"Lessons from the Archives," University of Hartford Libraries Board R.G.A April 28, 2016 UNIVERSITY OF HARTFORD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES March 14, 2016 Greetings: The weather has made it near impossible not to think spring is coming! We are coming to the end of this fiscal year which means our last meeting of the University Libraries Board will be: April 28, 2016 1877 Club, Room D Noon - 2:00pm Lunch will be served Our guest speaker will be a voice from the past - Dr. Ronald Epp, previous University Librarian. Many of you will remember him and I hope those who will be meeting him for the first time will enjoy his presentation. Sean Parke, University Archivist, will also be joining the meeting. The renovation plans for the Mortensen Library are moving quickly and it is seriously exciting to be part of the future not only for the Libraries but for the entire University. We will hear an update from Institutional Development and maybe see some updated images of our soon to be construction project. I am expecting the shovel will be in the ground right after commencement this May. Please rsvp to Judy Kacmarcik (Kacmarcik@hartford.edu or 860-768-4269) by April 15. I have enclosed a parking permit for Visitors Lot K for you convenience. Please place it on your car dashboard. Hope to see you soon, Rande Randi Ashton-Pritting Director, University Libraries Enclosure 200 Bloomfield Avenue, West Hartford, CT 06117 P: 860.768.4268 F: 860.768.4274 hartford.edu University Libraries Board of Visitors April 28, 2016 1877 Club, Room D Agenda Welcome and Greetings Eunice Groark Consideration of minutes from Jan. 28, 2016 Eunice Groark Introduction of Student Employees Randi Ashton-Pritting and selection committee: Kyle Lynes, Reference Librarian Carol Lubkowski, Allen Public Services Librarian Alcadelin Herrera Aidan O'Connell Nicole Wynter Mary Young Membership Committee Report Charles Condon Introduction of Dr. Ronald Epp Randi Ashton-Pritting Introduction of Sean Parke, Archivist Randi Ashton-Pritting Presidents' College Report Nancy Mather Institutional Advancement Report Kate Pendergast $ Director's Report Randi Ashton-Pritting Next year's meetings: Oct. 25, 2016 Jan. 24, 2017 April 25, 2017 * AND OUR MYSTERY GUEST WAS RONALD H. EPP The April Board meeting is always a favorite. It is at that meeting we present some of the best student employees that University Libraries have. Without these students much of the work and many of the services offered would not be offered. Over the years, many guest speakers have been highlighted at these meetings: faculty with their new books and newsletters, student projects (Hartford Hand Project), and other very interesting University programs have been presented. At the April 2016 Board meeting, we had a voice from the past-Ronald H. Epp, PhD (previous University Librarian). While Epp was at the University of Hartford, he served not only as University Librarian but as a faculty member in philosophy. He came to the University from Choice Magazine, where he was an editor. He left the University to become the University Librarian at Southern New Hampshire State University and has since retired to Pennsylvania. However, his passion has been and will always be Acadia National Park. Epp presented his travels with his most recent book Creating Acadia National Park: the Biography of George Bucknam Dorer (Friends of Acadia, 2016). His talk included the importance of libraries and archives along with the importance of saving the past to be used in the future. Epp's travels while writing his book took him to a variety of interesting archives as well as places he wouldn't have expected (family papers). Epp's passion for Acadia has helped to make connections between the unexpected sources and possible future relocation of materials. As a life-long librarian, Epp has always documented and tried to connect information with the user. The interest in the national parks is generational. The parks are known for the expansive beauty, vibrant flora and fauna, and wild areas of solitude. August 2016 was the 100th anniversary of the National Parks and Epp's book helped to celebrate this magnificent gift that we all share. And we all look forward to Epp's next book Epp's book may be found at the Harrison University Libraries F27 M9 E77 2016. IN MEMORIAM: JUDITH PINNEY, 1929-2016 Judith Pinney died with grace and dignity on June 12, 2016. After graduating from The Chaffee School, she attended Wheaton College, The Hartt College of Music, and in 1964 received her BA, English from the University of Hartford. Pinney took post-graduate courses at Trinity College, Hartford Graduate Center, and the New England Institute for Neuro Linguistic Programming. She was a Corporate of Hartford Hospital, a board member of Planned Parenthood, American Cancer Society, American Red Cross, as well as the University of Hartford Libraries Board of Visitors. Pinney loved learning and sought to "fathom the mysteries of life." University of Hartford Library Newsletter IN MEMORIAM: SAMUEL S. FULLER, 1923-2016 Samuel S. Fuller of Suffield, passed away on November 9, 2016 at home surrounded by his Resources loving family. He graduated from Suffield Academy and received his bachelor's degree from Williams College, Williamstown, Mass. He served with the U.S. Navy during WWII. Fuller's career was in the banking world and he worked his way up the ranks to being head of the 22, #1 Trust Division for Connecticut National Bank. Fuller believed strongly in his community. Fall 2016 Those who knew and loved Fuller will pause and think of him often. He had a big presence and liked to tell a good story. He will be missed by all. 14 "Lessons from the Archives" 28 April 2016. U. of Hartford 1, Welcoming remarks and historical context. 