Archives and Special Collections Interest Group

Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Minutes for October 1, 2009 meeting

Present:
Sarah Campbell, Margaret Anderson, Mark Savolis, Mott Linn, Dodie Gaudet, Kathy Markees, Fordyce Williams, Ellen More (chair), Alice Howe

The group met for conversation and lunch at the Worcester Art Museum café—many thanks to Debby Aframe for organizing this! The following are our updates:
Alice continues to be busy processing collections ("status quo").

Fordyce announced a major weekend of activities at Clark to commemorate the visit of Freud, Jung, Ferenczi and others to Clark University in 1909. It was Freud's only visit to the U.S. He received an honorary degree, and considered this visit instrumental in Americans' growing recognition of psychoanalysis. The Archives have been busy with requests for photographs and other materials to support the event. In conjunction with these events, the Friends of the Goddard Library will host Sophie Freud on Oct. 15. It's open to the public. In addition, she has completed an exhibit for the Digital Archives project.

Kathy described her work as "nothing but Dickens!" The WPI Dickens project to digitize their extensive holdings of original, chapter-by-chapter serial publications of Dickens' works is proceeding on schedule. They are busy capturing images, creating OCR files, etc. Kathy recently received a grant to acquire a series of conservation/preservation volumes. She and the Conservation lab were featured in a story in the Worcester Telegram and Gazette.

Dodie announced that the CMRLS is considering consolidating its several statewide offices into only 2 or 3 regions. The Central MA region is funded until June 30, and they are waiting to see what the reorganization will mean for their office.

Mott reported that the Clark library and archives have finally "settled back in" after months of an extensive remodeling project. He is now working with a university-wide records management team to create a new system for the university, one that will incorporate the Archives. This is the first time they have undertaken this.

Mark Holy Cross is currently preparing for its re-accreditation visits, necessitating much documentation of the Archives' work over the past few years. In preparation for the Information Privacy Act which will go into effect in 2010, the archives has scanned all digital files to "cleanse" them of personal identifiers such as SS #s, dates of birth, etc. Mark recently created an acquisitions advisory committee to help in making acquisition decisions.

Margaret has become a "lone arranger" since the departure of Rodney Obien to the wilds of New Hampshire. (Hi Rodney—we miss you.) She is currently immersed in processing WPI's video games collection, has completed the inventory of the recently acquired Morgan Construction Company papers, organizing files from the Provost's office of former WPI faculty prior to processing them, and generally moving forward with the arranging and describing backlog with which we are all familiar.

Sarah is working on the Holy Cross Archives' web site and has just launched a new exhibition, "Dinand Library Then and Now." She has created a database program for their photograph collection, digitizing the Holy Cross student newspaper collection, and creating a new web exhibit, "Mercy and Martyrdom: The El Salvadoran Martyrs."

Ellen, speaking for herself and for Kris Reinhard, described the work she and Kris are doing to prepare for an event October 13 at UMass Medical School in conjunction with American Archives month, titled "Celebrating the History of UMass Medical School: Look How Far We've Come (and how we got started)." Kris will host an open house at the Archives/Rare Book Room. Ellen has organized a luncheon panel presentation of 6 faculty members from the school's first decade, representing teaching, research, and clinical care. Kris has put together a large window display on the Archives with early pictures of many faculty, administrators, and staff. We're asking people to identify them ("Who Am I?"). Kris is about to complete a finding aid for our publications collection and recently put together a poster on the history of our Graduate School of Nursing in time for its accreditation site visit. Ellen is teaching an elective in History of Medicine and continuing to do archival research and oral history interviews on the history of UMMS. She has written 2 articles on this history in the Library's publication, SouteReview. In August she gave a talk at Washington University in St. Louis for the opening of the NLM/ALA traveling exhibition, "Changing the Face of Medicine."

Our next 2 meetings will be held at Holy Cross in the spring and WPI next fall.
Respectfully submitted,
Ellen More