Author: dvarchivists

Archives Month Philly: Free Library of Philadelphia Rare Book tour and exhibitions

October 25, 2014

Currently, the Rare Book Department at the Free Library of Philadelphia is providing tours which include an introduction to the history of the book showing select items from the collections, including cuneiform tablets, a section of a papyrus scroll, a medieval manuscript and a leaf from a Gutenberg Bible. The tour also includes a visit … More Archives Month Philly: Free Library of Philadelphia Rare Book tour and exhibitions

Archives Month Philly: Free exhibit on Delaware River life in Bristol

October 22, 2014

Contributed by Shaun Kirkpatrick Did you know that an amusement park once sat on an island in the middle of the Delaware River?  Or that a Bristol, Pa.-to-Burlington, N.J. ferry in the 1750s charged 6 pence for a pig to ride (the same as a human), unless the pig was dead…in which case it was … More Archives Month Philly: Free exhibit on Delaware River life in Bristol

Archives Month Philly: Making sauerkraut at the German Society

October 22, 2014

Contributed by Shaun Kirkpatrick On Oct. 14 at the German Society of Pennsylvania (GSP), local food writer Marisa McClelland led a workshop on making that definitively German dish, sauerkraut.  For a little over an hour, McClelland helped attendees use a tablespoon of salt and some mixing and mashing to turn two pounds of cabbage into … More Archives Month Philly: Making sauerkraut at the German Society

Archives Month Philly Returns!

October 1, 2014

Archives Month Philly, a month-long festival of history-themed events at Philadelphia’s vibrant and diverse archives, special collections libraries, and cultural institutions, returns for a second year. This year’s headlining events include a chance to view historic lantern slides, an exclusive look at the stories of Philadelphia’s World War I dead, a revealing talk on the … More Archives Month Philly Returns!

Remembering the Great War with Operation War Diary

September 26, 2014

Contributed by Bryan J. Dickerson In the summer of 1914, the Great Powers of Europe plunged into the first of two calamitous world wars.   This year, as part of the efforts to commemorate the 100th Anniversary of the Great War, the National Archives of the United Kingdom, the Imperial War Museum and Zooniverse have teamed … More Remembering the Great War with Operation War Diary

Hidden Images, New Technologies: Improving Access to HSP’s Visual Materials

September 9, 2014

Posted on behalf of Sara Borden: For the last year or so, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania (HSP) has been working on a project to improve the image viewer that we use on our Digital Library website.  Utilizing Linked Open Data and RDF, the project will also enhance the discoverability of our graphics materials and allow … More Hidden Images, New Technologies: Improving Access to HSP’s Visual Materials

New Gallery: Colonization in the Foulke Papers

August 21, 2014

Contributed by Scott Ziegler William Parker Foulke, widely remembered for discovering the first dinosaur bones in America, was deeply interested in a number of reform causes. Not the least of which was the effort to colonize freed slaves in Africa. A new gallery, Colonization in the Foulke Papers, focuses on these efforts. Building off of the African … More New Gallery: Colonization in the Foulke Papers

In Church Attics, Clues to the Private Life of Early America

August 1, 2014

From the New York Times STURBRIDGE, Mass. — Sarah Blanchard was sorry she skipped a worship service. Sarah Wood apologized for denouncing infant baptisms. And as for the Cheneys, Joseph and Abigail? Well, “with shame, humiliation and sorrow,” they acknowledged having had sex before marriage. More than 250 years ago, their confessions of sin were … More In Church Attics, Clues to the Private Life of Early America

Meet Chelsea Houck!

August 1, 2014

Contributed by Barbara Anne Beaucar   Chelsea has been working as a volunteer intern at the Barnes Foundation Archives in Merion since November 2013, helping the archivists with a variety of tasks from photocopying, scanning, pulling and re-filing records for researchers to cataloguing and data clean-up in the collections management database. Assigned her own project, … More Meet Chelsea Houck!