Welcome class of 2016, and all others who may stumble upon this post! My name is Karl Moll, and I am a rising Junior who works as the Archivist’s Assistant in the Haverford College Quaker and Special Collections in the Library, which houses the College Archives (and a great place to look for a job once you get to campus!). I thought it might be interesting to take a look at what incoming freshman at Haverford were experiencing 100 years ago when they came to campus. Now, the ‘Ford has undergone a lot of changes in the last century: for starters, we are no longer an all-male school, the class size was about 1/10th the size it is now (167 students at the school, 48 of them freshman), the Morris Infirmary was still under construction, and the college was officially Quaker.

When freshmen entered the college, they were given a handbook:

This book was designed to introduce the new students to the customs of the college, and was funded by the Y.M.C.A. (which was still very much the Young Men’s Christian Association). The main goal in publishing the guide was to “call…attention to an organized effort for the development of Christian character amongst us”. Though, since this is Haverford, the organization “lays no emphasis on creeds or dogmas, and in no way tries to exert sectarian influence”. To me this sounds reminiscent of the second part of the oft-quoted segment of the 1888 Commencement Speech by President Isaac Sharpless:

Every time I read this, I get chills

It seems to fit into the tradition of being one’s own person.

One of the more interesting sections of any of the class handbooks from years past are the Rules for Freshman. Unfortunately, 1912-1913 seems to have been a reasonable year, and there are only “Points for Freshman”. Most of these are still pretty sound advice, though many are outdated:

Some useful information for incoming freshman, plus advice

In other years, there are rules banning freshmen wearing mustaches and carrying canes. Freshmen were also required to move out of paths to make way for upperclassmen, and not lighting an upperclassmen’s cigarette could lead to a fine. Maybe this year the Officer of Hazing (yes, that was an actual title) decided to take it easy. The sophomores were traditionally in charge of Hazing (or teaching the school’s customs). To see some funny rules from earlier years check here or here (feel free to browse around the site that the link brings you to, these are the digitized images from Haverford Special Collections and the Archives of the College!).

One of my favorite parts of historical Haverfordiana are the songs that freshman were expected to learn and sing at sporting events (failure to learn the songs resulted in punishments which ranged from midnight head shavings to monetary fines to being thrown in the duckpond). The major sporting events on campus were soccer and football (“Undefeated Since 1972″), but many of the songs could be sung during alumni events, or seniors could just make the underclassmen sing in the dining hall if they felt like it:

Various publications on campus and College Songs

I wish we still had songs like these...

More Songs!

The rest of the handbook provided the new student with reference material to all the resources on campus. These range from train schedules, telephone and telegraph services, the various clubs on campus, student publications, secret societies, and more…

Customs and the “Honor System”:

College Customs and the Honor System

The Honor Code of today seems very similar to the Honor System of old, but at the same time very different. And while we still have a “Customs” period for Freshman like in the post above, it is far removed from what these old newspapers show us:

So a lot has changed over the years, but there is still that Haverfordian feel through it all

If you have any questions about this, or other aspects of Haverford History, feel free to shoot me an email at kmoll@haverford.edu, or email Haverford Special Collections (hc-special@haverford.edu) where you can get some more expert advice. If I were writing “Points for Freshman” for the incoming class of 2016, one that I would stress would be to stop in and visit Special Collections in the back of the Library. The collection is really one of the gems of the college. You can find the historical materials for the club you get involved in, genealogical records of famous Quakers, old sports photos, anti-slavery materials, maps,  yearbooks from years past, rare books (Copernicus, Darwin, Shakespeare… no big deal), records for the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, and much more.

As part of a series of posts by our student employees, Karl Moll ’14 talks about what he’s been working on in Special Collections this summer:

One of the bigger projects that I’ve been working on this summer has been to create a template which allows users to input archival information from a finding aid into Excel and then it converts it into a valid EAD program so that it can be uploaded into Archivists’ Toolkit.

If you don’t understand what the above section means, that’s all right. It took me a little bit to get it all, and I’m going to walk you through it now.

EAD is subset of XML which is a programming language which is pretty similar to HTML, without most of the style commands. XML is really useful in creating hierarchies of information, which is why EAD (Encoded Archival Description) is based on this format. EAD is a standard used by many archives and special collections across the country to make finding materials easier across collections. For more on the history of EAD, look here. For more on standards in general, I may write another blog post about the development of ANSI standards. But more on that later.

