New Finding Aids Published

Our archival processors had a busy spring. Here are the latest new and updated finding aids for some of our collections:

HCLA 1648 Mary Gyla McDowell 100th Volunteer Infantry Regiment papers - This collection consists of diaries, scrapbooks of newspaper clippings, pamphlets, pencil sketches and photographs, memoirs and Veterans' society records of the 100th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry Regiment. It also includes many manuscript drafts and transcripts of war time correspondence written by Mary McDowell.

HCLA 1783 Henry Shoemaker papers - Henry W. Shoemaker, born in 1880, was an author, banker, newspaper columnist, newspaper publisher, diplomat, archivist, civil servant, and collector of Pennsylvania folklore. The collection consists of correspondence, ephemera, publications, photographs, and scrapbooks documenting Shoemaker's professional and family life and personal interests.

RBM 2385 Sir Edward Maufe architectural papers - Sir Edward Brantwood Maufe (1883-1974) was first principal architect for the United Kingdom from 1943 to 1969, noted for churches, cathedrals, and various war memorials. This collection consists of architectural drawings, blueprints, and pencil sketches as well as business records from English architect Sir Edward Maufe.

RBM 9526 Michael Dummett papers - Michael Dummett was a philosopher and advocate for racial justice who worked extensively on issues related to immigration. This collection includes materials related to his academic interests in philosophy and voting procedures and to his personal passions for electoral reform and racial equality.

RBM 9555 Wanda Gag papers - Artist/illustrator, translator and author Wanda Gág (1893-1946) created picture books that integrated a dynamic visual style and vitality with the stories. This collection consists of materials related to the book Tales from Grimm for which Gág translated, interpreted, and illustrated stories from Grimm.

PSUA 84 Bernard Asbell papers - Bernard Asbell was an associate professor of English at the Pennsylvania State University teaching nonfiction writing from 1984 until his retirement in 1992. He was the author of twelve books, most notably The Pill: A Biography of the Drug That Changed the World (1995) and Paterno: By the Book (1991). This collection of papers from Bernard Asbell documents his work as an author and includes manuscripts, notes, information files and audiotapes.

PSUA 141 A.E. Bye papers - Arthur Edwin Bye, Jr. received a bachelor's degree in landscape architecture from the Pennsylvania State University in 1942. One of his earliest projects was designing a woodland landscape for the Reisley house, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in Pleasantville, NY. Mr. Bye published several books, most notably Art into Landscape, Landscape into Art, filled with photographs, many of his own works, framing landscaped views both natural and man made that he thought successful. This collection of the papers of Arthur Edwin Bye, Jr. includes architectural drawings, articles, correspondence, plans, prints, brochures, invoices, contracts, reports, and photographs. [Still being processed by intern, updated finding aid simply reflects incorporation of recent accretions]

PSUA 149 Clarence Ray Carpenter papers - C. Ray Carpenter was research professor of psychology and anthropology, Pennsylvania State University, 1940-1970, and University of Georgia, 1970-1974. He studied primate behavior, produced primate films and videotapes, and researched communication processes.

PSUA 470 Ivan Illich audiotapes - Ivan Illich spent fall semesters in residence as a visiting faculty for Penn State's Science, Technology and Society Program from 1986 to 1996. He published a series of books treating a range of topics from gender to water to literacy during his Penn State years. This collection of the visiting faculty and social historian Ivan Illich consists of 24 audiotapes of his lectures from the 1970s, primarily about the institutionalization of education.

PSUA 478 Baseball records - The first organized Penn State baseball team played in 1875; the team was established in 1893, and a permanent coach hired in 1903. This collection includes media guides, statistics, newspaper clippings, photographs, and artifacts.

PSUA 1111 Pennsylvania State University at Erie records - Pennsylvania State University at Erie began in 1948 as The Behrend Center of Penn State, offering the first year of college courses. In 1959, it became The Behrend Campus of Penn State, and in 1973, Penn State Erie, The Behrend College, granting four-year and graduate degrees. This collection includes personnel files, continuing education course materials, records of Provost and Dean John M. Lilley's administration, the School of Science, and faculty organizations.

PSUA 1281 Ben Franklin Technology Center of Central and Northern Pennsylvania records - The first PSU-affiliated Ben Franklin Technology Center, established in 1982 as the Advanced Technology Center of Central and Northern Pennsylvania, is an investment program providing financial resources for projects to develop new products, processes, and jobs with the mission of drawing investment capital to Pennsylvania. It later was renamed the Ben Franklin Technology Center of Central and Northern Pennsylvania. The Ben Franklin Technology Center records document its administrative activities, including project summaries for technology transfers; correspondence, primarily as agreements between partners; and financial proceedings from the 1990s.

