OSU 150: Hops history open house: Oct 3rd 10:00-2:00 (SCARC foyer)

Did you know that Oregon State University has the first archive in the country dedicated to saving and sharing the history of hops and brewing? Visit the OHBA in the Valley Library to learn more about the history of research at OSU and hops throughout the state through a variety of photographs, memorabilia, oral histories, research reports, homebrew club newsletters, books, industry periodicals, and art from breweries throughout the state.

The Oregon Hops and Brewing Archives (OHBA), established in 2013, is the first in the U.S. dedicated to collecting, preserving, and sharing materials that tell the story of Northwest brewing. We document the regional hops and barley farming, craft and home brewing, cider, mead, and the OSU research that dates to the 1890s! Learn more about what you’ll find in the collections at https://guides.library.oregonstate.edu/brewingarchives.

Like, let’s do lunch! 1980s film showing: Oct 12 12:00-1:00 (Willamette East)

Like, let’s do lunch! Step back in time with News and Communications Service totally awesome film footage from the 1980s. Clips include DaVinci Days activities (1989), Art professor Harrison Branch talks with OSU Art students (1986), eavesdropping on curious campus conversations (1986), and aerial footage of campus (1983).

OSU Women exhibit reception Oct 17 4:00-6:00 (SCARC reading room)

Join us to celebrate, consider, and be curious about women’s work, words, communities, professional barriers, heartbreaks, contradictions, achievements, and perseverance. Learn more about the history of women at Oregon State University at the “Women’s Words : Women’s Work” exhibit opening and reception.

• Treats, coffee, and exhibit tours 4:00-6:00.
• Exhibit introduction and talk 5:00.

Glitter in the Archives! Using History to Imagine Queer and Trans Futures October 26 2:00-4:00 (SCARC reading room)

Join the OSU Queer Archives (OSQA) for our annual crafting event using archival materials! Come learn about OSU and Corvallis area queer history and be inspired to imagine, create, and “craft” queer and trans futures.

The Great Beaver Bake Off Oct 31 12:00-1:00 Willamette Rooms.

Join us for the 12th annual archival recipe cooking event! Bring your favorite sweet treat to share. This year will be a baked good bake-off and tasting competition, so bring your best beaver spirit and dress up as your favorite baked good! Get inspired by historic recipes posted on our blog (bit.ly/2019OAMrecipes).

#dogaday: vintage dog photos all month long! Instagram @osuscarc

Missing your best canine friend? Celebrate archives this month with some of our very favorite historic dog photos.

Mark your calendars for October 31st noon-1:00 for the 12th annual Taste of the ‘Chives! Meet us in the Willamette Rooms on the 3rd floor of the Valley Library and bring your best baked treats.

Here are some ideas:

• 
• 
• Citations
• Men making donuts in Portland, Oregon. P217:34:65
• Oregon State University Folk Club. Gateway to Our Kitchens : The Oregon State University Folk Club Cookbook. Corvallis, Or.: Printed by Franklin Press, 1981.
• Oregon State Fair Cookbook Featuring Award-winning Recipes from past Years. Salem, Or.: Oregon State Fair & Exposition Center, 1983.

We completed or updated six finding aids in July and August 2018.

• Two of the guides are updates to reflect current descriptive practice and incorporate additions to the collections
• Two of the guides are for collections that were only minimally described and are now fully processed
• Two of the guides are for University Publications (PUBS)

Finding aids that have been updated to reflect current descriptive practice and incorporate additions:   

President’s Commission on the Status of Women Records, 1971-2010 (RG 159)

These materials were generated and assembled by the President’s Commission on the Status of Women (PCOSW), an independent commission established in 1972 at Oregon State University with responsibility for advising the President and other administrators on issues of concern to women on campus.  The records in the collection document the activities of the Commission in its research and advisory role. 

E.E. Wilson Photographic Collection, circa 1855-1953 (P 101)

This collection consists of images of Wilson, a Corvallis native and Oregon Agricultural College (OAC) alum, as well as his family and friends, the OAC campus, Corvallis, and other locations around the Pacific Northwest.  The collection also includes images of the 1915 Panama Pacific Exposition in San Francisco and photos of Siletz tribe members.  Digitized images from the E.E. Wilson Photographic Collection can be viewed in Oregon Digital.

