Harvard Central Administration and University Research Centers

Harvard University’s network of over seventy libraries experiences an average of ten collection emergencies each year. To prevent collection loss, reduce staff stress, and improve recovery outcomes, we have created broad-based emergency training for library staff at all levels. Our dynamic and comprehensive training program supports a centralized response team that is highly effective, and a community of library staff who are comfortable with initial response procedures and emergency planning. Bi-annual intensive, hands-on training consists of a mock water emergency with a variety of de-accessioned collection materials in which participants learn first-hand how to be aware of their own safety, communicate to initiate response action, take preemptive action to prevent further damage, and set up a salvage operation. Other training components include a collections emergency preparedness bench-marking workshop for library administrators and managers, hands-on collections salvage for curators and collection managers, format-specific identification and salvage for staff working with audiovisual materials, a one-hour basic emergency training for student workers, and tabletop exercises for local emergency teams to practice their emergency plans.

Harvard Library Preservation Services staff coordinate the training sessions, and have created a number of publicly available resources to complement the training. We collaborate with a number of Harvard groups to ensure that sound best practices are employed, that communication and roles are as clear as possible, and that everyone is at the table to improve the content of the training. Library managers contribute deep understanding of the collection priorities and library staff needs. Harvard’s operations and facilities staff help us understand building response methods and how they coordinate emergency responders and contractors. Environmental health and safety staff inform best practices for safe emergency response. And everyone shares wisdom gained through experience, both the successes and the lessons learned. We hope this paper will allow other emergency teams to benefit from our mistakes and discoveries.

Open-access advocates should pursue fast and slow strategies at the same time. The primary long-term strategy discussed here is the reform of research culture to the point where institutions and individuals care more about the quality of research than where it is published.

In this posting for 2015.05.20, I experiment with different ways of making annotations in a commentary. The passage I have chosen for this commentary is Iliad 5.166–469. I will analyze these 300­odd Homeric verses in two different ways, viewing them through both the lower and the upper part of a bifocal lens. The word lens is my working metaphor here for the critical perspective I hope to achieve.

In my posting of 2015.05.01, I analyzed the Homeric passage at Iliad 17.608–625 where a hero named Koiranos is killed while driving the chariot of Idomeneus, king of the Cretans. After the killing, which happens at verses 610–612, the hero Mērionēs suddenly appears at verses 620–621, as if out of nowhere, and he grabs the chariot reins dropped by the mortally wounded charioteer. Then, at verses 621–624, he hands the reins to Idomeneus, who is shown at verse 609 as he is standing on the chariot platform, and he instructs the king to whip the horses and drive the royal chariot back in retreat to the headquarters of the Achaeans, where their ships are beached. At verses 624–625, we see that Idomeneus complies, and he drives away in the chariot (624–625).

In Plato’s Phaedo 118a, we read this description of the very last seconds before Socrates died from the poison that pervaded his body after he was forced to drink the potion of hemlock that the State had measured out for his execution:

Then he uncovered his face, for he had covered himself up, and said—this was the last thing he uttered—“Crito, I owe the sacrifice of a rooster to Asklepios; will you pay that debt and not neglect to do so?”

These last words ever spoken by Socrates, as quoted in Plato’s Phaedo, are referring to a ritual performed by worshippers of the cult hero Asklepios. It seems as if Socrates had made a vow to perform such a ritual.

The date for my putting together a posting for this week, 2015.04.30, coincides with the date of a special day set aside for celebrating the life and accomplishments of Ellen Bradshaw Aitken, whose premature death on 2014.06.14 deeply saddened me as her friend, colleague, and former teacher. But this day of celebration, at McGill University in Montréal, gives me the happy opportunity to tell about Professor Aitken’s research. In telling my story, I will speak about her as Ellen, not as Professor Aitken, recalling those many happy times when I could talk to you directly, dearest Ellen. That said, let’s get started. I concentrate here on Ellen’s discoveries and discovery procedures concerning the topic of charioteering in Homeric poetry. Ellen’s research on this topic goes all the way back to 1982, when she was a senior at Harvard College, studying in the program of the Committee on Degrees in Folklore and Mythology. That year, she submitted an honors thesis entitled “ὀπάων [opāōn] and ὀπάζω [opazō]: A Study in the Epic Treatment of Heroic Relationships.” The thesis, combined with all her other stellar work as a young student at Harvard, earned her a baccalaureate degree summa cum laude. Then, more than thirty years later, Harvard’s Center for Hellenic Studies initiated a plan to publish a second edition of this masterpiece in Homeric research. Ellen’s untimely death has not thwarted this plan, and an annotated version of her original work is about to appear. I have volunteered to produce my own annotations for this online work, and what I present now is one part of those annotations. I focus here on a Homeric hero who had particularly interested Ellen: he is Mērionēs the Cretan, who fought in the Trojan War as an opāōn or ‘follower’ of the hero Idomeneus, king of all the Cretans. This Mērionēs was also a charioteer who competed in the chariot race organized by Achilles in Iliad 23 to compensate for the death of Patroklos.

