In this long overdue blog entry, I’ll recount the work I’ve been doing and the experiences I’ve had as a student assistant at Special Collections over the past month. I’ve been assigned with the conservation and digitization of the Friendly Association Papers, a collection of documents from the mid-eighteenth century that chronicle the efforts of a bunch of Philadelphia Quakers as they sought to arrest the escalating violence between Native Americans and settlers in Pennsylvania . The Papers contain a fascinating mix of journals, letters, minutes of conferences, receipts of trade between merchants and Native Americans, land deeds etc. The details of this effort to resolve conflict by  fiercely  advocating pacifism are worthy of several separate blog posts. For now, I’ll focus on my role in preserving this collection for posterity.

Within a few days of starting my job, I was left wondering about the extent to which the alkalinity of a solution of ammonium hydroxide decreases after a container of it is left open overnight. Let me backtrack and elaborate on my duties to shed some light on how I managed to land myself in such a quandary. I alternate between working in the main Special Collections section located towards the back of Magill and the bindery on the library’s 1st tier.

In Special Collections, I operate the camera-stand shown on the left to photograph the documents after they’ve been treated in the bindery and catalog the images before they are uploaded online to Triptych, the tri-college digital library. All of the above tasks take place under the watchful eyes of Anne Moore, the Digital Collections Librarian, and Bruce Bumbarger, the Library Conservator responsible for the bindery. The bindery is a pretty neat place, containing books and manuscripts in varying stages of disrepair as well as housing the hardware and chemicals needed to treat these books and bring them back into a satisfactory condition. The ammonium hydroxide I previously mentioned is one such chemical used in the conservation of the Papers to insure the documents are thoroughly de-acidified before they are re-housed. Besides being treated with ammonium hydroxide, the documents are also put through a series of baths (pictured above) to make them less brittle and remove the iron in the ink responsible for the corrosion endangering the documents. Recently, Magill hired two summer interns (one of whom is the possessor of the appendage in the right picture)  specializing in library conservation to speed along the process of conserving the Papers. Hopefully, you’ll be hearing from them soon.

In my time at Haverford, I’ve developed the lucky habit of meeting interesting people in the most random of places. My streak continued when I ran into David Cook, MD, class of ’64 in the bindery where he occasionally volunteers. I remember a conversation with David in which I was really struck by the numerous changes Haverford has undergone since he was a student here. Apart from the obvious dearth of XX chromosomes, there were many open areas of land that are now carrying the weight of buildings which we take for granted, including Gummere. After being forced to live there in the 1st week of summer, I have to say that sounds like a reasonably fair trade-off, even though I’m sure most of my peers would beg to differ. Anyway, I’m veering off-track now. It just seems really cool that an alumnus  has continued to maintain such a close association with the college after the elapse of such a long time. I can only wish that I have the same relationship with Haverford long after I graduate.

This week, I’ve been feverishly adding to the skeleton that is the Archivists’ Toolkit version of the WWC finding aid—so feverishly, in fact, that the details of each letter I copy and paste often blur together as they whiz by my eyes on the screen, jumping from their home in Microsoft Word to land safely in their fresh new digs in AT. At this point in processing a collection, I’m always torn between reading every letter’s description in order to really get to know the materials and actually getting some work done. The latter usually wins out, but a few key phrases caught my attention earlier this week, so I let my curiosity get the better of me, if only for the benefit of this blog post.

I stumbled across this description of a September 1912 letter from William Warder Cadbury to his parents: “Sara’s condition has worsened considerably.” Reading it felt almost like a dream—thrust into the middle of the action, not knowing how or why you got there in the first place—so I went to the beginning of the folder of letters and did some background research. I pulled the letter to see what was happening and found out that, in fact, Sara Imbrie Manatt (pictured above), Cadbury’s wife of exactly one year, was gravely ill. I knew that Cadbury had two wives, but his second wife, Catharine, is the one who is featured heavily in this collection. What happened to Sara? What was their marriage like? I had lots of questions that demanded answers.

The first letter in Box 6 of this collection holds the key: written from Cadbury to Sara while he is in China and she is in Berkeley, CA, this love letter is probably the most beautiful thing I’ve ever read. Though he is thousands of miles away, Cadbury writes with such affection for Sara that I had to briefly pause the song playing on my iPod; somehow, 90s *NSYNC ballads pale in comparison to the words of William Warder Cadbury. In the letter, Cadbury speaks of their upcoming wedding and marriage, and gushes about his “dear Sara,” only later to call her, rather solemnly, “my precious Sara” when he writes of her worsening condition to his parents.

