Wooden Anniversary

It’s a bit hard for us to believe, but this week marks the fifth birthday of the Pauling Blog.

The blog was started in March 2008 with a couple of different ideas in mind.  Most immediately, a stamp honoring Linus Pauling was soon to be released by the United States Postal Service and we (the OSU Libraries Special Collections at the time) wanted to get our hands on a mechanism for both promoting and covering the event.

More broadly, we had long felt a need for a space where we could conduct outreach and present research in a more flexible context than had previously been the case.  Prior to the blog, Special Collections was able to present stories about Pauling mainly through our Documentary History website framework or through smaller TEI-based exhibits.  Both platforms worked well (and continue to do so) but both also required a fair amount of time and energy to construct.  Our website at the time included a News feature as well, but the audience for this was limited to those who happened across our department homepage, and by definition the tool was really only useful for announcements of newly released projects or upcoming events.

Once the stamp event had concluded, part of what we attempted to do with the blog was to tease out smaller stories from the massive documentary history websites that had been released up to Spring 2008.  In effect, we viewed the documentary histories as collections unto themselves for student researchers to review and utilize in developing blog posts.

As such, were able to put together posts about, for example, Linus and Ava Helen Pauling’s trip to Lambaréné, Gabon in 1959 to visit Albert Schweitzer.  The trip is touched upon in the Linus Pauling and the International Peace Movement documentary history, but it is more fully explored on the blog, a platform which allows for greater investigation into the supporting documents available on the documentary history site but not discussed at length within the framework of the site narrative.

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With time we pretty well exhausted the documentary-history-website-as-collection idea, so we moved on to more original research conducted specifically for release on the blog.  (Not coincidentally, it is at about this time that we started posting once per week, rather than twice.)  Doing so has allowed us to explore many more of the fascinating nooks and crannies residing within the monstrous Pauling archive.  It has also provided a terrific experiential learning opportunity for our student writers.

For those who may have wondered, creating the Pauling Blog is a group project.  The site is overseen by one of the Special Collections & Archives Research Center’s faculty, but most of the writing is generated by a talented cadre of students. In five years, at least twenty people have written posts for the blog, most of them undergraduate students.  Our student writers have gone down many paths once leaving the Valley Library – dental and optometry school, public policy work, graduate studies in Spanish and even one person who decided to stick around the department and is now a vital part of our operations.  Presently we have three student writers on staff – a graduate student in the history of science, a senior who plans to pursue further study in public history and a senior looking forward to a career as a midwife.  All three are careful, tenacious researchers and will be tough to replace when they move on.

The student writers are assigned a topic, given tips on where in the collection to look for resources and then off they go.  Their texts are completed well in advance of their posting, and before they go online they receive a thorough line edit from the faculty member in charge of the project.  Since March 2008 they have compiled 408 posts, generally in the neighborhood of around 1,000 words in length.  The sum of that work now comprises a significant resource for Pauling studies; one full of original research not deeply explored by any of Pauling’s biographers.

And they have attracted an audience: in 2012 the blog recorded over 110,000 views, a close to 30% increase over the previous year’s traffic.  While the resource certainly has its regular followers, most of the traffic that hits the Pauling Blog arrives via search – with perhaps 410,000 words of searchable text inhabiting the web and over 1,100 images as well, there is plenty of content for people to stumble across.

It’s worth noting as well that, just as Pauling was truly a man of the world, so too is our’s an international audience.  While the lion’s share of traffic is based stateside, in 2013 alone WordPress has recorded visitors from far flung locations including Mozambique, Benin, Laos and Djibouti.

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Five years is a long time for a blog of this sort to keep chugging along, but we have no intention of going anywhere.  The Pauling Papers are truly epic and the only limitations on this project, it would seem, are our own initiative and creativity.  So keep expecting fresh content from this space, usually every Wednesday, except when meetings, email or the hectic pace of life in the reading room render Wednesdays unavailable.

