An average of about one email a day comes to us from ArchiveGrid users asking us for access to items in a collection they learned about while using our database, or for help finding materials. Each request offers a chance to explain what ArchiveGrid is (not a library or archive, but a database of archival collection descriptions) and who we are (not librarians or archivists, but employees of a research department that helps librarians and archivists do their work). Sometimes our users explain their research in detail to us, and a message I received Thursday particularly piqued my interest. An attorney constructing a memorial about Judge Learned Hand seeks something unique beyond photographs and other historical bits to anchor the project. I searched “learned hand” in ArchiveGrid to find out what materials pertaining to him exist, while at the same time hoping our system would have truly unique leads to offer.

A papers collection at Haverford College that the college received as a gift includes an autograph collection, “including letters of Henry Clay, Calvin Coolidge, Judge Learned Hand, Warren Harding, Theodore Roosevelt, John Greenleaf Whittier, Woodrow Wilson and others.” If Hand’s signature is available among these materials and it can be  digitized, this might be a powerful element for a memorial.

Billings Learned Hand (note the link to Hand’s Wikipedia page: Because it’s biographical, it links to OCLC, VIAF, and Library of Congress data about him) lived from 1872-1961 and graduated from Harvard Law School. In his career, Hand was appointed by Presidents Coolidge and Taft during their administrations to serve as a federal judge. Narrowing a search to Harvard’s law school archives reveals reminiscences called “My year with Judge Learned Hand” by one of Hand’s law clerks. This primary source would paint the most intimate picture of the judicial role model Hand was and that our researcher admires. Tapping it may reveal new knowledge, and that needed focal point for a Hand memorial. Other papers of Hand are at the Library of Congress, which would detail more about his career.

Archivists and librarians spend much of their time sorting the names of people, groups and places. Authority control systems are an integral part of processing archival materials and manuscripts, and an important area of innovation, as we’re seeing with work around the EAC-CPF.

Hurricane names represent an interesting alternate approach. As described on the National Weather Service website, there was once a practice of naming tropical storms and hurricanes in the West Indies after a particular saint’s feast day. Given that hurricane season in the North Atlantic (generally from June through November) would encompass the same limited set of saint’s days, the same name could be attributed to more than one storm system.

The first hurricane named this way was Hurricane of San Bartolme in 1568, and earlier storms were named years later by historians. Two major hurricanes named after San Felipe occurred on exactly the same day, but 52 years apart, in 1876 and 1928.

As Wayne Neely writes in The Great Hurricane of 1780, “This system for naming them was haphazard and not really a system at all.”

The Great Hurricane of 1780 is also known as Hurricane San Calixto II. It’s thought to be the deadliest Atlantic hurricane on record, responsible for, among other things, the sinking of 40 French ships involved in the American Revolutionary War, with 4,000 souls lost. You may then be left wondering whether it’s named after Pope Callisto II, or if it’s the second hurricane named after the Feast of Pope Saint Callisto I. We’re not sure.

The practice of naming hurricanes after women began in 1953 in the United States, and in 1978-1979, male names were added to the storm lists. These six-year storm name lists for Atlantic hurricanes are developed by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), and each year’s list includes 21 names. If a given year has more than 21 named storms, the Greek alphabet is used. Then each list repeats every seventh year. So, these names can recur, perhaps with some of the same ambiguity as Hurricane San Felipe. Remember Tropical Storm Alberto from May, notable as the earliest-forming tropical storm in the Atlantic in nearly 10 years? It was also the name of a tropical storm that caused considerable damage in Florida and Georgia in 1994.

For certain calamitous storms, the name is retired. There are currently 76 names on the “retired” list, including the notorious Andrew, Donna, and Katrina. The list of names is controlled by the WMO, and given recent events, we suspect they will retire Sandy too at their next annual meeting.

For an inside view of what’s involved in search and rescue operations following a major hurricane, take a look at this transcript of a 2005 interview after Hurricane Katrina with Commander Meredith Austin, provided through ArchiveGrid by the U.S. Coast Guard Historian’s Office.

“You know in an average hurricane we’ll fly out to the impacted area and get RV’s if we have to because it’s not that you want to be pampered or anything but when it’s really hot and it’s really humid and you want people to work in really harsh conditions for 12 to 14 or 18 hours a day, you’ve got to have a place for them to recover or they’re going to be no good to you the next day. So to have them sleeping out in tents we have to worry about fire ants and your stuff getting wet. You can do that for a couple of days, anyone can, but we’re here for the long term. There are going to be Strike Team folks down in these areas for probably a year.”

Although the Giants just won their second World Series for San Francisco by beating the Detroit Tigers from what would have been their fifth World Series win, there is still plenty of San Francisco and Detroit sports history to be made for what seems like two significant reasons:

1. The Detroit Lions haven’t gone to, let alone won, a Super Bowl.

2. The year 2014 will mark 10, 20, and 30-year anniversaries of Detroit and San Francisco sports: The Detroit Pistons won their last NBA championship in 2004, the San Francisco 49-ers won their last Super Bowl in 1994, and the Detroit Tigers won their last World Series in 1984.

It goes without mentioning that there is plenty of sports history to be found in ArchiveGrid, but the amount of it depends on the sport. Hundreds of search results show up for searches related to the Tigers and Giants teams, while football teams are much easier subjects to research because they retrieve fewer matches. A search in ArchiveGrid for the San Francisco 49ers yields 46 results, while a search for the Detroit Lions, in quotes, gets 22 results.

Three results show up each for the Detroit Pistons and the Golden State Warriors, the closest NBA team to San Francisco (in Oakland), which hasn’t won a championship since 1975. Perhaps an interesting research lead is the Will Herzfeld Papers, 1967-1990, held at the New York Public Library. The search result display indicates he was the chaplain for the Warriors. What would it be like to provide spiritual needs to a team struggling to win a championship? Unfortunately, further research will have to wait, since access to the library’s finding aid was shut down due to potential damage from Hurricane Sandy.

Farther down the San Francisco Bay in hockey, the San Jose Sharks haven’t won an NHL title, and a search for them in ArchiveGrid reveals only two results.