So Long, Farewell, Auf Wiedersehen, Good-bye

It's true - we made it through each part of the move, including leaving the old building, getting into the new building, moving collections from two off-site facilities and remediating the worst of the Iron Mountain failures - but the economy is driving our team apart.

I'm off to new adventures of a non-archival nature; finances compel me to resume my previous IT career.  The archival profession as a whole should have an open discussion about why a career that requires at least one (and often more) advanced degrees and a high degree of technical skill typically pays so poorly; hopefully, at some point in the future, that will change.

While that will not happen soon enough for me, I can say unreservedly that I've had a blast in this profession, and especially here at Drexel - how many jobs combine detective work, fun with history, techie buzz and all-around camaraderie with an amazing team? 

And my work will stay with me - when last in Seattle, I noted places where Amy Kaukonen (WMC 1915) had lived and worked in that city, and I can answer just about any question you might pose about the evolution of women in medicine (or at least point you to someone who might know where else to look for details - why not start with The Chaff?).  When looking for pet names, my first impulse is now to honor an early woman doctor - it's no doubt a modern manifestaiton of Jeremy Bentham naming his cat The Reverend Sir John Langbourne, DD (perhaps this happens to other UCL alums as well?) - although I would maintain that Anna M. Longshore-Potts, MD, is much easier to remember.

It's also been interesting to see how many search results we get from middle schools, especially those looking for information on women doctors during the civil war, such as Mary Edwards Walker, and those looking for Rebecca Cole and Eliza Grier.  It's especially encouraging in light of the planning grant we recently received to develop more content (and context) for this age group - something I'll be keeping tabs on from afar.

I look forward to a future blog post when the Correspondenzblatt der Homoeopathischen Aerzte goes online - while I may be moving on, this blog will be in the extremely capable (if very busy) hands of other members of the department, so do continue to follow along.  Hopefully, there will be a new hire announcement in the near future (and I'll try not to leave anything too strange for that person in my soon-to-be-former office - we've got enough of that sort of thing in the stacks).

And here are a few other takeaways –

• Someone should research and write a real biography of Emeline Horton Cleveland (pictured).
• Planning to move your archives is nearly as hard as actually moving your archives.
• Nineteenth-century medical theses are fascinating – especially this one.

With that, I must say farewell - it's been a wonderful opportunity to share some of our work here with you, and I'll continue to keep an eye on future developments.  Watch for more to come!

A Bit of Good News

We're getting a Pew grant! The hard work of our crack grant-writing team^* paid off and the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage awarded us a $75,000 Interpretation Planning grant to support the development of interactive online programs for young audiences based on our collections.

This will not be the first time we've looked beyond our usual academic researcher demographic and aimed for younger audiences; in 2006, we received a History Channel grant that led to a relationship with the Philadelphia High School for Girls. Using primary sources from the collection, the students learned about women in medicine by looking at the long history of Girls' High graduates attending the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania.

This time around, the focus is on 'serious play' (which, pictured at right, was rather different in the 1880s) - reaching students in grades 6-12 through online games and interactive features that incorporate original documents and photos. The spotlight remains on the history of women in medicine (as well as Philadelphia's place in medical history), but the project should lead further into digital humanities directions. You can keep up to date on our progress via our new Twitter account - feel free to follow along!

^*All three of them

And...We're In!

Apologies for the lack of updates, but the move has been something of a time killer. The good news is that we have been comfortably ensconced in the new building for a month now, and while we have yet to get absolutely everything moved in from our off-site storage (both locally-housed and at Iron Mountain), we are more or less up and running. Here are a few things we learned during this most recent move:

1. New buildings can be dustier than 'old' archives
   The new compact shelving (left, with your cruise directors posed by photographer Dan Burke) is wonderful, but we had to wipe it down with old t-shirts before moving in the first portion of our holdings. Then there was a bit more construction work done which added yet more dust - but luckily, it seems this layer will be cleaned up by people who actually do that professionally, rather than by a few archivists.



2. New buildings mean many visitors
   While I've moved offices before, this is the first time I've experienced a nearly-daily stream of visitors coming to tour the new space. It's certainly not unpleasant to see people taking notice, but it does behoove one to keep things tidy - not always an easy prospect in this line of work!



3. New buildings have glitches
   While this is a no-brainer, the challenge has been trying to predict what those will be before they pop up - and who is responsible for fixing them when they do. So far, we've been relatively lucky and have managed to avoid any showstoppers.



4. New buildings generate 'stuff'
   Starting the day we moved in, various departments appeared with 'potentially important stuff' - the accessioning table filled up rapidly (and stayed that way).
   



5. New buildings have no impact on 'regular work'
   On-site and remote research has continued apace - we've been a bit slower in responding to requests, but we have yet to completely turn anyone away. The same is true of grant applications, College events, digital projects and the like; we may have to offer a bit more expectation management than normal, but the world does not stop for anyone - certainly not us!



6. New building t-shirts don't design themselves
   But we still hope to get around to doing that in the near future - I still have my 'I survived the Women.com server migration' shirt from the late 1990s, and it's only fair to commemorate this event in the same classic style.
   

We expect the rest of the collection to appear some time in January - and then a complex integration project will begin!

You Can't Always Get What You Want...

We had quite a bit we wanted to say last week about the latest installment in our move saga, but we opted to wait to see how the situation developed. Without going into too many specifics, it's a near certainty that any major construction project at a university will undergo a few changes along the way and, as with any large organization, those changes may or may not be communicated to all interested parties (especially when the news might not be welcomed by said parties).

It's easy to understand why there was reluctance to announce 'we're putting a large electrical room where your stacks are on the plans' (clearly, no one wants to cross a bunch of scary archivists!) and given the scale of the larger project, it is perhaps surprising something similar had not happened already. The good news is that everyone who needed to know did find out in time and while more complicated political machinations were going on behind the scenes, a happily workable solution was produced (we think!).

While the placement of the new electrical room is in direct opposition to Chapter 3 of Planning New and Remodeled Archival Facilities and so of course we still have concerns about what this means as far as fire suppression, water damage possibilities and general environmental concerns, there is good news - the loss of storage space will not be nearly as bad as we feared (despite a loss of overall square footage). In fact, it's possible that we will end up with a more usable (if slightly less aesthetically-pleasing) space as a result of being forced to think creatively about how to manage the interloper. And when all is said and done, we'll still have the entire collection in one space and largely housed in fantastic compact shelving - it's only to be expected that there will be some bumps along the road, from both internal and external sources.

Hopefully this is the last major layout concern we will face, as we really want to move on to the more important items on our moving list - like choosing paint colors for the walls and panel colors for the aforementioned compact shelving. Given that the footprint for what will be our offices finally exists (and, therefore, seems a lot more real), we are looking forward to getting those fun decisions made (and we are not at all procrastinating about the hard ones, like the logistics of actually getting all our offsite material folded into one big, happy collection).

The lessons so far can be summed up as follows: 1) remain vigilant; 2) make friends and influence people; 3) Mick and Keith were right: you just might find you get what you need!

New blogger

I am now a blogger.

Documenting ourselves

ke_shoot_jg_sm.jpg
Originally uploaded by mmg24

The groundbreaking was joyful as it was simultaneously laughable (golden shovels and hardhats) and exciting (anticipating a new space in the not-too-distant future).