Gest Fellow Christian Gonzales is a Ph.D. candidate in United States History at the University of California, San Diego.  His research is on “Anglo-Indian Antiremoval Collaboration, 1819-1859.”

Christian Gonzales 2009 Gest Fellow

I came to Haverford to research material for the final chapter of my dissertation, which investigates Native and Anglo American groups that opposed the removal of the Indians from the eastern United States during the 1820s and 30s. I was specifically interested in the joint efforts of the Seneca and the Orthodox Quakers of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting to prevent Seneca removal and to stop ratification of the 1838 Treaty of Buffalo Creek.

To my delight, the documents in the Special Collections Library were richer than I expected. They clearly illuminated the relationship between the Seneca and the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, and revealed in great detail their combined political efforts to thwart removal. The documents of most help were those of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting’s Indian Committee. The papers and letters of Friends such as Joseph Elkinton, Ebenezer Worth, and Solomon and Sarah Lukens, all of whom lived for years among the Seneca of the Allegheny reservation, helped reveal Seneca perspectives on removal, explained why Friends opposed removal, and clearly detailed Friends’ efforts to acculturate Seneca through formal schooling and projects designed to persuade Natives to pursue Anglo-American agriculture. Other papers in the PYMIC collection painted interesting pictures of Seneca daily life, and gave moving insight into the emotions Friends experienced living with the Natives. For instance, the letters of Susannah Wood described a performance of the Green Corn Dance, recorded the procedures of a Seneca Council meeting, and gave touching accounts of Seneca children playing in the snow. They also communicated her feelings of homesickness, and revealed the depth of sorrow she endured from the loss of her two year old son, Francis. Susannah taught with her husband John at the Tunesassah Boarding School for a year before her sudden death in 1853.

Other resources were also extremely helpful. The Dictionary of Quaker Biography and the necrology card file allowed me to reconstruct the major life events of Friends who worked with the Indians. And the copies of The Friend, in the periodicals collection, detailed the reasons why several yearly meetings, including Philadelphia, New York, Ohio, Baltimore, and New Jersey, participated in the national antiremoval campaign of 1829-30, which sought to stop the forced removal of the Cherokee.

I would like to thank the staff, John, Diana, Ann, and David, for the instrumental help they provided while I was in residence at Haverford. Their insight and knowledge were vital to the success of my research.

From time to time, we will be posting profiles of our Gest Fellows. Michael E. McGuire is a Ph.D. candidate in History at Boston University.  His research is on “Quaker NGOs That Offered Humanitarian Aid to France During and After World War I.”

Michael E. McGuire 2009 Gest Fellow

I am researching the work of American non-governmental organizations (NGOs) formed to aid French civilians during World War I, and to assist France’s postwar reconstruction, to see whether such NGOs affected Franco-American relations. These NGOs include large umbrella organizations like the American Red Cross, and smaller NGOs like the American Friends’ Reconstruction Unit, which trained at Haverford before deploying to France. I am particularly interested in how American Friends were selected and trained for their work in France, how they integrated with existing English Friends’ operations, how the Friends cooperated with similarly-concerned governments and NGOs, how American Friends overcame the language barrier (many tried to brush up or learn French on the voyage or on the job), how both French and American cultures interacted when American Friends entered and remained in parts of France, and how both Friends and French people commemorated NGO work after it largely ceased in 1920.

Lucy Saxon (’06) is pleased to return to the Haverford College Special & Quaker Collections this summer for an internship culminating her library school experience.  She will graduate in August from San Jose State University with a Masters in Library and Information Science.  Lucy was a Comparative Literature Major, and is interested in archives and special collections, language, literature, history, and quakerism.
This summer, she is assisting Digital Collections Librarian David Conners in cleaning up and standardizing records from many databases as they are combined into the new Collections Manager system.  She is thrilled to be working on the Fine Arts Collection, doing cataloging, and helping to make part of the collection available online.  She will also help to write cataloging documentation for future catalogers.  She is delighted to be back in the Special Collections where her undergraduate work inspired her decision to pursue a career in librarianship, and is enjoying another beautiful summer on campus.

Past Haverford Gest Fellow, Maurice Jackson, will speak at the Library Company on Thursday, February 5, 2009, 5:30 pm – 7:00 pm.  Jackson’s new biography of Quaker abolitionist Anthony Benezet will be the subject of his talk entitled "Let This Voice Be Heard: Anthony Benezet, Father of Atlantic Abolitionism." Jackson is Assistant Professor of History at Georgetown University. RSVP acceptances only to 215-546-3181 or email lpropst@librarycompany.org.

So much has been written and recorded about Rufus Jones (1863-1948) as author, educator, leader and Friend, but it is not as often from his own hand.  Here, then, is what Jones reports about himself on Haverford’s personnel register in 1946 in his large, clear hand. The original can be found in the collection of his papers, 1130, box 90.

Students working in Special Collections this summer have published online 1,100 letters from the Cope Evans Family Papers, beating their goal by over 100 letters.  In addition to scanning, the students researched genealogical information about the people mentioned in the letters, and cataloged the letters before posting them to Triptych, the Tri-College Digital Library.  The team consisted of (from left-to-right) Luke Mueller, MLS graduate student at Drexel University; Hannah Lonky, HC ’10 history major; Sara Bornstein, HC ’09 history major; and Mara Miller, HC ’10 classics major.     

