Images of “by-gone days:” Visualizing the Manayunk of yesteryear

Oftentimes, history can seem like an accumulation of paper trails, a collection of stories told through the letters, diaries, and other written records that our ancestors leave behind.  However, graphic materials are also compelling historical artifacts, as I’m continually reminded while working on rights and reproductions orders at HSP.  Within our rich and diverse collections, [...]

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Transparency in documentary editing

Postmodernist theory, which emphasizes the inevitable existence of individuals’ subjectivity and bias, has for the most part, become commonplace thinking. Within academe, postmodern critical analysis has affected all disciplines, including the “pure” sciences, which are no longer viewed as completely objective and neutral. The reality of subjectivity has caused scholars in the humanities and social [...]

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Rights and Reproductions, or “R&R” for those in the know

Since starting at HSP in July as the new Rights and Reproductions Associate, I’ve handled lots of orders for digital reproductions of HSP materials and permission to distribute these materials in books, exhibitions, and other media.  Processing R&R orders provides a great front row seat to HSP’s unique and diverse materials, not to mention the cool [...]

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Dad humor of the early 1900′s

Phase two of HSP’s Digital Center for Americana Project is well underway. This project has the same broad goals of processing and creating digital access to collections as the pilot phase did, but this time around the focus is on ethnic history collections rather than the Civil War. The collections in DCA2 all come from [...]

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These American Lives

With part two of the Digital Center for Americana project underway, collections coming up the digital library pipeline include family album watercolors and oral history sound recordings that provide unique glimpses into Philadelphia family life, as well as how family life changes when individuals leave their country of origin for Philadelphia. Given the role that [...]

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Getting from paper pages to digital texts

Now that we’re elbow-deep in encoding the 300 or so documents for the Greenfield Digital Project, my colleague Faith Charlton and I are spending a lot of time at the keyboard. As I’ve explained in past posts, we are digitizing, transcribing, and annotating primary source documents to tell the story of Bankers Trust Company, a [...]

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Sharing Ideas

April was a month of learning, sharing, and inspiration for me, thanks to several conferences and workshops. First, I attended the annual meeting of the National Council on Public History (NCPH), held in Pensacola, Florida this year. I bumped shoulders with several hundred other public historians from around the country and learned about how others [...]

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The Life of a Digital Collections Intern

Posted on behalf of Stephanie Sendaula Before I even applied for my current internship, which is in digital collections, I debated whether or not I should apply for a traditional archive internship … processing, describing, ladder-climbing, etc… To be honest I do a little bit of those now. Actually, I do a lot of ladder [...]

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The Philadelphia Record news clippings morgue

About 90% of materials that will be included in the Greenfield digital project on the Bankers Trust Company of Philadelphia come from the Albert M. Greenfield Papers (collection 1959). The other 10% include items from other collections here at HSP that also provide information about the bank. One such collection that Dana and I have [...]

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Untangling text encoding

Over the last few months, I’ve been spending a lot of my time focused on a fairly technical topic: text encoding. Basically, text encoding is a method for representing text in a digital form. It allows you to record information about text — for example, whether it is handwritten, or mentions someone’s name, or is [...]

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