For this project, I’m working on a brilliant template by Matt Herbison which properly formats the information that is inputted into a spreadsheet into a valid EAD program so that it can be uploaded into Archivist’s Toolkit. It is a really wonderful template that makes converting a finding aid into AT so much easier than writing the code by hand, or even entering it directly into AT. However, to be super useful to us here, I’ve been trying to make some modifications to it.

The first thing I did was get rid of a lot of the fields that we wouldn’t be using for our finding aids. After a lot of consultation with John and Diana, we determined that all we really needed were Level, Title, and the newly added Call Number or Shelf Location. More on the Call Number in a bit. The template went from looking like this:

To this:

This new version is a lot more streamlined for what we need it to do, since that’s all the information that we are really interested in anyways. Since there wasn’t already a field for Call Number, I had to create one. This part of the project ended up taking some time getting familiar with XML and EAD.

I really wanted there to be a way to put the call number with each individual item in the Finding Aid. The way I first tried was just to concatenate the Title cell in Excel with a Call Number cell, so that it would look like “Karl’s Papers, 2010-2012. Call Number: R1 SA B3″ but this lacked a symmetry when it actually created the finding aid, since not all the titles are the same length. I was looking through the AT window…

…when I noticed that there was this field:

Now, a Component Unique Identifier sounds a lot like a Call Number to me, so I then began an Internet quest to learn more about XML and EAD to see what tags corresponded to this entry field (I knew that there HAD to be something, since AT fields correspond to the EAD standard). After a couple of days of teaching myself about XML, I realized that the tag <unitid> </unitid> would be my best bet.

Now, the template works by concatenating cells in the spreadsheet so that the code is automatically produced. In the back-end of the program, it looks like this:

Notice that some of the columns have fixed values such as “<c0″ and “><did><unittitle>”. These are here to create certain constants for a valid program, and it ends up producing code like this:

I changed some of the fixed cells so that they would populate the Component Unique Identifier field in Archivists Toolkit using the <unitid> tag so that it produced code like this (the differences are pretty subtle):

So after I made those changes, Archivists Toolkit was able to accept it as a valid program to be uploaded, with a call number for every field and then produce a Finding Aid like this:

The Call Number is on the left side preceding the Title. I’ve been working on various ways of making the Call Number more readable, but haven’t uploaded it to AT yet.

My next blog post on the templates will be on my ongoing struggles to deal with nesting issues to provide the user with one extra level of hierarchy!!! Stay tuned!

–Karl Moll ’14

As I mentioned in a previous post, a few weekends ago was alumni weekend. On that Friday, an alumnus came in and asked to see an item that caused most work in the library to stop. All of the student interns came to see the book the alumnus requested, namely a copy of Shakespeare’s first folio.

Oooh. Ahhh. I was really surprised that we had something as rare and precious as a first edition Shakespeare work. There are 228 still in existence of the approximately 1,000 originally printed. A copy stolen from Durham University was valued at 15 million pounds or approximately 25 million U.S. dollars. I was astounded that I could read through this book just for fun.

Then John Anderies, the Head of Special Collections, told me that this was only one of a few astounding works that we had in special collections. Apparently we also have a 1472 Foligno edition of Dante’s Divine Comedy. This astounding book is even rarer than Shakespeare’s first folio; there are only 14 copies of the Foligno edition in the world, and it is the first printed edition of the book. It is so old that the book still has illuminations, ornate pictures or letters done in gold leaf and painted.

I and a few other students came to the archives the next day to study the Foligno copy.

I was thrilled and astounded to be able to handle amazing manuscripts like the Foligno Dante and Shakespeare’s first folio. These pieces are part of the William Pyle Philips collection. Philips was the class of 1902, and donated a number of priceless artifacts to the library including a first edition of Paradise Lost, the famed Descartes letter, and a copy of Copernicus’ De Revolutionibus Orbium Caelestium. Seeing and leafing through these pieces reminded me of the amazing hidden resources that our library holds, and wish that more students availed themselves of the absolutely unique opportunities that Special Collections provides.

