80 years ago

Open Culture is celebrating Francois Truffaut's birth by "bringing back a wonderful series of audio recordings — Truffaut’s lengthy interview with another legendary director,Alfred Hitchcock".

CTC does not own Truffaut's classic work Alfred Hitchcock : A Definitive Study. Over a thousand libraries do own this title. It could be borrowed through inter-library loan. Do a search in World Cat, then fill in the Request Item form to have the book sent to your library.

A search through our collection pulled up over 30 titles about Alfred Hitchcock. Hitchcock on Hitchcock : Selected Writings and Interviews refers to the interviews with Truffaut in a number of places. (Using the search feature in an electronic book is so wonderful).

Listen to the interviews and read the quotes to see if you think Truffaut captured the real Hitchcock.


-kss

Birthday wishes

Happy Birthday, Alice Walker!

Literary Reference Center by Ebsco, includes thousands of plot summaries, synopses, and work overviews; articles of literary criticism; author biographies; full text of over 430 literary journals; book reviews; classic and contemporary poems and short stories; full text of over 7,000 classic novels; author interviews; and images of key literary figures.

It feels easy to search in the basic Literary Reference Center. Fill in the box with the authors name and voila, information appears that is sorted under tabs that clearly tell you what you'll find- biographies, criticism, images, short stories, and reference.

The Advanced Search screen looks just like the Ebsco Advanced Search screens. This makes sense since Literary Reference Center is an Ebsco product.

Again a heart felt Happy Birthday, Alice Walker. Thank you for sharing your literary gifts with all of us!

To access information about Ms. Walker or her work, go to GALILEO.
Select Databases A-Z
...Select L
.....Select Literary Reference Center
Get the current GALILEO password from your CTC Librarian.

-kss

Not just a fan

Do you read the bulletin (program) at a funeral? Some contain a wealth of information about the person who is being remembered.As a genealogist, I treasure these printed mini-histories for the details they share about a person. Most people won't get a paragraph in a history book. Even a narrowly focused history of a county won't have information about all the people who lived, worked, and contributed in some way to the life of the community. The funeral program tells just a bit of their story

The African American Funeral Programs from the East Central Georgia Regional Library online collection consists of over one thousand funeral programs ranging from 1933 to 2008 (with the bulk of the collection beginning in the 1960s) from the Eula M. Ramsey Johnson Memorial Funeral Program Collection.

A majority of the programs are from churches in Augusta, Georgia, and the surrounding area, with a few outliers in other states such as New York and Florida. The programs typically contain a photograph of the deceased, an obituary, a list of surviving relatives, and the order of service. The collection provides extensive genealogical information about the deceased, including birth and death dates, maiden names, names of relatives, past residences, and place of burial.

Alongside this genealogical information, the obituaries provide a rich source of local history about African Americans. Many of the people included in this collection were prominent in their communities, and many were involved locally in the struggle for civil rights.

Read the histories of real people. Let them be remembered.

GALILEO
...Select Databases A-Z
....Select A
......The African American Funeral Programs

-kss

Amazing Grace

Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database is the result of the African Origins Project, a scholar-public collaborative endeavor to trace the geographic origins of Africans transported in the transatlantic slave trade. Many have contributed to this international research project, which is based at Emory University. The database provides information on almost 35,000 slaving voyages that forcibly embarked over 10 million Africans for transport to the Americas between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries.

It's very interesting to look at the maps, read the charts, and begin to think about the statistics. I wandered around trying to figure out how I might use this information. I looked at how many voyages were done by various countries, Spain and Portugal had 18,000+ voyages while Great Britain had 12,000+. Over 4 million Africans were brought to the Caribbean. That struck me as a lot of people for the islands. Just over 300,000 were brought to North America. I wonder if those numbers are based on the first landing?

Still thinking about how to use the information, Amazing Grace began to resonate in my brain. The author of the hymn was a slave trader who gave up slave trading and preached the Christian Gospel. A search in Credo Reference gave me his name, John Newton.

When did he cross the Atlantic? I selected Basic Variables, Captain and crew, Captain's name. I typed Newton as the Captain's name. 25 men named Newton were Captains. John Newton is listed for three voyages in 1751, 1753, and lastly in 1754. His middle voyage had an insurrection. Forty slaves died during the 1753 voyage. The 1754 voyage had no deaths of slaves.

Fascinating to look at the statistics and tie the facts to a person.

-kss

What month is it?

Various groups claim a month as their time for concentrated rememberance. February used to be Presidents month with Abraham Lincoln and George Washington's birthdays both falling in February.
Currently we emphasize Black History during February. An interesting resource for Black History in Georgia is, The New Georgia Encyclopedia which provides access to authoritative information on people, places, events, history, and other topics about the state of Georgia.

The search box is in the middle of the left column. The search engine looks for each word in a phrase. A search for 'Black History' retrieved many articles that had black or history in the article. Quotation marks didn't  keep the words together as a phrase.

The link for Advanced search gave me the option to limit the search to 'exactly matches the terms'. Limiting the search by subject didn't pull up any articles. Limiting the search to keywords pulled up 6 articles. It is intriguing that so little in the encyclopedia refers to 'Black History'. A similar search in Advanced search for 'Civil Rights', limited to 'exactly matches the terms',  and subject turned up a wealth of articles.

It seems like so much of Civil Rights in Georgia ties to Black History. I wonder why they didn't use both terms as subject categories?

The New Georgia Encyclopedia is accessible through GALILEO as well as the web .

-kss

It's nifty, this book turned 50

From Booklist Online "February 1st was the 50th anniversary of One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest."
"For many, the iconic 1975 movie may be the most familiar version of this story, either because they’ve never read the book or because they’ve seen the movie more often. Kesey wasn’t a fan of the film, and there’s a different tone to the novel that make it worth revisiting. The final scenes of the film are powerful, but still not quite the gut punch that Kesey creates." read more

If you have not read the book, we have two copies in our collection. We also have an e-book with critical commentaries if you're interesting in digging a bit more into this  work of 20th century literature.


-kss