Tag: Archival collections
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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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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…
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Alexanders & Anderson
On February 8th, the PBS series American Masters aired a brand-new two-hour documentary on Marian Anderson called “Marian Anderson: The Whole World in Her Hands.” The production staff reviewed over 600 photographs, 400 documents and 18 audio recordings from Penn Libraries Marian Anderson Collection. The result is a visually and aurally rich sotribute to one…
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The World through Ursula Sternberg’s Eyes
One of my favorite parts of my job as an archivist is to be able to step into the shoes of someone long gone and see the world through their eyes. This probably stems from my girlhood (and if I am honest, adulthood) crush on Atticus Finch, who told Scout, “you never really understand a…
Unique at Penn 