Tag Archives: Stacks

Stacks maintenance and the case of Servando P. Barroquillo

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Stacks maintenance is a task that involves the inspection of books in the shelving areas of a library that are not accessible by the public. The inspection includes examining each book for damage and dusting each book and shelf.

Photo of blue book next to carved owl. When one is examining a book for damage, they sometimes find items in the book. Last year, when examining the bound periodical “Marine Biological Laboratory – Biological Lectures 1898” – call number ISLM 570 M337B 1894 – I found the following items:

Picture of open book with stamp and postcards.

The first item is a Loan Division card for interlibrary loan with two stamps.

Picture of calling card with name for Servando P. Barroquillo.

The second item is a calling card for Servando P. Barroquillo. Calling cards, also called visiting cards, have now evolved into today’s business cards.

Barroquillo’s calling card is printed on cream colored textured card stock with the text of his name printed in black. Calling card etiquette of the day suggests cards be simple and plain without embellishments and Barroquillo’s calling card fits the standard. When arriving in a new place, the owner of the card could add his contact details to the card, as is evident on Barroquillo’s calling card. His address is given as Room 27, Hull Zoological Research Laboratory, University of Chicago. His telephone number, Blackstone 2347, is of a time when exchange names were still used.

But just who was Barroquillo, and why was he using this book? As a genealogy librarian, I had ways to find the answers – time to search!

A simple search for the name “Servando P. Barroquillo” through the Ancestry Library Edition database (free to use at the Indiana State Library) produces several returns. It proves beneficial that he has an unique name.

The first record chronologically is the 1910 census for Alameda County, California. He is listed as a boarder with no occupation in the household of Edward Eccleston. His age is given as 16, making his approximate birth year 1884. His birthplace the Philippines. The year of immigration to the United States is 1902.

According to the Oakland, California City Directory, in 1914, Barroquillo can still be found in Alameda County, California, working as a domestic servant in Oakland.

The “California, U.S. Historical Students Database, 1893-1946,” shows that, in 1915, a Servando Pontevedra Barroquillo is enrolled for his second year as an agricultural student at University of California in Berkley.

Image of World War I Draft Registration Cards for Servando P Barroqillo.A World War I draft card states his birth date is Oct. 25, 1894. This is a 10-year age difference from the year of birth given in the 1910 census. Finding age differences like this is fairly common when doing genealogy research.

After discovering that Barroquillo was a student at University of California, I pause my search on Ancestry and Google “Servando Barroquillo” (Quotations around a name, signals to Google that you want the words searched next to each other in that exact order). The search did not result in anything too great. So, I tried again, this time adding the middle initial P, searching for “Servando P. Barroquillo.” This time, the returned results included a pdf file from the University of Chicago.

The documents are correspondence dating January 1917 through June 1917 from the Office of the President.

The file is filed with genealogical details.

The first document written on Jan. 11, 1917, is from Servando Barroquillo to the Philippines Bureau of Insular Affairs. The Bureau administered the customs and supervised the civil affairs of the Philippine Islands.

In the letter, he states he was born on Oct. 25, 1984, in Ponteverda, Capiz, Philippines and that he has been in the state of California since August of 1906. In the letter, he lists the educational institutes he has attended, including the University of Santa Clara and the College of the Pacific. He concludes the letter by asking for guidance to find opportunities to attend a medical school.

Since I know university and college archives sometimes share a digital history of the institution and that history can include student records, I continue to search the University of Chicago’s digital presence to see if I can find additional information.

I find the University of Chicago Campus Publications digital collection and search just the surname Barroquillo. The results return a newspaper article in the student newspaper the Chicago Maroon about Servando Barroquillo playing guitar at the Filipino Club.

Image of the Maroon newspaper.

Next, I search for information from the other institutions I know Barroquillo attended, University of California in Berkeley and the College of the Pacific.

While UC Berkeley does have university archives, little is available online. The student newspaper the Daily Californian, also provides little online. To research Barroquillo’s time at Berkeley, I would have to contact the university or visit in person.

The College of the Pacific is a college within the University of the Pacific. The University of the Pacific does have a healthy online collection for its university archives. On page 41 from the 1916 edition of the student yearbook The Naranjado, S. P. Barroquillo is listed as a member of the sophomore class. Page two of the student newspaper, The Pacific Weekly, dated March 29, 1916, announces that S. Barroquillo has signed up for an oration contest, speaking on the United States and international peace.

Image of Naranjado yearbook, page 41.Image of The Pacific Weekly, March 29, 1916.

