Research Ready: November 2013

Each month, we post a processing update to notify our readers about the latest collections that have finding aids online and are primed for research. Here’s the scoop for November:

Broadside, decree from Jose Gomez de la Cortina, following Santa Anna's capture, 1836
Decree by Mexican Secretary of War Jose Maria Tornel, via District Governor  Jose Gomez de la Cortina, regarding Mexico’s response to Santa Anna’s capture at San Jacinto: while Santa Anna remains in prison, a bow of black crepe was to be placed on all flags and standards, and the national colors were to be flown at half mast. Jones Texas Broadsides, box 1, folder 11.
Program, Woodrow School of Elocution and Physical Culture presentation, 1916
A program from a 1916 presentation by the younger girls attending the Woodrow school. The school used the White system of expression, a noted methodology to teach students how to best utilize gesture, emotion, and voice in public. Woodrow School of Expression and Physical Culture, box 1, folder 1.

A Day in the (Texas Collection) Life: Petra Ibarra-Nagel and Priscilla Escobedo, Student Assistants

Meet Baylor seniors and archives student workers Petra Ibarra-Nagel and Priscilla Escobedo, in our latest staff post giving you a peek into the day-to-day work of The Texas Collection:

Magnified Petra
Sometimes archives work requires a closer look. Here Petra turns the magnifying glass on herself while working on the Foy Valentine papers.

My name is Petra Ibarra-Nagel and I am a senior international studies major from Bellingham, Washington. I have worked as a manuscript archives student worker since April 2011, and I also worked in the TC library this summer. I help with processing collections by making sure that materials are physically preserved to withstand deterioration over time and organizing those materials in a way that best assists researchers in their quest for knowledge.

I have had the pleasure and privilege of working with a variety of archival materials at The Texas Collection, ranging from 19th-century pocket-sized family portraits to correspondence containing signatures of former presidents of the United States. It’s always fun to see what new materials come in—you never know what will be important elements of a historical narrative!

Smiling Pat Neff
Pat Neff was a somber man, Petra learned while working with his papers, so she was delighted to find this smiley (sort of) photo of the Texas governor and Baylor president.

My favorite collection to work on is the one that I was originally hired to assist in processing, the Pat Neff collection. Working with Pat Neff taught me a lot about the importance of preservation and organization of materials but also about integrity and teamwork. You may recognize the name Pat Neff from our campus’ beautiful golden dome-adorned administration building; however the legacy of Pat Neff extends far past his Baylor career. The former Texas House of Representatives speaker, county attorney for McLennan County, Governor of Texas, Texas Railroad Commissioner, and President of Baylor University rarely took a moment to himself.

That being said, it is understandable how there were approximately 643 boxes of Pat Neff material to process. Communication between everyone involved in processing is crucial to preserving the historical value of materials and integrity of the collection as a whole, especially when the collection contains so much material. If the materials are not processed the same way throughout the collection, locating individual items for researchers would be like trying to find a needle in a haystack…and then, without proper preservation methods, accidentally shattering the needle when you find it. In this way, The Texas Collection makes it easy to learn more about your passions throughout Texas history.

~

My name is Priscilla Escobedo, and I am a senior international studies major from Irving, Texas. I have been a university archives student worker at The Texas Collection for a little more than a year. I also worked in the TC library this summer.

The Texas Collection is located in Carroll Library, one of the oldest buildings on campus. It was once home to the Baylor Chapel, Baylor Museum, the early Robert Browning collection, and Baylor’s main library. I know all of this because of my work here! Some of my duties include research, our backlog sorting project, pulling books and collections for researchers, and various other archives duties.

Samuel Palmer Brooks' 30th anniversary of his Baylor graduation program
This spread comes from a program for a luncheon celebrating the 30th anniversary of the graduation of President Samuel Palmer Brooks, found while sorting backlog.

The backlog sorting project never ends. The university archives receives a box every month of newsletters, programs, flyers, and more, that get printed for the university…and these piled up over time. As a result, in addition to the new incoming boxes, we have many older boxes of miscellaneous materials that need to be sorted by department, organization, etc., so that those items can be found. The older boxes can be very interesting—I’ve found documents from the 1920s sitting next to documents from the 1980s. Needless to say, I’ve read a lot on Baylor’s history and have learned so much about life at Baylor.

