Category Archives: Mudd Library Staff

Princeton wins MARAC Finding Aid Award

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We are very pleased to announce that the Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Library’s Archival Descrip­tion work­ing group has been awarded the 2012 Fred­eric M. Miller Find­ing Aid Award by the Mid Atlantic Regional Archives Con­fer­ence (MARAC). The award rec­og­nizes out­stand­ing find­ing aids and find­ing aid sys­tems in the Mid Atlantic region. Sub­mis­sions are eval­u­ated in the areas of con­tent, design, inno­va­tion, and adher­ence to descrip­tive standards.

Main Page for the new finding aids site

Main Page for the new find­ing aids site

Princeton’s archival descrip­tion work­ing group includes two Mudd staff mem­bers: Mau­reen Calla­han and Dan San­ta­maria, who serves as chair of the group. For­mer Mudd staff mem­ber Regine Heber­lein is also a key mem­ber of the group, as are Don Thorn­bury and John Delaney from Fire­stone Library’s Depart­ment of Rare Books and Spe­cial Col­lec­tions and Jon Stroop and Shaun Ellis of the library’s dig­i­tal ini­tia­tives group.

The group was awarded first prize in the 2012 com­pe­ti­tion for findingaids.princeton.edu, the redesigned find­ing aids inter­face for descrip­tions of Princeton’s archives and man­u­scripts col­lec­tions. The new inter­face was the result of more than a year of close col­lab­o­ra­tion between Depart­ment of Rare Books and Spe­cial Col­lec­tions and Dig­i­tal Ini­tia­tives staff. The site con­tains descrip­tions of all of the archival and man­u­script col­lec­tions held at Prince­ton and includes a num­ber of inno­va­tions including:

Images of the collection in the context of the finding aid

Images of the col­lec­tion in the con­text of the find­ing aid

• Deliv­ery of images of actual col­lec­tions mate­r­ial directly from the find­ing aid interface

• Con­tents lists that are sortable by title, date, or phys­i­cal loca­tion in the collection

• Enhanced topic fea­tures, list­ing col­lec­tions related to our col­lect­ing strengths

• Bet­ter options for users to con­tact the library and con­nect with each other, includ­ing “Ask a Ques­tion” but­tons for ref­er­ence requests and com­ment­ing fea­tures for users wish­ing to request a descrip­tion enhance­ment or share infor­ma­tion within their own social networks

• Auto­mated request­ing of col­lec­tions mate­r­ial from all con­tents lists

• Direct access to com­po­nents of col­lec­tions (often boxes and fold­ers) from search results and Faceting and brows­ing options from search results.

In addi­tion to the work of the team that devel­oped the find­ing aids site, it should be noted the site is built on data cre­ated by dozens of library staff over the last sev­eral years. The inno­va­tions described above would not be pos­si­ble with­out the work of these staff mem­bers in pro­cess­ing and describ­ing our collections.

The award comes with a small mon­e­tary prize, which will be donated to a small his­tor­i­cal soci­ety in New Jer­sey. While use of the find­ing aids by our patrons is our biggest reward, it’s great to receive recog­ni­tion for the hard work that went into devel­op­ing the site. Con­grat­u­la­tions to every­one involved!

Mudd Manuscript Library Annual Report: Fiscal Year 2012

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Mudd Man­u­script Library Annual Report, FY2012

 

Sum­mary

The staff at Mudd Library had a very suc­cess­ful year in 2012 with notable high­lights that include:

