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What makes a collection “interesting?” Two processors, two opinions, one collection

Monday, August 8th, 2011

My partner, Sarah, and I just finished processing the “FOCUS: Philadelphia Focuses on Women in the Visual Arts” collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art Archives this week. FOCUS was a two-month long city-wide arts initiative in Philadelphia in 1974 that emphasized contemporary feminist art and was run by a group of volunteers comprised of artists, teachers, staff at the PMA, and other local art enthusiasts. This was a wonderful little collection of records (just three linear feet to start with!) that created an interesting dynamic for us as we wrapped up our processing. Part of the finishing touches we put on each collection includes determining and assigning a “research value” for the materials.

The value is calculated on a scale of 1 to 10, which combines a topical interest ranking value with a quality of documentation value. To help determine these values, we ask ourselves questions such as: How frequently have recent researchers sought materials on topics substantially documented in this particular collection? How rare is the collection’s documentation of a particular topic or topics? How extensive is that documentation and how deep or detailed is it? Is there anything missing from the documentation, such as certain important year spans or key figures?

This routine project activity receives neither much attention nor time compared to our other responsibilities, yet it remains one of my favorite tasks. It is a satisfying way to synthesize what I have learned about the collection after immersing myself in it. It also tends to generate enjoyable discussions or even friendly debates. FOCUS was one such collection about which Sarah and I differed slightly in how we wanted to evaluate it. We both could see the obvious value that the collection has and agreed on the quality of documentation value being “rich” or a 4 out of 5. This was because despite the relatively brief existence of the FOCUS initiative, the deliberate documentation of programs and events by internal committees makes this collection an especially comprehensive and robust representation of the group’s activities.

Sarah and I differed in opinion concerning the overall interest and appeal of the topics in the collection. I felt that the collection’s interest value should rate a 4 out of 5 (or “high”) for several reasons. The records most likely would entice individuals and researchers interested in feminist art movements, local Philadelphia history, grassroots community initiatives, non-profit collaborative activities, the grant writing and application process, and even censorship in art. (The collection documents a rather delicious scandal concerning the banning of Judith Bernstein from the Philadelphia Civic Center’s art show because of her “overly sexual” charcoal drawing entitled “Horizontal.”) Sarah thought that the specificity of the materials may alienate some users and information about the specific artists is probably duplicated elsewhere, so the collection’s appeal would not be quite as far-reaching or widespread outside of the Philadelphia community; as such, the value should only be “moderate,” or a 3 out of 5.

While neither Sarah nor I could convince the other that her opinion was best, we ultimately concluded over an amicable snack of tea and cookies (outside of the archives of course!) that it was perfectly fine to disagree. We simply documented in our worksheet that we each felt differently and explained our reasons why. Being able to work independently as well as collaborate with colleagues is one of the true benefits and strengths of this project. Maintaining a dialog with others who view the same work in a different ways helps me to further develop and explore my own opinions, as well as to better understand how other users may approach archival materials. In turn, being exposed to so many amazing collections with this project allows for examination of the on-going question: Why do we as archivists chose the materials we do to be included in the archives?

Posted in All Posts, Christiana Dobrzynski Grippe, Collection Processors, Institutions, Philadelphia Museum of Art | No Responses »

More Product Less Process: Embracing flexibility in finding aids at Drexel University Archives

