In the fall of 2008, during the first semester of my freshman year here at Haverford,  I started working in Special Collections with Digital Collections Librarian David Conners to finish the Cope Evans project.  Started in 2002, the project was to digitize the Cope Evans Family Papers collection in order to make each item available on the web.  This involved reading, scanning, and transcribing almost 3,000 items dating from the 18th to the 20th century.  I had very little knowledge of the Society of Friends before coming to Haverford, and working with this collection of papers was a great way for me to really understand the essence of Quakerism.

At the culmination of the project in the spring of 2009, an event was organized to unveil the work that all of the students, interns, fellows, and librarians had been doing for the project.  Members of the Cope and Evans families were invited, as well as other members of the community, and anyone who had worked on the project in the past.  I spoke on the student panel at the event, and wrote a couple of pieces about some themes that arose from the letters, which were the compiled into a booklet about the collection.

Currently, I am working with Manuscripts Librarian and College Archivist Diana Franzusoff Peterson as the student archivist. I plan to major in Anthropology with a minor in Spanish. I also study Arabic, and plan to spend my junior year abroad in Egypt.

Charlotte Brooks, Marlis Gildemeister, Laurence Wylie, and an unidentified woman learn auto mechanics as part of the Relief and Reconstruction master’s degree program during World War II.

The College Archives maintains a collection of historic photos organized by subject for patrons to view. This photo and many others are available online through Triptych, the Tri-College Digital Library.

Today we’re delivering 172 audio tapes to Safe Sound Archive in Philadelphia where they will be put in cold storage to ensure their longevity. The tapes come from both the Quaker Collection and College Archives and include such content as the 1941 acceptance speech of Haverford honorary degree recipient Herbert Hoover and Howard Brinton’s 1960s lectures on Quakerism as well as a series of oral histories conducted from the 1990s through early 2000s on the history of Haverford College. The recordings, comprised of reel-to-reels and cassettes, have all been digitized and are gradually being uploaded to our DSpace repository. The digitized recordings will help to make the content more easily accessible, while the storage of the originals at one of the country’s premiere commercial audio archives will ensure that the master recordings remain viable should we ever need to transfer them again.  Special Collections maintains hundreds more audio and video recordings and as time and funding allow we will continue to digitize and upload more content.

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.

Special Collections puts many of its digitized objects into Triptych: the tri-college digital library.  Materials documenting the history of the College can now be found in one collection, "The History of Haverford College."  The collection combines over 500 historic photographs, documents from the College Archives, and published histories of the College.

Students working in Special Collections this summer have published online 1,100 letters from the Cope Evans Family Papers, beating their goal by over 100 letters.  In addition to scanning, the students researched genealogical information about the people mentioned in the letters, and cataloged the letters before posting them to Triptych, the Tri-College Digital Library.  The team consisted of (from left-to-right) Luke Mueller, MLS graduate student at Drexel University; Hannah Lonky, HC ‘10 history major; Sara Bornstein, HC ‘09 history major; and Mara Miller, HC ‘10 classics major.     

Technologist Josh Peterson talks in this podcast at Seattle’s “Idea Day” about how the current development known as Web 2.0 can be explained by the thoughts and actions of Benjamin Franklin. Web 2.0 has been described as “a social phenomenon referring to an approach to creating and distributing Web content itself, characterised by open communication, decentralization of authority, freedom to share and re-use, and ‘the market as a conversation’.”