Special Collections & Archives Blog

Senior Molly McCurdy has been working in Special Collections for her entire time at Wake Forest. She is so good at what she does for us, we save only the very best (most tedious and complicated) projects for her. Currently, Molly is finishing the CRMF (Church Record Microfilm) project that we launched about two years ago. The project consists of tracking down paper work and databases for over 1,000 churches from a variety of locations (including the often vilified Procite database), synthesizing the materials into Archivists’ Toolkit, exporting the EAD, and publishing the EAD in WakeSpace. The workflow is meandering at best, and the materials she has to work with are inconsistent and confusing. Molly does not let this deter her and approaches this project with enthusiasm and determination. Stay tuned for the soon-to-be-announced completion of the CRMF project! Thanks to Molly and all of our student assistants for their hard work!

It is with great excitement that we share this “What Are You Working On?” Tessa and Bill are both working on digitizing and creating metadata for the University Archives Photograph Collection (RG10.1). This photograph collection is extremely valuable in content ranging from the Old Campus to modern events. The provenance and organization of this collection are rather unclear, making digitization and online searchability even more desirable. We have only just begun this project, so stay tuned for updates and releases. Thanks to Tessa, Bill, and all of the student assistants who make our work possible!

This is one of our amazing student assistants, Charles. This is Charles’ second year working in Special Collections and we are lucky to have him on our team. Charles is working on a very large project to process the reel to reel collection and publish an Archivists’ Toolkit finding aid. RG11.1 Audio Recordings, Tapes [Reel to Reels] is housed in approximately 40 linear feet of boxes, containing over 500 recordings (some up to 5 tapes per recording). The inventory and finding aid is a first step towards eventual digitization. You would be surprised by some of the speakers that have spoken on this campus: Malcolm Mudderidge, Peter Jennings, Timothy Leary and Dr. Sidney Cohen, Betty Ford, and Elie Weisel to name a few. We thank Charles for all of his hard work and look forward to the finished finding aid.

Lindsey has been working in Special Collections for two years now and we couldn’t be luckier to have her. She is currently working on the tremendous “Bio File” project that includes creating a finding aid and digitizing thousands of biographical files. This is a highly used collection and will be a great online resource when it is completed. Lindsey is also one of two students working to transcribe and make available the finding aids for over a thousand church record microfilms (CRMF) that we have in our collection. This is a very important project and we couldn’t do it without Lindsey’s dedication and attention to detail. Thanks to Lindsey and all of the student assistants, we couldn’t do it without you!

Today’s “what are you working on?” post features another of our hard working and dedicated student assistants, Nate. In his second year of service in Special Collections and Archives, Nate can be found on any given day assisting Beth in rare books, digitizing manuscript collections, or generally being our “Jack of all trades.” Today he is working on helping relocate hundreds of linear feet of church and biographical files for our upcoming construction.We appreciate all of the hard work Nate and all of the student assistants do for us, we would not be a success without you. Thanks, Nate!

Meet Chelsea Hosch. The face of the Special Collection and Archives reference desk on Tuesday and Thursday mornings, Chelsea has been doing excellent work! She is working on inputting Biographical Files into Archivists’ Toolkit and scanning all of the images in these files for a long term, highly anticipated digital project. Chelsea is a sophomore, but this is her first year working in Special Collections and we are so happy that she has joined our team. She has also helped tremendously by adding additional information to the Tribble Presidential Papers, allowing staff and researchers to find materials more quickly. Thanks to Chelsea and all of our student assistants for their fantastic work!

We are so happy to have our students back for the semester and are eager to show the world what we are working on. Pictured is student assistant Palmer Holton holding pulp fiction from the Clarence Herbert New Collection (MS577). This collection contains a wide variety of materials including photographs, maps, manuscripts, and printed materials. Although it will be a while before this collection is processed and has a finding aid available, we are excited about the process. As you can see in the picture, sometimes working in Special Collections is dirty work. Palmer’s job is to scan these materials so that patrons can access the content without getting their hands too dirty! Included in the pulp fiction materials are “Blue Book Magazine”, “The Red Book Magazine”, “The Premier”, and “Adventure” from the 1900′s to the 1930′s. This is a visual and content rich collection and we can not wait to finish processing so that researchers can access these materials. Thanks to Palmer and all of the student assistants who work so hard to make the collections available to the public.