Swarthmore College ‘s Externship Program is an opportunity for a current student to spend five days at the workplace of an alumnus/a in order to gain practical exposure to a career field.  Naomi Liang joined us in Special Collections this January:

From January 11 to January 15 I participated in an externship offered by David Conners, Digital Collections Librarian (Swarthmore alum ’03), at Magill Library’s Special Collections.  The Swarthmore Extern Program entails five days of job shadowing to allow undergraduates to explore a particular field of interest.  My current prospective majors are philosophy, English literature, and sociology/anthropology.  Since knowledge accession, reading culture and, generally, the process of research have long been fascinations of mine, I was happy to be able to absorb librarian life during my five days at Magill.

I spent much of my time working with David on digital archiving – scanning and photographing photographs used for classes, scanning books, reformatting digital audio, and cataloging art.  I sat in on a meeting of TAG, the Tri-College Technology Advisory Group, where librarians worked out the final logistics of the neat-looking new service Tripod Mobile (a mobile-friendly version of the catalog for use on smart phones).  During this time I also shadowed Ann Upton, Special Collections librarian and Quaker Bibliographer, who, along with David, guided me around the rare book vault and allowed me to pull out random items out of curiosity (including a beautiful 1854 edition of Walden and Christopher Morley‘s German literature notes from 1910).  Ann also showed me her process of deciding which rare books or Quaker books to add to the collection.  We also answered emailed reference questions regarding Quaker genealogies, and I spent a few hours working on the beginnings of a new project in Special Collections – the digitization of 19th century Quaker fiction illustrations for an exhibit on the popular depiction of Quakers.

Of course, my gathered gemstones of experience at Magill were not all from work.  During the coffee breaks and the all staff meeting I attended, “all staff” at Haverford consisting of only a little over 20 people, I was able to witness the collaborative and truly congenial atmosphere of a library workforce. I was amazed by and very grateful for the welcome I received by everyone, as well as for the stories I’ve heard from people in various stages of the library career – a current student, a recent graduate, and librarians who are well into their careers and love what they do, a number of whom began their life as college graduates with jobs completely unrelated to librarianship. I absolutely enjoyed my time at Haverford, and I am looking forward to my next visit to Magill’s Special Collections.

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.

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.

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.