This posting of 2015.06.10 continues from where I left off in the posting of 2015.06.03, where I was focusing on the audience’s reception of the first song of Demodokos. The song, as we saw, is paraphrased at verses 72–83 of Odyssey 8; and the reception, as we also saw, is described at verses 83–92, which I translated and analyzed in the previous post. These verses 83–92 say that the singing of Demodokos is a delight for the Phaeacians who hear his song, while it is a pain for the one person in the audience who is not a Phaeacian, and this person is the hero Odysseus. The occasion of the singing is a feast hosted by Alkinoos, king of the Phaeacians, and Odysseus is attending as a guest of honor, though his identity is not yet known to anyone there at the feast. But Odysseus too is a part of the audience, and that fact becomes a problem for the reception of the song performed by this singer.

I start by citing a most important article by Stephen White:

White, S. A. 2000. “Socrates at Colonus: A Hero for the Academy.” Reason and Religion in Socratic Philosophy (ed. N. D. Smith and P. Woodruff) 151–75. Oxford.

§2. Despite my admiration for White’s article, I cited it only once in H24H, at the end of this paragraph:

23§46. This is where the continuation of the argument comes into the picture. [When I say “this is where” in this context, I am referring to Plato Phaedo 88c–89c, where Phaedo’s inset narrative quoting Socrates’ argument for the immortality of the psūkhē is interrupted by Echecrates, who has been listening to Phaedo’s narrative from the start—but then the argument of Socrates is allowed to continue after Phaedo’s inset narrative is restarted—or, better, recontinued.] After the interruption of the argument, the argument will begin again, as Phaedo recontinues the inset narrative, and, in this recontinued narrative, the dialogue of Socrates gets a new life. The dialogue is brought back to life again. The dialogue, as Socrates himself implies, is resurrected. His use of the expression ana-biōnai, ‘bring back to life again’, in the text quoted [Phaedo 88c–89c] conveys the idea of resurrecting the logos, ‘argument’, the literal meaning of which can also be translated, more simply, as ‘word’. The followers of Socrates should lament not for the death of Socrates but for the death of the word. And if the living word stays alive, then there is no need to mourn for Socrates—even if his psūkhē or ‘soul’ were to die along with him. Plato’s Socrates refers in this context to a celebrated story about the men of Argos who refused to wear their hair long until they got a rematch with the long-haired men of Sparta who had defeated them (Herodotus 1.82.7). So also, says Socrates, the followers of Socrates should cut their hair in mourning for his death only if they are ready to fight once again for the argument that the psūkhē or ‘soul’ is immortal. So, maybe Socrates himself has been immortalized after all. It is in such a context that I can understand the argument of those who see traces of a hero cult of Socrates as instituted by Plato and his followers within the space of Plato’s Academy.

I recall here the happy occasion of my most recent viewing, in the year 2014, of the famous ancient Myrtiá (Μυρτιά) or ‘Myrtle Tree’ growing on the hallowed grounds of an old monastery, now a nunnery, in Palianí (Παλιανή), not much more than 20 kilometers southwest of Iráklio (῾Ηράκλειον), the ‘City of Herakles’, on the island of Crete. This enormous old tree, the myriad branches of which overshadow a great part of the visual space in the courtyard of the nunnery, is sacred to ‘Holy Mary’ (Ἁγία Μαρία) the Theotókos or ‘Mother of God’, as she is venerated by Greek Orthodox Christians, and she is known more specifically to the local population by way of the epithet Myrtidiṓtissa (Μυρτιδιώτισσα), ‘Our Lady of the Myrtles’. For a classicist like me, such an epithet can be described as “particularized,” by contrast with the “generic” epithet Panagía (Παναγία), which means ‘All-Holy’, and which is a generalizing way of referring to the Theotókos, whom Orthodox Christians equate with ‘Holy Mary’ as Mother of God-as-an-infant-Christ. In the first picture here, which I use as the introductory illustration for this essay, I show an icon where the Panagía and the boy-Christ are visualized within a frame of myrtle sprays. Thus a generalized Panagía can be envisioned as a particularized Myrtidiṓtissa or Lady of the Myrtles. This particular icon is what visitors can see in the courtyard dominated by the Myrtle Tree—and what I saw most recently in 2014, when I last visited the Tree, in the context of leading an intergenerational group of participants in a travel-study program. The second picture, underneath the introductory illustration provided in the first picture, is a “zoom-out” showing the context of the first picture. We see here that the visualization of ‘Our Lady of Myrtles’ as an icon is physically linked with the space dominated by the Myrtle Tree. And then, underneath the second picture, the third picture is a freeze-frame taken from a videography showing the moment when our group enters into the space shaded by the myriad branches of the Myrtle (and I can see me too there, from behind). This third picture signals what is essential for me to show in this essay: that the link between the Myrtle and ‘Our Lady of Myrtles’ is not just physical but mental as well, since the space that is marked by the Tree is thought to be sacred, and the sacredness is aetiologized—is given meaning—in the form of a sacred narrative about what I describe, in the title of my essay, as “heavenly origins.” And this narrative is encapsulated in the particularized epithet Myrtidiṓtissa, meaning ‘Our Lady of Myrtles’. After making my argument about this epithet Myrtidiṓtissa, I will show another example of such a particularized epithet as applied to the Panagía, which I will analyze in terms of another sacred narrative about “heavenly origins.”