Thursday, August 4th, 2011

Written by Rob Sieczkiewicz, Archivist, Drexel University Archives

Drexel University Archives and Special Collections was one of the first repositories to participate in the PACSCL Hidden Collections project; processors came to Drexel in Fall 2009. As a result we have changed our procedures for publishing finding aids. In the spirit of the “More Product, Less Process,” our goal is to provide access to collections as quickly as possible, with minimal concern for pretty finding aids. We had been using Archivists’ Toolkit for almost 18 months before the PACSCL project processors arrived, and were enthusiasts. Before AT, creating and publishing finding aids was a laborious process, with not so pretty results. AT allowed us to export EAD easily, using a stylesheet created by the American Philosophical Society, slightly modified with Drexel information. After a few months, we decided we to revise the spreadsheet to match our website, which basically meant that one of our staff of two had to teach herself how to edit EXtensible Stylesheet Language (XSL); this took a while, but the result was lovely. At the same time, inspired by the UMarmot catablog created by Rob Cox at UMass Amherst, we moved our collection descriptions to WordPress, relieving us of the chores of HTML editing was WordPress. The new platform and finding aid stylesheet looked great and worked just fine… until we needed to move away from WordPress and onto the same Content Management System (CMS) at the rest of the Drexel Libraries: Drupal. Moving to Drupal broke our stylesheet leaving us with a lovely-looking Drupal web site and unreadable finding aids. However, revising the style sheet to match that new site would have been a taken quite a bit of time. Asking whether such an effort would be worthwhile, we determined that if the default Archivists’ Toolkit stylesheet was good enough for the PACSCL project, it was good enough for us. Greene and Meissner say to invest your limited resources wisely – for us, the wisest investment was to put up the most basic finding aids, with minimal customization or adornment, and then process more collections, do more outreach, create more exhibitions rather than build the perfect XSL stylesheet.

We also upload finding aids to the PACSCL finding aids site. This process is slightly redundant, however, and requires a bit of HTML editing. Would it be a wiser use of resources to eliminate this redundancy? Why put finding aids in two places? We could simply link from the Drexel Archives web page to the PACSCL finding aids site. For some repositories, such as those who lack access to an institutional web page (or simply lack a web page), this is the only option. For others, giving up control of display is unthinkable. But for some repositories, like Drexel University Archives, it presents yet another option to consider in the quest to provide the most access to our patrons by making wisest use of our limited resources.

Posted in All Posts, Drexel University, Guest Blogger, Institutions, Minimal Processing, The Archivists' Toolkit | No Responses »

Efficiencies and Access at Haverford College Quaker & Special Collections

Monday, August 1st, 2011

Written by John Anderies, Head of Special Collections, Haverford College

Haverford College Quaker & Special Collections was one of the first institutions to be treated to the excellent work of Holly, Courtney and the fabulous student processors (hi, Forrest and Leslie!) hired for the Hidden Collections project. As a semi-official Guinea Pig, we really benefited from the extra time and attention given us by the PACSCL processing team. All involved did first-rate work and brought some much needed order to 10 of the high-research-value collections in our backlog. Participating in the project also jumpstarted our adoption of Archivists Toolkit to process new collections, has inspired us to find additional ways to open our holdings to researchers, and has provided our staff with ample opportunities to debate the pros and cons of minimal processing!

Today, we now record all accessions and process all new collections in Archivists Toolkit.

For accessions we record all gifts no matter the format (manuscripts, archives, books, photography and fine art) and any purchases that are not reflected in the acquisitions module of our ILS (such as manuscripts and photography). Eventually we hope to include retrospective accessions in AT too. In addition to the original 10 finding aids produced by PACSCL, we have completed 19 more in AT, all of which now reside on the PACSCL EAD Repository hosted at Penn, in addition to our local web server.

Our instance of Archivists Toolkit is installed on a Tri-College server located at Bryn Mawr College and serves the needs of four individual repositories across the consortia: Bryn Mawr Special Collections, Haverford Quaker & Special Collections, Friends Historical Library at Swarthmore College, and the Peace Collection at Swarthmore College. Accessions and Resource (or collection) records for our four repositories are partitioned within AT. However, we do share the tables for Subjects and People, which is very useful when the topics of our collections overlap, which they frequently do.

In addition to moving ahead on creating new finding aids in AT, we have spent the past year making our legacy finding aids more accessible. Previous efforts at moving our finding aids into the 20th century had produced only a handful of fully searchable guides online and a mish-mash of Word files, PDFs, XML files, Excel files, ASCII text files, and Filemaker Pro databases living on a single staff computer, inaccessible to our researchers without the direct intervention of staff. A decision to “not let the perfect be the enemy of the good” finally freed us from our paralysis and has produced extraordinary results.

