Archive Adventures: Celebrate!

October is my favorite month for a variety of reasons: the crisp air and vibrant costumes of the trees, the way the sun slants across the Valley just before dusk, and Halloween. Add this to a certain celebration across America this month and it's a bit like opening my Christmas gift a couple months early!

From basic "What is an archive?" lessons to in-depth lectures on records managements, we take this time to say it loud and proud to the public..."Archivists make it last longer!" It's all about making the artifacts and records we hold more visible, more accessible, and safeguarded for future generations. And we're not just talking to the public about it! The celebration is also dedicated to collaboration between archives, sharing information to help each other provide better services and practices. Though it's already the end of the month, archives are always around so it's basically a year-long thing!

This year, Pennsylvania is celebrating the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, making it the focus for our state's Archives Month.  Though it was in its infancy at the beginning of the war, Penn State has a great collection of Civil War papers from around the state. The James C. Stevenson papers provide unparalleled documentation in the form of diaries kept during his four years of service. He talks about everything from his fellow soldiers' experiences to life after the war. And if you are a photo hound, you'll get plenty of pictures of his regiment, the (PA 100th Volunteer Infantry) Roundheads!

We also have Asa Martin's (founder of the Pennsylvania Historical Society) collection, which includes letters from the time of the Civil War, land records, and documents from the early-mid 19th century. You'll have to come in to find more on the Civil War and explore the archives a bit. It's scary (good)  how much you can find!

From all of us in Special Collections (dressed up as our Records Management mascot REMSBY), Happy Halloween!

A Conversation with Owen William of the Folger Shakespeare Library

Monday, October 7, 2013

4:00 p.m. Mann Assembly Room, 103 Paterno Library

Owen Williams, the Folger Institute’s Assistant Director for Scholarly Programs, will talk about the research and educational opportunities at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC. He will focus on participation in Institute seminars, conferences, and workshops. He will also be happy to discuss fellowships and other funding opportunities, the Folger collections, and Folger-based digital resources and digital humanities initiatives.   

Penn State is a member of the Folger Institute’s Consortium, a group of forty-four universities here and abroad that plans an annual slate of advanced scholarly programs. Our membership gives Penn State faculty and graduate students priority in admission and eligibility for grants-in-aid to fund travel and lodging. These programs regularly include a variety of topical seminars, conferences, workshops, and symposia in addition to paleography training, dissertation seminars, and M.A.-level research methods courses. Recent offerings have included a three-week institute on “Early Modern Digital Agendas” supported by the NEH Office of Digital Humanities, a workshop on teaching the History of the Book, and a faculty weekend seminar on orality and literacy. 

This spring, upcoming programs include a two-day faculty seminar on “Rogues, Gypsies, and Outsiders: The Marginal People of Early Modern England” (directed by David Cressy); a one-day symposium on “Borders and Boundaries in Early Modern Jewish History”; “Shakespeare and the Problem of Biography,” a major conference sponsored by an NEH Collaborative Research grant; and a month-long Mellon Summer Institute on English Paleography.  

Like the Folger collection itself, the reach of the Folger programming is broad, and offerings include transatlantic and global topics as well as British literature and history. They engage scholars in a variety of fields, including European history, Asian studies, library sciences, continental literatures, theater history, and early American studies. 

The Folger also sponsors short-term and long-term research fellowships, which several Penn State faculty members have enjoyed. 

This talk is sponsored by the University Libraries, The Committee for Early Modern Studies, and the Material Text Workshop. For more information, please contact Marcy North mln14@psu.edu

What's the Buzz?

The fall semester has officially begun and we're busy as bees in the department. What's bugging me, though, is that with this semester's new swarm (Just kidding, I love you guys!!) I haven't had the time to sit down and write some posts. Well, I heard about something from one of my colleagues that is just the bees knees and figured, "Sweet! I've got to put this in."

Our own James Frazier, an entomologist here at PSU, is in the article that's all about the "Plight of the Bees" in the face of recent Colony Collapse Disorder. And I know that I'm on here making puns, but it's a pretty big deal. When our fuzzy friends vanish, so does our pollination...which means adios agriculture.

Being an agricultural school at heart, PSU obviously got on the apiary trail. One of those amazing trailblazers was Jonathan W. White, Jr., who had a 60-year career with honey and bees. And we have his papers, which means a sweet deal for you. I have to admit, I'm not the biggest fan of bugs, but when you get down to it bees are fascinating. They talk through dance, only produce 1/12th a teaspoon of honey in their entire lives, and are crucial for many crops across the world. According to one of our former employees, they even have kind of their own personalities hive-wise. We really miss her bee stories, but hope she was able to get new hives at new location down south!

If bees are your thing, come on in! We have more resources from the Department of Entomology, and you might even find in the course of your research that there's more to bees than just the buzz.