Summer students, interns, and staff take a workshop on using "Archivist's Toolkit" from PACSCL archivist Holly Mengel

Summer is a special time in Special Collections.  Gone are the regular Haverford student and faculty researchers that we work with during the school year.  And instead we keep busy with a steady stream of visitors, including faculty and graduate students from other institutions. And we’ll soon be welcoming a group of Gest Fellows to study in the Quaker Collection.  It’s also a time when we employ a team of student assistants to do intensive work on a variety of special projects we don’t usually have time for during the school year.  This summer we have a terrific team of seven students.  Together they work about 245 hours a week, and it’s always exciting to see how much gets accomplished during this time.  Our students this summer are working on several projects: Deanna Bailey and Patrick Lozada are processing papers from the William Warder Cadbury and Catharine J. Cadbury papers; Janela Harris and Jon Sweitzer-Lamme are processing the Morris-Shinn-Maier Collection; Christina Hurley is working on the Meeting House digitization project; Abdullah Ali Khan is working on the Friendly Association records conservation and digitization project; and Karl Moll is our “jack-of-all-trades,” helping out with a number of projects including our Online Finding Aids and learning the ropes of processing College Archives materials. Like summers past, they will be meeting regularly with Professor Emma Lapsansky to discuss the historical aspects of their work.  New this summer, they will be posting regularly on this New and Noteworthy blog (some have already started!) to tell you, dear reader, about their work as they go along.  Comments are open on the blog, so we invite you to join in the conversation!

Today marks my completion of going through half of all the links in the finding aid for Special Collections. This means that I have read the descriptions of, and checked the links for, HALF of all the collections in Special Collections. That is a lot of collections. And I have to say, there is some really interesting material in here. For instance, in the ” Baltimore Monthly Meeting Homewood records,” there are signed letters by Abraham Lincoln! Then, there are pictures of William Lloyd Garrison, noted abolitionist and newspaper editor, in the “Friends Historical Association” collection. Add to that documents from 1 A.D. (“Dean Putnam Lockwood”), correspondence with John Updike (“John R. Hawkins”), letters from Alexander Graham Bell (“Edward Drinker Cope”), documents from William Penn (“William Penn papers”), hundreds of recordings of concerts by Haverford students, faculty and others (“John Davison papers”), and a sampling of letters by U.S. Presidents (“William Pyle Phillips collection”)! And those are just the things that immediately jumped out at me! There are definitely some major gems for the curious explorer to find here. If one is interested in people standing up for there beliefs, there are multiple mentions of a Thomas Story (1670?-1742) who was a former fencer and musician turned Quaker, a friend of William Penn, discussed Quakerism with Tsar Peter the Great,and was arrested for preaching Quaker faith in Kilkenny (the warrant for his arrest is in the “British Friends’ letters”). For those interested in the history of the library, there are the “James Phineas Magill papers” (after whom our library is named) and the “Michael S. Freeman papers” (who was a major proponent of Tri-Co library cooperation). If your fancy is more American history, I would direct you to the “John Ewer letters” which are from one merchant to another regarding the early signs of the American Revolution.

If you aren’t necessarily interested in the above topics, but you are colored intrigued, you can always check out the Finding Aid (which I would generally recommend!). I’ve been working here for a semester, and I didn’t have any idea that this was all here. This leads me to believe that most of the college doesn’t even know what awesome resources are back here. So come check it out!

If you have any questions, you could email me at kmoll@haverford.edu, or, if you want the good help, email Haverford College Special Collections at hc-special@haverford.edu.

Post by Bridget Gibbons (’13), student worker in Special Collections.

This entry is part of our monthly series to highlight entries from the 20,000 letter Charles Roberts Autograph Letter Collection.

Langston Hughes was a busy man when he amiably corresponded with a biographer/ journalist on May 20, 1956.  The American-born jazz poet and face of the Harlem Renaissance was unable to give the time to search for a copy of his piece Waldorf Astoria because he was “so rushed with a new book, A Pictorial History of the Negro, that I just don’t have a spare moment for basement research.”