  • Pre­pared for the launch of Aeon on July 1, 2012.  This required sig­nif­i­cant work from both pub­lic and tech­ni­cal ser­vices staff.
  • Sig­nif­i­cant work done to upgrade access tools, in par­tic­u­lar a new find­ing aids site launched in beta, and other work done to pre­pare for inte­gra­tion of EAD data into Primo.
  • ACLU project com­pleted, with almost 2,500 lin­ear feet of records described as part of NHPRC-funded pro­cess­ing project.
  • In addi­tion to ACLU, 1,800 lin­ear feet of other pol­icy and archives mate­ri­als described, includ­ing the Harold Med­ina Papers.
  • The Daily Prince­ton­ian dig­i­ti­za­tion com­pleted, with the years 1876–2002 now online.
  • Dis­ser­ta­tion sub­mis­sion pro­ce­dure altered to pro­vide full-text, online access via OIT’s DataSpace.
  • Hosted IMLS intern Brenda Tindal
  • Con­tin­ued high level of use of col­lec­tions, both in-house and remote, with great degree of patron sat­is­fac­tion, with PDF requests sur­pass­ing paper copies.

Major Activ­i­ties

Pub­lic Services

In the past year, the staff of the Mudd Man­u­script Library served 1,686 patrons, 211 of whom had vis­ited Mudd prior to FY12 and 678 who were new researchers. We cir­cu­lated 8,531 items (2,761 Uni­ver­sity Archives boxes/items, 5,812 Pub­lic Pol­icy Papers boxes/items, 34 Gest rare books and 14 other items). For more on par­tic­u­lar col­lec­tions used, see Appen­dix A: Most used Archives and Pol­icy col­lec­tions in FY2012.

Staff also filled 354 pho­to­copy orders total­ing 39,431 pages, of which 265 orders were deliv­ered as PDF files total­ing 27,338 pages and 89 orders were ful­filled on paper, total­ing 12,093 pages, so a PDF con­tin­ues to be the pre­ferred method for the major­ity of our users.  Scan­ning con­tin­ues to be the default method by which we pro­vide images for patrons and last year we filled 90 orders for 266 scans.

We responded to over 1,900 pieces of cor­re­spon­dence (includ­ing 882 per­tain­ing to the Uni­ver­sity Archives and 403 to the Pub­lic Pol­icy Papers; 16 requests for per­mis­sion to quote) which arrived as follows: 1,317 e-mail; 111 tele­phone; 23 sur­face mail and 1 via fax.  Indi­vid­ual cor­re­spon­dence totals:  Mau­reen Calla­han, 64; Christa Clee­ton, 7; John DeLooper, 15; Kate Dun­don, 20; Lynn Dur­gin, 108; Dave Gille­spie, 9; Adri­ane Han­son, 81; Dan Linke, 207; Christie Lutz, 184; Christie  Peter­son, 88; Amanda Pike, 340; Dan San­ta­maria, 27; Brenda Tin­dal, 18; Kris­ten Turner, 35; Helene van Rossum, 5; Ros­alba Rec­chia, 82.   The staff also responded to more than 500 brief tele­phone calls.

Col­lec­tively, the staff worked with 9 dif­fer­ent classes relat­ing to junior papers and other research/writing projects with a total of approx­i­mately 115 attendees.

In addi­tion, a large num­ber of vis­i­tors took advan­tage of Mudd’s dig­i­tal cam­era pro­gram as 279 patrons pho­tographed 6,419 items from our col­lec­tions, total­ing 73,338 images.

John DeLooper left Mudd in Sep­tem­ber to accept a ref­er­ence librar­ian posi­tion, and in early Decem­ber, Christa Clee­ton joined the Mudd staff as the new SCAIV for pub­lic ser­vices (front desk posi­tion). Christa, who had pre­vi­ously worked at Fire­stone, quickly and effi­ciently assumed the duties of the posi­tion, from greet­ing and reg­is­ter­ing patrons to over­see­ing stu­dent work­ers to car­ry­ing out spe­cial projects for Dan Linke. Sig­nif­i­cantly, Christa became the coor­di­na­tor for Mudd’s social media efforts, respon­si­ble for our blogs, Face­book page and Twit­ter feed, all of which she has ener­get­i­cally attended to. She has been attend­ing the University’s Social Media SPIN meet­ings, and work­ing directly with the University’s direc­tor of social media to imple­ment best prac­tices and draw more atten­tion to our social media out­put. Christa also assisted Lis­beth Den­nis in cre­at­ing a Face­book page for RBSC.