We’ll close with a list.  For readers who are relatively new to the blog, here are ten of our favorite posts from olden days, followed by a nugget about Pauling that we just discovered yesterday and feel that we have to share.  Enjoy and thanks for reading!

10. Linus Pauling Baseball! (a perennial favorite)

9. The Roger Hayward compendium (much of which has since been repurposed into a major Omeka exhibit)

8. Angry and Frustrated, Pauling Considers a Run for the U.S. Presidency (a short post about an extraordinary document)

7. Creating The Pauling Catalogue (a collection of technical pieces providing an overview of the work that resulted in a six-volume, 1,800 page reference work featuring over 1,100 illustrations)

6. A Halloween Tale of Ice Cream and Ethanol (a fun story and a revealing glimpse into Pauling’s powers of observation and description)

5. William P. Murphy: Condon’s Other Nobel Prize Winner (an amazing historical coincidence)

4. The Anesthesia series (one of our first forays into fairly extensive original research about a lesser known component of Pauling’s scientific research)

3. The Pauling Chalkboard series (another such foray)

2. Lawrence Badash, 1934-2010 (remembering a good man and the story of what almost was)

1. The Quasicrystals series (the most ambitious bit of research and writing that any of our students has ever taken on)

…and a nugget that made us smile. From the National Academy of Science biographical memoir of Wendell Phillips Woodring:

Woodring became professor of invertebrate paleontology at the California Institute of Technology in 1927. During his teaching years, he became a close friend of Chester Stock, professor of vertebrate paleontology, of Ralph Reed, who sharpened his knowledge of the geology of California, and of his own student, diatom specialist Kenneth Lohman. During this time, much to his great amusement in later years, he and his wife employed Linus Pauling, later two-time Nobel laureate, as an occasional baby sitter for his two daughters.

Two Years on the Pauling Beat

Today marks the second anniversary of the launching of the Pauling Blog.  In two years we have generated 214 posts, garnered over 63,000 views (not counting those accruing from syndication, which WordPress doesn’t include in its total statistics) and been graced with nearly 7,400 spam comments, most of which, thankfully, have been kept at bay by the good folks at Akismet.

We’re a bit less philosophical today than was the case one year ago, but we do want to take this moment to reflect back a bit.  Our readership has grown substantially over the past year and, as we enter our terrible twos, we figure this is a good opportunity to take another quick look at some writing that many of our readers may have never seen.  Here then, are ten worthwhile posts from the early days of the blog.

1. Visiting Albert Schweitzer:  a review of the Paulings’ trip to Schweitzer’s medical compound in central Africa – in Linus Pauling’s estimation, “one of the most inaccessible areas of the world.”
2. Pauling and the Presidents: the first in a series of three posts on Pauling’s relationship with this nation’s Commanders in Chief and with the office of the Presidency itself.  The other two posts focus on Pauling’s complicated interactions with John F. Kennedy, and with his own brief flirtation with the idea of running for the office himself.
3. Pauling’s Rules: among Pauling’s major early contributions to science was his formation of a set of rules used to guide one’s analysis of x-ray diffraction data in the determination of crystal structures.
4. The Guggenheim Trip: a three-part series detailing Linus and Ava Helen’s adventures as they toured through Europe for a year, meeting major scientific figures and absorbing the fledgling discipline of quantum mechanics.
5. The Darlings: Maternal Ancestors of Linus Pauling:  an entertaining look at the colorful characters residing further down Pauling’s family tree.  We also featured Pauling’s paternal ancestry as well as Ava Helen’s lineage in separate posts.
6. A Halloween Tale of Ice Cream and Ethanol:  Pauling’s typically detailed and ultra-rational recollection of a hallucination experienced late one November night.
7. Clarifying Three Widespread Quotes:  three quotes attributed to Linus Pauling are scattered across the Internet.  This post investigates whether or not Pauling actually authored them.
8. Pauling in the ROTC:  often accused of anti-Americanism due to his pacifist beliefs, few people know that Pauling actually served in the Reserve Officers Training Corps, ultimately rising to the rank of Major.  This post was among the first in our lengthy Oregon 150 series, celebrating Pauling’s relationship with his home state.
9. Mastering Genetics: Pauling and Eugenics:  a post that delves into what was among the more controversial stances that Pauling ever took.
10. Linus Pauling Baseball:  we can’t help it – the video is priceless.

