Hering’s Paracelsus collection’s finding aid provided many challenges.  First it was a card catalog that had to be converted into a finding aid that would fit nicely in Archivists’’ Toolkit.  The cards were scanned and then made into a PDF that was then made into a Word document from which I could cut and paste the information.  As many people know, the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) process creates some mistakes in the text.  Also, only one or two cards were in English.  Through the process, which was actually sometimes more entertaining than tedious, I became well acquainted with old German and I enjoyed the chance to practice some high school and college Latin that I haven’t used in a long time.

Once the container list was entered, I began to do some research on Dr. Hering and Paracelsus.  Dr. Hering, the “father of homeopathy in America,” was interesting in his own right and he is the topic of another collection at DUCOM.  The breadth of activities in which Paracelsus was involved make him a fascinating topic, and there is a surprising amount of information that has survived about him.  He lived his short life in the early 1500s, a time period when people considered the ancient Greek and Roman doctors, Hippocrates and Galen, the authorities on medicine.  Paracelsus challenged many of the assumptions and established practices of the time, and helped bring medicine as a science beyond the ancient traditions.  He is credited with being the first one to say “it is the dose that makes the poison.”  Understanding this about Paracelsus makes it easy to see why the “father of homeopathy in America” wanted to learn everything he could about him.

The Lida Poynter collection on Mary E. Walker is about an equally fascinating individual.  Mary Walker was born in 1832 and died in 1919.  Her father had all his daughters work in the field with him and his son.  Since they were working in the fields, he wanted his daughters to be able to move freely and comfortably, so he banned his daughters from wearing heavy dresses and corsets.  He was also an amateur country doctor who believed most women’s fashions at the time were bad for their health.  This idea stayed with Mary and she devoted much of her life to dress reform.  She first experimented with trousers underneath dresses, then short skirts, eventually she abandoned the dress altogether and wore men’s suits that she altered to fit her frame.  She even wore a short skirt over trousers and a frock coat at her wedding in 1855.  She also had the word obey removed from the service, which in 1855 was remarkable.

Her father encouraged Mary to study medicine when she showed a talent for it.  When Mary was old enough to go to college, she went to Syracuse Medical College, the first medical school in the country to admit women.  She graduated as an M.D. and went on to open her own practice, which was not very successful.  At this point, the Civil War was getting underway and this is when her life gets even more interesting.

First she served in Washington D.C. as a volunteer in the army hospitals.  The doctor in charge was so impressed with her ability that he recommended that she be appointed an assistant surgeon, but she was repeatedly rejected because she was a woman.  After leaving and then coming back, she was finally given a commission and sent to Tennessee as the first female doctor in the Union army.  While serving on the front lines, she would often go unescorted and unarmed into enemy territory to offer medical aid to civilians.  She believed by doing this she would help turn the civilians to the Union cause.  She was also acting as a spy for the Union and reporting Confederate troop movements.  Eventually she was captured by the Confederacy, and later released as part of a prisoner exchange.

For her work with the Army, she was the first, and only, woman to be awarded the Medal of Honor.  In 1917 her Medal of Honor was rescinded along with 910 others when the requirements for receiving the Medal were changed.  She refused to return her Medal and wore it until her death in 1919.  Often police would stop and question her because she wore pants and was considered to be impersonating a man.  During these encounters when they would ask for her name, she would point to it on her Medal of Honor that was always pinned to her lapel.  In 1977, after many years of work by her grand-niece and a distant relative, President Carter restored her Medal of Honor.  This blog post only scratches the surface of this amazing woman’s life.

The Penn finding aids were all electronic documents that I could easily cut and paste into the appropriate fields in Archivists’ Toolkit.  The finding aids were complete with extensive biographical/historical notes, scope and content notes, and detailed container lists.  I began with these because they were so complete and posed few obvious problems.