Collections that were only minimally described:

Te May Ching Papers, 1947-1988 (MSS Ching)

This collection consists of teaching and research records created and assembled by Te May Tsou Ching, professor of seed physiology at Oregon State University from 1956-1988.   The materials document Ching’s career via correspondence; research materials including project files, laboratory notebooks, specimen photographs, and bibliographic records; teaching materials; administrative and programmatic records from the Crop Science Department; and records from her involvement in various professional activities and organizations.

Home Economics Club Records, 1937-1974 (MSS HomeEcClub)

These records document the activities and operations of the Oregon State University Home Economics Club.  The record are comprised of constitutions, correspondence, financial records, meeting minutes, reports, newsletters, materials from state and national organizations, and scrapbooks.

University Publications:  

Oregon State College Preview and Promotional Booklets, 1938-1960 (PUB 010-24j)

These annual publications provide a preview for incoming students and the new academic year and promote Oregon State College to potential new students.  All of the publications are available online in Oregon Digital.

Staff Newsletter, 1961-2009 (PUB 008-22a)

The Staff Newsletter consists of the weekly publication for Oregon State University faculty and staff published from 1961 through 2009 as The Staff Newsletter, OSU This Week, OSU This Summer, and LIFE@OSU.  The newsletter includes articles, announcements and news of campus-wide interest.  The Faculty Senate minutes were published as an appendix to the newsletter during the 1960s and 1970s.  Most of the issues ofOSU This Week and OSU This Summer for 1987-2008 are available online in Oregon Digital.

This post is contributed by Maddie Connolly, a SCARC Student Archivist, and a senior majoring in archaeology, and minoring in French and history. Her Honors thesis focuses on redware ceramics in medieval England that were excavated from a witch’s house!

Dr. Emily Brock recently completed a two-month stint as resident scholar in the OSU Libraries. Brock came to OSU to conduct research in support of an upcoming book on the 20^th century roots of the plywood industry. Her interest in the history of plywood originated in 2013 when she worked as a Fulbright scholar in the Philippines, where she observed the country’s significant involvement in plywood production and exportation. Her research was especially exciting for the Special Collections and Archives Research Center as she made use of several natural resources collections that have not otherwise been heavily used.

Brock’s research on the development of the plywood industry focuses on the American presence in Southeast Asia in the first half of the 20^th century, and on the subsequent rise of American-style multinational corporations in the region. One specific focus is on the role that the international plywood industry plays in stripping away the natural context of harvested trees, thus encouraging apathy on the part of consumers towards the origins of source materials. This apathy in turn has worked to diminish reverence for the incredible biodiversity of Southeast Asian tropical hardwoods forests, an unusual turn in light of modern ecological awareness movements.

Timber production in Southeast Asia increased significantly following the diminishment of the presence in the Philippines at the onset of World War II. The timber industry of the era was one of the most lucrative in Southeast Asia, where most countries at the time were struggling economically following years of occupation by neo-colonial powers and, later, destruction wrought during the war. The need to clear agricultural lands for food production, much needed for war-torn countries, accelerated deforestation in the region.

During the war, plywood was developed and marketed as a cheaper alternative to expensive and inefficient traditional wood sources and also to metal resources that were scarce during the war years. Initial uses for plywood as a metal substitute included medical and military contexts including, for example, leg splints and instrument panels in motorboats, ships, and aircraft.

Lauan wood, a genus of tropical hardwood which makes up a significant portion of Southeast Asia’s tropical forests, was one of the most common types of wood used to produce plywood in the early years of the product’s development. Contemporary “lauan” plywood, despite being marketed as such, is not actually made of lauan wood because, like many tropical hardwoods indigenous to Southeast Asia, lauan species have become endangered as a result of the success of the plywood industry. That said, tropical hardwoods are favored for plywood production because they are cheap, there are no knots in the wood, and they do not have growth rings.

Plywood is composed of thin layers of wood held together by glue. It is considerably cheaper and more efficient to produce than are traditional wood products and it enables the use of scrap material, since the actual kinds of wood used in plywood production are less important to its functionality than are the number of layers and the types of glue used to create the product. Put differently, the material characteristics of plywood are not dependent on the species of wood used but rather on the production process. The combination of the international production line and the relative insignificance of wood types leads consumers to conceptualize plywood as distinct from its source materials. Consumers tend to prioritize indications of how plywood will behave over information about what makes it up.