As always, thanks for reading!

Many Years…

The Pauling and Miller families on Linus and Ava Helen’s wedding day. Salem, Oregon. June 17, 1923.

I just saw a statement by Dr. Joyce Brothers about vacation, who said, you can never plan to go with your companion for longer than three days on vacation, because people can’t stand being with one another for more than three days.  She just doesn’t know anything!  Thirty years ago, we were in our cabin here, and my wife said to me, ‘Do you know, we’ve been married for about thirty years now, and this is the first time you and I have been alone for a week without seeing another single human being?’  Well, we were happy being by ourselves, without seeing another human being for a week, to say nothing about living together for 59 years; and rarely being away – years went by before we were ever away from one another a single night.  Many years.

-Linus Pauling, 1990.

Linus Pauling Online

Reflections on Year One of The Pauling Blog

Today marks the first anniversary of The Pauling Blog, and in celebration we’re announcing a new addition to our blogroll, archivematica.

Over the past few months, The Pauling Blog has featured a number of posts on our digitization projects which have, in turn, garnered a fairly-substantial amount of reader interest. While we will continue to post about our work here, we would also like to offer our readers access to other information about digitization efforts around the web. Hence archivematica, a blog about Peter Van Garderen and his work as a digital archive designer and analyst.

Peter is the president and senior consultant of Artefactual Systems, Inc. and a doctoral candidate in archival science at the University of Amsterdam. Peter’s doctoral work is concerned with digital archives in both a practical and social context, focusing on issues of public access and cross-archival collaboration. In his spare time, Peter uses archivematica to blog about developments in the world of archives, his Artefactual-related projects, and his scholastic research. For a topical and literate look into the mind of a professional archivist, we highly recommend a visit to archivematica.

Additional information about Peter Van Garderen’s work, thesis, and the Artefactual team can be found here.

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This is the 112th post that we’ve generated in our year of blogging and at the time of this writing, the project has attracted a hair over 13,000 views.  More importantly, readership is increasing steadily – despite it’s being the shortest of the twelve, February was, by far, our highest-trafficked month to date at just over seventy views per day.  Numbers like these do not a blog empire make, but we’re heartened by the feedback that we’ve been receiving and are glad to likewise note that older posts are being found in equal measure to newer content.

Here is a look at the top ten most-viewed posts of this past year.

1. Roger Hayward (1899-1979): Architect, Artist, Illustrator, Inventor, Scientist [published 4-22-08; 2,287 views]
2. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle [5-29-08; 408]
3. Featured Document: Linus Pauling’s Birth Certificate [3-31-08; 231]
4. Roger Hayward and Linus Pauling [5-1-08; 190]
5. Creating the Pauling Catalogue: Formatting Text with XML and XSL [8-12-08; 189]
6. Linus Pauling and the Birth of Quantum Mechanics [5-20-08; 187]
7. Cancer and Vitamin C Redux [9-30-08; 180]
8. The Martha Chase Effect [1-2-09; 174]
9. The Paternal Ancestry of Linus Pauling [9-23-08; 168]
10. Scenes from the Linus Pauling Legacy Award [5-6-08; 168]

Pretty clearly we’ve tapped into the “Martha Chase Effect” with our series on Roger Hayward, which shows up in two spots on the front page of the Google results for the “Roger Hayward” simple search…though this being the Internet, it surely does not hurt that this image is among the many used to illustrate the super-popular “Architect, Artist, Illustrator…” post.