While the PACSCL/CLIR project is using MPLP to process collections at the individual repositories, the legacy finding aids that I am dealing with are for collections that have been processed to a variety of levels.  At Penn, all the finding aids are for collections that have been processed to the folder and sometimes item level.  The problems that did come up with these finding aids resulted from how detailed they were.  One collection had a 45 page biographical note.  Archivists’ Toolkit would not save this massive note and kept showing a bug report.  Thinking it was a formatting issue, I copied and pasted a few pages at a time and saved each time, until it produced the error report.  I then typed the note in Archivists’ Toolkit and saved until it produced the same error report.  This way I was able to confirm it was the size of the note that was producing the problem.  Another problem, with the same finding aid, was footnotes.  This was a very detailed biographical note and it referenced items in the collection.  Archivists’ Toolkit’s text entry is very basic and keeping most formatting that is in the original document is very difficult.  I was able to solve this by making the footnotes endnotes.

Drexel University College of Medicine’s finding aids often had detailed container lists with clearly identified series, so the data entry was rather straightforward.  However, each finding aid had only sketches or timelines for their biographical notes so I had to do some research and expand on them, which turned out to be a lot of fun, and I want to talk about them at greater length in a future post.

The Historical Society of Pennsylvania’s finding aids are a mix of standard finding aid, narrative description, and inventory.  So far, I have only worked on three collections.  The finding aid for the Mutual Assurance Company records, better known as Greentree, was fairly complete.  The problem with this collection was that it was written as a narrative rather than as a standard finding aid.  Many of the paragraphs began with a box number and a general description, and then finally, a list of what was in the box.  It was fairly easy to extract the box number, a general title, and the container list.  However, because it was a narrative, what would typically be the biographical note was spread throughout the entire document.  I was able to go through it and put it all together for a more traditional note.  Some of the other finding aids are more or less just container lists and I will need to write notes for them.

One thing I have learned over the past couple of months is that standardization is strongly needed in the archival community.  Learning about different attempts at standardization and standards that have been created is one thing, but this experience has shown me why it is needed.  That being said, it has also shown me how and why it is so difficult to create standards for archival collections.

Legacy finding aids entered into the Archivists’ Toolkit thus far:

Drexel University College of Medicine

University of Pennsylvania

Historical Society of Pennsylvania

These collections will be available for research soon!

AWH developed out of the War Service Committee of the Medical Women’s National Association in 1917.  It was started to finance American women physicians for war work, offering medical and emergency relief to refugees and, later, to provide general public health services around the world.  Throughout its history, the agency focused its efforts on emergency medical care, maternity and children’s welfare, and preventive health-care programs.

In its earliest years, during and after World War I, AWH personnel labored extensively in France, Albania, Greece and the Near East to provide medical assistance to impoverished communities further devastated by the war.  Work in those countries continued throughout the 1920s and 1930s with added services in Serbia, Russia, Asia and the rural United States. The outbreak of World War II returned the agency’s attentions to Western Europe as projects of emergency medical relief were made necessary in war zones.  After World War II, the AWH shifted its focus from direct relief to financing training and employment of native female medical personnel in countries like China, Japan, Haiti, India, Southeast Asia and the Philippines.  Eventually, the organization curtailed its emergency medical services in favor of on-going prevention programs.  For example, AWH was involved in the study and prevention of pellagra, a disease resulting from malnutrition that effected the rural southern United States in epidemic proportions in the early to mid 20th century.

There’s no doubt that the women of the AWH were amazing!  And the photos found in the photograph collection evidences their amazing work in a way that textual documentation alone could not — together the photographs paint a very real and vivid portrait of the organization and its efforts over sixty-five years.

The collection is comprised of hundreds of photographs documenting field and clinic work conducted in Africa, Albania, Bolivia, France, Greece, India, Korea, Russia, Switzerland, Turkey, The United States, Vietnam and Yugoslavia.  A majority of the images depict AWH members treating patients whose health suffered from the devastation of war in Europe and elsewhere, especially after WWI, and issues of health resulting from abject poverty and malnutrition. Photographs of work conducted in the United States document the “Rural Services” division of the AWH. The earliest images in these files depict visiting doctors and nurses who traveled into remote regions of the rural south, administering health care and preventative health care education to families at their homes.  Later images depict health care provided in established clinics, like the Woman’s Maternity Shelter in Greenville, South Carolina.

