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If Today Is Sunday, This Must Be 1798
A section of a diary kept between 1797 and 1800 by the Quaker farmer Jacob Peirce recently joined the collections of the Penn Libraries as Oversize Ms. Codex 2079, thanks to the Philadelphia Society for Promoting Agriculture. Peirce was a busy man, but he found time to write brief entries about the work of the […]
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Fiddle Music, Fishing and Dreaming of Michigan
As a new project processing archivist at Penn Libraries, I had the distinct pleasure of beginning my term at Kislak by processing the H. Owen Reed papers (1920-2016), gifted to Penn by his grandson. Herbert Owen Reed (1910-2014) was an American composer, musician, music educator and author. Born in Odessa, Missouri to musical parents (his […]
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Posters from the uprising
When this portfolio of Mexican student posters arrived at my desk for cataloging I was struck by the image on the cover, and questions started to form in my mind. What was the meaning of this man, padlocked chain in his mouth, with the ironic text below “Libertad de expresión” followed by what looked like […]
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Folksonomy and films
(Time travel with film archives) Though the Penn Museum has many different film collections, the everlasting 16mm Kodachrome films of Penn graduate Watson Kintner (1890-1979) have to be the most gratifying in that they keep revealing new elements and finding new audiences at every turn. Though understood to be amateur travelogue films, what one immediately […]
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Ghostly hints of lives lived
Stephan Loewentheil and William H. Miller, III, recently gifted the Kislak Center one of the most amazing collections on which I have had the privilege to work … the Edward S. Curtis collection of interpositive glass plates and papers, 1899-1929. While the bulk of the gift consists of 168 interpositive glass plates used in the […]
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Infinite Hope: The Wonderful World of Ashley Bryan
After nearly 19 months of work, through campus shut-downs and work-from-home orders due to the pandemic, it is my distinct pleasure to have completed processing the Ashley Bryan papers, a collection that is near and dear to my heart as a person and archivist. My awareness of this collection extends all the way back to […]
Unique at Penn 