- [Chelsea] Howdy, from Texas A&M.

- [Jeanne] I repair books and make sure that you're able to turn the pages and work with them.

- [Dr. Blanton] He's clearly trying to sell Texas.

He's offering Texas to anyone.

- [Jeremy] Every story was read and every story meant something to somebody.

Stories are something that humans all have in common.

- Welcome to campus.

Welcome to "Texas A&M Today".

(light music) Howdy, I'm your host, Chelsea Reber, at Cushing Memorial Library on the campus of Texas A&M University.

Today we're focusing on the fascinating people and collections that help the A&M libraries earn national attention.

We'll find out why College Station is an important hub for sci-fi fans.

Plus we'll get a firsthand look at one of the most important artifacts in Texas, which lives right here at A&M.

And we'll take a road trip to see more Texas history in Aggieland's backyard.

But today, let's start with a behind-the-scenes group that helps keep the libraries running: the preservation department.

Together, they protect, preserve, and restore books for generations of future Aggies.

(gentle music) - Our work within the libraries, it's sometimes not seen or thought of.

We do a lot to steward and to basically safeguard and preserve the extensive collection that the library holds.

The mission of the Preservation Unit is to ensure the long-term access of the library's collection.

- There are five libraries.

We roughly have over 6 million volumes.

I think there are a lot of things that make the libraries stand out.

The Preservation Unit is key.

This is a unit that supports both the print and the digital collections, as well as our general circulating collections and the special collections and archives.

- All of us that work at Preservation want to make these things available to people to study, to research, and just enjoy the collections we have.

Currently, we have four librarians and about five professional staff that work together in addition to maybe a dozen or so student employees.

(light music) - The goal is always to keep our materials, our library materials, in the best possible condition for as long as possible.

If we are faced with some sort of disaster scenario with our collections, being able to respond to those disasters and recover materials is something else that we focus on heavily.

So I am actually going around and recording data as far as temperature, humidity, and light levels, and looking at that sort of over time.

We record historical data and we go back and we log it, we look at it.

We look for any sort of aberrations or concerns.

If we're seeing high humidity over time in a given area or we're seeing fluctuations, we like to see stability in our spaces.

We're looking at those environmental conditions.

We're also looking for the presence of contaminants.

If our HVAC filtration isn't working well enough, you know, if we're starting to see deposit on materials that require attention.

Also concerned environmentally with pests.

There are a lot of pests that will damage paper and eat starch, glues, leather, other things that are components of library materials.

(light music) - As to how many items that we've actually digitized, it would be in the millions.

Sometimes we think of digitizing an item and you think, well, a book or a paper or map, but in reality, a book, for example, each page is an image.

So, a large volume could actually result in a large number of files.

Nowadays, most scanning, most reformatting, or digitizing we call it, is done with cameras.

As fast as you can turn pages is almost as fast as you can digitize that book.

We, in the digital service center, can digitize other things.

Microfiche, microfilm, we do larger maps.

Large items can be scanned or digitized on large format scanners.

We can even digitize three dimensional objects with 3D scanners.

We're able to do just about any type of media.

We have student employees who actually do the book repair, who fix the damaged books, and do a lot of very technical and valuable work for us.

The majority of them actually work here where we are now in the Digitization Lab.

They work to, basically do that scanning, that reformatting from physical to digital of our projects to make them digital.

(soft music) - I repair books and make sure that you're able to turn the pages and work with them.

We rehouse hundreds, if not thousands, of books in a year.

I love that I work with collections that get used.

It adds challenge to the work and problem solving because when I do a treatment or a treatment strategy, I'm working on something that will be handled.

It won't hang on the wall and no one will touch it.

We use our art history for context.

We use our fine arts for reconstruction.

Most conservators can re-engineer the works that they're working on 'cause you need to know how they're made to know how to repair them.

All conservation treatment begins with an assessment or evaluation.

What's important about this?

What is the intention?

If we have a teaching item, it means it gets higher use.

If we have a donor or a scarcity item, we might think about how it might be exhibited or it gets requested for loans quite a bit.

Then I come up with the best strategy with the curator that will address stabilizing the items.

So if we have a detached board, we're going to attach that board.

If we have tears, we're going to mend those tears.

If we have staining, we might wash paper.

We did over a hundred repairs on one map.

Or it could be as simple as laying down a thread on "The Hobbit", which took 15 minutes.

(giggles) (sentimental music) - I would want people to know about the Preservation Unit is that our work, though not always visible, is done with the patron in mind.

Really is to take care of the extremely valuable, diverse, and expansive collections that the library holds.

