A place for news and information about rare books, manuscripts and university archives.
Cataloging photographs can be frustrating. I’ve been working on the Middletown Press Project and one of my jobs is to sort the photographs that we received. Many of the photographs are impossible to date and the people and places impossible to name. The unidentifiable photographs are placed into one large box that sits on the … Read more
The following post was written by Doreen Mangels, a graduate student in the Simmons Graduate School of Library and Information Science. This semester Doreen was an intern in Special Collections & Archives. We are grateful for her excellent work! I recently finished processing two series in the Music Department Records collection. The first series includes … Read more
I recently have been going through press clippings from the Middletown Press. The press clippings are just one part of a larger collection of photographs, negatives, and articles from the Middletown Press that myself and two others are going through and filing. Today, I couldn’t help but stop when I came across an envelope marked … Read more
We have been adding student theses to WesScholar, our online repository of Wesleyan scholarship. We have most of the 2009 and 2008 theses, a smaller number of 2007 theses, and we’re adding earlier theses as time allows. We just added one of our all time most popular theses, The “Quails”: the History of Wesleyan University’s … Read more
Special Collections & Archives will be open today, Friday, May 8 from 2pm to 5pm, and tomorrow, Saturday, May 9, from 1pm to 4pm. The extra Saturday hours are intended to help students complete their research in our department. We send our condolences to the family and friends of Johanna Justin-Jinich. Our campus mourns together.
I recently came across an interesting collection of the Great Hollow Wilderness School, a Wesleyan run summer wilderness program for disadvantaged youth. In the late 1960s, a 1,440 acre wildlife preserve on New Fairfield (almost on the New York-Connecticut border) was will to Wesleyan and in 1969, the Great Hollow Wilderness School was created. The … Read more
Celebrate EARTH DAY with SC&A Wednesday April 22, 2009 3:00-5:00pm Don’t miss the opportunity to come to Olin Library and step into Special Collections & Archives between 3:00-5:00pm on Wednesday April 22 to see some of our materials selected specifically for our Earth Day exhibit. Our newly acquired atlas “EARTH” will be on display. Sure, … Read more
In 1939, the Wesleyan Alumni Council started collecting alumni memories, which included those of Wesleyan professors, pranks, the burning of North College in 1906, and the arrival of women in 1872. This collection, the Alumni Council Collection of Recollections, has been a pleasure to read. Because of the nature of these anecdotes, in this post … Read more
My latest processing project is that of the Middletown Manuscript collection dating from 1668 to 1937. The collection is made up of a variety of documents from the Middletown area with no real common theme except for the location. The collection is not very big, but it is filled with some interesting documents, not only … Read more
A publisher’s proof copy of a novel, with the author’s own edits and revisions hand-written throughout, gives us a rare glimpse into the author’s writing process. What sections did he or she cut? How were phrases rewritten, or words exchanged for other, better choices? We have such a view into the writing process of the … Read more