The price and quality of plywood dropped as the industry expanded out of Japan and the Philippines into other regions of Southeast Asia, including Korea, Taiwan, and eventually Indonesia. Manufacturers began sneaking durian wood into the inner layers of their plywood, which became an issue because durian wood smells just as bad as it infamous fruit and, when used in building materials, the smell lingers and permeates the structure. This issue came to a head rather quickly as product came to be used in the construction of residential homes. Brock points out that problems of this sort are made possible as a result of the extreme disinterest of consumers toward the source materials used in plywood production. Indeed, the major draw of plywood is that one does not have to know exactly what it is made of to know how it will perform.

The Resident Scholar Program supports researchers from around the world in their use of the Special Collections and Archives Research Center’s holdings. Applications to the program are accepted from January to April; more information can be found on the program website.

This post is contributed by Maddie Connolly, a SCARC Student Archivist, and a senior majoring in archaeology, and minoring in French and history. Her Honors thesis focuses on redware ceramics in medieval England that were excavated from a witch’s house!

Katie Macica recently became the 29th researcher to complete a tenure of work sponsored by the OSU Libraries Resident Scholar Program. Macica is a PhD candidate from Loyola University, Chicago.

Macica’s research focuses on the impact of World War II on regional industrialization. Specifically, she looks at how war-time industries coincided with and influenced local economies throughout the war as well as how policies and practices in place before the war affected the circumstances within which war-time industries were established and managed. She is particularly interested in the role and development of local Pacific Northwest industries throughout the war effort. To this end, she came to OSU to utilize maps and documents from SCARC’s collections that pertain to economic and industrial development during the first half of the twentieth century.

At the outbreak of World War II, the Pacific Northwest region of the United States was relatively isolated geographically from the war effort and from contemporary military and industrial centers of production. The region was home to a significant forestry and forest products economy, which Macica noted underwent a period of internal change at the start of the war, as characterized by a move toward sustainability practices and away from complete extraction. The start of the war came on the heels of the New Deal-era environmental movement which increased awareness about the impact of extractive industries like forestry, agriculture, and mining — the region’s major local economies at the time.

Initially, the forest products industry weakened as its workers were pulled by the draft or moved on to jobs in other industries that were considered more necessary for the war effort. By the end of the war, however, forest products from the Pacific Northwest were in use throughout the war zone. Macica’s research focuses on the shift of the Pacific Northwest forest products industry from relative insignificance to an indispensable source of production and resources for the war effort.

As the war dragged on and metal resources for aircraft, ships, and storage and housing facilities dwindled, the demand for forestry products increased. Wood was used in place of metal wherever possible, particularly in certain components of military aircraft and ships, and as molds, scaffolds, trusses and other construction materials. Its strong forestry economy enabled the Pacific Northwest to ultimately become a hub of shipbuilding and aircraft construction during the war, as easy access to plentiful forest products and to ample hydroelectric power from the Willamette and Columbia rivers facilitated military industry and sped the construction process. Wood products were also commonly used in place of metal in the construction of military storage facilities and housing for military workers.

In her resident scholar presentation, Macica emphasized, despite the enormous demand for Pacific Northwest forest products, the extraction of forest resources did not reach its peak during the war years. All-out exploitation was, for one, prohibited by the National Park Service, which refused to allow the destruction of national parks in order to harvest materials for the war industry. Environmental conservation efforts inherited from the New-Deal era also helped to limit the exploitation of national forests to supply the war effort.

Shipyards in Portland, Seattle, Tacoma and Vancouver, and aircraft production centers in Seattle made up the bulk of the wartime industrialization of the region. These industries were drawn to the region primarily because of its abundance of forest products, but also because local waterways were being harnessed to provide hydroelectric power and house shipyards.

Macica’s research indicates that wartime industries in the region literally laid the groundwork for continuing industrialization in the Pacific Northwest after the end of the war. The shipbuilding and aircraft construction industries relied on pre-existing local economies and natural resources, which enabled regional development to continue without interruption in the post-war years, since industrialization was not dependent on outside financial support or resources.

The Resident Scholar Program provides research support for visiting scholars from around the world. New applications are accepted every year between January and April.  More information can be found here.