Student profile: Deanna Bailey ’12
In the fall of 2008, during the first semester of my freshman year here at Haverford, I started working in Special Collections with Digital Collections Librarian David Conners to finish the Cope Evans project. Started in 2002, the project was to digitize the Cope Evans Family Papers collection in order to make each item available on the web. This involved reading, scanning, and transcribing almost 3,000 items dating from the 18th to the 20th century. I had very little knowledge of the Society of Friends before coming to Haverford, and working with this collection of papers was a great way for me to really understand the essence of Quakerism.
At the culmination of the project in the spring of 2009, an event was organized to unveil the work that all of the students, interns, fellows, and librarians had been doing for the project. Members of the Cope and Evans families were invited, as well as other members of the community, and anyone who had worked on the project in the past. I spoke on the student panel at the event, and wrote a couple of pieces about some themes that arose from the letters, which were the compiled into a booklet about the collection.
Currently, I am working with Manuscripts Librarian and College Archivist Diana Franzusoff Peterson as the student archivist. I plan to major in Anthropology with a minor in Spanish. I also study Arabic, and plan to spend my junior year abroad in Egypt.
Tags: Cope, Evans, Haverford History