When the PACSCL crew left us in 2009 we had—in addition to their 10 finding aids created in AT—approximately 45 other finding aids online. By agreeing that it was better to supply our researchers with something “quick and dirty” than nothing at all and through the dedication of our students and staff, we turned all of the other finding aid formats into PDFs and mounted them on our web server. These are listed on two web pages in both Collection Name and Collection Number order and the complete lot of nearly 250 finding aids is searchable using a Google Custom Search. The results lists are not always pretty and neither are some of the finding aids, but for the first time the majority of our materials are discoverable online and our researchers seem pleased with the access.

As the work of the PACSCL team has discerned over the course of the grant, there are those collections which work well with minimal processing and there are those that do not. Historically, we have never given the same level of attention to each of our collections. Personal and family papers have often received more detailed processing than business papers and archival records. While we have not adopted an MPLP approach at Haverford, we are interested in discerning ways of saving time and money while still providing rich access to our researchers and offering fulfilling and educational opportunities to our student employees and interns. In the coming months we hope to try our hand at an “iterative” approach at enhancing collections by revisiting selected series within some of the collections processed to a minimal level under the PACSCL project. And we aim to improve the remainder of our online finding aids bit by bit.

As one of the first institutions to dive into the PACSCL Hidden Collections project, we are pleased to see it wrapping up and hope that the other institutions who have participated have been as pleased and inspired as we have.

Posted in All Posts, Guest Blogger, Haverford College, Institutions, Legacy Finding Aids, The Archivists' Toolkit | No Responses »

Birth dates and the British Empire

Tuesday, July 26th, 2011

I always feel a mild sense of archivist euphoria (or, perhaps, geek-phoria) when I encounter a document bearing my birth date: July 9. Certainly the oldest such document I’ve uncovered while working on the PACSCL project lives at the Rosenbach Museum and Library: a July 9, 1657, letter written to John Thurloe, British secretary of state under Oliver Cromwell, from one of his officials on the island of Jamaica. “Wow,” I thought, staring at the letter, “this was written 330 years to the date before I was born!”

Imagine my consternation, then, when I read a bit of the letter and discovered it was a sobering missive relating early British colonizers’ attempts to “subdue” the island’s indigenous population. The letter-writer—apparently a British soldier named William Brayne—requests that Thurloe dispatch to the island “bloodhounds” to assist soldiers in “finding and killing” Jamaica’s “wild negroes.” The letter continues: “I am Confident [that] if his Highness did but know how useful they [the bloodhounds] might be here he would cause some to be speedily sent” (Volume 3, p. 121).

The topic of the letter was enough to turn my stomach; the cold, detached, even clinical way in which Brayne discusses the topic made me even more ill. It’s not every day that you read a coolly written letter requesting the tools by which to subjugate an entire civilization.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have been too surprised, given the years covered by the John Thurloe papers—1655 to 1660. By this time, the British Empire had established its dominion: in parts of the present-day United States, in many of the smaller Caribbean islands, and in Asia, Africa, and other regions. It had also, by this time, established and consolidated a number of trading companies, like the British East India Company, to administer the colonies and capitalize upon their economic possibilities. Furthermore, the Empire had just signed the Treaty of Westminster, ending the first conflicts in the Anglo-Dutch Wars, and was well-embroiled in the Anglo-Spanish War (1654-1660), which was sparked by commercial rivalry and resulted in the English takeover of Jamaica in 1655.

By the time the Protectorate collapsed and Thurloe lost his job in 1660, paving the way for the return of the monarchy and the further expansion of the British Empire, the “wild negroes” of Jamaica had been sold into slavery, exploited by British trade groups as free labor for the burgeoning sugar cane and coffee industries. (Enslaved Africans were also transported to the island.) A century later, those slaves—who by then well outnumbered their white masters—mounted Tacky’s Revolt, an attempt to overthrown the colonial government. More than two centuries of violence and political maneuvering would ensue before Jamaica could finally become an independent state on August 6, 1962—a mere twenty-five years before my birth, in 1987.

