Mary Elizabeth Hallock Greenewalt and the Magical, Mystical, Musical Finding Aids

Yesterday, April 5th, 2011, we at HSP hosted an event for the new, Musical Finding Aid. What does this mean, you ask? Do not fret, if all your questions aren't answered in the next paragraphs please leave a comment!

Last year Matt Shoemaker, director of digital collections and systems, was awarded a grant from the Heritage Philadelphia Program (HPP). This grant helps institutions like HSP do small, creative, out of the box projects. This year's project, envisioned by Matt, was to select a small group musicians to compose a score no shorter than 1 minute. This score would reflect the feel and subtleties of the Mary Elizabeth Hallock Greenewalt Collection. This would, of course, express aspects of the collection which aren't available in the neutral voice of the written finding aid. Matt did an excellent job explaining this:

"Now a finding aid, in case you do not know, is a standard research tool at archives. It is a non-interpretive tool for patrons of archives so they can more easily find the materials they would like to use. It provides some background information on the collection and what it deals with, information on how it is organized and has different levels of description to assist people about what they should look at, for their personal purposes...Finding aids are very structured, matter-of-fact, and are very careful to not impart any of the archivist's preconceptions...When my team first thought of this project we wanted to explore the other methods for people to utilize information for fulfilling their research needs as well as try to give a taste of this feeling to researchers considering the collection."

His words aptly sum up the trajectory of this project called the Musical Finding Aid. It was brought into fruition by 5 musicians: Willhem Echivarria, Maurice Wright, Ted Houghtaling, Max Lawrence and Andrea Clearfield. To hear their musical creations click on the links below.

This link refers back to an earlier blog and gives great background information about the musicians:

http://processandpreserve.wordpress.com/2010/11/03/greenewaltmfa/

This link is where the musical finding aid is permanently hosted on HSP's website:

http://www2.hsp.org/collections/manuscripts/g/0867Musical.html

The event last night was graciously made possible by Pennsylvania Humanities Council, HSP staff volunteers, the finding aid musicians, HPP and of course Matt Shoemaker. For those that did make the event and for those that could not be there please feel free to browse the photos below.