Quakers have had an uneasy relationship with music since the late 17th century.

Although singing was recognized as an authentic expression of the connection with Spirit, too much music could become amusement and a diversion. Popular culture played with this dichotomy as demonstrated by this sheet music cover of 1919. Special Collections’ online exhibit ‘Sing ye in the spirit’ : Music & Quakerism in Harmony will show you more on the subject.

Some of the newest notes among Friends are being sung by Jon Watts who blends spirituality, Quaker history and rap. Listen to him and watch to see if your shoulders don’t begin to shake, too!

Bright Star, a movie by New Zealand film maker Jane Campion, tells the story of the secret love affair between English poet John Keats and the fashionable girl next door, Fanny Brawne.  The film makes use of several love letters between John and Fanny, including one from the Charles Roberts Autograph Letter Collection in Haverford College Special Collections.  The movie premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May and was shown at Haverford alumnus Harlan Jacobson’s Talk Cinema in Philadelphia and Bryn Mawr this past weekend.  It is scheduled to open commercially on September 18.  Subsequent posts on this blog will reveal more about the Haverford Keats letter.

Haverford College Quaker and Special Collections has gone live with our new website.  Based on the look and feel of the main Haverford College site, the new Special Collections site incorporates numerous utilities that bring dynamic content to the site.  Up-to-date calendar items appear in the Upcoming Events section alongside an improved New & Noteworthy Blog and a list of New Quaker Books.

The main page also features our Current Exhibition and open hours for the day.  A device known as the “Tridget” will be familiar to users of the main library site.  Ours is customized to include not only a search box for Tripod, but also interfaces for Triptych, the Tri-College Digital Library, online Finding Aids, and Web Archives of Haverford, Quaker and Peace related sites.

Pages below the main page include those titled About, Collections, Research, Services, Exhibitions, our annual Gest Fellowship and our Blog.  The About page contains the usual contact information and staff listing, and also includes links to our online presence on Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr.  Collections navigation now relies more heavily on visual representations of our offerings and includes when possible search boxes for individual subcollections.  Several new Finding Aids have been put online recently and there are many more to come in the following months.

The new Research page includes tips for successful research in Special Collections and links to subject guides of relevance to those using our resources.  The Services page now includes a fee schedule for Copying, Scanning, and so on.  The Exhibitions page gives detailed information on our current and past exhibits, including ongoing online exhibits.  The Gest Fellowship page includes the current instructions and criteria for applying for our one-month research fellowships and includes a list of all current and former Gest Fellows, their institutional affiliations and the topics of their study.

Our New and Noteworthy Blog is a feature continuing from the old site, but we have switched blogging software to WordPress, which allows our content to be featured on the College’s main site and which also feeds to our main page as well as to Twitter and Facebook.  The Blog and our New Quaker Books features may be accessed by subscription using an RSS news reader as well as via e-mail notification.

The process of designing these new pages was a several-months long undertaking led by Digital Collections Librarian, David Conners.  Several of our student employees did much of the coding and photography featured on the site, and staff of the Communications office and the Library were invaluable in helping us with some of the more advanced dynamic applications.  We hope you enjoy the new site and find it useful.  Questions and suggestions may be sent to us at hc-special@haverford.edu.

Lucy Saxon (’06) is pleased to return to the Haverford College Special & Quaker Collections this summer for an internship culminating her library school experience.  She will graduate in August from San Jose State University with a Masters in Library and Information Science.  Lucy was a Comparative Literature Major, and is interested in archives and special collections, language, literature, history, and quakerism.
This summer, she is assisting Digital Collections Librarian David Conners in cleaning up and standardizing records from many databases as they are combined into the new Collections Manager system.  She is thrilled to be working on the Fine Arts Collection, doing cataloging, and helping to make part of the collection available online.  She will also help to write cataloging documentation for future catalogers.  She is delighted to be back in the Special Collections where her undergraduate work inspired her decision to pursue a career in librarianship, and is enjoying another beautiful summer on campus.

As 2009 is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin and the 150th anniversary of the printing of On the Origin of Species, we recently went through the process of adding our First Edition copy to the official Darwin Census. 

The objectives of the Darwin Census are:

1. to establish the frequency of the known variants;
2. to identify any unknown variants; and
3. to locate missing presentation copies.

Eventually the results of the Census will be posted to Darwin Online.

In the process of registering our copy we noted that while ours is indeed a first edition text, it is housed in a second edition binding!  This was not an uncommon occurrence for books having seen some use to be re-cased in a newer binding at a later date.  Distinguishing features of a First Edition text include the publication date of 1859 and only two quotations on the verso opposite the title page.  It also has the word “speceies” misspelled on page 20, line 11.  The distinguishing feature of our Second Edition binding is a single full point (“.”) after the word MURRAY at the bottom of the spine!

Our copy is in good condition and the text is complete, including the advertisements at the back of the book.  It has some minor foxing and noticeable fingerprints at the bottom of many of the pages, a sure sign of use.  Our reader also noted the misspelling on page 20 and has crossed out the offending letter in pencil!  It contains a bookplate for previous owner John Hadmar Sticht, a doctor who received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1952.  It was purchased by the College in 1970.

Our copy is now known as No. 10036 and, like all of our rare books, is available for viewing in the Special Collections Reading Room.

Our colleagues from across the pond at Friends House Library, London send word of improved access to their pre-1801 printed materials:

Over the past two years the Library at Friends House, London has been matching its holdings of all its early Quaker writings to the English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC) database and has now downloaded these records to its own online catalogue.

Thanks to funding from the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, the Pilgrim Trust and the Sir James Reckitt Charity a further 7,400 titles are now available for users to search via our online web catalogue.

During the course of this project we found that over 1000 items were not known outside this Library. Photographed & described, their bibliographic records now appear with 470,000 other mainly English language titles published between 1473 and 1800 from over 2000 libraries worldwide on the ESTC database.

You no longer need to visit or contact the Library to find out if we hold a pre-1801 item. You can search online under author, title, keyword, corporate author, year of publication or date range, publication type, classification, language as well as ESTC number, Wing and Smith references; a great improvement from the card catalogue.

For more information, please contact:

Library of the Religious Society of Friends
Friends House
173-7 Euston Road
London NW1 2BJ
T: +44 (0)20 7663 1135
E:  library at quaker.org.uk

The Cope Evans Family Papers are now available online in Triptych, the Tri-College digital library.  The collection contains almost 3,000 letters, photographs, and business documents of the closely related Quaker families of Cope and Evans of Germantown, Pennsylvania, written between 1732-1911. Letters discuss family, friends and home life, reflecting the social environment of these Quaker families. Other topics to be found within the letters include local history, Haverford history, travels in Europe, education, illness and death, health concerns, and discussions of national events such as the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the assassinations of Presidents Lincoln and McKinley.

Our hours for the week of March 9-13 will be:

• Monday, March 9: 9am – 12:30pm, 1:30pm – 4pm
• Tuesday, March 10: 9am – 12:30pm, 1:30pm – 4pm
• Wednesday, March 11: 9am – 12:30pm, 1:30pm – 4pm
• Thursday, March 12: 9am – 11:30am ONLY
• Friday, March 13: CLOSED

We will resume our regular hours on Monday, March 16.

The Friends Historical Association, with its office in the Quaker Collection, has accepted an invitation to join with the North Carolina Friends Historical Society. Members of both organizations will now benefit from a wider Quaker perspective in scholarly publications concerning the history of the Society of Friends.

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