The biggest change in Mudd’s pub­lic ser­vices oper­a­tions this year was the imple­men­ta­tion of the Aeon cir­cu­la­tion man­age­ment sys­tem, done in con­junc­tion with the rest of RBSC. All Mudd staff attended train­ing ses­sions in Jan­u­ary, with Lutz, Pike and Clee­ton par­tic­i­pat­ing in extra train­ing and numer­ous meet­ings regard­ing imple­men­ta­tion, use, and work­flow issues. Full imple­men­ta­tion took sev­eral months, but in June we con­ducted pre­lim­i­nary tests of the sys­tem, and start­ing in July, began using the sys­tem.  Lutz, Pike and Clee­ton worked to alert cur­rent and future Mudd researchers to the changes through our web­site, social media out­lets, and in exchanges with patrons. Both expe­ri­enced and new Mudd users have been quite recep­tive to the new sys­tem and par­tic­u­larly appre­ci­ate that they can sub­mit requests for mate­ri­als prior to their arrival at Mudd. While there was some con­cern among staff that we must first send researchers to the Access Office in Fire­stone to obtain Spe­cial Col­lec­tions iden­ti­fi­ca­tion cards, we have not heard many patron com­plaints over the need to make this extra stop. How­ever, this stop is a tem­po­rary mea­sure until Mudd obtains the hard­ware and soft­ware nec­es­sary to cre­ate the ID cards here at Mudd.

Through­out the year, we received acco­lades from patrons for the qual­ity and effi­ciency of the ref­er­ence ser­vices we provided.

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Meet Mudd’s Maureen Callahan

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Mau­reen made fast friends with this warthog who was a part of the hotel where she was stay­ing while work­ing on an archives project at the Uni­ver­sity of Fort Hare in Alice, East­ern Cape, South Africa.

Name/Title: Mau­reen Calla­han — Pub­lic Pol­icy Papers Project Archivist

Title/Duties: My offi­cial job title is Pub­lic Pol­icy Papers Project Archivist. Like every­one at Mudd, I do a lot of dif­fer­ent things, but my main focus is being a good inter­me­di­ary between the feet, yards, even miles of archival records that we have and researchers who want to come to use them. I spend time fig­ur­ing out how to describe mate­ri­als in aggre­gate and make sense of their con­text and con­tent. Or, to put it another way, I dig through a lot of dusty stuff so you don’t have to.

I also work with other archivists and librar­i­ans here to lever­age the tools of a net­worked world to make our resources avail­able to peo­ple who might never be able to come to Prince­ton to do research. We’re look­ing at pos­si­bil­i­ties for mass dig­i­ti­za­tion so that we can put our actual stuff – and not just descrip­tions of it – on the internet.

Recent projects: Part of the rea­son why I enjoy my job so much is because I get to do a lot of dif­fer­ent things. Dan Linke and I are cur­rently work­ing on an exhibit about the 1912 elec­tion – read­ing about char­ac­ters like Eugene Debs, Teddy Roo­sevelt, Woodrow Wil­son (and let’s face it, to a lesser extent) William Howard Taft is extremely engag­ing, and we’re hav­ing fun think­ing about ways to explain the con­texts and par­al­lels of 1912 and today.

Over the sum­mer I processed the papers of Judge Harold R. Med­ina, a fig­ure so well-known dur­ing the 1940s and ‘50s that he made the cover of Time mag­a­zine, but who is rarely ref­er­enced today. Med­ina presided over the trial of the lead­ers of the Com­mu­nist Party, USA, and over a huge anti-trust case against invest­ment bank­ing firms in the early 1950s. After spend­ing qual­ity time with Judge Med­ina, I would say that there are pos­si­bly dozens of arti­cles and dis­ser­ta­tions to be writ­ten from the con­tent of his records. I hope that we see an uptick in researchers now that his papers are more fully processed!