Now I had to figure out what happened to Sara one year after their marriage that caused Cadbury such grief. Reading frantically through a few more letters from Cadbury to his parents, I found out that Sara, then three months pregnant with their first child, unexpectedly became so sick with what Cadbury later called “the Toxemia of Pregnancy” that eventually the child had to be removed in an attempt to save the mother’s life. Sara died a few days after the removal of the child. Cadbury speculated after the fact that had they done the procedure a month earlier, her live might have been spared, but she wanted a child so badly that they waited for any sign of recovery, which, sadly, never came.

The tragedy of such a loss affected Cadbury quite a bit, which is evident not only in the way in which he speaks about her final moments, but also in the way he manipulates pen on paper; throughout the emotional letter, written over the course of many days, his handwriting becomes looser and more dramatic. When Sara’s still alive, his writing is neat, as if he’s conserving all his energy for her, but when she passes, he seems to let go of everything and write truly from the heart. Click on the thumbnails below for larger images of the letter.

I’ve recently been introduced to one of the more exciting sides of working in the archives–hunting for buried treasure much more literally than is usual in the archives.
While going through the papers of Julia Cope Collins, a member of an important Quaker family and wife of a Haverford professor, I found a small envelope, labeled ‘Bryn Mawr Trust Company’. Below this was scrawled ‘Safe Deposit Box Keys.’ Indeed, there were three keys on a small keyring in the envelope, one with a number on the base.
For obvious reasons, this discovery excited me. The Bryn Mawr Trust Company is very close to Haverford’s campus–it was certainly possible, I thought, that the bank had kept a record of the items in the safe, or at even that the safe had been forgotten by the family and that the contents were still there.
A little quick googling provided a name of someone who might, it seemed, have some information about the fate of the box. I sent her an email, asking whether the safe might still be in use, or whether they might be able to give me any information as to what might have been in the safe.
While we were waiting for a response, everyone at Special Collections did some thinking and discussing of what might be in the safe, and what we could do with it. The consensus was that while we had a clear right to whatever was in the safe, sending the valuables to her heirs was the right thing to do. We would, however, probably keep the papers from the safe. We are, after all, a library.
A few days ago I got a call. Their Safe Deposit Box specialist told me that (shockingly) they don’t keep unpaid safe deposit boxes for fifty years, nor do they keep records for that long. The knowledge of what was in that safe deposit box has been lost to history.
Even after that disappointment, it’s certainly been an adventure. I’ve learned that even seemingly serious, grown-up people will get excited when they find an old safe deposit box key. And I’ve learned that most real places, unlike libraries, don’t keep records from fifty years ago.

Hello, library fans!

Now that you’ve heard from Patrick a couple of times about our work with the William Warder Cadbury and Catharine Jones Cadbury papers, I thought I’d give you an idea of what goes on from my side of the desk.  While Patrick’s expertise is East Asian history, mine deals with the more technical aspect of processing a collection and creating a finding aid.  I’m pretty sure our pairing for the summer was somewhat orchestrated by the powers that be (i.e. the wonderful staff of Special Collections), whose mysterious ways I have always admired.

The last students to work on this project left us with a Microsoft Word document version of an almost-completed finding aid for the WWC collection.  At that point, we were not yet using Archivists’ Toolkit, which is an open-source archival data management program used to create finding aids. It has also been my best friend for the past year, since I’ve been using it to create (from scratch!) a finding aid for the Haverford College History Collection, a daunting yet wildly fascinating task.

In fact, much of what goes on in Special Collections on any given day can be described as “daunting yet wildly fascinating,” but usually it’s more of the latter and less of the former. This holds true for the WWC collection, which, at first glance, looks like an amassing of letters, photographs, and pamphlets.  But as you get to know the collection, you realize that, yes, it is many decades’ worth of papers, but it tells a story rife with history, and breathes life back into what most of us only read about in textbooks.

As you might have noticed from Patrick’s blog posts, some of the seemingly most pedestrian details can be of significant importance to a researcher.  It is our job to make those details available for potential researchers, giving the pedestrian a chance to become paramount. Less poetically, our job is to use Archivists’ Toolkit to create a finding aid that can be posted online, and easily found by a Google search. This required first that we be trained in AT through a boot camp led by Holly Mengel and Courtney Smertz, who are currently part of the team that is working on the PACSCL’s “Hidden Collections” project. Having worked with AT before, I felt at ease with most of what Holly taught us, but she was still able to teach me a few tricks that make inputting data considerably easier and faster (rapid data entry, anyone?).

We hope to finish processing the last few boxes and be able to complete a finding aid for this collection by the end of the summer. We will continue blogging about our progress along the way, so stay tuned!

