There is always more work to be done in Special Collections than can be done by the full-time staff.  To complete some projects additional short-term staff is needed.  Below is a profile of a part-time librarian, Anne Moore, who has been often seen in Special Collections in the last year.

I am a recent Library Studies graduate from Drexel University and currently working in Haverford College Special Collections Library on my second project.  The first project took place during the spring of 2009.  I worked with Manuscripts Librarian & College Archivist Diana Franzusoff Peterson, updating and encoding a finding aid for the Baltimore Yearly Meeting records.

I returned in December of 2009 to work on a digitization project about Quakers and slavery with Digital Collections Librarian David Conners.  This is a joint project with the Friends Historical Library at Swarthmore College.  Materials relating to Quakers and slavery have been digitized, transcribed, cataloged, and uploaded to Triptych, the Tri-College Digital Library.  In addition to the digital library, an exhibit webpage is also being created that will highlight featured resources, a timeline, and scholarly essays on various topics related to Quakers and their role in abolishing slavery and the slave trade.

When I first joined the project, I spent my time digitizing and transcribing manumissions books from Philadelphia Meetings.  These manumissions document the freeing of slaves.  Entries include the name, age, and date of the release of the slave as well as the Quaker releasing them.  Another interesting and noteworthy item is the first organized protest against slavery in the Americas from 1688.  More recently I have been coding webpages and providing materials for the Quakers & Slavery exhibit website (coming soon!)

Parthenia is set free by her owner Hannah Dawes

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.

We learned the happy news last week that we have been awarded a Save America’s Treasures grant from the National Park Services for the preservation and digitization of the papers of the Friendly Association. The papers are among our most heavily used collections, having been used by several published scholars, as well as Ph.D. candidates, Master’s degree thesis writers and undergraduate history majors from Haverford in recent years.

The “Friendly Association for Regaining and Preserving Peace with the Indians by Pacific Measures” was established in 1756 by a group of eminent Quakers in Philadelphia following months of horrific violence between settlers and Native Americans on the Pennsylvania frontier. Self-consciously contrasting themselves with the British army, the militia, and the more militant representatives of the proprietary government, the leaders of the Friendly Association sought to establish peaceful relations with the Delaware Indians and other nearby tribes, and thereby prove the effectiveness of Quaker pacifism.

The Friendly Association was a private initiative, without the official sanction of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, but it quickly assumed a prominent role in many of the most important controversies of the day. Israel Pemberton and the other leaders of the Association sought to represent the interests of the Delaware in their ongoing dispute with the Pennsylvania government over the so-called “walking purchase.” They monitored and participated in a series of treaty negotiations in the late 1750s and early 1760s, and eventually their disputes with the proprietary government became one element in a broad Quaker campaign to establish royal government and rescind the colonial charter.

The Friendly Association papers contain hundreds of unique and detailed accounts of behind-the-scenes treaty negotiations; historical documents dating back to the early years of Pennsylvania related to Indian affairs; the correspondence of Pemberton and others relating to fund-raising and the exigencies of Pennsylvania politics; and missives from Indian leaders, transcribed or otherwise transmitted by an intricate network of Indian “go-betweens” who maintained almost constant contact with the Association.

Dating from 1745–1792, the papers were bound into five folio-sized, half-leather scrapbooks in the late 19th century. The documents suffer from embrittlement of their housing and support, iron gall ink corrosion and degradation of the documents themselves, and heavy use, greatly exacerbating the threat of continued damage from the preceding problems. Treatment will take place in our in-house conservation lab and will allow for removal of the documents from their embrittled scrapbook leaves and stabilization of the document inks and paper supports. Each document will also be scanned and the resulting digital images will be loaded into Triptych, our digital library system. The project will take two years to complete and will involve several staff members, preservation interns, and student assistants.

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.

Charlotte Brooks, Marlis Gildemeister, Laurence Wylie, and an unidentified woman learn auto mechanics as part of the Relief and Reconstruction master’s degree program during World War II.

The College Archives maintains a collection of historic photos organized by subject for patrons to view. This photo and many others are available online through Triptych, the Tri-College Digital Library.

Today we’re delivering 172 audio tapes to Safe Sound Archive in Philadelphia where they will be put in cold storage to ensure their longevity. The tapes come from both the Quaker Collection and College Archives and include such content as the 1941 acceptance speech of Haverford honorary degree recipient Herbert Hoover and Howard Brinton’s 1960s lectures on Quakerism as well as a series of oral histories conducted from the 1990s through early 2000s on the history of Haverford College. The recordings, comprised of reel-to-reels and cassettes, have all been digitized and are gradually being uploaded to our DSpace repository. The digitized recordings will help to make the content more easily accessible, while the storage of the originals at one of the country’s premiere commercial audio archives will ensure that the master recordings remain viable should we ever need to transfer them again.  Special Collections maintains hundreds more audio and video recordings and as time and funding allow we will continue to digitize and upload more content.

The Cope Evans Family Papers are now available online in Triptych, the Tri-College digital library.  The collection contains almost 3,000 letters, photographs, and business documents of the closely related Quaker families of Cope and Evans of Germantown, Pennsylvania, written between 1732-1911. Letters discuss family, friends and home life, reflecting the social environment of these Quaker families. Other topics to be found within the letters include local history, Haverford history, travels in Europe, education, illness and death, health concerns, and discussions of national events such as the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the assassinations of Presidents Lincoln and McKinley.

Special Collections puts many of its digitized objects into Triptych: the tri-college digital library.  Materials documenting the history of the College can now be found in one collection, "The History of Haverford College."  The collection combines over 500 historic photographs, documents from the College Archives, and published histories of the College.

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.     

Technologist Josh Peterson talks in this podcast at Seattle’s “Idea Day” about how the current development known as Web 2.0 can be explained by the thoughts and actions of Benjamin Franklin. Web 2.0 has been described as “a social phenomenon referring to an approach to creating and distributing Web content itself, characterised by open communication, decentralization of authority, freedom to share and re-use, and ‘the market as a conversation’.”