CARLI Digitized Book of the Month – January 2016

From: Illinois Institute of Technology

I live, eat, sleep, breathe theses--or at least that's how it feels sometimes, having cataloged my institution's master's theses for the last several years, and more recently having acquired the privilege of creating metadata for retrospectively-digitized theses uploaded to the institutional repository. I mention this because it has made me more acutely aware that historically theses have received minimal cataloging treatment. And I mention that because I wish I had discovered the existence of this thesis about two and a half years ago.

Written in 1907 by Alfred L. Eustice for his B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from the Armour Institute of Technology, the thesis is titled Effect of Quality of Surface and Color upon Absorption of Light. Due to the dearth of literature on artificial illuminants at that time, Mr. Eustice investigated how wall coverings affect room lighting. The key words missing from the title, and therefore from the metadata as well: wall coverings.

I was investigating the opposite--how room lighting affects wall coverings--in the Fall of 2013, when my library hosted a traveling exhibit related to Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short story "The Yellow Wall-Paper." In conjunction, I curated a supporting exhibit stemming from the question of whether the wallpaper actually could have caused the narrator's descent into madness. I won't belabor my conclusions (which can be found here, if you really want to know), but I will briefly address a few ways in which Mr. Eustice's research could have been useful to my own.

This thesis was written a mere 15 years after the story's publication, which from a 21st-century perspective is darn near contemporary. I can't claim to grasp the more technical aspects, but its findings substantiate the exceptional light-reflectiveness of the color yellow with scientific evidence. Although I was aware of Anaglypta and flocking trends, I hadn't given a whole lot of consideration to the influence of texture on visual perception--perhaps because surface qualities weren't emphasized in the story's description of the wallpaper, but in hindsight further exploration of that aspect might have been merited.

So that's why it would have been nice if I'd serendipitously stumbled upon this thesis a few years earlier, but maybe it's not too late for someone else. Either way, it serves as a reminder that there are treasures waiting to be rediscovered, and I can hope I've made this one a little less obscure.

Written by Ellen K. Corrigan, Associate Professor, Cataloging Services, Booth Library, Eastern Illinois University

This volume was contributed by the Paul V. Galvin Library, Illinois Institute of Technology. You can find this volume and others from CARLI participant libraries in the Internet Archive.