The Thurloe papers at Rosenbach are chock-a-block full of interesting insights into Protectorate-era England (at least for those who can decipher seventeenth-century script). Check out some of my images of the five-volume set below.

Posted in All Posts, Collection Processors, Devin Manzullo-Thomas, Institutions, Rosenbach Museum and Library | No Responses »

Picturing religion

Friday, July 22nd, 2011

Presbyterian Historical Society - RNS 12

What can a photograph tell us about an individual’s religious beliefs and practices? A lot, according to Colleen McDannell, author of Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America. In that book’s opening chapter, McDannell unpacks a single image—a snapshot of the living room of a home built by the Farm Security Administration—to reveal how wall hangings, knick-knacks, and furniture communicate valuable (and otherwise unobtainable) information about a family’s connection to the divine, the church, and other believers.

McDannell’s analysis came to mind as my partner, Dan, and I began processing the photographic collection of the Religious News Service at Presbyterian Historical Society. The photographs in the collection are nothing like the one McDannell uses in her analysis—most of the images are photojournalistic shots of denominational gatherings, public appearances, or other religion-related activities. Nevertheless, McDannell’s larger point—that a photographic image can tell us just as much or more than the written word—still applies to this fascinating collection.

Since its founding in 1934 by the National Conference of Christians and Jews, Religious News Service (RNS) has operated as a sort of religious Associated Press, sharing religious happenings and religious takes on current events with the broader reading public.

Presbyterian Historical Society - RNS 13

To say that RNS’s photographic records capture every U.S. religion-related event in the twentieth-century would be an overstatement—but not a major one. The photos depict typical national and international “current events”: political ceremonies, summits, and speeches; social events like rallies, protests, demonstrations; scenes from wars and other conflicts; and the like. But they also depict specifically religious events, trends, and observances, and introduce viewers to important contemporary figures in Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish communities.

Some researchers might value this collection for its visual chronicle of major events in twentieth-century American religious history. Indeed, the collection does substantially document the history of American Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish groups during the twentieth century. But for researchers who want to move beyond this narrative usage, the collection might prove useful in raising questions. Why do the photos often document meetings between politicians and religious figures? And why do they so frequently depict those whose religious beliefs and practices make them “different”—Amish, Orthodox Jews, Catholic nuns?

Presbyterian Historical Society - RNS 08

Questions like these point to the real utility of a collection like the RNS photos: scholars of American religious history can take the collection itself as a historical document and consider how its composition—its foci and its lacunae—reveals Americans’ thinking about religious matters during this era. Perhaps RNS focused on political-religious interactions because so many mid-century Americans were concerned about the “dividing wall” between church and state. And perhaps photographers pursued images of the Amish, Orthodox Jews, and Catholic nuns because Americans have had (and continue to have) an ongoing fascinating with the unknowable religious “other.”

Regardless of their value to researchers, the RNS photos—from the breathtaking to the bucolic, from the horrifying to the hilarious—have provided for interesting conversations between my processing partner and me over the last month-or-so. Check out the thumbnails below for some images from our processing work. Photographs may not be used without permission from the Presbyterian Historical Society.

Presbyterian Historical Society - RNS 01

Presbyterian Historical Society - RNS 04

Presbyterian Historical Society - RNS 05

Presbyterian Historical Society - RNS 06

Presbyterian Historical Society - RNS 07

Presbyterian Historical Society - RNS 09

Presbyterian Historical Society - RNS 15

Posted in All Posts, Collection Processors, Devin Manzullo-Thomas, Institutions, Presbyterian Historical Society | 3 Responses »

Presbyterian missionaries in Brazil

Tuesday, July 19th, 2011

While prepping for processing at Presbyterian Historical Society (PHS) back in March 2010, I remember feeling just a little jealous of the processors who would actually get to process all of the super cool collections there! So you can imagine how I jumped at the chance to process a collection at PHS when our processing schedule changed at the last minute. I could not wait to get my hands on some papers!