I also think to look for any Philippines Bureau of Insular Affairs that may be available online.

Searching the Online Books Page for books authored by United States. Bureau of Insular Affairs, my eye is drawn to the title Directory of Filipino students in the United States. Sadly, Servando Barroquillo is not listed in any of the volumes, though it appears a brother is listed.

Image of list of Filipino students in the United States.

Returning to my Ancestry search, I see that in the 1920 census Servando Barroquillo is living in Indianapolis. In 1928, he marries in Allen County, Indiana. The 1930 census shows that he has moved to Kane County, Illinois and he returned to Indiana by the time the 1940 census was taken. His death certificate shows that he dies in Allen County in the year 1944. His parents are listed as Pedro Barroquillo and Geralda Buenfa.

Image of Servando P. Barroquillo death certificate.

Now that I know the name of his parents from the death certificate and his place of birth from the 1917 letter he sent to Philippines Bureau of Insular Affairs, I decide to see if the Ancestry Library Edition database and the Family Search Affiliate Library database have any record sets on the Philippines.

Ancestry search Philippines.

In Ancestry, I select the search tab and from the drop-down menu. then I choose Card Catalog and type “Philippines” in the keyword box. The search returns some promising results including: Philippines, Select Births and Baptisms, 1642-1994; Philippines, Select Marriages, 1723-1957; and Philippines, Select Deaths and Burials, 1726-1957. I search all the above vital record collections for the surnames Barroquillo and Buenfa.

There are no promising results for the birth records.

In the marriage collection, I find a Jose Barroguillo getting married in Pontevedra, Capiz, Philippines. He was born in 1902 to Pedro Barroguillo and Guarda Buanafe. There is also an Amado Barraquilla getting married in in Pontevedra, Capiz, Philippines. He is born in 1906 to Pedro Barraquilla and Gerarda Buenafe. The men getting married appear to be brothers of Servando Barroquillo, but now I do not know the correct spelling of the surnames!

Several Pedro Barroquillos are found in the death records, but there is not enough information to determine which one is the correct Pedro Barroquillo. After trying several spelling variations of her name, I do not find any promising matches for Servando’s mother.

Screenshot of Family Search Philippines.Next, I look to see if Family Search has any record sets on the Philippines. I select the search tab and choose Catalog from the drop-down menu, type “Philippines” in the place box and select online records. The search returns 308 results. The most intriguing results are the following: Philippines, Civil Registration (Spanish Period) 1706-1911; Collection, Indexes to bautismos, 1706-1898; Philippines births and baptisms: 1642-1994; Philippines deaths and burials: 1726-1957; Philippines marriages: 1723-1957; Indexes to Defunciones, 1800-1898; and Indexes to Matrimonios, 1757-1911.

The cards in the collections are generally arranged alphabetically under the name of each province or locality. The cards can be handwritten, but some cards are misfiled and others are in reverse order. Many of the indexes are incomplete and some reports are missing. Family Search also notes some of the records are in Spanish, Chinese, Filipino or Philippine dialects. This makes working with these collections quite difficult.

Even though I knew the province, Capiz. my search in the Philippine collections on Family Search was not successful. Many of collections just had a handful of cards for Capiz and some of the records were handwritten in Spanish.

Screenshot of Full Text search Family Search.

Not satisfied with my research in the Philippines record sets, I tried a searching with Family Search’s Full Text search. Full Text search is an experiment offered from Family Search Labs. In the name box I type “Servando Barroquilla.” One of the items returned was a delayed birth certificate.

Image of LaGrange delayed birth certificate.Delayed birth certificates were created by the county courts in the 1940s to document a birth when no birth record was found. An adult requested a delayed birth certificate from the county court (usually the county they resided in) to provide documentation for applying for social security or a passport.

The delayed birth certificate for Servando Barroquilla has his parents named as Pedro Barroquilla and Gerarda Buenafe. Since Servando Barroquilla was the informant for the certificate, I now know that I have the correct spellings of his parents’ names!

My next Full Text search is for the name “Pedro Barroquilla” with the keyword Buenafe. This final search includes results for Notarial Records in Pontevedra, Capiz for the years 1916-1917. The records mention his wife’s father: Calixto Buenafe, blind and of the age of 90!

Image of Pontevedra, Capiz. Notarial Records 1916-1917 register.

Image of Pontevedra, Capiz. Notarial Records 1916-1917.

After a few hours of research there is now a fairly complete snapshot of the life of Servando Barroquilla, and why he would be interested in a book on biology.

Stacks maintenance, however; is never finished!

This blog post is by Angi Porter, Genealogy Division librarian.