Hughes describes his current work and notes that some of his blues poems are being set to music, including Love is Like Whisky and Cool Saturday Night, and the most recent, Lonely House from “Street Scene” in the June Christy album, Something Cool. He comments on his own moving picture which he wrote in 1939 with Clarence Muse, Way Down South, “it is still shown sometimes on TV—to my horror!” Additionally, his play, Emperor of Haiti was produced by Elsie Roxborough, and in his letter he denies speculation that he and Elsie were engaged to be married.

The interviewer wanted to get his hands on Hughes’ stark poem, Waldorf Astoria for good reason. In it he grazes his famous themes of racial and socioeconomic equality, especially in New York City. He challengingly contrasts the luxurious hotel which opened for the social elite during the Great Depression with the lifestyles of the urban poor and in doing so, gives, as he always does, a voice to the oppressed:

Have luncheon there this afternoon, all you jobless.
Why not?
Dine with some of the men and women who got rich off of
your labor, who clip coupons with clean white fingers
because your hands dug coal, drilled stone, sewed gar-
ments, poured steel to let other people draw dividends
and live easy.
(Or haven’t you had enough yet of the soup-lines and the bit-
ter bread of charity?)
Walk through Peacock Alley tonight before dinner, and get
warm, anyway. You’ve got nothing else to do.

The semester is off to a bang in Special Collections.  Last week, history of science professor Darin Hayton, brought his class on “The Scientific Revolution” to visit and introduced them to a range of primary sources and the types of questions one should ask when confronted with such a text.  Texts discussed during the visit included Nicolaus Copernicus’s De revolutionibus orbium caelestium (1543), Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica (1686), and Ralph Cudworth’s The true intellectual system of the universe (1678).  In an upcoming assignment, students will be asked to select, describe and analyze a text from our collection (or Bryn Mawr’s) that falls between 1500 and 1700, roughly the dates covered in the course.  In preparing for supporting this assignment bibliographers Ann Upton and Margaret Schaus have uncovered a rich trove of scientific literature within our rare book stacks.

Students in professor of art history Carol Solomon’s course on “Art, Politics, and Society in Nineteenth-Century Europe” have been spending quality time with editions of the works of William Blake.  This week students picked illustrations from such works as The Songs of Innocence and Experience, America, a Prophecy, The Book of Urizen, Vala or The Four Zoas, and The Book of Job, and presented on the works within the political, social and cultural contexts of the period.

Next week we’re expecting a visit by professor Kaye Edwards and her class on “Quaker Social Witness.”  They will be learning about our print, manuscript, and online resources on Quakerism from librarians Diana Peterson, Ann Upton and Anne Moore.  During the semester students will have several assignments that will make use of materials from the Quaker Collection.  Three research papers will include an exploration of a specific Quaker testimony and its relationship to social action; an examination of a historical figure from the Religious Society of Friends; and an analysis of a current Quaker project toward social justice.  Additionally, students in the course will be attending parts of the upcoming conference on Quakers and Slavery, co-hosted by the University of Pennsylvania, Swarthmore College and Haverford College.

Post by Deanna Bailey (’12), student worker in Special Collections.

This entry is part of our monthly series to highlight entries from the 20,000 letter Charles Roberts Autograph Letters Collection.

In a 1952 letter to Dr. Gilbert F. White, then president of Haverford College, Nobel Prize winning theoretical physicist Erwin Schrödinger compares himself to his close friend and colleague, Albert Einstein.  Rebels in the world of physics, Schrödinger and Einstein were just two of many scientists who made great contributions to the 20th century, a few of whom were able to come to Haverford due to the Philips Grant.

The Philips Grant consists of funds left by Haverford alum William Pyle Philips (Class of 1902) for two purposes: the purchase of rare books “which the college would not otherwise buy” and to invite “distinguished scientists and statesmen” to Haverford.  Among the rare books made affordable by the Philips grant are a few of Special Collections’ most notable items, including a copy of Copernicus’s De revolutionibus orbium caelestium, Castiglione’s The Courtier, and Marlowe’s The Famous Tragedy of the Rich Jew of Malta. Among the scientists who were able to visit Haverford are Nobel Prize winners Niels Bohr and Enrico Fermi, and theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer.