PSUA 1292 Intellectual Property Office records - The Intellectual Property Office is a unit of the Research and Technology Transfer Organization in the Office of the Senior Vice President for Research. It is responsible for managing, protecting, and licensing the intellectual property of faculty, graduate students, and staff at all Penn State University locations. The records of the Intellectual Property Office consist primarily of patent files, invention disclosures, agreements, and correspondence.

PSUA 1392 Office of Student Activities records - This collection primarily documents the allocation of student activity fees to various student organizations and events at The Pennsylvania State University. Materials include annual financial reports from student organizations, files for active and defunct student organizations, and correspondence and publications about student government, housing issues, and events, with a few photographs and t-shirts. An Office of Student Activities was active before World War II. It had as one of its primary functions the oversight of funds for student organizations and events. In 1997, it became a subordinate body of the Office of Union and Student Activities (USA).

PSUA 1410 Theta Chi, Omega Chapter records - Theta Chi, Omega chapter, was founded at Penn State College as a men's social fraternity in 1919. The collection contains a history of the Omega chapter of Theta Chi fraternity; a petition to become a chapter; newsletters (1991-2009); photographs of the Penn State campus, groups and individuals, and the fraternity; a 1919 signature book, rattle, and a picture and memento book; a drawing of the fraternity house (1990); and papers of two fraternity members.

PSUA 6421 Penn State Altoona records - Penn State Altoona traces it's history back to 1929 when Penn State College (now Penn State University) began offering technical evening classes in Altoona. This collection contains administrative records for Penn State Altoona. These materials include personnel files, legal file, records from the Chancellor's office, and other records related to the administration of Penn State Altoona.

PSUA 8488 Women's Ice Hockey records - The Penn State women's hockey team was founded as a club program in 1996 and soon became a varsity team. The team began competing at the NCAA Division I level in 2012. This collection consists of clippings, articles, press releases, and moving image recordings related to the women's ice hockey team.

PSUA 9551 Charles F. Beatty, Jr. papers - This collection consists of papers, certificates, photos, and artifacts during Charles Beatty's time as a student and football player at Penn State.

Construction Alert!

Visitors to the Special Collections Library will noticed lots of fences and construction around the Library with crosswalks and building access points changing over the summer. The Library is posting regular construction and renovation updates on the main Library blog. Please check it out before your visit.

http://sites.psu.edu/libconstruction/

Our hours of access remain the same, but road closures may delay offsite retrievals Please check with us in advance of your visit so we can make sure we have the collections you need available.

Sister Joan Chittister Archive Dedicated at Mercyhurst

This past Wednesday, Jackie Esposito (University Archivist), Tim Pyatt (Head of Special Collections), Robyn Dyke (Records Management/PSUA), Nicole Hendrix (Library Development Director), and Jane Ingold (Penn State Behrend Reference Librarian/Archivist) attended the dedication of the Sister Joan Chittister Archive at Mercyhurst University. It was a momentous occasion that celebrated the culmination of hard work, dedication, and collaboration in creating a truly amazing collection. We at Special Collections are honored and excited to make Sister Joan's collection accessible to the public and preserve it for future generations.

We would like to thank Erie TV News and the Erie Times News for their coverage of the event and permission to post their videos on our blog. You can find video clips of Sister Joan and the dedication of the Archive at Mercyhurst University here and here. Additional pictures from the event are also available on the Benedictine Sisters of Erie website here. Below, you will find the text from Jackie's speech at the ceremony, which beautifully illustrates the contributions, struggles, and the lasting legacy of Sister Joan, a truly amazing woman.
 

Dedication of Joan Chittister Room, Mercyhurst University

Wednesday, April 30, 2014

Presented by Jackie Esposito

It is my pleasure and privilege to address you this afternoon to honor Sr. Joan Chittister and her contributions to Mercyhurst University, Mount St. Benedict Monastery, Penn State University, and, perhaps most importantly, to the archival traditions of women nationally and internationally.

Sr. Joan has made numerous bold and courageous choices over the course of her life. Each choice bracketed by challenges and obstacles to be overcome. She has faced head on many battles over which she emerged victorious. But, perhaps, no action of Joan’s was quite as courageous or forward thinking as consciously and deliberately establishing research centers that document her activities as a writer, a social scientist, a theologian, and as a woman. This seemingly fearless act defies tradition and patterns of historical knowledge development. For hundreds of years, history ignored or deliberately censored the role of women and their contributions to society. Historical accounts treated women as invisible to the event surrounding them or, more likely, treated them as completely and totally non-existent. Women’s lives and narratives were unheard. Their voices were silenced.

