From Workshop to Practice

This past weekend I attended a Guild of Bookworkers, Delaware Chapter workshop taught by Pamela Spitzmueller.  Pam is the first James W. Needham Chief Conservator for Special Collections in the University Library and the College Library at Harvard University. The workshop was to inform us about considerations that must be taken into account with folded [...]

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My dear Mrs. Meade,

As I processed the George G. Meade collection (#410), I found it very interesting to see the amount of military information transmitted in George G. Meade’s letters to his wife during the Mexican-American War (and later letters during the Civil War).  [Like the map on the left.]  I always associated military correspondence with censorship, but [...]

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Getting lost in the details…

For the past month, I have been working with maps from the General George Meade collection. Four large, flat Hollinger boxes contained hundreds of maps and large documents that range in date from the early 1830s through the Civil War.  The maps require individual treatment and I have enjoyed being able to soak in the [...]

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How much does it cost to explore the lands west of the Mississippi?

Well, sometime in the mid 1700s, Thomas Hutchins estimated that such an adventure cost £6163.  (In today’s money, that equals about £902,515 or 1,806,835 USD.  Seems reasonable, right?) I came across this intriguing document while processing our collection of Hutchins’s papers (one of our Adopt-A-Collections).  Hutchins (1730-1789) was a military engineer for the British Army [...]

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