NEH Grant Provides Free “Security in the Archives” Workshop to Tri-State

Steely Library’s Eva G. Farris Special Collections and Schlachter University Archives was recently awarded its second National Endowment for the Humanities Preservation Assistance Grant. This grant will bring an archival security specialist, Ms. Mimi Bowling, to NKU to conduct a security assessment of the Special Collections and Archives division.

For the last twenty years Ms. Bowling has co-presented a workshop on archival security nationally. She is a founding member of the Society of American Archivist’s Security Roundtable. Prior to establishing her consulting practice in 2004, she was Curator of Manuscripts at the New York Public Library for twelve years. She also worked at the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia University, and the National Park Service and was involved in the prosecution of archival theft cases at both places.

Thanks to the NEH funding, on Thursday May 16, 2013, Steely Library will offer a free half day workshop on security for archival collections. Taught by Ms. Bowling, this workshop is open to archivists, librarians and staff or volunteers of cultural heritage institutions throughout the region.

The workshop qualifies for two (2) Archival Recertification Credits through the Academy of Certified Archivists.”

Attendees are asked to register online at http://nkuarchives.eventbrite.com by May 14^th. For questions, contact Lois Hamill, University Archivist and grant director, hamilll1@nku.edu.

Archives hosts primary source workshop for teachers

What is a primary source? What questions can be used to analyze primary sources? How can students learn about the historical record from primary sources?

These are just a few of the questions we explored in a recent Using Primary Sources in the Classroom workshop with local teachers. State and national education standards require students to use and interpret primary sources. Archives, as the major type of repository for this material, play a key role in helping teachers and students meet these goals.

The workshop, led by Lois Hamill, University Archivist, and Anne Ryckbost, Manuscript Processor, engaged teachers in hands-on activities analyzing Civil War-era documents and photographs using inquiry-based methods. The teachers learned how to guide a primary document through the steps of observation, reflection, and questioning to examine historical themes, events, and people.

Throughout the workshop, the teachers enthusiastically shared ideas and strategies for incorporating primary sources into their curriculum. The room buzzed with excitement when the teachers looked at original materials including a letter from a Civil War soldier to his wife (Cyrus Reasoner Civil War collection link), a carte de visite of confederate general E. Kirby Smith, and general orders from Camp Dennison in Cincinnati.

If you are interested in using primary sources from Special Collections to enrich your curriculum, please contact Anne Ryckbost at ryckbosta1@nku.edu or Lois Hamill at hamilll1@nku.edu.

In with the New: Recent Acquisitions in Special Collections and Archives exhibit opens

Visit the archives research room in Steely Library room 106 to get a sneak peak at new archival collections in our latest exhibit In with the New: Recent Acquisitions in Special Collections and Archives.

This exhibit takes visitors through the process of acquiring unique archival material and highlights four newly-received collections. These rich collections include art, papers, artifacts, and photographs that document a variety of themes in northern Kentucky history. The exhibit highlights the papers of Della Lewis Jones, a local African American educator; the art and family papers of Charles J. McLaughlin, an area artist and architect; research and manuscripts from Theodore H.H. Harris; and marketing materials from Louis Trauth Dairy.

The exhibit is open to the public from 1-4:30 p.m. Monday-Friday in room 106 on the first floor of Steely Library. For directions and parking information, please visit http://library.nku.edu/about_the_library/maps_and_parking/. For questions about the exhibit, contact Anne Ryckbost at ryckbosta1@nku.edu.

McLaughlin in Bruges, Belgium in 1925.

NEH Grant will help NKU Preserve Region’s History

Northern Kentucky University has received a $50,000 National Endowment for the Humanities Sustaining Cultural Heritage Collections planning grant to evaluate the environmental climate in which the W. Frank Steely Library’s Eva G. Farris Special Collections and Schlachter University Archives stores its historical collections and permanent university records.  The goal is to create a sustainable, energy efficient, preservation quality environment for the protection of these collections which have “regional and national significance.”  Only eighteen of eighty applicants nationally received funding.

University Archivist and assistant professor Lois Hamill is the principal investigator for the grant which will bring consultants from the nationally renown Image Permanence Institute of the Rochester Institute of Technology, and engineers from Staggs and Fisher of Lexington to work with NKU.  The planning grant will fund the next phase of work to create a state-of-the-art research archives for NKU and the Greater Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky community.

Steely Library’s Special Collections documents “the rich history and heritage of the region and its people” says Arne J. Almquist, Associate Provost for Library Services.  Notable collections include Stanley Chesley’s legal papers for the tragic Beverly Hills Supper Club fire, the Northern Kentucky African-American Heritage Task Force Papers, collections on organized crime and its clean-up in Newport, and Civil War correspondence and diaries.  The archives also owns a Frank Duveneck portrait and an original copy of the first book ever written about Kentucky.

The W. Frank Steely Library Special Collections & Archives Sustainable Preservation Environment Planning Project is funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities Sustaining Cultural Heritage Collections grant. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this article, do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Finding Falmouth, by guest writer Austin Wolfe

As part of the ENG 366 / HNR 394 course, we were heavily involved with NKU’s own special collections and archives as we learned about the treatment and handling of special and rare documents. Over the course of the semester, we took trips to various other archives and collections in the Cincinnati area, but we focused on with NKU’s collections, which has proven to be a very rewarding experience.

We had to pick a topic that could be researched through archival work. When I heard that the NKU Special Collections had documents pertaining to my hometown of Falmouth, Kentucky, I became quite interested and immediately knew what I would focus on for my project. I dug deep into Special Collections Warren J. Shonert Americana Collection in order to focus on education in the county in the early 20^th century. 

