I began working in Special Collections in the summer of 2008 after my freshman year at Haverford.  I worked with Manuscripts Librarian and College Archivist Diana Franzusoff Peterson on two projects.  The first was a light conservation of the Hartshorne family papers.  The Hartshorne family is a prominent Quaker family in the Philadelphia area.  I also looked through the archives of the Haverford and Bi-Co News to look for connections between Haverford and China for an exhibit on Haverford’s relationship with China.

During the 2008-2009 academic year I worked with Quaker Bibliographer and Special Collections Librarian Ann Upton on a number of projects.  The first was an inventory of the William Jenks collection, a collection of early Quaker writings from around the time of the founding of the Society of Friends.  The second project was a re-housing and inventory of the Quaker Broadside collection.  This project has led to the on-going digitization of the collection.  Upon completion of the inventory, I displayed some of the work I had done on the collection and gave a presentation to the Haverford Corporation/Board of Managers describing the project.  I also regularly worked with Ann checking in Serials and keeping our Serials group collection up to date.

During the summer of 2009, I again worked with Diana Peterson to create a finding aid for the William Warder Cadbury and Catherine Jones Cadbury collection.  For most of the summer I dealt with the numerous unsorted photos in the collection.  Many of these photos were from their stay as Quaker missionaries in Canton, China at the Canton Christian College.  I sorted them into folders, performed some light conservation on them, and ultimately created a finding aid so they can be easily available to scholars.

This fall, I have continued working with Ann Upton on the Serial groups and now the Pamphlet groups collections.  In addition, I have been working on an inventory of the Quaker Rare Books Collection, a collection substantially larger than the Jenks Collection I worked with last year.

Outside of my work in Special Collections, I am a Philosophy major at Haverford and a Political Science minor at Bryn Mawr and am interested mostly in political philosophy.  I also run on the cross country and track teams here at Haverford.

Tags: Bi-Co News, Cadbury, China, Hartshorne, Jenks

This entry was posted on Monday, January 11th, 2010 at 11:27 am by David Conners and is filed under Exhibitions, People, Students. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.