As an MPLP candidate, this was a good choice.  A majority of the arrangement and identification was already done for us, which left a little bit of time to just enjoy the pictures!

Interestingly, during processing there was some healthy debate over the potential use and value of the collection.  It was argued, because the images were produced and used by the publicity department of AWH, that the composition and subject matter was likely carefully selected and staged to showcase AWH field work in an entirely positive light, and therefore the collection was not necessarily an honest or good or interesting resource.  It is true, many photos in the collection were obviously enhanced for printing in brochures and other AWH promotional materials.  However, I would argue, that most archival resources (whether written correspondence or organizational records or photographs) can offer only one point of view – that of their creator.  And what creator doesn’t have an agenda?  Furthermore, it should be noted that words can be and often are just as carefully selected as a photograph is staged.  In this case, realizing the images to be what they are – internally produced and maybe at times staged images – makes them an incredibly powerful resource that could be used to inform a variety of research topics.  Besides, images of injured and ill people are honestly revealing (and heart-wrenching) no matter what.  Whether candid snapshots or carefully constructed compositions doesn’t change the fact that the subjects were in fact starving, sick or hurt and that AWH tried to help them.

Needless to say, I personally feel that this is a fabulous resource depicting the work of AWH in a way that textual records can not.  For those of you out there who, like my colleague, do not always trust images, you’ll be glad to know that there is a complimentary collection of textual records of the American Women’s Hospitals that is also available for research at DUCOM.

The project team consists of Project Archivist, Courtney Smerz; Student Processors Leslie O’Neill, Laurie Rizzo, Eric Rosenzweig and Forrest Wright; and me, the Project Manager. We worked with a wide variety of collections which span the 18th to 20th centuries and cover, at the broadest level, the topics of Quakerism, colleges and universities, and medicine. These collections include institutional, family, and personal papers.

As proposed in More Product, Less Process by Greene and Meissner, institutional records do work best. On average, these collections, largely at Drexel University, were processed at an average of 2.18 hours per linear foot. Personal papers, at Drexel University College of Medicine and Haverford College, were the next easiest, and these were processed at an average of 2.25 hours per linear foot. Family papers are, by far, the hardest, taking significantly more time per collection. Our average for processing family records is 4 hours per linear foot (which is still in the minimal processing range, as suggested by MPLP). The issues that make family papers difficult, to name just a few, are the number of family members contributing to the collection, the time span of the collection which often crosses several generations, and the fact that a good deal of the correspondence is not actually addressed or signed with a person’s name. Quite frequently, letters are sent to “Dear son,” or signed “Your loving mother.” When working with one person’s records, this is not quite as daunting as when you have 4 or 5 potentials for the “mother” and an endless number of possible “sons.” The 19th and 20th century Quakers, the main source of our family collections in this first semester, have a few truly delightful quirks which made processing their collections just a tiny bit trickier. For example, they consistently name their children after relatives … so it is entirely possible to have several Jane Rhoads in one collection. Moreover, in these collections, once they married, in-laws became “mother,” “father,” “sister,” and “brother,” making even the most general identification of senders and recipients virtually impossible in the minimal processing world.

We also discovered that there are some downsides to minimal processing, particularly in the description of collections. Moving through a collection at the rate this project demands means that absorbing content is really difficult. For the first semester, I created processing plans (Courtney is taking over for the rest of the project) for the collections on our list and wrote biographical/historical notes. I think minimal processing at 2 hours per linear foot without the processing plans and rough notes would be absolutely impossible–sometimes the physical processing cannot be done in that time frame.

At this point in the project, I am not sure that I would recommend minimal processing at 2 hours per linear foot–it is just too fast. 4 hours per linear foot, I think, would be a completely different story. Minimal processing, of which I am a fan, really does work and more importantly, it makes the collection available to the researchers long before it could be if we demanded full processing. Although I have not had the luxury of trying minimal processing at 4 hours per linear foot, I am convinced those additional two hours would result in more content and more thorough and accurate biography/history notes and scope and contents notes. My biggest fear with our notes is that we don’t know enough to let the researchers know that the collection contains the material they are seeking. Time will tell once researcher discover these previously hidden, and now “unhidden” collections!