Taking on the Philip Sheeder Landes papers, I got to travel to mid-twentieth century Brazil and learn about Presbyterian mission work in an otherwise Catholic dominated mission environment. Landes was born in Brazil and spent most of his life there, and helped to build a Presbyterian community across the entire country — which is no small feat, in case you didn’t realize, Brazil is gigantic! In addition to evangelizing, the mission (there were actually 3 or 4 related Presbyterian missions strategically placed in Brazil) brought literacy and other education, including a farm school, to people throughout the remote areas of Brazil.

The Landes and other missionary papers we processed at PHS taught me a lot. For one thing, the missionaries we got to know truly embraced their adopted countries as their own, whether they were stationed in Brazil, China, Korea or the Belgian Congo. They devoted their whole lives to their work and chose to raise their families in these countries. Though there were undoubtedly negative consequences of missionary work and perhaps some ethnocentric motivation, I found that the missionaries we met were well-intentioned people, who provided very valuable services to the communities in which they lived.

While I was excited to process the Landes papers and learn more about Landes’ work in Brazil, I was frustrated to find out that approximately half of the collection is in Portuguese, a language that I am not familiar with! I didn’t get to learn as much about the Brazil mission as I would have liked, but I was surprised to see that even with the language barrier, I was able to quickly provide much needed order to a collection that was in complete disarray when I found it. Now it is ready for use, and I expect that a researcher, especially someone with knowledge of the Portuguese language, would certainly be satisfied with what it has to offer.

Posted in Minimal Processing, Presbyterian Historical Society | 3 Responses »

Jesus Loves You… Let Me Draw You a Picture To Prove It

Monday, July 11th, 2011

When most of us think of the word “evangelist,” we picture people like Billy Graham—seemingly angry, fist-shaking preachers who whisper, cry, shake, and shout in an effort to drive their audience to a spiritual frenzy. McKendree Robbins Long—the early twentieth century Presbyterian evangelist whose papers Dan and I just finished processing at Presbyterian Historical Society—was probably a lot like Graham in some ways. But Long didn’t just rely on his oratorical prowess to draw would-be believers to Jesus Christ. Long, a classically trained visual artist, also used pictures to proclaim the Old Time Religion.

Long’s papers at PHS reveal this evangelist’s penchant for fusing his soul-saving impulse with his artistic muse. Two classical examples of this activity—hand-drawn sketches titled “I Will, Be Thou Clean” and “There is Never a Drought in the Spirit”—depict the two New Testament tales in which Jesus heals the lepers and meets the woman at the well, respectively. Each contains an implicit message to viewers—Jesus saves, both physically (from disease) and emotionally (from the “drought” of loneliness experienced by the woman at the well).

Most interesting to me was Long’s apparent obsession with the Christian doctrine about the end of the world. A number of his paintings and illustrations depict death, destruction, and damnation—all end-of-the-world themes Long culled from New Testament scriptures. Many of the works feature familiar faces, too—one, appropriately titled “Apocalyptic Scene with Philosophers and Historical Figures,” shows historical actors like Charles Darwin and Karl Marx awaiting their final Judgment on the banks of a boiling lava-filled river. (Researchers, please note that only a copy from a scan of this piece of art is available at the Presbyterian Historical Society. The original oil painting is at the North Carolina Museum of Art).

As in much apocalyptic art, Long’s work isn’t just about condemnation. The artist-evangelist also fills his paintings with impressions of hope and salvation. In “Apocalyptic Scene,” that hope takes a familiar Christian form: a cross, surrounded by angels and gilded with a heavenly glow. It’s far off in the distance, a fleeting glimpse of redemption amid the terrifying immediacy of Hell—just where an evangelist like Long, preoccupied with fire-and-brimstone approaches to Christian conversion, would want it.

Photographs cannot be used without permission from the Presbyterian Historical Society.

Posted in All Posts, Collection Processors, Dan Cavanaugh, Devin Manzullo-Thomas, Institutions, Presbyterian Historical Society | No Responses »

The Vote!