Questions or comments about the project can be emailed to me (dbailey@haverford.edu) or Special Collections (hc-special@haverford.edu).

-Deanna

The Fall 2010 issue of the Haverford Alumni Magazine features treasures from Quaker & Special Collections and focuses on the use they receive in the college’s curriculum. We had a great time working with the communications staff  to produce this story and are particularly happy to see the focus on the students we welcome everyday.  The issue also includes profiles of three Haverford alums who are themselves collectors of special collections materials.  An online copy of the magazine is available here.

In 1979, a junior history major at Haverford named Conrad Turner, chose as the subject of a research paper a letter from Special Collections by philosopher René Descartes from 1641. Turner’s paper was written for the Junior Seminar in Historical Evidence (History 361), a ground-breaking program begun in 1969 in order to inject the study of material culture and the use of primary sources into the undergraduate history curriculum. In one assignment, students selected an unidentified object and were asked to determine the object’s identity, provenance, use, and social context. In another assignment students selected a document from Special Collections, and were assigned to prepare a transcription and in-depth analysis of its content.

Over thirty years later, the Descartes letter was discovered to be unknown to the scholarly world and—even more surprising—to have been stolen from a French library in the mid-nineteenth century. This exciting news was widely reported in the media in early 2010. On June 8, in a ceremony held in Paris, France, Haverford returned the letter to its rightful owner, the Institut de France. At the reception that followed, Conrad Turner ’81—the alum who wrote the paper on the Descartes letter—gave this moving speech about working with the Descartes document, Haverford’s decision to return the letter, and the potential for education to inspire and engender integrity.

Steve Emerson, Mr. Anderies, Members of the Board, Scholars, Distinguished ’Fords and guests: while Rene Descartes, Count Libri and “father of the Internet” Vinton Cerf have made today’s ceremony possible, we have come here because we have a spiritual connection to Haverford, and also of course because many of us happen to live in Europe. It says something about Haverford that a 370-year-old letter is the reason for my trip from Belgrade to Paris, allowing me to visit my senior year roommate Mark Sadoff and his wife Sheila. I have been on the wrong side of the Atlantic and in some cases deep in the Eurasian continent for every reunion for most of the last 23 years, so being part of this one is special for me, and being invited to say a few words is a real honor.

The Turner paper, as it has come to be known, is a footnote in the story of the Descartes letter. But as someone who, as Chris Mills put it, “spent some quality time cuddled up with that document back during the Carter administration,” I’m happy to share some thoughts on what this letter, and its return to l’Institut de France, symbolize. It has to do with the obligation universities have to educate not only their students, but also society at large.

Real education inspires. For too many of the world’s undergraduates, the reality is different. Information is force-fed into the brain, causing a brief rearranging of a few neural networks before being swept off to make room for the next brutal infusion of facts. What remains is a grade on a transcript. Inspiration, on the other hand, turns the brain into a magnet not just for facts but reason, purpose and values. That is what makes the difference between a good college and a great one.

The other day I spoke to Serbian university students about Diversity in the United States. Students there complain that professors lecture at them while keeping a studied distance. They’ve learned to expect worse from foreign diplomats, so I love to smash those stereotypes: as I addressed those students I paced the room, stepping forward and back, gesturing, asking open-ended questions, encouraging a lively give-and-take… In other words, I worked hard to inspire them.

Some of you will recognize a style mastered by Professor Emeritus Roger Lane. I sat quietly during his year-long American History course, but that didn’t prevent me from admiring, and one day imitating, his inspirational teaching style. It just seemed like the right way to do it. (I don’t mean to contradict myself, and please don’t tell Roger, but that’s the only thing I remember from his class.)

As a student then I thought it bizarre that some people could get worked up over the Honor Code. What was the big deal? Yet 21 years later I was on the lecture circuit, addressing thousands of students at a dozen universities in Kyrgyzstan on the subject of academic integrity, helping them write honor codes, and leading seminars using abstracts provided by Haverford’s Honor Council. Concepts that seemed pretty mundane to me as a student turned out to be excellent tools for helping universities, through their students, to come to terms with problems that threatened their country’s development.

And then there’s the Descartes letter, which over a few weeks forced a sleepless young man to think of the great philosopher and mathematician as a real human being.

It’s not unusual for a student to see the extraordinary as ordinary, as I did the Honor Code, Roger Lane, and even exclusive access to an original letter penned three centuries ago by one of mankind‘s greatest thinkers. And really, isn’t that a goal of education? We should enter the workforce taking for granted that inspiration and integrity are the ideals we’re supposed to strive for. Embracing these values is what grounds us throughout our careers, as we engage in the struggle between our desire to hold to the values of our profession, and our need to navigate the politics governing that profession.

