Current Projects

Within the next few weeks, I hope to complete or make significant progress on the following projects:

--Digitization of selected items from the Pennington Research Association Archives, housed in the Friends Collection at Earlham College. The association has paid us to digitize, create metadata, provide full text of the documents, ensure quality control, post images and host the collection through PALNI.

--Completion of processing of the Louis and Mary Ruth Jones collection, a significant collection of genealogical material. Thanks to an industrious student worker, I am almost done with this collection.

--Moving collections around in our climate controlled space in order to provide more room for our expanding collection. This process included moving supplies out of the climate controlled area, which gave us another free range of shelves. The downside? This free range of shelves is closest to overhead pipes. Do I wish there were no overhead pipes? Yes, I do, but we are not going to be making any changes in the HVAC anytime soon, and thus we must make do with the original system built long before my arrival here (although of course I might have built it in same way considering constraints on cost and the building itself). So, the question is what goes under the pipes? We did have a leak once, though not over the shelves. I have decided, in consultation with Tom Hamm (head curator), to place the Friends Serial Group (FSG) in this space. FST is a burgeoning collection of Friends pamphlets from around the world. These are available elsewhere and thus are in this sense replacable if they were to sustain water damage. The collection also needs expansion room and currently has no room to expand where it is shelved. Thus, FSG will be in better shape with room for expansion, and we will have room to expand our manuscript collections and growing collections of Earlham donor records in better space. And I'm going to be looking for other ways to maximize our space.

--Continuing work on processing the Friends United Meeting collection. This is one of our largest collections.

--Beginning work on electronic records management at Earlham. I'm convening a committee to look specifically into managing our institutional records. This will be a long process, but I'm looking forward to getting started.

Of course, there are a number of smaller projects going on, and many researchers to help! Reference questions take up part of every day. Some smaller projects include smaller collections I work on as I have time, with help from the students of course; adding images to the new Earlham Digital Archives; and various surprises that come up every day. The surprises often are related to reference questions, of course.

I will talk about my long range goals in another post. As I think about these short term projects, and projects nearing completion, I see an emphasis on genealogy and prioritizing based on donors. The Penningtons paid us for the project, we have many genealogical researchers, and the Friends United Meeting is an organization with which we have close ties. Improving relations with donors is very important for future gifts of collections, and for financial donations as well. There is nothing startling in this observation, but I do believe it suggests we are focusing on helping the current users of our collections and those who know about our collections, especially Quaker organizations. Many of my long range projects concern bringing more people into the archives, by providing more information about our manuscript collections through online searching, meeting the standards of the archives profession, and outreach. Our core group of researchers is likely to remain genealogists, Quaker organizations, and students; but I hope with other projects to encourage other types of researchers to use our collections when appropriate. (more on our hidden collections later...)