Thursday, July 7th, 2011

My partner Michael and I are coming to the end of six months processing at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. We’ll be sad to go, but we’re excited about moving on to the National Archives and Records Administration (Mid-Atlantic Branch). We hear they’ve got an interesting collection for us to dig into! But first things first, we’re finishing up our final collection at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania: the League of Women Voters of Philadelphia records.

The League of Women Voters (LWV) was formed in 1920, replacing the National American Woman Suffrage Association just before the passage of the 19^th Amendment granted American women the right to vote. The Philadelphia branch of LWV was founded soon afterward, with the same goals of educating women voters and generally promoting issues of interest to women. The Philadelphia LWV included among its storied members Sarah Logan Wister Starr, that philanthropic powerhouse of 20^th-century Philadelphia’s social and political circles, whom we came to know and love while processing the Belfield papers. She wasn’t the only powerful women in LWV, however. Those ladies knew how to take care of business. Accounting for the special interests of half the American population, the LWV wielded real political power and they knew it. They kept an eye on every politician’s voting record; they tracked developments in issues relating to education, the environment, international relations, and women’s rights; they even found time to hold local events, including car care clinics!

The collection is an amazing resource for anyone studying the League of Women Voters or grassroots political action in the context of an inner-city environment. Because the LWV was tracking a diverse number of subjects and keeping tabs on numerous politicians, education, Philadelphia government reform, and other political and social issues of special concern to the League of Women.

Voters are also well documented in this collection. We hope you’ll come to the Historical Society soon to check it out!

Posted in All Posts, Celia Caust-Ellenbogen, Collection Processors, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Institutions | No Responses »

Former dancers (subject specialists) process the Pennsylvania Ballet records

Friday, July 1st, 2011

One of the first discussions my processing partner, Christiana, and I had was about our secret past as ballet dancers. This didn’t have much bearing on the first two collections we processed (the papers of the Safe Energy Communication Council and Health/PAC), but our third was the Pennsylvania Ballet records at Temple University Special Collections. Our knowledge of ballets, costumes, performances, and famous dancers would obviously have some effect on how we processed this collection, but we weren’t sure whether our subject knowledge would help or hinder our attempt to process at 2 hours per linear foot. This collection had a lot of photographic materials, and a not insignificant amount of those were unidentified or “miscellaneous.” Would we be so bogged down in trying to assign ballets to unidentified performance photographs that our processing speed suffered? Or would our knowledge of costumes and sets enable us to blithely sort miscellaneous photographs into piles of Sleeping Beauty, Nutcracker, Giselle, and so on?

Subject knowledge is a clear advantage when doing traditional processing. Knowing something about your collection before you start can save you research hours and make both arrangement and description easier. In the case of minimal processing, however, subject knowledge can only do so much good. There are some strict time limits on processing speed and everything must be considered in terms of trade offs: you can spend more time researching if you process a little quicker. If you leave those “general” or “miscellaneous” folders as they are, then you can do something more elaborate with the next series. Taking the time to utilize subject knowledge must be considered in the same way, which means there is a tipping point when doing so is no longer worth the time.

For example, in the Pennsylvania Ballet Collection there were times when we could have given titles or added description to previously untitled photographs and folders. We tried only to do this only when it would be quick and not break our stride. So if we looked through a folder of publicity photographs from, say, Sleeping Beauty, and found that unlabeled photographs from Giselle were included, it only took seconds to add the second ballet to the folder title. However, there were more situations in which we could have used our subject knowledge but chose not to, because we simply didn’t have the time. At the bottom of one box we found a thick layer of loose and unlabeled photographs of dancers, performances, and fundraising events. It would have been fairly easy to sort out all of the Nutcracker photographs. Or any photographs of a famous dancer. Or photographs we could date to a specific span of years when a certain dancer was in the company. But we couldn’t, because while this would have been easier for us than for processors without subject knowledge, it still would have taken an awful lot of time (which of course we didn’t have). So we decided to place these photographs in the dreaded “miscellaneous” folders and move on, doing the same with a box of loose slides. We also didn’t touch any chunky folders already labeled “miscellaneous,” “general,” or other vague terms that didn’t tell you much about content. (Folders with only one or two items in them, though? Those got re-titled.) If we had taken the time to identify every single one of those unlabeled items, then we would have had to skimp on arrangement and description elsewhere, which was not an option.