Joan Chittister evaluated her personal contributions to society, reviewed her own history, and scanned the horizons of documentary evidence. The vision she saw was lacking in voices which she recognized as resonating her experiences, documenting the cries she had heard around the world, and, most significantly, preserving for all time the everyday lives of women. Joan stood back and decided this void had to be filled and it needed to be filled deliberately, professionally, academically, and with careful thought and planning. Joan’s desire to change the landscape of history, archival services, and personal documentation has resulted in the treasures we celebrate today.

By creating research centers at the Mount, Mercyhurst and Penn State, Joan Chittister has challenged the historical record to explain the narratives she has witnessed, to listen to the voices she has heard, to validate the experiences of women across five continents, and to honestly acknowledge that these women represent realities that must be recognized, cherished, and valued in a manner no less important than the great words of the great men vaulted in archives, museums and libraries internationally.

At an archival conference held here in Erie last year, Joan entreated the attendees to value their vocation by recognizing that “it is a matter of going where our talents, our interests, our excitement, our gifts, our skills lure us and lead us rather than struggling to go where prestige or status or power or money are our only real goals…” Without archival collections documenting the lives of women, there are no role models to follow, no leaders to emulate, no seers to open our eyes to what is possible, no traditions to follow.

The Joan Chittister Research Center at Mount St. Benedict Monastery establishes for visitors a place of peace and comfort to follow the footsteps of a woman who served a “good, holy and devoted life” within a ministry of God and in a sense of religion.

The Mercyhurst University Center establishes a sanctuary for undergraduate students to explore their own personal futures by questioning the various trends of times, recognizing social change and the engines that drove it, defining sweeping transformations, and acknowledging epochal undertakings for their soundness.

Penn State University’s Joan Chittister Collection establishes a formal repository for the various formats and creations documenting Joan’s long and distinguished career. Highlighting her correspondence, writings, broadcasts, speeches, and public policy statements, the Penn State collection is open to researchers worldwide to investigate the course of one woman’s life and the impact this life had on the thousands of people she came into contact with over the course of her varied and successful career.

As Joan has stated, “without archivists a society loses its history, whole peoples are made invisible. The world ignores the richness of difference, the lessons of social change, the paths that were tried and failed, the paths that were trodden over, the paths that were never tried at all. And great ideas are lost in cobwebs of time.” If Joan is correct and archivists are “the real keepers of a culture,” they cannot do their jobs without collaborating with courageous creators of the record. In this case, Sr. Joan Chittister.

So I ask each of you here today to contemplate two archival realities. The first is positioned solidly in the decision of Sr. Joan to preserve her heritage, to document her activities, to recognize that voices need to be heard and narratives need to be shared. The monumental work of creating the Chittister Collection has fallen onto many shoulders, has taken numerous hours, and required enormous prescience and patience. Without the day-to-day development of her documentary heritage strategy we would not be here today. My personal and professional gratitude is extended to the many hands and hearts who have developed and preserved this collection.

Second, let’s take a moment to recognize and acknowledge the leaders of the three research centers for their dedication and perspective. The Mount, Mercyhurst and Penn State have each taken on their individual responsibility to maintain and provide access to this collection in perpetuity. I don’t say the word perpetuity lightly because it assumes a commitment for generations to come. It also provides those generations with history that otherwise would be lost. These administrative decisions require significant resources and a commitment for the future that recognizes the value and need to document this particular history, to bring the voices to life once again, and to stand at the crossroads and welcome the challenges with open arms. Congratulations to the leaders who stood at the precipice and said yes to the future of knowledge for tomorrow. Well done.

I will close my remarks with a quote from the feminist author bell hooks which envelopes the concepts and ideas we have discussed so far. Hooks has stated, ”…education is and should be a place where there is a sense of struggle, where there is visible acknowledgment of the union of theory and practice, where we work together as teachers and students to overcome the estrangement and alienation that have become so much the norm…” For all of us here today, let us allow the Chittister Collection, the Chittister Research Centers, and the Chittister legacy be writ large as the opening of the doors to the sounds of joyous voices and narratives of human beings, particularly women, here in Erie, Pa., throughout the nation, across the world, and, perhaps one day, through the universe.