Assessing collections with the HSP survey method

If your archives has limited resources and lots of collections that need attention, how do you decide which ones to focus on? In the HSP Archives Department, one of the main tools we use is the HSP collection survey methodology, which has become a model for collection assessment work at dozens of institutions around the [...]

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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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More on Confederate prisons

Archaeologists in Georgia announced yesterday that they have found the site of Camp Lawton, a Confederate prison camp near Millen, Georgia. You can read more about the project at Georgia Southern University’s Camp Lawton web site. As you may remember, we processed a collection earlier in the Digital Center for Americana project that included images [...]

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One of our unknown gems

Early on in the Digital Center project, I worked on a description for the Robert Knox Sneden collection of “Sketches of Confederate Prisons.”  I discovered that not only did this collection have an obsolete call number, but it was not listed in either our OPAC or our graphics card catalog.  The only way to find [...]

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