Armorial Lockplates: A Story of Success in Renaissance Rome

This article was prompted by a gilt bronze lockplate in the Rijksmuseum, originally the decorative fastening of a chest and one of a large group of similar objects. Hardly any other metalwork design was more extensively reproduced in Italian Mannerism. Its success was based on the appealing design and the fact this type of lockplate offered the possibility of integrating coats of arms and thus personalizing a chest. The paper presents new examples not yet listed in Charles Avery’s comprehensive overview (2001), identifies a whole series of clients for these lockplates on the basis of heraldic and genealogical analyses and deduces from this an origin in Rome and a dating of the entire group (previously dated 1540) to the last third of the sixteenth century.It has been generally assumed that the specific function of these objects was to decorate marriage chests. Closer analysis argues against this thesis. The lockplate in the Rijksmuseum is particularly significant in this context. The coats of arms on its lateral cartouches identify the Roman Orazio Ruspoli and his wife Felice Cavalieri (marr. 1594) as the clients for the piece. Surprisingly, however, the crest on the hasp belongs to a family that was not related to this couple. A comparable finding is made for a lockplate in the National Gallery in Washington, which has also been misinterpreted so far. In this case, too, the coats of arms on the plate and on the hasp do not point to a family connection, but to neighbouring and presumably friendly families. The analysis of other examples, such as one in the Palazzo Venezia, confirms that these lockplates and the chests to which they were attached were not exclusively bound to the context of marriage. As travelling chests, which became must-have items for the Roman upper class, they seem to have been open to a variety of functions.

An Experiment to Increase Online Archival Accessibility: Using Unique Page Views to Measure Online Efficiency

The authors, Prof. Jonathan Dembo and Prof. Mark Custer have used Unique Page Views generated by Google Analytics to identify and track ten of the least used online manuscript finding aids on the Special Collections Department home page of the J. Y. Joyner Library website at East Carolina University. The authors are unaware of previous attempts to use online access statistics to identify and select archival finding aids for experimental purposes. They are also unaware of any previous attempt to use online access statistics, Unique Page Views (UPV's) or Google Analytics to track and assess the results of finding aid revision experiments. In their experiment, Prof. Custer first generated reports showing Unique Page Views of each online finding aid. Prof. Dembo then revised the finding aids to add information to selected elements, including biographical / historical notes, scope notes, accession information, and inventories. He then tracked the changes in unique page views over more than a year. The authors' findings demonstrate that increasing detail to the finding aids had a dramatic impact on unique page views received. Comparable finding aids selected as a control sample increased at a fraction of the rate of the revised finding aids. Moreover, the authors provide evidence to show that revisions to specific online finding aid elements significantly impacted the relative ranking of the finding aids on the website. Prof. Custer who developed Google Analytics as a research tool at Joyner Library has provided Notes on Technical and Statistical Methods. The authors have also provided five tables illustrating the results and providing web addresses for all the finding aids included in the experiment.

Difference in glucose dependency of insulin and somatostatin release

The splenic Brockmann body of channel catfish (Ictalurus punctatus) was isolated and perfused in vitro. It has been shown previously that the hormone release from the catfish pancreas in response to various stimuli resembled that of a mammalian pancreas. The release of insulin and somatostatin was measured at various concentrations of glucose in the perfusate, and the corresponding dose-response curves were derived. As in a variety of mammalian pancreases, insulin release was stimulated half-maximally at ca. 9 mM glucose. In contrast, half-maximal somatostatin release occurred already at ca. 5 mM glucose. Although a comparable finding with mammalian D cells has not yet been reported, histological and physiological resemblances of the mammalian and the fish pancreas suggest that mammalian D cells may also have a glucose sensitivity in the 5 mM range.