While working with the Cope Evans family papers, Special Collections student worker Thea Hogarth recently came upon a surprising letter.  Written by Clementine Cope over a span of days in April 1865,  the personal letter covers many topics including education, the weather, …and the assassination of the President Lincoln.   On pages three and four, Clementine chronicles her reaction to the “the presidents dreadful death, wh. seemed dreadful enough to strike every one dumb with horror & astonishment.”  The letter can be seen in Triptych: the tri-college digital library. A transcription can be seen by choosing “page and text” from the view drop down menu and the clicking the go button.

The qualities of digital media are well-known: their agility, portability and scalability, among others.  Their one down-side seems to be the result of their usefulness: we can’t keep up the ratio of preservation to advances in technology.  A couple of years ago, we attended a week-long workshop on digital preservation at Cornell University, and one of the slogans of this really excellent workshop was “there is no silver bullet” in terms of preservation of digital assets.  We came away from that workshop with strong ideas on how to get started and created a campus-wide survey on the types of digitalia being employed and methods used to preserve them.

On November 14 & 15, 2007, David Conners and Diana Peterson attended a workshop held at the new PALINET headquarters in Philadelphia entitled “Stewardship of Digital Assets,” which the organizers subtitled “sustaining digital collections.” About 40 people attended the PALINET workshop from a variety of institutions: museums, public libraries, community colleges, universities, government, and businesses.  Haverford was one of the smaller institutions represented; most attendees came from government institutions like NARA, the Pennsylvania and Delaware State libraries, even the Supreme Court of Canada.  The trainers included Liz Bishoff, former Executive Director of the Colorado Digitization Program; Tom Clareson, Program Director for New Initiatives at PALINET; Robin Dale, former Program Manager for Preservation at RLG; and Katherine Skinner, Co-Director of the MetaArchive Cooperative.

While the expression “there is no silver bullet” was still uttered, it was not a slogan.  In the final analysis, we wrote up a strategies statement based on our assessment of risk of loss in which we listed: increased institutional buy- in for digital preservation; an expansion of the previously formulated survey; an improvement of our backup procedures for digital objects; transfer of digital objects on superseded formats and CD and DVD to spinning disks; and consideration of the future of digital objects that are produced in proprietary formats.  We listed the personnel and stakeholders we considered vital in this undertaking and broke down our preservation plan to the level of implementation.  Finally, we projected financial needs and potential resources.

Following are some of the points presented in the workshop that merit notice in this report and some further detail to the strategies statement outlined above

1) A short definition of digital preservation as prepared by ALCTS suggests that it is the combination of policies, strategies and actions that ensure access to digital content over time.  Integral to these propositions are such factors as assigning responsibility for digital preservation to staff, technical specifications, reliable master files, sufficient descriptive, administrative and structural metadata to ensure future access and a quality control procedure. In addition are such factors as disaster preparedness, programs to refresh, migrate and emulate digital data, and, of course, sources of funding. One way to get started may be to hire a consultant.

2) We had always thought of back-up of our various digital formats (think: websites, email, data sets, GIS, images, audio, video, among others) as synonymous with preservation, but, while this continues to be of significance, it lacks the necessary aspect of long-term preservation or structural integrity. Best practices also dictate the employment of standards, oversight to curry to new media and a system of LOCKSS (lots of copies keep stuff safe).

3) While we might aspire to being a Trustworthy Repository (www.crl.edu/content.asp?l1=13&l2=58&l3=162&l4=91) that ingests all digital material produced by the college and provides it safe, updated and authenticated harbor until its egress at any point, the cost in terms of personnel and money may be greater than what Haverford can afford. There is a good deal of literature on life cycle preservation for digital media, and a number of institutions that are gearing up to step into this role.

4) Katherine Skinner gave one of the more interesting presentations when she talked about the founding and organization of the MetaArchive Cooperative (MetaArchive.org).  The MetaArchive is a cooperative made up currently of Emory, Georgia Tech, Virginia Tech, Florida State, and Auburn.  They use a LOCKSS (www.lockss.org/lockss/Home) -based system of servers to deposit their digital objects.  If any particular copy of a digital object is compromised on an individual node, the other copies can overwrite it.  Two aspects of the MetaArchive were interesting to us.  First, the cost to deposit our digital data in the MetaArchive is only $200/year.  Second, the MetaArchive Cooperative is interested in exporting its model to other groups, which has already been implemented for a state-wide digital preservation program in Alabama.  Is this something PACSCL or PALCI would be interested in?

Next steps: we hope to build on the survey that was circulated across Haverford’s campus, stressing the need not only to back-up critical digital data, but also to engage in best practices for long-term preservation, including providing counseling on practices (safety, security, longevity, breadth, authenticity, reporting) and prioritization analysis.  This is all possible as long as there is institutional interest and commitment.

Diana Franzusoff Peterson and David Conners

Former Special Collections Executive Secretary & Research Assistant, J’aime Wells’ article “‘Until Called For’: Safekeeping Materials in Special Collections” appears in the current issue of Haverford’s College Information Resources Newsletter.

David Conners, our new Digital Collections Librarian, has recently had an article published in Library Journal.  Co-written with Laena McCarthy, Image Cataloger and Assistant Professor, Pratt Institute Libraries, the article "Can The Jobs Be Found," reconsiders the common presumption that entry-level jobs for recent library school graduates are hard to find.