Following, a list of collections processed, the project timeline from June to December, and looking forward:

Collections Processed
18 Collections
255.5 linear feet at an average of 2.84 hours per linear foot

Drexel University

Drexel University College of Medicine

Haverford College

Looking forward:

The first, the Hering-Knerr family papers, I actually finished on Wednesday this week.  It measures 6 ¼ linear feet and processing was completed in approximately 38 hours.  Physical processing took about 19 hours, data entry and description took another 19 – TOO LONG.  It sounds silly but data entry was slow going because there were a lot of files containing German language articles, which were difficult for me to type into the AT fields.  Description was slower because of the need to learn about Calvin Knerr, a large contributor to the papers, and include a short bio on his life, and to fully describe the nature of the series within the collection, which were not always completely straightforward.  Much of the collection was housed in envelopes and identified though it required quite a bit of arranging and foldering for almost the entire collection.  Papers, especially contemporary newspaper clippings, photocopies of related archives from other repositories, notes and other miscellany were also added to the collection over time, and needed to be removed.  In this case, those items were given their own series at the end called Reference Materials.

Though considered a collection of “family papers,” it is actually primarily a collection of papers of Constantine Hering, none other than the “father of homeopathy in America.”  What ultimately makes it officially a family collection are the discrete groups of material of Calvin Knerr, Hering’s son-in-law and a homeopathic physician himself; Hering’s and Knerr’s children; and correspondence of Hering’s wife’s family.  The collection content is reflective of family relationships as well as Hering’s and Knerr’s medical careers.  Hering’s career is especially showcased as it was lived and seen by himself, Knerr and his son Carl.

There are a few gems in the collection, all connected to Constantine Hering.   There is, a letter (pictured to the left) written by Hering as a child to his mother on her birthday; an uncut telegram tape, supposedly measuring NINE yards long (MPLP does not allow time for double checking such claims), that describes the symptoms of a patient to Hering for consultation; a manuscript written by Hering about the issue or possibility of cholera contaminating New York City harbor; and a letter about one of Hering’s patients requesting exemption from military service based on his contraction of “National Hotel Disease” in 1857.  What’s National Hotel Disease you ask?  That year, at the National Hotel in Washington DC, hotel guests, including soon-to-be president, James Buchanan, were stricken ill with a gastrointestinal ailment from which numerous people died.  I am not quite sure exactly what was decided to be the cause, but many theories, some citing foul play, were discussed at the time.

The Sarah Cooper Tatum Hilles family papers still have a LONG way to go!  As you can see from the picture below, this is a collection of unidentified bundles of letters from the nineteenth century (and that is only a small sampling of the number of bundles actually in the collection).

It was quickly established, both from the survey and from the correspondence itself that a majority of the letters were addressed to Sarah Hilles, but beyond that identification required considerably more effort.  And since the whole point of this project is to provide even greater accessibility to these hidden collections than the survey did, I started to open envelopes, unfold letters and sort them by correspondent.  Phew!  What a task – especially at this rate!  I think Holly already alluded to this when discussing the Rhoads family papers and I am sure any of you who have been in my shoes will not be surprised, but these families were big and they all wrote to each other and they all had the same names across generations.  Needless to say, this has been going FAR SLOWER than two hours per foot, but it still feels like rapid fire when you consider the condition of the materials.  More on that later…

In the meantime, here are a few more snapshots from the Hering-Knerr family papers.

Essentially, what we learned through processing the collection and from the accession record is that DUCOM archives has George Hay, who was the comptroller for the Woman’s Medical College in the mid-twentieth century, to thank for ensuring the survival of these records and their disposition in the archives.  Not only did he turn over his own materials, but he also made sure to hand over records that came into his possession over the years of other important personnel.  As a result, the collection, though roughly 30% is in fact Hay’s papers, is an assemblage of institutional records produced by leading administrators of the Woman’s Medical College throughout the mid-twentieth century.  There are records for Sarah Starr, Dr. Ellen Culver Potter and Vida Hunt Francis, and within these groups researchers will also find correspondence with and other records related to Dr. Martha Tracy—all notable women in institutional history as well as the general history of women in medicine.