Baylor University Catalogue, 1851-52
Priscilla has relied heavily on Baylor catalogues, such as this first one from 1851, for her research for the Baylor Book of Lists project.

My main project is the Baylor Book of Lists, a project that will list out who worked at Baylor since its inception. Right now I have over 60 pages of the names of people who worked and taught at Baylor and Baylor medical school, and the classes they taught. Some courses, such as orthography and ancient geography, are no longer taught at Baylor (although the subjects might be incorporated in other classes), and it’s interesting to see how education has changed over time.

Working at the Texas Collection has taught me so much about what it’s like working in an archives and library and about the history of Texas and Baylor.

The Texas Collection turns 90 this year! But even though we’ve been at Baylor for so long, we realize people aren’t quite sure what goes on in a special collections library and archives. So over the course of 2013, we are featuring staff posts about our work at The Texas Collection. See other posts in the series here.

Introducing BARD: Discover Yesterday's Stories (and Our New Database)

By Paul Fisher, Processing Archivist

BARD Banner

The Texas Collection is happy to open our newest discovery tool, the Baylor Archival Repositories Database (BARD), to our researchers. We believe this system will enable you to find more archival materials from The Texas Collection than ever before!

You can discover finding aids to our archival collections by browsing or searching in BARD. Finding aids are documents that describe groups of archival materials. Finding aids that you will see in the system have an administrative note describing the historical context of the collection, scope and content notes that describe what is in the collection, and container lists that show the materials in each folder and box.

You can enter the BARD system by visiting http://www.baylor.edu/library/bard. You’ll also find a tab for BARD on The Texas Collection homepage:

BARD-Homepage

Once in the system, you have several options for finding resources. For example, let’s say you want to see all the collections that have anything to do with Texas in the American Civil War. To look for this, you could enter the words “Civil War Texas” in the search field.

BARD-Search field

Now click “Search.” When I did this search, 82 results came up! Since we have thousands of collections in the database, you may wish to narrow your search using more precise search terms if you receive that many results.

Click “Display Finding Aid” under each entry to view further information about each collection. We will talk about other things on this page, such as the “Top Subject Clusters” on the left, and the “Advanced Search” tab at the top, in a later post.

BARD-Display finding aid

To continue with this example, I went down to the #7 entry, the James and Patience Crain Black papers, and clicked “Display Finding Aid” underneath that title to open a new window that describes just that collection. This is what came up:

BARD-Finding aid

The window open now describes the James and Patience Crain Black papers. Within this window, you can explore all kinds of information to help you decide whether the resources in this collection would be useful in your research.

If you want to see the list of materials in the collection, you can click in the list on the left to jump to a specific group of materials. Most of our collections are organized in groups called series, which are basic groups of materials organized by the function in which they were used. For example, in the James and Patience Crain Black papers, if you wanted to know what letters were in the collection, you could click on “Correspondence,” and the list that came up would be the indicated correspondence.

BARD-Jump to Series

The list of materials will appear in the pane on the right. If we clicked “[Series] Correspondence” in our example, then all the letters in that group would come up, like this:

BARD-James and Patience Black correspondence

These particular letters are organized in three folders by year, and are in box 1 of the collection.

If you would like to set an appointment to view the actual materials in the collection, click on “Baylor University. The Texas Collection” at the top of the page to view our contact information (the text circled in the screenshot below). You’ll need to provide the name of the collection and the box numbers so we know what to pull for you.

BARD-How to link to Texas Collection contact info

When you are done viewing finding aids in BARD, be sure to close down the system properly. In the main search page, on the upper right corner, click the red “Log Out” to exit from BARD. Leaving the system in this way is very important to ensure the proper functioning of the system.

BARD-Logout

We plan to discuss other helpful ways to use this exciting new system in future blog posts. Stay tuned for more news and helpful hints about the new Baylor Archival Repositories Database!

The Texas Collection is piloting the program, but Armstrong Browning Library and Poage Legislative Library also will be using BARD to share their finding aids. Look to those repositories soon to learn more about their efforts!