Author Q&A: Mariam Touba

Mariam Touba

It was my pleasure to work at the New-York Historical Society's library, an independent research library with collections documenting New York and American history, for many years. Mariam Touba, reference librarian and curator of the library's extensive historic newspaper collection, possesses expertise I could only hope to aspire to. Now the N-YHS library staff has authored a book that's a testament to the N-YHS library collections and to the library staff's knowledge: When Did the Statue of Liberty Turn Green?: And 101 Other Questions About New York City (Columbia Univ., Oct.). I caught up with Mariam to ask her about it. [See review, p. 85.]

How did you and your colleagues select these 102 questions?
Many of the questions have come to us at the reference desk—through telephone, letter, in person, and, lately, email—over the years. Others emerged as library staff worked with the library's collections: for example, a photo archivist wondered why street cleaners were dressed in white. Each of the staff contributors submitted questions. We wanted to share with the reader the sense of how many different topics and how many different time periods are represented in the N-YHS library collections. The result is a book that's more a narrative of New York City's rich, idiosyncratic history than an amalgamation of trivia, something we knew had been done before.

What would the 103rd question have been?
Where does New York dump all its garbage?

How has the world of e-information so far affected the N-YHS library's collection development and your work at the reference desk?
We all get tempted to say, "Well, this has been digitized and is freely available online, so why buy and maintain it?" But it happens here less than one might think. More often we feel it's our responsibility, specifically as a historical society, to keep, conserve, or even acquire an original. We simply do not know how well a digitized item may last or how long it may be accessible. N-YHS is also a museum, so we're mindful of the desire to display the real thing in our galleries.
E-information has significantly changed our reference work, however. We receive fewer of the straight factual questions about the city—"Why is New York called the Big Apple?"—that people now find on their own online. Even this book, originally conceived as straight question-and-answer, veered more toward the nuanced or complex explanation as it developed.
We still get as many reference questions, but they're rooted in the personal and specific, usually from people trying to locate an individual or a company from a bare hint. Tools like Ancestry.com, GoogleBooks, and online, searchable newspapers have made searching out these people or institutions in the great mass of the past so much easier, but the online sources are not as effective in gauging continuity—"How long did she live there?" "When did the company go out of business?" "For how many years was the restaurant at that address?" For those things we are still paging through city directories, assessment records, guidebooks of the past, all maintained here in the library.

What is one of your own favorite research discoveries relating to NY history that you uncovered through N-YHS collections?
Well, the joy is that you learn something every day. I remember coming across a small, one-page circular—what we librarians call a broadside—with the heading "To the Publick. New-York, October 5, 1774. By Mr. Rivere." It served as a reminder that Paul Revere was well-known to the patriot "publick" in New York long before his "midnight ride" the following spring; that he had already made many arduous journeys carrying messages from Boston to Philadelphia and back; that those Committees of Correspondence were truly vital to the cause. And, by the way, yes, New York was commonly spelled with a hyphen then, as it still is in New-York Historical Society.

What's a book you recently finished (whether or not on NY history), that you'd recommend?
I was aware that it was generally well-received but was still startled at tennis champion Andre Agassi's autobiography, Open: how it read so well and came with a certain humor and self-awareness along with that happy ending. It stayed with me all summer. On a more academic note, I was drawn to the innumerable insights in Akhil Reed Amar's America's Constitution: A Biography, insights that come not only from the author but from the very framers of the Constitution and its amendments—they were far more on the ball about government than I ever imagined.—Margaret Heilbrun, Library Journal