Fondly, Pennsylvania
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Fondly, Pennsylvania
Fondly, Pennsylvania is HSP's main blog. Here you will find posts on our latest projects and newest discoveries, as well articles on interesting bits of local history reflected in our collection. Whether you are doing research or just curious to know more about the behind-the-scenes work that goes on at HSP, please read, explore, and join the conversation!
It seems like only yesterday I was schlepping my luggage and 32” x 40” poster around 103-degree Austin, Texas. Alas, four months have passed since I attended the 2009 Society of American Archivists conference!
One of the larger collections in the DCA Project is the Meade collection. The collection contains a number of volumes, nearly twenty of which are the General's correspondence books dated from the early 1860s through the late 1860s. The books are all of the same make and appear to be all the same state of disrepair.
While continuing to work on the Allen collection I came across a curious set of cards. The cards were numbered in a series and each series seemed to tell some kind of moral story. Since the text is in German we had a lot of fun trying to guess what the story was just based on the illustrations. Tara O'Brien, our Director of Preservation and Conservation Services and resident German speaker/expert clued us in as to what these were and the stories they were telling, but we thought it would be fun to share these with our readers and see what you could come up with.
Today, I virtually had the processing room to myself since everyone else is out for the holiday. This is a rare occasion, and one that I usually take advantage of by playing music and sometimes singing out loud. (And you thought archivists were serious, proper folks who never raise their voices above a whisper except to scold you when you pick up your pen!)
2010 will mark the 100th anniversary of the current home of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, located at 13th and Locust streets.
It is a milestone for a building that most people walk by without giving a second glance. Just how did HSP come to live at this site? Here’s a quick rundown of our pre-Locust Street history.
Spurred by a spate of positive comments about, first, the Chew blog and now Fondly, Pennsylvania, I have been thinking a lot about how readers use the information they gather from following our blog offerings.
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While working with the Allen Family Papers I came across some travel journals with ephemera from the trips (mostly postcards) laid in. The journals span 1909 to 1934 and cover the family’s trips to Europe (with one exception of a trip to California via the Panama Canal).
This past Friday I gave a presentation in Jersey City about HSP’s Adopt-a-Collection program, which allows people to donate money earmarked for processing and conserving a specific collection. My talk was part of a panel on “creative funding” for archives, at the fall meeting of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference (MARAC). There were three of us on the panel.
Followers of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania’s Question of the Week may already be familiar with Albert J. Edmunds, HSP’s former cataloger and (alleged) resident ghost. From 1891 to 1936, Albert was responsible for describing and subject cataloging HSP’s diverse set of collection material, creating many of the handwritten and, later, typed catalog cards that are still used to access our collections today—and perhaps still typed today by Albert's spirit, as goes the local folklore.
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