SALVATION ARMY HISTORICAL MUSEUM
Phone: 847-294-2136 E-mail: USCMuseum@usc.salvationarmy.org
We’re on the Web! www.uschistoricalmuseum.org
et ter l s w e N m u M u se l a ic r o t is H April 2015
Can you name anyone?? The Museum would like your help identifying where this Salvation Army building is?
Digitizing the Museum By Major Jim Garrington Director , Salvation Army Central Territory Historical Museum Betsy has a Master’s Degree in Museum Studies and six years of experience; Gloria is a museum veteran of nearly a decade, and me? Well, I’ve been in a lot of museums. I’ve always liked museums. But the difference between being a visitor looking at exhibits and actually working in one is significant. I have an “end-user” viewpoint. This is the very first time I’ve had a glance “under the hood.” OH MY! The first thing that struck me about the Salvation Army Central Territory Historical Museum is that I couldn’t research in the manner to which I have
If you can identify anyone please email us at USCMuseum@usc.salvationarmy.org or send us a letter: Salvation army Museum 10 W. Algonquin Des plaines, il 60016
become accustomed. I’m like most people who have gotten comfortable with computers; I want to know when Abraham Lincoln was born, I Google “Abraham Lincoln birthdate.” I’m curious about the origins of the Luddites, I type in “Luddite origins.” I can’t remember to which religion the Eightfold Path belongs, I just type it into a search engine. You can find Salvation Army information online, but very little will come from this museum. In fact, it probably won’t come from any museum in the Salvation Army world. You may be able to glean a bit from official Army websites, but most post only brief summaries of historical information. A few historical Army books have been scanned and are internet searchable, but none (that I have located, at any rate) are available from Army websites. My initial reaction to this was: Deplorable! Unthinkable! Unacceptable! For many, if you can’t be found on the Internet, you don’t exist! What does the researcher—or even the merely curious person—in Williston or Garden City or Sault Ste. Marie do when he needs information about us and our heritage? They can drive several hours and look through our resources. They can all or write and
ask us to look up something for them. They can see what’s in the local public library. But if one wants to research online on their own though there is not much. We simply are not as accessible as we should be in this information age. This became my mission I wondered why this wasn’t already the main priority of the Museum. That soon became evident: Betsy understood far better than I did the Herculean task I had so blithely assumed for the Museum. Actually, I still don’t really know how to get from here to there. One step, however, is obvious: in a digital age, in which things are accessed digitally, our information must be digitized to be accessible. We have a deliciously overwhelming mountain of historical information here; pictures, letters, clippings, official documents, artifacts, 16 mm films, microfiche, VHS and audio cassette tapes. For you to be able to access this from the comfort of your living room, it all has to be transformed into digital media. Frankly, even this step alone— aside from all the other steps necessary to reaching the objective
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HISTORICAL MUSEUM NEWSLETTER
that I, with my end-user mentality, envision—is daunting. But we have begun. As we work on research projects for corps officers and other interested in Army history we scan everything that is sent out. We were able to procure copies of 18 historical videos, originally VHS in our collections in digital form from the Southern Territory, and have begun working with volunteers to convert our other VHS cassettes. We have converted about 100 audio cassettes, including oral histories and tapes from Central Territory programs, to MP3 format. It’s definitely a start.
But only a start. We have books, Yearbooks, Dispos, the Central War Cry and other documents, some of which are over 100 years old. Many of these documents, like the Central War Cry, are oversized bound books in very delicate condition that cannot be simply plopped down on our copier. To handle the digitization of these artifacts we are searching for other options. Such as having them handled and digitized by a company that specializes in archival works on paper.
APRIL 2015
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Preparing for Commissioning Weekend As many people are doing at this time of year the museum is preparing for commissioning weekend in June. This year is an especially exciting one since it’s not only the 150th celebration of the salvation army as a whole but the 135th of the central territory. In honor of that we thought it would be fun to share some neat photos from the army’s history that you maybe haven’t seen before.
I hope I have whet your appetite for some of the treasures that are available here, and hopefully in the next few years more and more of the collection will become available to the wider public—or at least the wider Army public—on the internet. And maybe you would like to help us with this project. Would you like to volunteer to help us? We are always looking for people interested in Army history and willing to get their hands dirty! If you have a passion for history, keen attention to detail and willingness to be trained we would love to have you apply to volunteer with us.
L a s t M o n t h ’ s C a n yo u n a m e a n yo n e ? ? Red Shield Club in Kansas City, MO
Last month we had a great response to our “Can You Name Anyone” photo! Unanimously everyone said that the officer to the right is Colonel Bernie Lodge. The officer to the left was a bit of another story. We ended up with three people saying Lieutenant Colonel Raymond Johnson and we were able to find other photos in his file to confirm it is indeed him!
Joe the Turk with family
Playing outdoors at Camp Wonderland