- With our special collections, we're dealing with materials that are hundreds of years old.

Books from the 15th and 16th century, for example.

When you think about the sort of journey that these things may have made over hundreds of years to wind up in our care, that by being sort of an element in the life cycle of a book like that that's actually survived hundreds of years of, you know, who knows what, war, fire, famine, whatever, to finally come here to Texas A&M, to be able to care for that briefly in its long lifespan so that hopefully a hundred, 200 years from now that item is still somewhere in the world, hopefully here, and still being used as it is today.

- We are seeing people who want to use materials different ways.

They want the convenience.

So it really is a hybrid situation where we've got both the physical and the digital, and I think that's going to continue.

This is a really pivotal unit that makes sure that everything can be used and that it's there for the future Aggies, future researchers, so that it can be used for generations to come.

- The preservation librarians work on pieces from many different collections, including major pieces of Texas history.

For more, we go back in time, to 1830, when Texas was a fraction of what it is today.

Before statehood, before the Alamo, before independence from Mexico, there was Stephen F. Austin and one big map.

(soft music) - This map is called Stephen F. Austin's map of Texas.

Left corner is higher.

And we're really excited to have it at Cushing Library.

The case it is in is a custom-made case.

The case was made by Goppion, who's a wildly important Italian case maker.

They did the framing and casing for the "Mona Lisa".

They also did all of the display and casing work for the Crown Jewels.

This is a wildly important map in Texas history.

There's a number of things that lead to the rarity of it.

First is just scarcity.

The map was printed in several editions, 1830 being the first.

And we actually don't have a number of how many maps were printed when it was printed, and there's never been a census actually done of how many still exist.

Through my own research and working with my co-curator of the Texas collection, we've been able to identify about 10 copies in institutional holdings.

These are libraries and museums in North America.

We're also aware of one in the major Texas Museum in Germany.

And then we know of a couple that are in private collections.

So on that front, it's just hard to get your hands on.

And when you think about a map like this, once it goes into a collection, such as an institutional one, it's unlikely to leave.

They've bought it to make it available to the public.

This is one of those pieces that kind of speaks to the heart of these really important landmark pieces in the collection that we would not be able to have if it wasn't for donors and former students who really care about seeing this sort of research material available at the university.

We're good.

In then.

(soft music) - In 1830 when this map was released, life in Texas was obviously very primitive compared to the way we see it.

Texas was a land teaming with natural resources that were largely untapped.

There wouldn't have been a lot of settled towns.

Some of the places that would've been called towns in that map, you might barely call a village today.

- Something to keep in mind is at this point, Texas is still part of Mexico.

And in the production of this map, Austin had one very firm command of what he was supposed to do.

In exchange for having his land grant, which was a very large chunk of land in Central Texas, he needed to map Texas in return for the Mexican government.

And so what Austin had done in creating this map was he, being unable to fully canvas all of Texas, solicited hand-drawn maps from kind of his counterparts around the state.

He also worked with a general from Mexico who'd done some mapping of Texas also.

And so, Austin really did have a hand in laying out every line and river, and just the etching of every community and road that ended up on the final map.

- He's clearly so attentive to timber, to navigable streams.

He's attentive to wild buffalo herds or wild horse herds.

He's attentive to forest and swamps.

He's clearly trying to sell Texas.

He's offering Texas to anyone who will look at this map as there's a little bit here for all of you.

- [Sierra] When I look at this map, which is pre-Texas as Texas, it does really start leading into this strong identity that Texas has for itself.

- I think this map is a very direct representation of who Stephen F. Austin was.

The magnification that you see is Texas.

It's not the United States, and that in a way reflects Austin's, I think, primary motivation.

This almost missionary zeal that he has for Texas.

- Austin used surveys conducted across the state to draw the map, and the first edition took five years to complete.

The map isn't the only part of early Texas history in the area.

Let's take a trip about 40 minutes down Highway 6, to the birthplace of Texas.

(light upbeat music) We're at Washington-on-the-Brazos today.

Nearly 200 years ago, this is where Texas became Texas.

Today, it's a historic site with several Aggies a part of a staff dedicated to preserving a portrait of the 1800s.

We asked some of their historians to tell us about the history making moment that happened here and the Texan way of life.

- Davy Crockett, Mary Austin Holly, they're all talking about Texas as a paradise.

Crockett writes that it's the land of milk and honey, game of plenty.

It was even described as heaven on Earth for men and dogs.

- I think coming to Texas in the 1820s and in the 1830s was seen as an opportunity for a fresh start.