*For those of you who don’t know, the Woman’s Medical College was an amazing institution founded in Philadelphia in the mid nineteenth century to train–you guessed it–woman doctors!  More on that and other related collections can be found here: http://archives.drexelmed.edu.

All in all, I think the Hay Collection is pretty good and it has some noteworthy documentation, especially records relating to proposed institutional mergers with other hospitals and schools in the Philadelphia area.  Taken together, the records shed light on a few key events in institutional history and may inform study of the history of medicine, especially the administrative side of medical education and, to a lesser extant, how related cultural changes affected the education of women in medicine.

An especially fun file, titled in a manner to pique any researcher’s interest, “the Louise Wright ‘Incident,’” details a student’s efforts and publicized fight against her suspension from Woman’s Medical College in 1891 (Hay also somehow acquired a handful of very early institutional records and gave them to the archives as well).  What the “incident” was exactly is not quite clear, though it received much publicity.  Louise Wright, I assume, contacted the local press, and the story as well as a chain of correspondence between Wright and the college regarding the matter was published in the newspaper.

As far as minimal processing goes, the Hay Collection definitely deserved more than our allotted two hours per linear foot — in the end, I think I gave it closer to four hours though I can’t say for sure and it probably could use even a little more TLC in a perfect world.  When we found it, the collection was pretty mixed up (thank goodness for that accession file) and it was partially processed.  I still can’t decide if this partial processing helped or hindered our effort…  At least after processing the collection has a basic arrangement and is described fairly well.  A lot of individual files in the collection are still a mess and it could use some more re-foldering, but that’s nothing that a second go ‘round by the archivist (or a well trained student intern) couldn’t fix.  And anyway, I sincerely believe the collection is now usable in a way it was not before so from that perspective I think minimal processing did very well by it.

The second collection was partially processed when I started and was relatively small. Dr. Bertha Van Hoosen was a notable obstetrician and gynecologist, as well as a surgeon. She was active in the creation of the American Medical Women’s Association and was the association’s first President. She also developed a new surgical procedure for appendectomies and wrote an autobiography called “Petticoat Surgeon.” The collection is mostly her correspondence from missionaries, other physicians about the American Medical Association and later the American Women’s Medical Association and the funding of a new Medical Women’s Library. The papers also included many images, however, they were all medical related, so I will not show them here.

While Bradford’s collection was an excellent candidate for minimal processing, I think the Van Hoosen collection would have benefited from a more traditional processing plan. Regardless, these two collections which have valuable information for those interested in either general biographical information about homeopathic physicians or about women in medicine are now available to researchers, whereas these two great collections were previously inaccessible.

I also prepared a processing plan for our training collection, what became the George A. Hay Collection of Administrative Records of the Woman’s College of Medicine, which Drexel University College of Medicine Archives graciously provided.  That afternoon, I experienced the first of what I am sure will be many panic attacks about minimal processing and the work we have before us.  To put it bluntly, the Hay collection was messy and a great example of why maintaining good accession files and surveying collections are very important.  In this case, it was the accession file that enabled me to identify and retain some important but not immediately apparent provenance and is what made minimal processing possible in the end.  Even so, this collection required way more than our target two hours per linear foot and was a good lesson in planning for some things to take longer than they are supposed to!  It’s too complicated to get into here; you will just have to check out the finding aid when it’s mounted on Drexel’s website to see what I mean…

I’d say the biggest accomplishment of the past month was hiring our team of student processors.  We received the top 50 applicants—yep, that’s right, the TOP 50—from human resources.  We talked to a lot of impressive candidates.  In the end, we selected four who came with good experience and expressed genuine interest in the project as well as the archives profession.  I am looking forward to working with them!

Believe it or not, that all transpired during weeks one and two!