Worked at Mudd since: I’ve worked at Mudd since Feb­ru­ary of 2011. Before that, I led a project to dig­i­tize rare mate­ri­als from the Mid­dle East and North Africa at George Wash­ing­ton Uni­ver­sity, and pre­vi­ous to that I was an archivist at the Penn Museum.

Why I like my job/archives: Well, at an eso­teric level, I believe that an hon­est look at the his­tor­i­cal record tends to destroy pre­vi­ous con­cep­tions of what is nor­mal, and I think that there’s some­thing extremely lib­er­at­ing about this. Even Mudd’s records of fairly main­stream char­ac­ters have the power to chal­lenge my pre­vi­ous con­cep­tions of how power presents itself, how peo­ple behave, and how the nation operates.

Much more con­cretely, I like work­ing with peo­ple and I like work­ing with tech­nol­ogy. We get a lot of ques­tions that start with “my ances­tor went to Prince­ton. Can you tell me about him?” I appre­ci­ate the chance to con­nect peo­ple with the peo­ple who came before them, and some­times sur­prise them with the rich­ness of our records. This process is reward­ing, and I’m opti­mistic about the capa­bil­i­ties of the web to bring our resources to more people.

Favorite item/collection: I’m not sure if it’s my favorite, but last year we acces­sioned the records of Elmer C. Werner, an IRS agent who had the goods on Halliburton’s (well, the group that existed that even­tu­ally became Hal­libur­ton) ille­gal con­tri­bu­tions to Lyn­don Baines Johnson’s sen­ate cam­paign. I wrote a blog post about it, which tells the whole sor­did story:

blogs.princeton.edu/mudd/2011/03/how-high-can-an-income-tax-fix-go-the-lbj-tax-scandal-that-youve-probably-never-heard-of.html

IMLS Archival Fellow: Brenda Tindal

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Brenda Tindal for HM

Brenda Tin­dal is one of nine archival fel­lows cho­sen from a very com­pet­i­tive appli­cant pool to par­tic­i­pate in Increas­ing African Amer­i­can Diver­sity in Archives: The His­to­ry­Mak­ers’ Fel­low­ship, Men­tor­ing, Train­ing and Place­ment Insti­tute, described by Har­vard Uni­ver­sity Pro­fes­sor and pre-eminent African Amer­i­can scholar Henry Louis Gates as“a won­der­fully inno­v­a­tive pro­gram.” The pro­gram addresses the “appalling low pro­por­tion” of African Amer­i­can archivists, which despite decades of effort has increased by only 1% in 22 years–from 1.8% as recorded in the Soci­ety of Amer­i­can Archivists (SAA)‘s 1982 sur­vey of its pro­fes­sion­als, to 2.8% in 2004 as recorded by the A* Census.