That you would've come here and everything that you would have would be something that you would have had to build with your own hands.

Roads and rivers would've certainly been present and would've aided you and guided you on your way coming into Texas, but they would've been just as much barriers as they would've been as paths and trails that you would walk.

(soft music) - This site wasn't much in 1836, just an unfinished frame building in the small town of Washington.

But it was enough to be a gathering place for 59 delegates to change Texas forever.

- It was in this room that the Texas mystique would come into full fruition with the signing of the Texas Declaration of Independence on March 2nd of 1836 and then the drafting of the Texas Republican Constitution, which would be the formative document that would make Texas its own independent nation.

- While Santa Anna's forces attacked the Alamo, the delegates remained for 17 days, dedicated to forging a new path ahead.

Nearly 10 years later, Texas was admitted to the Union as its 28th state.

But the stories and legends about early Texas life remain to this day.

- We've had this mythos built up around Texas almost from the beginning.

You know, they're all documenting Texas and trying to get more folks to come out here.

And they're extolling the wonders of the people, too.

The folks of Texas are somehow battling the elements more heroically or more fiercely than others.

You get all of that built up and it just grows and grows until Texas really does become a state of mind.

- After the Declaration of Independence was signed, town leaders lobbied for Washington to be named the permanent capital of the Republic of Texas.

But leaders chose Waterloo, later renamed Austin.

It's time for an Aggie Fact.

We are more than 5600 miles away from Rome, yet we have a connection to Ancient Roman history.

In 2012, pieces used in a first century Roman chariot were donated to Cushing Memorial Library.

Made of bronze, iron, lead, and silver, they were used to keep the chariot together.

They're very rare, well preserved, and a perfect item to show school groups and visitors.

When you think of science fiction and fantasy, A&M probably doesn't come to mind.

But Cushing Memorial Library and Archives is home to a world-renowned collection.

In fact, "Game of Thrones" author, George R.R.

Martin, who isn't even an Aggie, chose Cushing as his official archive.

We took a look inside the collection and found out why A&M and sci-fi do go together.

(bright music) - Most people in the world like stories.

I think stories are something that humans all have in common.

We all find ourselves in stories and we find ourselves attached to stories.

The science fiction and fantasy research collection is one of the largest collections of its kind in the entire world.

Books and pulp magazines and non-fiction books and scholarly journals and archival collections and objects and comic books and games and audio visual materials, all kinds of stuff relating to science fiction and fantasy.

Every story was read.

Every story meant something to somebody.

The collection's kinda a living record of what joy and what importance people attach to stories.

Science fiction, what it really does well is look at the present, what world we're living in now, through the lens of the future.

What kind of world do we want to live in?

Who are we as people?

How do we react to things?

How do we live with each other?

How do we react to each other?

So it's important to have that on record.

That's a record of who we are and what we think about things.

That's why we collect it.

(keyboard clanking) - As I scrambled down the sandy slope, I could hear Mitsa over the emergency comm channel, yelling at someone to get the hopper in the air now.

They were about 10 kilos away, working on in their part of the island, so there was no way they were going to get here in time to help.

I'm a science fiction and fantasy writer.

My first book came out in 1993.

When you're first starting out, especially in a creative field like this, it can be really difficult to keep your confidence.

Cushing really helped me with that.

(light upbeat music) Going to the collection reminds me why it's fun and why I wanted to do this so badly when I was younger.

They would invite authors to come and see it and to talk to them about donating their manuscripts and papers.

That was kind of a sign that you were really a real author.

(light upbeat music) - Most of the materials we acquire are donated.

The question I probably answered the most, like why is George R.R.

Martin's stuff here?

There is an organization on campus called Cepheid Variable.

It's a student group.

Every year they ran an event called AggieCon, which was largest and longest running student-run science fiction convention in the country.

Harlan Ellison and Anne McCaffery and Neil Gaiman and people like that, and George R.R.

Martin would come.

He made friends here and he liked the area and he liked the library.

Our director at the time went to him and suggested, "You're a well-known author.

Have you thought about what you wanna do with your papers, your manuscripts and things?"

And he came back a few years later and said, "Yeah, let's do it."

He likes A&M and he's been giving us materials ever since then.

- [Martha] I was a member of Cepheid Variable, which at that time was a science fiction and fantasy student committee.

The things that Cepheid had, like we had signed movie posters and other stuff that were just kind of stored not very well and were starting to go missing.

And so we donated a lot of that stuff to Cushing just so it'd be a little bit more protected.

- Today we were going through our storage unit.