Resources to learn more:

Tracing your Philippine Ancestors; Call number: ISLG 929.19599 V222T
Etiquette of Visiting Cards
House of Cards: The Politics of Calling Card Etiquette in Nineteenth-Century Washington
Tips for Reading Civil Registry Records in Spanish
Philippines Genealogy
National Archives of the Philippines (NAP)
Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA)

From the ISL stacks: A historic appreciation of resource sharing (and form)

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Beige on black, the light switches on the second floor of the State Library’s stacks banished the archival darkness. Halogen hummed to life, a substitute for the silence; narrow strips of light painted the shelves pale above the Library and Information Science collection. Stacks retrieval was nothing new to me, but it has always inspired a sense of wonder. Prior to joining the Indiana State Library as its new interlibrary loan specialist this January, I’d spent most of my career working in academic collections: first, as a student lender at Indiana University’s Herman B. Wells Library in Bloomington, and later, as local document delivery coordinator for the University of Michigan’s Harlan Hatcher Graduate Library in Ann Arbor.

Cover image: “What the OCLC Interlibrary Loan Service Means to Me.”

You might call it fate, then, to spy this volume, wedged between several monographs on digital resource sharing after a good few minutes spent distracted by a bibliography on four centuries of cat books. “What the OCLC Interlibrary Loan Service Means to Me: A Collection of Essays” (Z 713 .W43 1999) was published on the 20th anniversary of OCLC’s interlibrary loan service. The prompt for the volume was simple: in five hundred words or less, contributors – ranging from students and teachers to librarians and freelance writers – were invited to submit their thoughts on what interlibrary loan meant to them for a shot at a $1,000 grand prize. Roughly a quarter-century later, this collection of essays is a fascinating snapshot of resource sharing at the turn of the millennium. Even the cover, hearkening back to my childhood in a rapidly digitizing world, vaguely reminds me of the old DK/Scholastic children’s books on the “information superhighway.”

Robert Mathews’ crossword.

Particularly interesting in this volume is how various contributors interpret the genre of “essay” for the contest. Among the various traditional short essays include submissions in the form of a crossword – a rearrangement of letters and words from the title of the collection itself – and poetry like the “Song of the Happy Scholar.” Humorously, two contributors took an extremely minimalist approach to their submissions: “Job security,” reads one dryly. Another writes, using their best supervillain impression: “Now the WORLD is mine!” As a student of literature and creative writing, the shattering of expectations with form has always struck me as a compelling type of argumentation or storytelling. Beth Posner’s statement preceding her generated word list from the volume’s title seems to hint at this type of narrative subversion, too: “Maybe we can even learn to see OCLC in other ways by this list.”

Beth Posner’s generated word list from the volume’s title.

Over 25 years later, it’s a fun thought exercise to imagine the wide range of responses (and visual interpretations) to this question that OCLC would receive in 2025, given the advancements in technology since this volume was published. For me, the meaning of a service like interlibrary loan is not just about “permitting access” to materials requested through InfoExpress and Indiana Share. It’s about participating in a broader, patron-oriented collaboration with the many public and academic libraries throughout Indiana. From education to entertainment, I view resource sharing as a form of service to our Hoosier communities.

And, if asked to write my own minimalist contribution to this volume, it would be simple: “The joy of patron discovery.”

This blog post was written by Eric Altemus, interlibrary loan specialist at the Indiana State Library.

Where are the Books in a Closed Stack?

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The Indiana State Library is primarily a research library. Whether you are looking for United States Congressional hearings, researching the War of 1812, or looking for the latest information on environmental science, the material is probably in the closed stacks.

Like most research libraries, the Library of Congress, Chicago’s Newberry Library, and the William H. Smith Library at the Indiana Historical Society, the books and manuscript material are stored in areas that are not accessible to the public. The State Library and Historical Building first opened in 1934, and it featured the latest construction of the day with the main book stacks divided into seven-stories in this four-story building.

Stacks1Stacks2_edit

The latest in automatic electric elevators with pushbutton-control were installed, and the stacks were arranged as an integral part of the heating and ventilation system.

Elevator2

As the collections grew and the building was expanded more rooms were added and the new book stacks are now moveable, allowing for even greater use of space.

new Shelving_edit

Whether the material is on open or closed stacks, our skilled librarians are happy to assist both the novice and professional researcher.

This blog post was written by Marcia Caudell, Reference Librarian, Indiana State Library. For more information, contact the Indiana State Library at (317)232-3678 or “Ask-A-Librarian” at http://www.in.gov/library/ask.htm.