Crimson and Gold Connection; Steve Cox

Welcome to Crimson & Gold Connection, keeping you connected to the people and current events at Pittsburgh State University. On Crimson & Gold Connection this week, I'm joined by Steve Cox University, Archivist and Head of Special Collections at the Leonard H. Axe Library of Pittsburgh State University. You're a recent appointee to Pittsburgh State. How long have you been here now? I started in early August, so I'm just about three and a half months. And you've come up from Tennessee, I understand. Right, last 14 years I've been the Head of Special Collections and University Archives at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. So what do you find special about Pittsburgh State and where you are working right now? I've got a large number of collections. I think maybe a slightly larger number of collections that you would see for an archive this size. But I like the focus of a lot of them, which focuses on the regional history, including the mining history for three state. Area and especially the socialist activity that was occurring in this area, particularly Gerard, back in the late 1800s and early 1900s. We've got a magnificent set of collections that deal with the socialist newspaper, Appeal to Reason, that was published in Gerard, starting in the late mid-1990s, up until the 1920s.

The predecessor to that was Emmanuel Haltman, Julius, who went on as the founder of the Appeal died, J.A. Wayland, to start his own publishing company and was known for publishing the little and the big blue books, which were distributed widely across the United States. As I understand it, the Axe Library has one of a few complete collections of the blue books. I think mostly complete. I think there may be one or two or three or four that they don't have, but there were over a thousand published over several decades. In most cases, we got multiple copies of a lot of them, but I do believe, and I haven't had time to really check the inventory, but I've been told that there were some that were published or we knew there were plans to be published and may never have not actually gotten published. We just haven't determined that yet.

How many of you have been published in New Zealand and Haltman, Julius, for colorful characters in their day? Right. They were. Looking at some of the things that they published, particularly Haltman, Julius, with his little blue books and big blue books, some of them I think would have been fairly controversial in the 1920s, years prior to that, into the 30s. Do you find that the special collections are getting used much these days, particularly in respect to things like the blue books? We've been quite a bit of scholarship with Wayland and the Haltman Julius collection, not just locally, but we've got some professors from other universities that have been doing some work in the last 10, 15 years on that. A lot of faculty members here on campus are aware of them and have used them, and one thing I'm seeing that I didn't see when I was in Tennessee was that classes are coming in to use the material. Some of the instructors are building exercises and other projects around students coming into the special collections and using some of our materials, which is nice to see. One of the other collections I believe you have down in X is the collections of Eva Jessie.

Yes, and that was one of the things that attracted me here. I have a music background and when I saw that they had that collection here and she was involved with George Gershwin in the initial production of Porgy and Best in the 1920s, that really got my attention. That and a handful of other music collections were what originally attracted me to the position. But since I've been here, of course, I'm just finding all sorts of really exciting and fascinating collections, and it seems like every week it changes on what my first big major research project delving into our collections is going to be. You do have some fairly strange items in the collection, don't you? As I understand it, there is at least one piece of memorabilia from the Russ Hall fire of 1914. Right. You probably talk about the horse blanket, the horse hair blanket. Yes, we do have that. I have not seen that yet. I know where it is. I just haven't opened the box and taken a look at it. And so far, the three months that I've been here, nobody's come in to ask to see it, but I understand it is a popular thing for students to come in to see.

But I think all special collections have some very interesting items during the course of going through and processing some of the collections. You discover some as well that you didn't realize that you had. Your role of university archivist also involves you in making presentations inside the university. Correct. And I've already given several talks to various groups when they rededicated Nation Hall. I think in my second or third week I had to go and give it just a slight quick five minute talk on the history of Nation Hall. The person it was named after the faculty member. So I like doing those. I'm very comfortable with public speaking, but I was glad to get to do that one in my third week. Because it gave me an excuse and a reason to really learn some of the university's history. I think as a university archivist, you become officially or unofficially the university historian. It will be called upon to give talks and presentations of university history, plus constantly getting calls and emails from various departments on campus just wanting some quick information on the history of something.

So it's part of our job to look it up and get that information to them. Many items nowadays you're actually digitizing to make available through the digital collections program. Right. And archives really jumped on that bandwagon probably in the early 90s, mid 90s when digitization became easier and cheaper to do. And so we archivist realized that this is an excellent way to do outreach and to get a lot of our collections available online. And so we have been doing that for quite a while now and have over a dozen collections I believe that are digitized. Things like the university yearbooks, some of the mining pictures and a handful of the collections that we have. Anything else that you would like to add about university archives that I haven't asked you at this stage? Well, I tell people it's it's a wonderful job. It's truly one of those I can't believe they pay me to do this type jobs, but I'm afraid if I say that too many times I'll quit paying me and just expect me to do it for free.

So, but it is it's a job that's it's always interesting you never know what you're going to find when you open up a box of an unprocessed collection. So it's it's a career's worth of work is usually mostly very interesting to do. So it's it's not a bad way to work. Steve Cox University Archivist, thank you for joining us. Thank you for having me. For KRPS and for Crimson and Gold Connection, I'm Robert Smith. Join us for Crimson and Gold Connection, Wednesdays at 850 and Fridays at 350.