As an archival fel­low in res­i­dence at the See­ley G. Mudd Man­u­script Library at Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity, Tin­dal is actively engaged in pro­cess­ing archival mate­r­ial, research, ref­er­ence ser­vices, appraisal and col­lec­tion devel­op­ment, ped­a­gogy, and out­reach ini­tia­tives. Her work “advances Mudd’s com­mit­ment to mak­ing the Uni­ver­sity Archives and the Pub­lic Pol­icy Papers acces­si­ble to patrons who include fac­ulty, stu­dents, vis­it­ing schol­ars and researchers, and geneal­o­gist, among oth­ers,” says Tin­dal. It also allows her to “hone invalu­able skills and con­tinue to develop a greater lit­er­acy of the many facets of archival work within an aca­d­e­mic library.” Addi­tion­ally, Tin­dal adds, the Increas­ing African Amer­i­can Diver­sity in Archives fel­low­ship pro­gram has also given her the oppor­tu­nity to “build upon her exper­tise in African Amer­i­can his­tory and cul­ture, while cul­ti­vat­ing rela­tion­ships with like-minded archival prac­ti­tion­ers, who have a vested inter­est in diver­si­fy­ing the pro­fes­sion and the nations archival holdings.”
The goal of Increas­ing African Amer­i­can Diver­sity in Archives is to pro­vide African Amer­i­can archival col­lec­tions with African Amer­i­can archivists and other archivists qual­i­fied and inter­ested in work­ing with African Amer­i­can col­lec­tions. Ulti­mately, the pro­gram seeks to “increase the vis­i­bil­ity of the archival pro­fes­sion and African Amer­i­can col­lec­tions through pub­lic programs/outreach efforts,” says Exec­u­tive Direc­tor and Founder of The His­to­ry­Mak­ers, Julieanna L. Richardson.
“I am delighted Brenda is part of the Mudd staff,” said Uni­ver­sity Archivist Daniel J. Linke. “She brings a pas­sion for doc­u­ments grounded in a deep under­stand­ing of their his­tor­i­cal con­text. In just the first few weeks she has been here, she has been fan­tas­tic in the class­room work­ing with stu­dents, and I expect her time here will ben­e­fit us as well as her.”
Speak­ing on the impor­tance of the pro­gram, Tin­dal says, “an ini­tia­tive of this mag­ni­tude is inge­nious and has the poten­tial to rede­fine the indus­try by address­ing the paucity of African Amer­i­cans in the archival pro­fes­sion, and in turn, ele­vate the unique per­spec­tives that we bring to the domain of library and infor­ma­tion science.”
Brenda Tin­dal is a Ph.D. can­di­date in the Grad­u­ate Insti­tute of the Lib­eral Arts (Amer­i­can Stud­ies) at Emory Uni­ver­sity, where she is com­plet­ing a dis­ser­ta­tion enti­tled “’What Our Com­mon Past Had Done to Us’: Land­scapes of Mem­ory, Rep­re­sen­ta­tion, and Enact­ments of Move­ment Wid­ow­hood, 1963–2006.” Tin­dal has worked on numer­ous archival projects, includ­ing the Alice Walker Papers and the orga­ni­za­tional records of the South­ern Chris­t­ian Lead­er­ship Con­fer­ence at the Man­u­script, Archives, and Rare Book Library at Emory Uni­ver­sity and the Andrew J. Young Papers at the Auburn Avenue Research Library on African Amer­i­can Cul­ture and History.

Meet Mudd’s Jimmy Lu

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Name: Jimmy Lu ’13

Major: Mechan­i­cal and Aero­space Engineering
Title/Duties: Spe­cial Col­lec­tions Stu­dent Assis­tant. I copy and scan doc­u­ments to ful­fill patron orders. I deliver files to offices that are too valu­able to be sent via cam­pus mail. On occa­sion, I also watch over the library’s read­ing room, lest patrons misbehave.
Recent projects: Dig­i­ti­za­tion of Trustees Min­utes. From the old vol­umes of early 1900s to the con­fi­den­tial records of the recent years, I con­tribute to humanity’s tran­si­tion from our reliance on paper to a bondage to electronics.
Worked at Mudd since: Sum­mer 2010
Why I like my job/archives: It’s a nice change of pace from my course­work. I can per­form my duties while let­ting my mind drift and wan­der. The immer­sion in the his­tory of Prince­ton is also very enjoy­able. See­ing the old doc­u­ments that have sur­vived from Princeton’s baby years strength­ens my con­nec­tion to the pres­ti­gious insti­tu­tion. Addi­tion­ally, the short dis­tance between the archives and most of my classes suits my lazy self very well.
Favorite item/collection: The Daily Prince­ton­ian Records. Noth­ing cov­ers the many aspects of Prince­ton and the hap­pen­ings inside the Orange Bub­ble as com­pletely as the stu­dent news­pa­per. It’s inter­est­ing to see the changes in the writ­ing qual­ity, the focus of the arti­cles, and the tem­pera­ments of the stu­dent body through the many decades.

