Indian Rights Association records

Work on processing the Indian Rights Association records (Collection 1523) has begun and will continue for the next three months. This is another one of the Civic Engagement collections funded by NHPRC. Since portions of the collection had been previously processed here at HSP our work will consist of arranging the part of the collection [...]

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Mary Elizabeth Hallock Greenewalt and the Magical, Mystical, Musical Finding Aids

Yesterday, April 5th, 2011, we at HSP hosted an event for the new, Musical Finding Aid. What does this mean, you ask? Do not fret, if all your questions aren’t answered in the next paragraphs please leave a comment! Last year Matt Shoemaker, director of digital collections and systems, was awarded a grant from the [...]

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Thoughts on archival collecting

What does it take to develop an active archival collecting program? How can we focus our acquisitions on the materials we really want to collect, rather than simply the ones people offer us? Overseeing archival acquisitions is one of my main tasks at HSP. We collect a wide variety of materials, some of them mundane, [...]

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HSP Civic Engagement Collections: A new NHPRC-funded project

This month HSP begins a new 26-month project to process and conserve fourteen collections related to civic engagement in Philadelphia and beyond. Willhem Echevarría has already started work as project archivist, and in December he will be joined by Leah Mackin as project preservation technician. Previously, both Willhem and Leah worked on our Chew papers [...]

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PhilaPlace project strengthens HSP archival work

Recently the Historical Society of Pennsylvania acquired a small collection called the Pisano and Siciliano Families Papers. Through photographs, vital records, family histories, and other materials, this collection documents two Italian families whose members came to the United States in the early 1900s and settled in South Philadelphia and Camden, New Jersey. A highlight of [...]

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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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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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Can You Guess the Story?

While continuing to work on the Allen collection I came across a curious set of cards. The cards were numbered in a series and each series seemed to tell some kind of moral story. Since the text is in German we had a lot of fun trying to guess what the story was just based [...]

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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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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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