Improving Access Through Technology

I am happy to announce that the Historical Society of Pennsylvania’s new digital assets management system (DAMS) has officially gone live for the public!   You can access the DAMS by going to digitallibrary.hsp.org The implementation of this system, which is driven by the open source software Collective Access, was a major component of the [...]

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Further thoughts on processing and the Greenfield papers

Arranging work on the Albert M. Greenfield papers is almost done but we have lots of work to do to complete the finding aid. This collection is very large, so it’s taking us a lot of time to input the collection’s data into Archivists’ Toolkit, the software we’re using here to create EAD finding aids. [...]

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What constitutes a draft of the U.S. Constitution?

Posted on behalf of Lee Arnold, HSP Library Director What constitutes a draft of the U.S. Constitution?  This sounds like a rather simple question, but it is actually very complex.  The Historical Society of Pennsylvania (HSP) is home to millions of documents.  Of these, we have considered six of them Constitutions.  HSP has what we [...]

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What use is a blog?

Spurred by a spate of positive comments about, first, the Chew blog and now Fondly, Pennsylvania, I have been thinking a lot about how readers use the information they gather from following our blog offerings. I was really pleased to know that Seth Bruggeman has been using our blogs in his Public History and American [...]

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The Fruits of Our “Ghost Writer”

Followers of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania’s Question of the Week may already be familiar with Albert J. Edmunds, HSP’s former cataloger and (alleged) resident ghost. From 1891 to 1936, Albert was responsible for describing and subject cataloging HSP’s diverse set of collection material, creating many of the handwritten and, later, typed catalog cards that [...]

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