This struggle is evident in the letter itself, which if you read between the lines is really a scene from a political drama. Descartes’ challenge was to be true to scientific values while avoiding offending the religious figures who could have been his undoing. It wasn’t easy, and makes you wonder where he got his inspiration and integrity.

My stories from Haverford days are only a small part of the picture, and I’m sure many of you have similar ones. But colleges have a responsibility to educate that transcends even their duty toward their students. Returning the Descartes letter to its owner should be an obvious step. We might even take it for granted. Others do not. A close colleague of mine, whose opinions I respect, was incredulous when I shared the news. “Why give it away? Who cares how it got there, it’s Haverford’s now.” I understand this point of view. Many people would agree, maybe a majority. It was stolen a long, long time ago, and stuff happens.

But stuff doesn’t just happen. We make it so, as individuals and as institutions. Seen in another way, Haverford’s power to confer a prestigious degree carries certain rights and privileges, as well as obligations. Just as I was allowed 31 years ago to connect with history by staring at original ink marks, a great college must be aware of its historical role, and through its actions improve on history by taking a public stand on behalf of integrity. In this case, Haverford’s obligation – to educate us by inspiring us – was simply to do the right thing and return the letter to its home, giving up any perceived benefit the college might have had by clinging to it.

And your decision has inspired us, the news rippling through academic networks worldwide in multiple languages, all the way to my daughter’s high school in Belgrade, where the librarian, on learning my humble connection to the story, gaped at me as if I were a rock star and said, “That was you???”

Occasionally, we stop to take note of a new acquisition.  This time, it’s a manuscript musical score donated by Michael Clive of Connecticut entitled  “Spinks Spunk: a Pyramidal Biologue” for orchestra, piano and other individual instruments written in 1908 by members of Haverford’s class of 1909, especially composer M.C. Spiers and lyricist Alfred Lowry Jr. Individual sections have such titles as “Class Song, 1909,” “Faculty Life,” and “Army March,” allowing a glimpse of a different time at Haverford.  Another manuscript collection here in Special Collections, the Bacon Family papers, gave us insight into who “Spink” was: Alfred Lowry.

Alfred Lowry Jr. (1888-1935), was the son of William C. Lowry and Elizabeth Webster and husband of Grace Bacon Lowry, and received his B.A. and M.A. from Haverford College in 1909 and 1910 respectively.  He was a teacher of German and later French, was Secretary General of Alliance Universelle des Union Chretiennes de Jeunes Gens, a section of the YMCA, 1916-1920, then performed religious work in Central Europe, 1920.  He was a recorded minister in the Society of Friends.

Mark Herbert Carver Spiers (1886- ), son  of Isadore Spiers and Jane Williams and husband of Faith Randall, was a “Spoon Man” at Haverford, an award given to the best all-around student.  He was also president of his class, manager of the football team and a leader of the Glee Club while at Haverford.  He went on to be Headmaster at Spiers Junior School, then a salesman and insurance agent.

Our expectations on the potential interest among today’s Haverfordians for this unique item are high.

• Deborah Roberts, Professor of Comparative Literature and Classics, and Bret Mulligan, Assistant Professor of Classics, discuss the traditional study of Greek and Roman literature and language at Haverford College.
• Emma Lapsansky, Professor of History and Curator of the Quaker Collection, discusses the controlled nature of the curriculum at Haverford College in the 19th Century.
• Darin Hayton, Assistant Professor of the History of Science, talks about the historical significance of some of the science volumes in the Haverford Library’s 1836 catalog.
• Bruce Partridge, Professor of Astronomy, describes three different categories of materials he notices in the early Haverford Library collection: popular works, scholarly works, and textbooks.

Please join us for a lecture by Steven Rothman, noted Christopher Morley scholar and curator of the current exhibition in the Philips Wing, on Morley and his life-long relationship with Haverford College. Wednesday, April 18, 2007 at 4:30 pm in the Philips Wing of Magill Library, Haverford College. Refreshments will be served.

Christopher Morley (1890-1957) was a prolific and popular novelist, editor, playwright, poet, essayist, and book lover. But more than anything, Morley was a devoted Haverfordian, who grew up on the campus (his father was a beloved mathematics professor), graduated from the college in 1910, and returned as a successful writer to give lectures and visit brother Felix, who became Haverford’s fifth president. On the fiftieth anniversary of Christopher Morley’s death we honor this “local boy made good” and his lifelong commitment to Haverford College.

For more information on our exhibition and events:
www.haverford.edu/library/special/