The first collection we processed here at the Academy was the Trustees records. The Academy, founded in 1812, had an Academic Council made up of staff members who managed the financial and daily operational activities. As the institution grew, the council decided to divide its responsibilities by creating a Board of Trustees who would be made up of outside members. The collection dates from the establishment of the Board in 1925 through 1993, with a bulk of the materials covering the 1970s and 1980s.

Since we will be processing several collections here, I was glad we began with this one. It enabled me to gain familiarity with the organization, structure and history of the Academy. The information I learned from these records will be helpful in the processing the proceeding collections.

Our processors do not have a lot of time to think about their processing decisions and once those decisions are made there’s no turning back.  Not to mention, we are working with students, who are learning the art of archival processing as they go and therefore do not have a lot of experience to draw from when making decisions about arranging collections.  Even so, because of the nature of the project, we need our teams to work independently.  As such, the processing plan is a very important part of our work flow.  It is completed prior to the processors’ arrival, provides them a place to start, and guides them in their decision making as they begin to divide collections into series and subseries.

Our teams are instructed to completely read all the materials in the processing packet prior to processing.  In doing so, the teams quickly become acquainted with the collection and its creators and are made aware of the various types of records to look for and how to group them.  Additionally, through the packets students gain a sense of the historical context in which the records were created—information that they do not have enough time to uncover on their own and that we believe to be essential in understanding archives and their value.

Since the students will ultimately devote a lot more time to the collections than we can, we do allow them to adapt the processing plan as they see fit.  If they feel additional or different series are necessary to maximize the collection’s accessibility, they may make those decisions on their own.

At all the repositories I have visited thus far (there are a few more stops along the way) I have gotten quite an in depth “sneak peek” at what’s in store.  Based on my experience over the past couple of weeks, we have some exciting collections coming up that are sure to be both interesting and challenging from the perspectives of history AND minimal processing — so stay tuned!

Here are some teaser snapshots of what’s to come:

In 1941, Dean Laura Campbell organized a memorial service in honor of the students who lost their lives in the war. The memorial service program, a newspaper article about the service and a few of the letters from parents to Dean Campbell stating if they could attend or not, and if so how many tickets they required are included.

An online version of the exhibition titled, “Scholars Who Served: A History of Drexel’s Veterans” is now available!

The materials from the Evening College records can be seen in the World War II section or in a list format following this link.

It was wonderful to see how our work with minimal processing made a collection immediately useful for the archives and its patrons.

I feel that the Jean Scobie Davis papers is an outstanding collection for researchers studying women’s history and social issues. Davis’ diaries document the struggles of women as scholars, and in academia, as well as her own personal experiences and reflections as a woman. This collection also holds material rich in the history and development of prison reform in the United States. The Westfield State Farm material contains reports, minutes, and accounts of life for not only inmates, but employees and staff inside a mid-century prison.

Olivia Stokes Hatch was born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1908, and attended Bryn Mawr College from 1925 to 1930. Prior to her marriage she was very active with the American Red Cross and American Conferences of Social Work. In 1939, Olivia Phelps Stokes married John Davis Hatch, Jr. an art collector, consultant, and museum director. They had four children: John Davis Hatch III, Daniel Lindley Hatch, James Stokes Hatch, and Sarah Stokes Hatch. Much of the correspondence in the collection is between Olivia, her husband, her mother Caroline Mitchell Phelps Stokes and her father Anson Phelps Stokes.

The final series, Collected Correspondence, is more correspondence! This correspondence is mostly between friends and relatives of the Mitchell and Stokes families.

This collection is an excellent resource for those researching family dynamics and relationships in the early to mid 20th century. The collection also provides an intimate look into the relief work of women during World War I through correspondence and diaries created by those involved directly. The work of women in the American Red Cross is also well documented through correspondence within the collection.

The Wagner Free Institute of Science is a unique and amazing place. Established in 1865 by William Wagner (1796-1885), who, for ten years prior, was holding classes and lectures out of his own home. He built the Institute at its current location.

The Wagner Free Institute of Science is a natural history museum and educational institution that is dedicated to providing free public education in the sciences, and is the oldest program of that kind in the United States. The Institute includes an exhibit gallery, classrooms, and a library.

The Natural History Museum on the third floor was organized according to Darwin’s evolutionary theory by Joseph Leidy, a renowned scientist, who became director of the academic programs of the Wagner Free Institute of Science after Wagner’s death. The Leidy’s display remains virtually untouched in the Museum to this day. The Institute very much feels like a museum within a museum.

Through processing the collections, we learned that Wagner owned a large portion of land surrounding the Institute. He built and purchased buildings that he rented as apartments or stores as revenue for the Institute. Although the Institute no longer owns these properties, they were instrumental to its founding and development. Things certainly have changed, what once was a series of late 19th century row houses is now a modern police station. Some houses in the area appear to have been built during the same era as the buildings Wagner rented out, giving us a sense of how things might have looked during his time.

I highly recommend taking a trip to the Wagner Free Institute of Science, especially if you have an interest in the natural sciences or the history of science. It is a beautiful and fascinating place.

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 MPLP processing went well. To begin, we reevaluated our processing plan and established a different set of series than originally intended. We also had to decide what to do with a third of the collection that was previously processed at the item level, but not in an intellectual order. It took some time to decode the collection, but once we had a good plan of action, the documents all fell into place. It was fun having the opportunity to read through the collection. Librarians, so I have found, have a wonderful sense of humor.

Some fun finds were:

A leather bound gold gilded book from the dedication of the W.W. Hagerty Library in October 1983.  In an acquisitions policy binder, there was a memo that read:

“Whoever finds this book: Well, this thing is so out of date that it is past the point of being laughable, therefore, we have decided to put it out of its misery by shelving it up here. And here it stayed until you picked it up, you dummy!!! Disregard anything and everything written in this book. The only reason we have not given it the heave-out is the basic librarian-like urge to preserve and protect all defenseless books.”

There were several issues of what must have been an internal newsletter titled, “The Call Number,” that contained a series of humorous articles. One folder contained several buttons with library related slogans on them — one read: “Librarians get paid weakly.” Also, one of the library directors, Richard L. Snyder, made his Annual Reports to the President enjoyable by inserting humorous chapter headings, amusing anecdotes, playful commentary, and laughable stories. All of which demonstrated his main points of the report, in what only must have been considered a refreshing change of pace for the president of the university after reading one dry annual report after another. Some of the directors were much more formal, stating: “I hereby take the pleasure in presenting the (insert year) annual report of the Drexel Institute of Technology Library.”

The Library records were both challenging and fun to process and Drexel University has been a wonderful repository to work at. We would like to thank both the Drexel University College of Medicine Archives and the Drexel University Archives and Special Collections for hosting us. Now we’re off to the next archive . . . The Wagner Free Institute of Science!