In honor of the 71st anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, I wanted to highlight two interesting photo albums created by World War II soldiers who were stationed at the Hawaiian naval base at different times during the war.

Norman C. Brauer, Jr. wasn’t stationed at Pearl Harbor during the attack; he was sent to the base afterward, working to salvage ships such as the USS Oklahoma. Brauer's scrapbook documents the success of salvage operations, and some of the Hawaiian-themed festivities the servicemen enjoyed on base.

Alice H. Ambler (1889-1981) was an independent, modern woman. Here she is pictured in her driver's license for 1923--the same year she entered a master's degree program at Columbia University. The Alice H. Ambler family papers at the Plymouth Meeting Historical Society tell Alice's story, plus the stories of other history-making Ambler women. 

Over the past few weeks, my new co-surveyor Faith Charlton and I have been surveying some collections here at HSP in order to get Faith up to speed with the HCI-PSAR Survey Method. Our methodology is nothing revolutionary--on the contrary, it is intentionally conventional because we would like our data to be comparable to similar projects. However, over the past year we found that a few adaptations and refinements were necessary when translating the basic archival survey tool into the small repository context.

We hope that everyone is safe, dry, and secure in the wake of "Frankenstorm" Sandy! With all the excitement of the past few days, now is a good time to write--or review--the disaster plan for your institution.