We now have an online finding aid for our collection of Nineteenth Century Administrative Records. A finding aid is like a super detailed catalog record, which gives you a description of the types of materials found in the collection, and a box by box description of where items can be found. Finding aids are a great help for researchers, since they can pinpoint exactly the items they need, rather than going through each document.
The Nineteenth Century Administrative Records includes the original charter of Wesleyan University, financial information about tuition and donors, student records (including who received demerits!) and even fun stuff like lists of “materials” and “apparatus” belonging to the Wesleyan University Laboratory. It’s fascinating to find out what Wesleyan was like over a hundred years ago by using archival collections like this one.