We have stuff leading all the way back from the 60s, 70s, 80s, all the way back to when Cepheid was started in 1969.

We wanted to get it here to Cushing, donate what we can.

Seeing these worlds come out of people's minds and being able to learn more about them, I think that's really neat.

It's in no way like the world we're living in now and it kind of adds that creative aspect.

And for that, it really like focuses on embracing the mind's imagination.

(light music) - [Sydney] Yeah!

- [Speaker] Ha!

Neat.

Don't know what that is.

- NPO of the month.

Growing up, I actually didn't get to interact with very many people in revolving to sci-fi.

How diverse it is and how many different types of things could be classified as sci-fi, anyone can get into it really.

(students indistinctly chatters) Having such a big community of people that I can get along with and talk about the things that I like, this made me like a much happier person, (laughs) honestly.

- Literature is how we as humans express ourselves.

We express our emotions, our values, our ideas.

What we think about the world, what we think the world should be, and we do a lot of it through these fictional lenses.

We do it through novels and short stories and movies and television.

And I mean, science fiction has always been a particularly interesting way of doing that.

We have a very high degree of access.

There are a lot of institutions that are much more careful about who they let in.

It's your property.

All I do and all my colleagues do with our stuff, we're just holding it for you and taking care of it.

I don't think any archivist or curator should be deciding that your research is important enough that we can let you in.

You're here, use our stuff, that's what it's for.

- The collection has items dating as far back as the 17th century.

It also includes more than 90% of the science fiction pulp magazines published in America in the 20th century.

Next, I caught up with a Texas A&M difference maker for a one-on-one conversation.

Today, that's the new Commandant of the Corps of Cadets, Brigadier General Patrick R. Michaelis.

A 1993 Aggie graduate, Michaelis started his new role in October after a distinguished military career, which he concluded by serving as Commanding General of Fort Jackson in South Carolina.

You served in leadership roles in Iraq and Afghanistan.

What did you learn in those roles that you can now share with A&M cadets?

- Great question.

So I think war or conflict in itself will always be a contest of wills.

And that will that we impart upon our adversaries really rides on a bedrock of what we believe.

And what Texas A&M really brings to light is the value of values.

And when you're in that period of the 60 seconds of the unforgiving minute, it's not what's up here, but what's in here that really defines the decisions you make.

And you see that every day.

- What made you decide that now was the time to leave the Army and come back to Texas A&M?

- Yeah, I was not thinking about it.

I was on a pretty good path, but this opportunity only comes along once in a generation.

So I talked to my wife.

We talked about it a long time.

I talked to some mentors, and I took the shot.

And this opportunity to come back here and to be a part of Texas A&M, to be part of the growth of thousands upon thousands of young men and women.

You know, I didn't come here to retire, I retired to come here and I'm pretty happy about it.

- An important campaign called March to 3,000 is underway at Texas A&M, and the goal is to grow the corps to 3,000 cadets for the purpose of building leaders, not necessarily for military service, but what you said, in industry and the nation and the state.

Can you elaborate more on the campaign for me.

- So as I look at this initial few months that I'm here, I'm looking at how we are doing in terms of our branding and marketing, how we're doing in recruiting and retention, but also looking at whether or not we have the facilities, the resources, the human capital.

Whether the Commandant's office is organized the right way, whether the Corps of Cadets is organized the right way in order to achieve 3,000.

But I think hitting 3,000 once is just the start, right?

You need to hit it consistently over time because that tells you you've got it right.

- When you're not working, how do you spend your free time?

- I'm probably one of a few general officers that rides a Harley.

- Oh, very cool.

- A little wind therapy every once in a while with my better half on the back.

We kinda like to go do that.

I like to read a lot.

- [Chelsea] Okay.

- I just got done with Ron Chernow's biography of Washington, and before that, Grant.

And I like SEC football.

- You came to the right place.

(Chelsea laughs) - I did.

- Who or what inspires you?

- I work every single day to live up to the values and the standards that my parents raised me.

Every single day.

They are my heroes, and I hope in some way, shape, or form I'm the same for my daughters.

And I also think that the legacy we create as leaders are the ones that carry us into the future.

We create tomorrow's potential today here in the Corps of Cadets, and that's what I'm very happy to be a part of.

- Well General Michaelis, thank you so much for joining me.

- Chelsea, thank you very much for your time.

- You can watch an extended version of this interview on our website.

That's it for this edition of "Texas A&M Today".

We're glad you joined us and hope to see you again next time.

(light upbeat music) (light upbeat music continues)