Weeks three and four, in my opinion, marked the real beginning of the project.  On October 13, 14 and 15, we held our first “boot camp,” providing instruction on minimal processing and Archivist’s Toolkit.  We were quite pleased with how everything went, though I’d bet that Holly and I learned more about providing effective training than the students learned about processing (and I think they learned A LOT)!  I’ll let Holly tell you more about that—let’s just say that our next training is going to be even better!

So here we are, in the middle of my fourth week on the job and the middle of the first week of official processing.  My team, Laurie and Eric, are doing great!  I am pleased to say that by Friday I expect Drexel University College of Medicine Archives will have three or four more processed collections complete with EAD finding aids and ready for research!

In training, we covered an overview of the project, basic processing theory, minimal processing theory, pre-20th century paleography, biographical and historical notes, scope and content notes and abstracts, the Archivists’ Toolkit, and hands-on processing. This seemed like a lot to accomplish in a three day period.

We planned for two days in the electronic classroom and one day for hands-on processing, but we quickly found that the two days in the electronic classroom was too much. So, on Tuesday evening, I placed a call to the remarkably flexible Drexel University crew and asked if we could start hands-on processing Wednesday afternoon instead of Thursday morning. Already, we learned that the hands-on work is where the real learning happens—across the board: photographs, writing notes, deciphering handwriting, and the Archivists’ Toolkit. ESPECIALLY the Archivists’ Toolkit! Because we finished the other training earlier than I anticipated, I attempted an explanation of the Archivists’ Toolkit without examples, and it was a dismal failure. The next day, however, our processors entered faux container lists into the Archivists’ Toolkit and every topic I had tried to explain the day before was made obvious.

The same thing happened with hands-on processing at Drexel’s off-site storage facility. The environment is terrific for group processing: a huge table on which to spread out a collection, chairs all around, and not a soul to disturb with conversation about the best way to process. With Drexel University College of Medicine’s George Hay collection before them, our student processors started asking all the right questions and, with a little guidance, answered them. The collection was not processed at the rate of two hours per linear foot, but we talked about issues and made certain that our processors are prepared for working next week!

The “Hidden Collections” Project has processed its first collection! A sincere thank you to Drexel University’s wonderful staff, Rob Sieczkiewicz of Drexel University Archives and Margaret Graham and Lisa Grimm of Drexel University College of Medicine, for helping to make our first hands-on training session possible and successful!

Not only was I excited to try out the manuals and discover their workability, I was also excited to get my hands on some papers. I strongly believe that archivists go into withdrawal if they do not get to breathe in a little dust and carefully maneuver through a folder of often brittle papers–at least I do!

So, I got busy–the collection is two linear feet and it appeared that someone had worked on it at some point. I began the actual processing, with a timer in hand, and applied all the minimal processing strategies laid out in the project’s manual which was largely guided by the work of Matthew Lyons and Cary Majewicz of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. And … minimal processing worked! The collection was physically processed and the container list was entered into the Archivists’ Toolkit in three hours and fifteen minutes. “Excellent,” I thought, “now I have forty-five minutes to write the bio and scope and content notes … plenty of time!” Okay, maybe not. Despite the fact that the collection contained a fair amount of biographical information (some of which was in German), it took me closer to two and a half hours to create these two notes.

While this was disappointing, I learned a lot–physically processing a collection in 2 hours per linear foot MAY be possible, and probably, quite frequently, IS possible. What does not seem possible is physically processing AND writing thorough descriptive notes in that time frame. With the number of linear feet to be processed (approximately 4600 linear feet) and the number of student processor hours allotted in the grant (8865 hours), it is going to be virtually impossible to do the project, even without adding a couple of extra hours per collections for description.

Thus, I decided that the project archivist and I would have to create really helpful processing plans and write up a rough bio. Then the students could quickly gain an idea of who or what the collection was about and what was in the collection. The students could begin physically processing the collection fairly quickly and therefore, take full advantage of the two hours per linear foot allotted to each collection. Their experience with the collection, combined with the supplied bio note and processing plan, could then be applied to enhancing the bio note and writing the scope and contents note–hopefully requiring significantly less time than it took me to write from scratch.