American Civil Liberties Union Records Processing Project Update

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The Mudd Library has reached an impor­tant mile stone in the ACLU Records Pro­cess­ing Project: com­plet­ing the col­lec­tion inven­to­ries. We now have a list of what is in each of the 2,500 boxes in the col­lec­tion. These boxes remain closed to research until July 1, 2012 pend­ing a review for restricted mate­ri­als. How­ever, researchers wish­ing to access the col­lec­tion before that date may request up to ten boxes be reviewed for imme­di­ate release. For fur­ther infor­ma­tion, please con­tact the Mudd Library at For more information on the project, you can read our previous blog entries
DAVE
We also wel­comed a new staff mem­ber to the project this sum­mer, David Gille­spie. Dave has a back­ground in Amer­i­can and mil­i­tary his­tory, with var­ied archival expe­ri­ence includ­ing research assis­tant at the Strate­gic Stud­ies Insti­tute, intern at the Get­tys­burg National Mil­i­tary Park Archives, and intern on the House Divided project cre­at­ing a dig­i­tal col­lec­tion on Dick­in­son Col­lege dur­ing the Civil War Era. On the ACLU project, he is respon­si­ble for review­ing the legal case files within the col­lec­tion for any restricted mate­ri­als, which account for about 65% of the records. Through this review, we expect to be able to open the major­ity of these mate­ri­als on July 1.

Meet Mudd’s Brandon Joseph

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Name: Bran­don Joseph ‘12

Major: His­tory, with Cer­tifi­cates in African Amer­i­can Stud­ies and Amer­i­can Studies
Title/Duties: Project Archivist Assis­tant. It is my respon­si­bil­ity to help the archivists at Mudd arrange and process col­lec­tions. My duties include col­lect­ing details related to the con­tents of col­lec­tions, rehous­ing and arrang­ing col­lec­tions, and cre­at­ing folder lists for find­ing aids that guide researchers. Occa­sion­ally, I mon­i­tor the wel­come desk, read­ing room, and page mate­ri­als for patrons.
Recent projects: For the past year, I’ve been work­ing with Adri­ane Han­son on the Amer­i­can Civil Lib­er­ties Union (ACLU) records pro­cess­ing project. Before the ACLU project, I worked on the George S. McGov­ern Papers and the James V. For­re­stal Papers.
Worked at Mudd since: Jan­u­ary 2009, the begin­ning of the sec­ond semes­ter of my fresh­man year.
Why I like my job/archives: Mudd is a relax­ing place with a great staff. I enjoy com­ing into Mudd and engag­ing with the library’s col­lec­tions in the mid­dle of a hec­tic day of class. Also, as a his­tory major and researcher, I am fas­ci­nated by some the mate­ri­als that are unearthed as I help process a col­lec­tion. At times, some of the mate­ri­als that I come across at Mudd haven’t been seen or touched in decades. It’s fun to be a part of the recov­ery of lost infor­ma­tion as I comb through the col­lec­tions at Mudd.
Favorite item/collection: The col­lec­tion of His­tor­i­cal Pho­tographs, which pro­vide a visual time­line to cam­pus events of the past. It’s inter­est­ing to see how the build­ings I live and work in on cam­pus have devel­oped over time. The Daily Prince­ton­ian Col­lec­tion is another favorite of mine. I enjoy read­ing about how Prince­to­ni­ans from dif­fer­ent eras digested and dealt with the social and admin­is­tra­tive issues that arose on campus.

Stu­dent Ques­tion: What is the favorite part of the col­lec­tions at Mudd? I love to check out the let­ters sent to the pub­lic offi­cials and orga­ni­za­tions that have col­lec­tions at Mudd. I feel as if the let­ters from the gen­eral pop­u­la­tion in par­tic­u­lar serve as a great way to mea­sure pub­lic opin­ions related to a given topic. While pro­cess­ing the McGov­ern papers, for exam­ple, I found hun­dreds of let­ters from con­cerned cit­i­zens from across the nation. Some asked the pres­i­den­tial can­di­date to endorse a par­tic­u­lar opin­ion, some praised McGov­ern for his work and wished him well dur­ing his cam­paign, while oth­ers blasted McGov­ern because of his poli­cies. There were even tons of let­ters and draw­ings from school chil­dren orga­nized by teach­ers from around the coun­try. The let­ters in col­lec­tions pro­vide access to per­spec­tives that may have been lost over time.

