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Creativity Is a Sleeping and Cunning Beast That Seems to Come and Go as It Pleases: The Jeffery Cotton papers
Jeffery Cotton (1957-2013) was an accomplished artist who kept passionate journals documenting his growth as a musician and as a person. He kept journals from a young age with the earliest journal in the collection written in 1975, when he was 18. Cotton diligently wrote about all details of his life and wrote in the…
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Time for a family meeting!
It is not unusual or uncommon for families to gather together for a family meeting. What is unusual, it to document it as though it were a formal council gathering of familial representatives. In processing the Lorenz and Zehring family papers, I came across something I had not seen before, minutes of family meetings, as…
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UPenn CAJS Rar Ms 620 and the mysterious Scroll of Antiochus
UPenn CAJS Rar Ms 620 is a bifolium from an Iberian bible which probably dates from the end of the 14th century or the beginning of the 15th century. This manuscript was purchased in December 2022 together with a lot of Judaica manuscripts in the collection of Marvin L. Colker, cataloger of manuscripts at Trinity…
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Penn Libraries hosts BitCurator Forum 2023: Digital Archivists across Philadelphia gather to share ideas and resources… in-person!
On March 28 and 29, 2023, three of the Penn Libraries’ digitally oriented staff–Rachel Appel (Digital Preservation Librarian), Sam Sfirri (Born-Digital Archivist), and Kelin Baldridge Smallwood (Processing Archivist) of the Born Digital Archives Preservation Program (BDAPP)–hosted two of four days of the BitCurator Forum 2023 as a local satellite even in the Class of 1978…
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Writing by Coal Oil Lamps, Editors in Exile, and Exposing the German American Bund: A Few Stories from the Career of William C. Lengel
When I began working on the papers of author, editor, and literary agent, William C. Lengel (1888-1965), the assumption I had was that Lengel and his relationship to author Theodore Dreiser is what researchers would probably find most interesting. From their standpoint as authors, Dreiser’s work is still in publication and remains of interest to…
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A letter writing cat
Whenever I process a collection, my hope is to find something fun and completely unexpected. A letter from George and Helen Seldes’s cat, Henry, would definitely fit that criterion. Journalist, author, press critic and publisher, George and his wife Helen spent the winter of 1962 in Spain. They honeymooned in Spain and would often return…
Unique at Penn 