As announced last month, the Alcohol Studies Archives Exhibit was soft-launched and added the RU Libraries Digital Exhibits page. The current, updated version features 51 pages with 403 images and 101 documents, with many links to related items in RUcore’s Alcohol Studies Collection.
The original exhibit page on the Omeka platform shown below (redirected to the new exhibit by now) had four topics. The new exhibit expanded significantly on three of them, incorporated Publications into the “Firsts,” and added two brand new ones: Mark Keller Collection and Temperance Tales.
The exhibit now is structured into five sections, showcasing “firsts” in alcohol studies, including the Summer School of Alcohol Studies, related to the Center. Two prominent scholars, E. M. Jellinek and Mark Keller, are featured through one-of-a-kind documents and artifacts preserved exclusively at Rutgers. The section on Temperance explores this historical movement through the lens of the Archives as a research resource, illustrating how the materials continue to support scholarship at the Center.
Before the official opening of the exhibit, a series of posts will describe its five distinctive components with a goal to collect feedback, starting with “Firsts” from the First. part of the original Alcohol Studies exhibit on the Omeka platform. Stay tuned for more posts with insider information on the content, selection criteria, and the process.
About the title “Firsts” from the First
This exhibit borrowed the title from a series called Classics of the Alcohol Literature, the primary source of many seminal articles in the field of alcohol studies. These are early writings on alcoholism published in the Quarterly Journal of Studies on Alcohol with comments by prominent scholars of the field from 1941 to 1946.
The articles were also collated in a rare book with the similar title. The Digital Alcohol Studies Archives made all of them available in 2023, see the original Table of Contents and a full list with links.
The first journal: QJSA
The oldest substance-related publication in the United States, called originally the Quarterly Journal of Studies on Alcohol, helped establish the study of substance use as a legitimate area of scientific investigation. Founded by Howard W. Haggard, M. D., director of Yale University’s Laboratory of Applied Physiology, QJSA evolved from early efforts at abstracting, indexing, and collecting literature on alcohol. Now called the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, it is the longest-running addiction journal in the US, published by Alcohol Research Documentation, Inc. based at the Center of Alcohol and Substance Use Studies at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey.
In addition to sample documents and images to illustrate the history of this prestigious publication, the journal page of the exhibit also benefits from many articles published in the Journal over decades. They provide more insight into the evolving field of alcohol studies as presented and preserved in scholarly articles, for example:
- Candon, P. M., Ward, J. H., & Pandina, R. J. (2014). The Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs and the Rutgers Center of Alcohol Studies: a history of the evolution of alcohol research. Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs. Supplement, 75 Suppl 17(s17), 8–17.)
This collage shows the various covers of the first scholarly journal in the field of U. S. alcohol studies since the demise of the American Journal of Inebriety in 1916. The image was used in:
- Ward, J. H., Babor, T. F., Allred, N., & Bejarano, W. (2024). The Modern History of Alcohol Research: Introducing the Rutgers Digital Alcohol Studies Archives. Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, 85(3), 289–295.
Publishing addiction science
Incorporating the “Publications” section of the Omeka exhibit with the “Firsts” made sense, since CAS was a pioneer in publishing both scholarly and lay literature related to the use and misuse of alcohol. The home of the Journal, the Center also published books, bibliographies, pamphlets, fact sheets, posters, and more.
The exhibit highlights the diverse topics, authors, style, format, and target audiences of publications with images and narratives. It covers the Lay Supplements, Monograph Series, Bibliographies, and the Alcoholism Treatment Digest in detail, linking to full texts where applicable.
The first research center
The Center of Alcohol Studies, which defined the field as it evolved, was built on five pillars: research, publication, education, therapy, and special services. The multidisciplinary fields of research include physiological, psychological, cultural, legal, educational, economic, and medical aspects of alcohol. The various divisions, however, often overlapped and were inseparable. The exhibit page detailing the five pillars also presents the afterlife, including the permanent, physical exhibit in the CAS conference room preserving artifacts to demonstrate the original idea.
The exhibit in the Conference Room of the Center of Alcohol and Substance Use Studies, pictured in 2023, was originally set up in 2013 to take students, visitors, and participants of CAS events back to the roots of alcohol studies through artifacts preserved by librarians, faculty, and staff.
Yale Plan Clinics
Consolidated several firsts into a single page, the Yale Plan Clinics section presents the two groundbreaking free clinics, known as the Yale Plan Clinics. They were opened in March 1944 in Hartford and New Haven, Connecticut as a joint initiative between Yale University’s Laboratory of Applied Physiology and the Connecticut State Prison Association. As announced in the Quarterly Journal of Studies on Alcohol, the clinics aimed to evaluate whether large-scale rehabilitation of individuals with alcoholism could be both effective and cost-efficient. The exhibit also presents an innovative, 144-page course packet for the Yale Plan for Business and Industry and the Yale Plan posters, more precisely, the seven out of the twelve large posters that were in decent shape to be digitized.
Measuring BAC
An expanded page called BAC Tools presents two innovative solutions to estimate alcohol content in breath and blood developed at the Center. The Alcometer and the Alco-Calculator were designed several decades apart, but rates of alcohol absorption and elimination were calculated on scientific basis solid and valid today.
Classified Abstract Archive of the Alcohol Literature (CAAAL)
As a librarian, I was delighted to dedicate a full page to CAAAL. A pioneer in organizing and sharing alcohol-related literature, the Center also established the first comprehensive systems for collecting and disseminating scholarly research on alcohol, which originated in the Carnegie-funded abstracting project, resulting in the Classified Abstract Archive of the Alcohol Literature (CAAAL). The first of its kind, a CAAAL is collection of approximately 20,000 abstracts from 1939 through 1977 of the scientific and scholarly alcohol literature compiled by Center staff from scientific journals, published and unpublished research reports, and scholarly monographs that they reviewed for the journal. The exhibit features examples and use of the McBee edge-notched punch cards with details such as the author, title, publication information, and a concise summary, as well as the method how the cards were punched along the edges with subject codes to be used for manual sorting via a needle-sort method.
Summer School of Alcohol Studies
Presented only briefly under this title, the Summer School of Alcohol Studies, the first educational program of its kind, had its own exhibit in Omeka, which was developed further into a separate, “80 years of SSAS” exhibit after the digitization of SSAS memorabilia in 2023-2024. Stay tuned!
