, Hal gave me a useful description of systems design engineering basics. The system can be designed, the metadata defined, etc after crucial questions have been answered.

Q1: who are the customers, primary and secondary? They must be defined.
Q2: what are the products?
Q3: who are the producers of products to meet the needs of the consumers/customers?
Q4: what is the infrastructure? (web for distribution? environment, procedures, standards)

Producers: produce info, need an interface, audit function, standards
Products: directly disseminated? archived?
Consumer: need assessment of security, protection for product, etc.

Hal recommended that I see Karen Davis, who teaches database design, modelling, metadata, etc.

Tailgate Trio

Well, if you missed the Student Helper Appreciation party today, you also missed hearing the Tailgate Trio that provided musical background entertainment. It all started when Ted Baldwin and I offered a violin/piano performance for the Fine Arts Fund. Kathy Kinsey won the performance and donated it to the student party. We invited Erma Fritsche to join us with her flute. With a tailgate theme for the party, we had to do something to tie our more classical style into the event. Hence the notion of wearing tails and calling ourselves the Tailgate Trio.

We concluded with "When you're smiling," appropriate for all public services staff - the whole world will smile with them...!

Strauss bashing

I finally got up the courage to view the programs about Strauss that put him in ill light. Actually, the first one, an A&E video from 1994 entitled The Golden Gate Bridge was not too hard on him. He was not known to be easy to work with, given to fits of temper and insisting on having the limelight. But the tone was OK. (CAS has this video, TG25 .S225G65 1995.)

The more recent PBS video from the American Experience series is entitled Golden Gate Bridge. This was recently ordered at my request for the Langsam collection (TG25.S225G66 2004). This is the video that dramatizes the conflict between Strauss and Ellis. It gets in plenty of digs about Strauss, the cantankerous Chief Engineer "who lacked an engineering degree." They also dubbed him as feisty, conceited, runty, and insecure. His bridges heretofore were dubbed ordinary, mundane, functional, patterned bridges, with little credit given his designs. His Aeroscope, designed for the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, was written off as not a feat of engineering. To their credit, they recognized Strauss for the visionary he was, as well as a promoter and champion of the GGB. And he was recognized as a commanding ego who saw in others special talents which he empowered.

They placed some emphasis on his adding C.E. after his name, representing a "graduate certificate of engineering, a degree he never received. " They also told how he watched the construction of the Covington Bridge (I think they mean the Cincinnati-Covington Bridge) when he was laid up in college from a football injury. Note the bridge was completed in 1867 and Strauss was born in 1870. What construction was he watching ca 1890? Hard to believe this is the work of PBS....

It gets my dander up.

Strauss timeline

I got back from LA on Thursday, April 28. Now that all the photocopied materials from Stanford and Berkeley have arrived, I am spending time reading every page in detail and inserting tidbits that refer to Strauss into a huge, detailed timeline. I am afraid the timeline is turning into notes for a book, a book I don't intend to write.

The more I read, the more I would like to know about Strauss' business and family firsthand. The business letters don't tell what was really going through his mind, and they focus primarily on the GGB project. Strauss had two sons. One went to Stanford and one went to Westpoint. The Stanford son Richard K. made it onto the company letterhead as Contracting Engineer some time mid-1935. I don't know what happened to the other son, Ralph V. Strauss. Or to Strauss' widow Ethelyn Annette. Perhaps I should track the families down!