2. Archivists traditional conserve documents that have administrative, fiscal, legal, and historical value. They add value to their collections by developing organizational structures and access strategies to encourage efficient use of their holdings. 3. I offer an unusual perspective here. I have been trained by archivists as part of my MLS. I view archives as a researcher who utilized the National Archives, the vast holdings of the Maine and Massachusetts Historical Societies, the New England Historic and Genealogical Society, and the archives within the incomparable Harvard University libraries system. 4. The archives needed for my project consisted of letters, film, diaries, wills, land transactions, maps, newspapers, reports, administrative records, scrapbooks, photographs, drawings, and ephemera. Example: Chapman Archive, not just legal archive. Also Crane Estate in Ipswich, examining papers of landscape architect C.W. Eliot 2nd...led to Charles Eliot Scrapbook and Frances R. Appleton Papers housed nearby. Harvard '75 undergrad years and obsessive details. Lesson 1: Not all archives have received adequate stewardship. 5. In Western culture, the archive is the parent to the library. In America, Harvard College provided the model for others and me. Founded by Puritans (1643) who were sticklers for record- keeping, convinced about the necessity of recording God's work in higher education. Staff attentiveness, rapid response, an archivist assumes responsibility for client needs-and anticipates future needs. 6. Also at Harvard, record keeping is carried out thoroughly: a record is kept for every course offered, for every year, including announcements, exams, reading lists, lecture notes, and theses. These are difficult to locate because of Harvard's cataloguing vocabulary. They also have kept Class Reports for the last 150 years, a compendium of living and memorial tributes to all grads, updates for each class every five years by the Class secretary. Explain how useful to me: Dorr's accident in 1925, travels. Lesson 2: Question staff about the institutional-specific idiosyncracies of their online catalog. 7. The sheer volume of some personal and family collections is daunting. At MHS alone, the grandfather of Acadia's founder, T.W. Ward, has over forty boxes of documentation; Dorr's cousin by marriage, was president of the MHS and has roughly equal quantity. Collection is not without improvement: Houghton Library and misattribution to Dorr's mother as his wife; at MHS unattributed 12-page essay on the Canton homestead in the Endicott Papers I identified stylistically as written by Dorr- catalog record changed when evidence submitted. Lesson 3: Educate staff about suspected errors. 8. The research process contains many stages. Initial investigation is based on the existing research agenda and the knowledge at that time of the researcher. In due course, the agenda changes (deepens, expands, contracts). One asks: shall I return to archive A, B, or C? The pressures of publication may cause one to abandon these options. Explain National Archives research on RG79, NPS, ignoring collections of Dorr's superiors and exiting with archival print, then smuggled back in. Lesson 4: Archival research results in loose ends which weigh upon the researchers psyche. What content have I deliberately ignored? 9. One needs to be alert to the unexpected. I knew of the Dorr family European travels from 1873-78 but the Dorr memoirs in the BHHS contained a single sentence that could have been easily ignored-reference to Rosalind and George Howard as hosts following death of William Dorr. Having never head of these two, pursuit begins. Explain. Contact Castle Howard Archives. Their curator unaware of relationship. Investigates and discovers dozens of letters, requiring transcription and analysis. Cursive handwriting habits vs. many young people who lack a skill we take as second nature. Does not bode well for historical research. Lesson 5: Persistence about the seemingly inconsequential is a hallmark of good investigation for both the researcher and the archivist. 10. Be attentive to family history. Both horizontal and vertical. Genealogists currently have a vast array of paper documentation as well as genetic information as we find on the Internet and television programs like "Finding Your Roots" hosted by Harvard historian Henry L. Gates Jr. Archival finding aids need to identify collections both near and afar that provide depth for historical researchers. Too many shallow biographies populate our bookshelves, their authors failing to explore in depth family history. This point was driven home to me by a cultural phenomena peculiar to Boston in the 19th-century. Who has heard of "Grandfather on the Brain"? Cleveland Amory in "The Proper Bostonians" explains that this elitist class regarded " family consciousness as a key to upward gravitation in the Boston social scale." One aspect of this is documenting a lifespan for one's offspring; writing a detailed family history that ideally links with one penned by one's father, his father, and so on. These provide a trove of historical detail, as in the Ward Family Papers by Samuel Gray Ward. Lesson 6: Our ignorance of family history is a likely cause of many difficulties that belie the human condition. We need to dig deeper into archival resources, especially when confronted by a throw away digital culture. CANP_Talks_LessonsfromArchives.4.16 UHA.MBOV.4.28.16