Meet Mudd’s Q Miceli

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Name: Q Miceli ’12

Major: Reli­gion, with cer­tifi­cates in Cre­ative Writ­ing (Poetry) and Judaic Studies

Title/Duties: Tech­ni­cal Ser­vices Stu­dent Worker. My duties include sort­ing cur­rent University-generated pub­li­ca­tions as they arrive at Mudd in a process called “acces­sion­ing;” enter­ing doc­toral dis­ser­ta­tions into a data­base (I used to pack dis­ser­ta­tions on CDs to ship to Pro­Quest, before the Uni­ver­sity started accept­ing dis­ser­ta­tions online); dig­i­tiz­ing col­lec­tions and run­ning a macro to match scanned fold­ers with phys­i­cal bar­codes; pack­ing col­lec­tions to send to off­site stor­age and scan­ning the box bar­codes to dis­charge them; look­ing up dupli­cates in the library cat­a­log; mov­ing boxes; pag­ing mate­ri­als for patrons; and some­times mon­i­tor­ing the front desk and read­ing room.

Recent projects: This past aca­d­e­mic year, I made a folder list for part the James Hugh Kee­ley, Jr. Papers (MC 191) using Archivist’s Toolkit (and a mask and gloves, since these papers had been stored in a chicken coop and sus­tained severe rodent dam­age dur­ing that time). This sum­mer, as with sum­mer 2010, I cat­a­loged over 1,000 senior the­ses, double-checking the infor­ma­tion in the depart­men­tal data­bases with the phys­i­cal copies of the the­ses, assign­ing each the­sis a num­ber, and shelv­ing the boxes of the­ses. Most recently, I sorted the University-generated acces­sions by spon­sor­ing depart­ment in the acces­sions drop box.

Q Miceli2

Worked at Mudd since: I started in May 2010 and worked full-time for most of the sum­mer. Then I con­tin­ued as a tech­ni­cal ser­vices stu­dent dur­ing the 2010-11 school year and for June 2011. After a ten-week intern­ship with the Smith­son­ian Archives of Amer­i­can Art, I returned to Mudd for the 2011-12 school year. It’s going to be dif­fi­cult to leave Mudd when I graduate!

Why I like my job/archives: “The world is quiet here.” –Lemony Snicket. The hum and energy of peo­ple work­ing to make mate­ri­als more acces­si­ble brings me a sense of peace and shows me that there can be order in the uni­verse. I like how archival work mixes the phys­i­cal (mov­ing boxes) with the intel­lec­tual (cre­at­ing intel­lec­tual order out of a col­lec­tion of mate­ri­als). I think the imme­di­ate goal of archives is to main­tain a repos­i­tory of well-ordered infor­ma­tion that is acces­si­ble to patrons, and I like know­ing that my work con­tributes to an ulti­mate goal of a well-informed public.

Favorite item/collection: It’s a toss-up between the Senior The­sis Col­lec­tion (AC 102) and the Arthur J. Hor­ton Col­lec­tion on Coed­u­ca­tion (AC 039). While cat­a­loging the Class of 2010 and the Class of 2011 senior the­ses, I read many a student’s inde­pen­dent work and saw how much stu­dents have learned (or not!) in their four years. I scanned part of the Arthur J. Hor­ton Col­lec­tion on Coed­u­ca­tion, and some of the ill-informed com­ments regard­ing the ulti­mate goals of females attend­ing universities–i.e., women only go to col­lege to get their “MRS” degree–made me laugh and feel thank­ful that the university’s atti­tude towards non-males has improved since then.