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Thinking back on these past twelve months, the main theme that strikes us about our project is just how much work it really requires.  Five people have written posts for the site, and in any given week two students and one faculty member devote upwards of 30 hours to generating ideas for the blog, researching them and writing them up.

But we feel that it’s worth the effort.  The Oregon State University Libraries Special Collections is a little bit unusual relative to many of our colleagues in that virtually every project in which we engage has some sort of web element attached to it as an ultimate goal.  A major component of this directive is the (also unusual) fact that one of our three full-time staffmembers is an I.T. consultant.  In short, we are very Internet-centric in our mission and our workflows.

This being the case, The Pauling Blog gives us an opportunity to feature smaller components of certain very large projects and also to talk about some of the methods that have been developed to help smooth the marriage between traditional archival practice and the world wide web.  As such, our readers can expect to see more of the same throughout the coming year – two posts per week on topics related to Linus Pauling or bits of news from within the department, a few fairly techical write-ups and the occasional post done just for the fun of it.  Thanks for reading!

The Paulings’ Wedding Anniversary

Linus and Ava Helen Pauling, wedding photo, June 17, 1923.

“I suppose that I am responsible to some degree for Linus’s deciding to put so much of his effort into peace activities. In talking with him, I said I thought that it was of course important that he do his scientific work. But if the world were destroyed, then that work would not be of any value — so he should take part of his time and devote it to peace work.”
- Ava Helen Pauling. Interview. June 1977.

Today marks the eighty-fifth wedding anniversary of Linus and Ava Helen Pauling. In honor of the occasion, we would like to briefly share the story of their meeting, courtship and marriage.

On January 6, 1922, Linus Pauling, still an undergraduate, entered a classroom as instructor rather than student. Oregon Agricultural College, now Oregon State University, had hired him to teach a freshman level chemistry course to a class of home economics majors. Thomas Hager, a Pauling biographer, tells us:

[H]e knew the best way to avoid any “boy professor” sniggering was to get right to the subject. This was the second term of a three-term course, and he decided to start by measuring the class’s basic knowledge. “Will you tell me all you know about ammonium hydroxide, Miss…” He ran his finger down the registration sheet, looking for a name he couldn’t possibly mispronounce. “Miss Miller?” He looked up and into the eyes of Ava Helen Miller. She was a small, delicate, strikingly pretty girl with long, dark hair. She was barely eighteen years old. She was a flirt. And, as it turned out, she knew quite a bit about ammonium hydroxide. (Force of Nature: The Life of Linus Pauling. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995. 69.)

In the months that followed, a relationship between the two blossomed and, at the end of the term, Pauling asked Ava Helen to marry him. She accepted. That fall, Pauling departed for Caltech where he continued his education and served as a teaching assistant. The couple corresponded regularly, but the distance between them grew unbearable. Against the wishes of both mothers, they chose to cut their engagement short and marry in the spring of 1923.

To make the trip up from southern California for the ceremony, Pauling purchased a Model T Ford from Roscoe Dickinson, a Caltech professor, and headed north for Oregon. Unfortunately, Pauling’s driving experience was limited to just a few minutes of practice and, come nightfall, he crashed into a roadside pit in the Siskiyou Mountains, resulting in an injured leg and a wrecked car. After waiting all night for help, Pauling was able to get his car repaired and arrived at the wedding on time.

Over the next six decades, the couple only grew closer. Together they raised four children, were leading activists for world peace, and were extremely instrumental in the creation of legislation banning the above-ground testing of nuclear weapons. Despite the pressures of Pauling’s work and activism, the couple remained inseparable until Ava Helen’s death in 1981.

In interviews, Pauling often cited his wife’s intelligence, good sense, patience and kindness as the foundation for many of his greatest achievements.

A plaque now hangs in Education Hall Room 201 on the Oregon State University campus, marking the location where Ava Helen Miller and her future husband first met.

For further information, visit the Linus and Ava Helen Pauling Papers.