In my current project at the SCRC, I have the good fortune of being able to check transcriptions from our Civil War Transcription Project that have recently been uploaded to our Digital Collections database. I am thrilled to be able to participate in this auspicious undertaking. We currently have over 980 documents uploaded, all of which must be transcribed by the hundreds of phenomenal volunteers who donate their time reading and transcribing them. As the transcriptions come in, they are uploaded and subsequently verified by a staff member. Lately, that staff member has been me.
When I started my work in the Special Collections Research Center here at Swem Library in August, one of my first projects entailed uploading metadata to our online database for the Nathaniel V. Watkins Family Papers, 1846-1889. This collection is now digitized to help preserve it, but is also part of our ongoing Civil War Transcription Project. All of the Watkins Papers from the Civil War era are currently online, which means that they are now ready to be transcribed and shared with researches worldwide. (more…)
The Special Collections Research Center (SCRC) at Swem Library contains numerous sources on a wide range of topics. For the past few months, I have been creating Guides that organize a number of these sources into specific categories. Essentially, the Guides are supposed to highlight those sources that might be of some relevance to particular topics.
The Special Collections Research Center at Swem Library is currently working on a transcription initiative as part of the “From Fights to Rights: The Long Road to a More Perfect Union” project. The transcription work is a massive effort by volunteers to transcribe selected documents such as diaries and letters and make them available online for current and future researchers. Currently, I am working on creating scans and descriptions of selected letters and documents from the Tucker-Coleman Papers, a large collection that covers dates from 1664 to 1945. As part of the transcription project, I am in the process of uploading letters from the collection written between 1861 and 1865, during the Civil War.
Well, I have gotten pretty far behind on updating you all on the new and exciting materials that have recently come into the Special Collections Research Center. But no more! In a few quick posts, I shall updated you on all of these wonderful new materials.
Five years ago, I took my first and only trip out of the United States, spending 10 days in France on a trip with my AP French class. Before splitting off into the suburban homes of our host families, we visited Paris and parts of the Loire Valley, where we toured numerous castles, cathedrals, and historic towns. Since then, I have often dreamed of returning to France and seeing other European countries for the first time. What a treat it was, then, to process the MurielMcCormick Papers this semester.
The Special Collections Research Center at Swem Library has begun a transcription initiative as part of the “From Fights to Rights: The Long Road to a More Perfect Union” project. The transcription work is a massive effort by volunteers to transcribe selected documents such as diaries and letters and make them available online. One of the first documents selected for transcription is the diary of Asa John Wyatt. Wyatt was a Confederate officer in Company I of the 21st regiment of the Virginia Infantry under the command of Stonewall Jackson. His diary includes accounts of his participation in Jackson’s Shenandoah Valley Campaign in the spring of 1862.
One of the intriguing features of working at the Special Collections Research Center is the variety of material that I have had the opportunity to work with over the course of my time here. Between August 2010 when I began working at the SCRC until now in April 2011 I have been able to work with, process, organize, and write finding aids for several collections with diverse subjects that have fallen into a wide range of chronological periods. Some of the collections I’ve worked with have included American Civil War letters from a Union soldier in the 1860s, love letter correspondence between a young couple in 1910s and 1920s Virginia, papers of an African American civil rights activist in 1960s Virginia, early twentieth century broadsides and announcements for traveling vaudeville shows from a small Virginia printing company, late eighteenth century sale receipts and legal documents from Rockingham County, Virginia (some of which referenced the Revolution or British rule under George III), and the papers of a photographic historian of the 1970s living in New York City. The collection that I most recently finished organizing and writing a finding aid for, however, contained by far the most interesting group of documents I had the opportunity to work with over the course of the past year – the Chester McNerney Collection.
Following my work on the Johnson-Nance Papers which I discussed in my last post, I began processing the Georgia Ragsdale Curtis Papers which I worked on during the months of November and December 2010. After this I organized a couple smaller collections before beginning work on the William Welling Papers, a collection I processed during the months of February and March 2011. Both the Ragsdale Curtis and Welling papers had similarities in the fact that they were both large, unorganized collections of documents created by or collected primarily by single individuals. The bulk of the material in both collections also dated to roughly the same time period, the 1960s and 1970s. The main parallel I drew between the two collections didn’t have to do with the documents they were made up of, though, but how I approached processing them and the transformative meaning they took as I worked my way through them. When I first started working with both the Ragsdale Curtis Papers and the Welling Papers, it was unclear what their significance was, most of the papers in each pertaining to seemingly mundane aspects of their lives. As I worked through the organization of each collection and wrote up their respective finding aids, however, I came to construct a clearer portrait of Georgia Ragsdale Curtis and William Welling and their individual importance.