Stu­dent Ques­tion: Besides your senior inde­pen­dent work, what else from your time as a Prince­ton stu­dent would you like to keep in “Princeton’s Attic?“
I would donate my diaries and col­lages from my time at Prince­ton in order to make another pri­mary source avail­able to researchers who want to doc­u­ment the expe­ri­ence of under­grad­u­ates on cam­pus. These mate­ri­als would serve as a coun­ter­point to the crit­i­cal part of my senior the­sis. In the event of some­one try­ing to extrap­o­late from my senior the­sis my views of the world twenty years later, I would donate them posthu­mously, in neatly ordered boxes so as to save some stu­dent worker the trou­ble of deci­pher­ing my hand­writ­ing. I would also donate the orig­i­nal note cards for the recipes that I devel­oped in the With­er­spoon, Pyne, and Lock­hart kitchens for use by future under­grad­u­ates han­ker­ing after dorm-friendly cake.

Bonus Ques­tion: Why “Q?” Short answer: I was one of five Stepha­nies in my high school grad­u­at­ing class, and since I went to school with the same peo­ple from first grade on up, we had dif­fer­ent nick­names to dis­tin­guish us. Long answer: I began col­lect­ing plush cats when I was four. When I was five or six, I thought, instead of call­ing myself a pet owner–for I viewed my cat col­lec­tion as my pets and playmates–I should call myself Ownie. Ownie is a either fem­i­nized or diminu­tive ver­sion of owner. Like the nick­name Suzy Q, my mother (Joanne Naples ’85) began call­ing me Ownie Q. Then my brother short­ened that to Q. I’ve been known as Q since high school, and that’s how I sign the Honor Code.

ACLU Archivists Across Time

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Paula Jabloner (left) and Adri­ane Han­son meet for the first time at the 2011 Soci­ety of Amer­i­can Archivists meet­ing in Chicago. Jabloner man­aged Mudd Library’s first ACLU records pro­cess­ing project in the mid-1990s that addressed 1,200 lin­ear feet of records and iden­ti­fied addi­tional his­tor­i­cal records. Han­son is now address­ing 2,400 l.f. of ACLU records, includ­ing those iden­ti­fied by Jabloner. Both projects were sup­ported by the NHPRC.

University Records Manager joins the Princeton University Archives staff

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On Jan­u­ary 3, 2011 we wel­comed Anne Marie Phillips to the Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Archives staff. Anne Marie is Princeton’s first Uni­ver­sity Records Man­ager, her appoint­ment under­scor­ing Princeton’s com­mit­ment to main­tain­ing its records at a level of qual­ity that will best sup­port the work of the Uni­ver­sity and ensure the com­pre­hen­sive doc­u­men­ta­tion of Princeton’s his­tory. Though part of the Archives, Anne Marie’s port­fo­lio is to serve the entire Uni­ver­sity community’s records needs.

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Anne Marie is respon­si­ble for expand­ing and improv­ing Princeton’s cur­rent records man­age­ment pro­gram, which was cre­ated in con­junc­tion with the Office of Gen­eral Coun­sel and other Uni­ver­sity admin­is­tra­tive units, and con­sists of records trans­fer infor­ma­tion and pro­ce­dures, as well as a Gen­eral Records Sched­ule. Records trans­ferred to the Mudd Man­u­script Library are acces­sioned, processed, and made avail­able as a com­po­nent of the Uni­ver­sity Archives func­tion of Mudd. Anne Marie will be updat­ing and expand­ing the Gen­eral Records Sched­ule, cre­at­ing spe­cial­ized sched­ules for records that are unique to var­i­ous admin­is­tra­tive units, and devel­op­ing and pro­vid­ing a con­stel­la­tion of poli­cies, pro­ce­dures, and ser­vices that will make it eas­ier for Uni­ver­sity staff to deter­mine what to do with the records they cre­ate and use as they per­form their jobs.

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