The Shonert Americana collection contains record books from Pendleton County’s schools in their various incarnations in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries and even includes one picture of the Pendleton Academy from the 1800s. The photograph is of particular interest because it provides visual documentation of where a school once stood in relation to one of Falmouth’s most prolific churches.  Since the school has changed locations many times and the church has not, one can actually see where Pendleton’s first educational establishment stood. The record books are interesting to read through, especially the commentary on various board meetings. By reading the recorded commentary, one can actually see the growth and initial development of the concert band in the Pendleton County School District. 

(Women in front of Pendleton Academy, late 19th century)

For those interested in the history of the Northern Kentucky area, NKU’s Special Collections and Archives is definitely worth a visit. I was very pleasantly surprised at what I learned about the origins of education in my hometown, especially since I hope to be an educator in the future. 

While I have not had the pleasure of searching through all the collections, the NKU Special Collections is bound to have something of interest to most anyone.

NKU Hosting Significant Exhibit of Original Paul Sawyier Works

Northern Kentucky University will celebrate the works of Paul Sawyier, a Kentucky son and one of America’s great impressionist painters, with “Kentucky Impressions: Paul Sawyier Original Works,” an exhibit of original Sawyier paintings, through Dec. 7 in the Schlachter University Archives and the Eva G. Farris Reading Room in NKU’s W. Frank Steely Library.

Sawyier is one of the commonwealth’s most popular and recognizable painters, whose work can be found in the Old Governor’s Mansion and the Executive Governor’s Mansion in Frankfort, the Kentucky Historical Society and Liberty Hall Historic Site. In what promises to be one of the largest exhibits of the artist’s work, visitors can see samples of Sawyier’s portraits, landscapes and scenes from Kentucky and New York.

 “The NKU exhibition of Paul Sawyier originals will be the most significant display of his works in recent times,” said William Coffey, president of Paul Sawyier Galleries in Frankfort, who helped to coordinate the event. “It will include over 60 of Sawyier’s very best oils and watercolors, many of which have never been displayed and some of which are his most popular paintings.”

Collectors spanning the east coast have lent their paintings to this collection to help visitors better understand the life of the painter, who sold more than 3,000 originals throughout his career and studied with famous artists such as Covington’s Frank Duveneck, Thomas S. Noble and William Merritt Chase.

Sawyier began his career in the Greater Cincinnati area, studying portraiture at the Cincinnati Art Academy. After studying under Chase in New York, he returned to Covington to work with Duveneck. Sawyier began painting scenes of his Frankfort hometown after seeing an Impressionist exhibit at the Chicago’s World Fair Colombian Exhibition.

He supported his family through his art and comforted himself after the loss of his mother by spending five years living out of a houseboat traveling the Kentucky River, painting scenes along the way. After exhausting the landscape in his area of Kentucky, Sawyier moved in with his widowed sister in New York City and switched from watercolor to oil. He painted parks and waterways before moving upstate.

Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport is the title sponsor for the exhibit, and the Northern Kentucky University Foundation Inc. and Mark and Rosemary Schlachter are presenting sponsors. The exhibit also will be a part of the Presidential Installation events on Oct. 26.

The exhibit is available in the Schlachter University Archives (Steely Library first floor) Monday through Friday (9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.) and Saturday and Sunday (1-5 p.m.); as well as the Eva G. Farris Reading Room (Steely Library second floor) Monday through Thursday (7:30 a.m. to midnight), Friday (7:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.), Saturday (11 a.m. to 5 p.m.) and Sunday (12:30 p.m. to midnight). Steely Library has reduced hours Oct. 14-16 and Nov. 21, and is closed Nov. 6 and Nov. 22-24.

The Bruce Family Papers: Local Perspective of National History

We’re delighted to share with our blog readers a guest post from Julia Slone, an NKU student, on her experience in Special Collections:

My spring semester course Romancing the Archives called to mind an “Indiana Jones- type” adventurer braving exotic locations in order to unearth a long- forgotten treasure. While the Northern Kentucky University Steely Library Special Collections and Archives may not qualify to many as an exotic location, the treasures found within its stacks will certainly prove interesting to even the most casual of history fans. The actual purpose of the course (which did not include any fedoras) was for students to learn about archives and special collections and become proficient in the research methods required for such locations. For our final project, students were required to combine information gathered from an object in a local archive or special collection along with secondary research in order to more fully understand some aspect of collecting.

The NKU Special Collections and Archives have many intriguing holdings and it was difficult to select just one with which to work. I eventually chose to work with the Bruce Family Papers, a collection of letters from a Kentucky family that range from the early nineteenth-century through the Civil War. Henry Bruce, Jr. lived in Covington during the Civil War and was a slave holder who supported the Confederacy. The letters written in the buildup to and during the Civil War are particularly fascinating because they offer a meaningful glimpse into what the war meant to average citizens of Northern Kentucky.

A letter, dated October 10, 1863, is written to Henry Bruce, Jr. by his cousin James H. Bruce in response to an inquiry about the stability of Confederate dollars and exchange rates. James Bruce, who was living in Nashville at the time, takes the opportunity to inform his cousin that, due to lack of employment, he has been forced to take a position as an “agent of the Nashville Union”, an abolitionist newspaper. James, like his cousin, supports the Confederacy, but asserts he is not the only non-Union man at the paper. In fact, he claims that only two Union men are employed by the paper. This letter clearly demonstrates how principles often had to be abandoned during the difficulties of war and is a testament to strength of the supposed Pro-Union movements in the South.

The Bruce Family letters are available for viewing in NKU’s Special Collections during operating hours, but the collection has also been made easily available online for those interested at http://archives.nku.edu/digital_collections/bruce_family_papers.php. The online database includes typed transcriptions of every letter, and almost all transcriptions provide a link to digitized images of the original letters.I would encourage you to take some time to explore the Bruce Family Papers in Special Collections.