In the discussion of minimal processing using archivists with subject knowledge, it’s also worth discussing how much this can help researchers. In the above Sleeping Beauty and Giselle example, our addition would only help someone who was looking for photographs of Giselle productions by the Pennsylvania Ballet (so, probably not the vast majority of people who will access this collection). The place where subject knowledge was most needed was in the un-arranged jumble of photographs and slides, but these are also the parts the collection that would have taken the most time to deal with and were therefore unlikely to be touched during any minimal processing project.

To sum up, subject knowledge helps in traditional processing and certainly didn’t hurt us here; but it didn’t greatly improve the quality of the description and arrangement we were able to do, nor did it save us much time. Because we were practicing minimal processing, we didn’t have the luxury of using our subject knowledge to its full extent. Having knowledge about the material in your collection before you begin can help you, but the rewards are small given that you might not be able to apply it without devoting more time than you can spare.

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Posted in All Posts, Christiana Dobrzynski Grippe, Collection Processors, Institutions, Minimal Processing, Sarah Newhouse, Temple University Special Collections | No Responses »

THE (yes, THE) William Penn papers

Friday, June 24th, 2011

When our friend and co-processor Jenna heard that Michael and I were working on the Penn family papers at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, she was a little bit jealous. “That’s amazing!” she gushed. “But, you do realize, you have officially peaked in your careers as archivists. It doesn’t get any better than William Penn!”

Truly, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania’s collection of William Penn and family is unparalleled. It is a rich and vital source for anyone studying the history of the Pennsylvania colony, the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), European-Native American cultural encounters, colonial administration, inter-colonial disagreements, the transition of colonial government at the time of the American Revolution, and myriad other topics. Michael and I were fascinated to find treaties upon which the Native American parties had drawn “pictograms” of their names next to the English equivalents. We were blown away by the sheer volume of records relating to the Maryland-Pennsylvania border dispute, which dragged on for many decades. I’m a bit of a Quaker history nerd, so I was thrilled to see Penn’s correspondence with George Fox. All of which is to say that from the perspective of a researcher, Jenna is right: it doesn’t get any better than the Penn family papers.

From the perspective of an archivist, however, I have to say: I hope that wasn’t the peak of my career. The Penn family papers were frustrating to process precisely because they are such an important and frequently-used collection. As an archives student I’m often told that archival processing and description are iterative processes, and this collection really brought that truth home. Almost two centuries have passed since the Historical Society was founded, and the Penn papers seemingly represent a cross-section of every fad, trend, and development in archival theory. There are huge bound volumes of collected documents, custom-size boxes for individual items, and several generations of Hollinger boxes; they are described in volume indexes, outdated finding aids, and a card catalog; important documents have been hand-copied, microfilmed, and photocopied. The collection is all over the place.

Under the auspices of this minimal-processing project, we didn’t have the time to update everything according to today’s standards and best practices. But even if we could, it might not even be desirable. Decades of scholars have used the collection as it is and cited their sources accordingly. While working on this collection, Michael and I had to ensure that nothing we did would inhibit the ability of researchers to find materials they used last week, or chase scholarly citations from 100 years ago. What processing we did was necessarily minimal, but our major objective was to create an online finding aid that would serve as an entry point to the collection. That much we accomplished, and we are pleased to make this contribution to the field. Welcome to the digital world, William Penn!

What have we learned from the experience?

Here are our words of wisdom to researchers: Come to the Historical Society of Pennsylvania! The Penn family papers are an incredible resource. We recommend you consult the card catalog on site to ensure you will have a fruitful experience.

Here are our words of wisdom to archivists: Come to the Historical Society of Pennsylvania! Maybe ask if you can get your hands dirty on an unprocessed collection instead of the Penn family papers. If you do work with the Penn family papers, allow at least 150 years to do a thorough job. At which point archival theory may have changed sufficiently that it will be time to start all over again….but you can worry about that when you get there.