Presented with the prospect of giving a lecture at Haverford College, Schrödinger voices his concern about Haverford’s students who have studied other great physicists of the time, including Niels Bohr, Max Born, Werner Heisenberg, and John von Neumann.  He cautions Dr. White in this regard, saying that “[w]hile being on most friendly terms with all of them, I heartily disagree with them at the root…Your students would ask my opinion on one or the other point in the works of [Julian] Schwinger, [Sin-Itiro] Tomonaga and others.  I should shock them profoundly by saying, I have not read it, because I am physically unable to follow arguments that make no sense to me.”

Schrödinger goes on to tell Dr. White about an essay he included in the letter, which was to appear in a volume in honor of Louis de Broglie, a Nobel Prize winning physicist.  Schrödinger qualifies his work as “not a new theory–just rebellion, argued rebellion.”  He then continues talking about his close friend Albert Einstein at the end of the letter, saying that “Einstein too is a rebel.  But we are rebelling in opposite directions.  To meet Einstein once again is, of course, a great temptation.”

With the end of this letter the communication between Schrödinger and Haverford College seems to stop; however, packed with a wealth of historical references, the letter places Haverford College in the realm of great scientists like Erwin Schrödinger.  At the very least, the letter is indicative of the importance of grants, such as the Philips Grant, that secure Haverford’s position as a highly advanced scholarly institution worthy not only of bringing great minds to the college, but also producing great minds from its student body, something that Haverford continues to accomplish even today.

Post by John Washington (’10), former student worker in Special Collections.

This entry is part of our monthly series to highlight entries from the 20,000 letter Charles Roberts Autograph Letter Collection.

While frantically scouring (actually just casually reading) through the names of letter writers in the Charles Roberts Collection, I found an artist/poet that I came to admire, Dante Bariel Rossetti, who I first came to know  because of his sister, poet Christina Rossetti.   I was excited to write a blog post about Dante Gabriel Rossetti who was famous for poems and paintings like “Song and Music” and “Girl in a Green Dress,” respectively.  When I started looking through the physical collection, I came upon a folder not listed in the inventory.  it was labeled Christina Rossetti!  I put Dante Gabriel Rossetti aside for his more “interesting” younger sister.

Christina Rossetti is best known for her poem “Goblin Market.”  She is British by birth with an Italian background.  Christina Rossetti’s was devoted to her religion.  For Christina Rossetti, her Anglican religion greatly augmented her sickly life.  She denied two marriage offers based on the religion, or lack of religion, of the persons asking her—using her writing as a way to talk about her rejections (see poem “Remember“).

The letter I found by her in the Charles Roberts Collection is addressed to a Mr. Bryant, possibly William Cullen Bryant—the American poet famous for writing the poem “Thanatopsis.”  Christina’s words are to the point but gentle; just as situations would deem her throughout her life.  First letting Mr. Bryant know what was wrong with what he did then letting him off of the hook and accepting him.

Since it is not a long letter, allow me to post it for reading:

Dear Mr. Bryant,

Please do not feel hurt at what I am about to say. More than once I have been applied to by letter from some or other person unknown to me who alleges that you have named me, more or less, as a reference. One such letter reached me this afternoon. In every case I have replied in your favour. But I cannot approve of perfect strangers being thus referred to me. It was a different thing when you told me Mr. Caine knew and could vouch for you, he and I being acquainted; to him there was no difficulty in my writing, and as you know I did write and act on what he told me. I must ask you not to use my name thus to strangers. All the same I remain.

After studying Christina Rossetti for a number of years, I have learned to understand her sense of self (I wouldn’t say humor) that she portrays in her writing.  This letter excited me because it encompassed her views on life in a few short lines.

Check out the list of other amazing people who have letters in the Charles Roberts Collection!  There are American and British poets, scientists, and signers of the Declaration of Independence—just to name a few.  This is the perfect place to get an insight into the lives of historical figures that interest you!

This semester 42 students are enrolled in the History and Principles of Quakerism class taught by Professor Emma Lapsansky-Werner. The record number of curious scholars is a reflection of the growing interest in Quakerism on Haverford’s campus. Last week two library sessions were held with students to orient them to the resources in the Quaker Collection that will help them complete their assignments that include a group project on a Quaker novel, presentation of Pendle Hill Pamphlets and a challenging bibliographic essay on some aspect of Quakerism. Students and librarians will be very busy in the weeks ahead exploring the breadth and depth of our collection!