Updated descriptions and new finding aids available

We have written a lot about process here on Fondly, Pennsylvania to let you know what projects we have in the works, but I realized that we have not kept up with telling everyone what we’ve completed.  There are 51 collections included in the Digital Center for Americana project, and at this point, 22 collections [...]

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Surveying Humphreys’ view of the Mississippi River

One of the remarkable components of the A.A. Humphreys papers is the documentation of the surveys the U.S. Corps of Topographical Engineers conducted during the 1850s and 1860s.  These surveys were done in response to repeated flooding along the Mississippi Delta.  Humphreys was appointed head of a team to make recommendations about how to remedy [...]

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Historical Society putting treasures on the Web

Listen to this WHYY radio spot about our Digital Center for Americana project.  Kudos to Peter Crimmins, who makes sure to mention that we cannot digitize all of our holdings. Historical Society putting treasures on the Web Posted using ShareThis

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The complicated story of the A.A. Humphreys papers

I have been working on processing the Andrew Atkinson Humphreys papers for the past month and a half, and am looking to finish them up by the end of this month.  This 111 linear foot collection consists of military records related to the Civil War, Humphreys’ work as a surveyor and topographical engineer, papers related [...]

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What are you eating there, soldier?

The longer I work processing manuscript collections, the more I realize that it is not the big events in these materials that get me excited, but the texture and circumstances of people’s lives and how they integrated monumental events into their everyday.  I love sifting through old receipts to see what people were buying, what [...]

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Secrets to Painless Rehousing

Today, I virtually had the processing room to myself since everyone else is out for the holiday.  This is a rare occasion, and one that I usually take advantage of by playing music and sometimes singing out loud.  (And you thought archivists were serious, proper folks who never raise their voices above a whisper except [...]

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Memoirs of HSP Printing Proofs

There are few things in conservation work that excite me more than a substantial transformation of an item.  When I pulled out the bundles of dingy paper from an old box, it was exciting to envision them clean, flat and arranged neatly in folders! The three bundles were bound in groups of roughly 100 sheets [...]

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Down the hall, in Conservation…

The Conservation lab has been a hubbub of activity lately with a plethora of projects ranging from the never-ending supply of book repairs and document mending to specialized projects such as the cleaning and repairing of Daguerreotypes. In addition to items from our general collections, the current collections being worked on are the Forrest Home [...]

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