As another academic year comes to a close, we'd like to recognize the contributions of the graduate students who served as apprentices in our Special Collections Research Center this year. These students come from the Department of History and the American Studies Program, and they tackle a wide range of projects, including arranging and describing collections, working on exhibits, and digitizing materials. Recently our graduate student apprentices have also shared their experiences with the public through posts published on the Special Collections blog.
American Studies apprentice Ed Hunt spent many hours building topical guides to material in Special Collections. His November blog post highlighted a few of his early contributions in the areas of Armed Conflicts & the Military, Latin America and the Caribbean, Films & Cinema, and more. The guides point to strengths of the collection and highlight unexpected discoveries, such as material related to oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. Among others, students in a military history course this fall used a guide that Ed created.
Hannah Bailey, History apprentice, worked on the digitization and transcription initiatives of “From Fights to Rights: The Long Road to a More Perfect Union.” “From Fights to Rights” is a project to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Civil War and the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Movement and will continue through 2015. In particular Hannah worked on the Nathaniel V. Watkins Family Papers, getting them ready for volunteers to transcribe them online. In the Special Collections blog, she describes getting to know this 19th-century family as well as members of the 20th-century Robb family, whose scrapbooks and photographs she digitized.
Recent additions to the online transcription project of “From Fights to Rights” were also highlighted by Shannon Goings, a History apprentice. She shared the understanding and insight she gained into Eastern Lunatic Asylum doctor John Minson Galt II through his diary as well as her favorite items in the transcription project – letters from children.
History apprentice Rachel Thomas recounted some of her own varied experiences in Special Collections, which included transcribing documents, arranging a collection, and compiling a list of “this day in William & Mary history” facts for use by Special Collections on Twitter (@SwemSCRC).
In her post “Crafting an Administrative History,” History apprentice Lauren Wallace talked about work on one of her projects - writing a history of William & Mary’s Ferguson Seminar in Publishing. Lauren said it best when she wrote: “It is amazing how much information can be gathered from only one box of information and how an administrative history can reveal not only the motivation of its founders, but also the environment in which it existed.”
Thank you to all of the 2011-2012 graduate student apprentices! Researchers and staff will be appreciating your efforts to help preserve and make available material in Swem’s Special Collections for years to come.