Princeton’s Mudd Manuscript Library primarily contains the University Archives, documenting University life, administration and research, and the Public Policy Papers collection, containing rare and unique items from 20th-century American governance.
Library staff highlight new collections, exhibitions and items of general interest on the Mudd Manuscript Library Blog. More for highlights from recent blogs.
A few years ago, University archivist Dan Linke was leading an undergraduate history seminar through Princeton’s collection of papers of the American Civil Liberties Union, housed in Mudd Library. After showing the students documents relating to Brown v. Board of Education, Linke shifted gears and pulled out a folder labeled Gideon v. Cochran, the early stage of the case that would become Gideon v. Wainwright and establish a defendant’s right to an attorney even if he could not afford one.
Near the top was a two-page letter, printed in soft pencil on lined prison stationery. Postmarked July 3, 1962, and sent from “State Prison Raiford, Florida” to Mel Wulf in the ACLU’s national office in Manhattan, it was signed “Clarence Gideon”: “Being refused a attorney was just one of the factors involved there is several more of them,” he wrote to Wulf. More…
A 10-year renovation is sweeping through Firestone Library — one so ambitious, it amounts to a thorough interior redesign of the 430,000-square-foot landmark at the heart of Princeton’s campus.
The University has hired Fred Fisher, a Los Angeles architect who designed Princeton’s glass-walled Sherrerd Hall, to create inspiring, aesthetically beautiful spaces within the building. When it opened in 1948, Firestone represented an innovative fusion of collegiate gothic on the outside, Moderne on the inside, Fisher said. Now he aims to create “a state-of-the-art contemporary library as well as recognizing and maintaining its historic DNA.”
See the July 11th of the PAW for more on this….
Maureen Callahan: Maureen has been supervising the final inventory work for the Bill Bradley papers, working with Dan Linke on an exhibit about Woodrow Wilson and the 1912 election, and writing help text for the new finding aids site (along with her usual reference and accessioning work). She is also organizing a June 26 Delaware Valley Archivists’ Group meeting about copyright, copyfraud and rights & permissions policies in archives.
Lynn Durgin: Lynn worked with ProQuest, the Graduate School and OIT to implement a policy change on Publishing Options for Princeton University Dissertations, which now allows for dissertation embargoes in ProQuest and in Princeton’s DataSpace. She also completed processing of 13 University Archives accessions.
Adriane Hanson: Adriane is wrapping up the 2-year grant project to process 2,500 linear feet of American Civil Liberties Union Records, which will be completed in June. This month, she finished the finding aid for the last series, so we now have description of the entire collection online and researchers have started to come use it, and we physically put the boxes in order. She also started planning for the next phase of the Daily Princetonian digitization project, which will be for the years 2003-present and will repurpose PDFs saved by the Daily Princetonian staff where possible.
Christie Peterson: Christie completed reconciling the results of last summer’s P collection shelf read with Voyager. She continued to investigate tools and methods for accessioning and managing born-digital materials in the archives through a site visit with electronic records archivists at Yale University. She also integrated additions to 12 different collections, oversaw the processing of another collection by a Special Collections Assistant, and met with developers from OIT to plan and move forward on the creation of a new web interface for the redesigned photograph, AV and memorabilia databases.
We are delighted to announce that a group of staff from the Department of Rare Books & Special Collections has been given one of the University’s new Special Performance Recognition Awards. Charles Greene, Miriam Jankiewicz, Jennifer Meyer, Aaron Pickett, Vicki Principi, and Michael Siravo, who worked together to make sure that irreplaceable items were safely and securely moved to new RBSC space earlier this year, were each awarded $1,000. After a complex planning stage involving projecting the amount of shelving needed, broken down by specialized types (e.g., rare books of various sizes, manuscripts, framed objects), the team proposed the idea of protecting the items by using the boxing methodology at ReCAP. This idea saved at least $50,000 over the cost of commercially-produced boxes. For those special items that did require commercial boxes, the team formulated a plan for just-in-time delivery which saved several thousand more dollars in offsite storage and trucking costs. Finally, the team provided security for the successful move of the materials, which was completed on a very ambitious schedule. As an added benefit, the Library gained valuable experience that will be useful in planning future collection moves in the course of the Firestone renovation.
