Many people are interested in the papers of M. Carey Thomas, not just to explore the details of her own life, but because of the numerous famous people she hosted at the college and her voluminous correspondence with notables of her day. The above photograph shows Thomas standing on the verandah of the Deanery, her home for over five decades of her life. A history and guide to the Deanery has been digitized and can be found in Bryn Mawr College’s new institutional repository by clicking here.

The index or finding aid to her papers at Bryn Mawr College Special Collections was created when this archival material was committed to microfilm, and we have now digitized the index to make it even easier to search her correspondence. Although this collection is relatively well known, we hope it will become even more so now that you can search the descriptions of the materials online.

Using Triptych, you can now perform word searches of the many letters she wrote and received and which can be viewed either in their original form by coming to the Special Collections Reading Room or you may view them on the microfilm machines in Canaday Library or through ILL. To request material, just pay attention to what Reel Number is indicated as this corresponds with the relevant box of original material.

The M. Carey Thomas index can be found in the ‘Finding Aids’ section of the Triptych site and there are three different listings by which entries can be searched: the Author Index, the Reel Listings and the Author/Recipient Index.

Mary Garrett at May Day celebrations

The Author Index details the correspondence Thomas had with others and gives descriptions of the letters in the folders, such as the below screenshot describing correspondence with Mary Garrett in 1894-5 regarding her health and financial matters. Searching this way will allow you to pinpoint more specifically what letters you may wish to view; Thomas’ correspondence with certain people is extensive and this will assist you if you wish to focus just on a certain period of letters or those from a particular person. As part of our work we have been digitizing and transcribing the letters between Mary Garrett and Thomas and this will form part of the digital collections of The Albert M. Greenfield Digital Center for the History of Women’s Education site (see previous post by Amanda Fernandez ’14 on the Educating Women blog, ‘From frustration to fascination’ which describes her work on this part of the project).

The Reel Listings are in chronological order and begin with material relating to Thomas’ early life as a child and include letters and materials related to her family.

For those interested in her formative years, this material includes papers from her mother, Mary Whitall Thomas, describing her personal reflections on religion and women’s place in society, and her journal detailing the Baltimore life of the Thomas household. This material gives us a glimpse into her personality and helps us to understand somewhat where Carey Thomas received her belief in women’s independence and the possibilities for a woman’s role outside domestic concerns.

A selection of this early material from Thomas’ childhood is currently being transcribed by volunteer Joanne Behm, a Bryn Mawr College alum, and a blog post on some of her findings will follow soon on the Educating Women blog so check back for more details. Many of the early letters between Thomas and her cousins are richly illustrated with their childhood drawings and will also be digitized and made available to view online as part of our digitized collections.

Finally, the Author/Recipient Index allows you to search if you know the name of the person corresponding with Thomas, and this will direct you to the reel/box numbers where you can find their letters (note: you will find letters arranged by year and thus correspondence over time from the same person can often be found in multiple boxes)

A note on the limitations of this method of searching: it is often necessary to know the exact name of a person as names of organizations are not always listed, so for example, you may need to know the exact name of the Secretary or Treasurer of an organization in order to find letters relating to them. There are also precautionary tactics needed when searching for correspondents who married whilst Thomas was writing to them as seen in the screen shot below.

Despite these limitations, the possibilities afforded by online searching of this catalog greatly increase the likelihood of you finding the letters that you wish to and it is much easier to use than the hard copy.

Our thanks are due to digital project assistant Jessy Brody for digitizing the materials and digital collections specialist Cheryl Klimaszewski for her work on Triptych.

As part of broad efforts by Special Collections to cultivate connections among individuals, disciplines, and institutions, Curator and Academic Liaison for Art and Artifacts Brian Wallace recently traveled to Minneapolis, Minnesota, to present a paper at the Association for Academic Museums and Galleries 2012 conference: http://www.aamg-us.org/conference12.php. In “Town/Gown Connect: Leveraging Community Assets Across the Campus,” Wallace and co-presenter Shari Osborn (Community Activist and Museum Educator at the Locust Grove/Samuel Morse Museum and Mansion in Poughkeepsie, NY) discussed ways campus arts programs can connect campus and community audiences, artists, and other stakeholders.

One of the two case studies Wallace and Osborn used in their presentation, Carrying, a 2010 project by artist collaborators Belshe/Prown (http://www.belsheprown.com/), addresses a topic of great interest to campuses and their surrounding communities – the difficult and all-too-often newsworthy topic of gun violence on campuses. Carrying consists of 50 signs – each bearing the rules governing the carrying of concealed weapons on campuses in each of the fifty states – designed to be temporarily installed across a collaborating campus and an adjoining town, village, or other municipal entity. As presented in New Paltz, New York – by the Village and Town of New Paltz and by the Dorsky Museum at the State University of New York at New Paltz – Carrying served to bring individuals and entities together, to highlight cooperation on a potentially contentious issue, and to galvanize broader public – and campus – awareness of the often-overlooked connections between town and gown.

The images here include digital versions of several of the signs, as well as a photograph of co-presenter Shari Osborn and the University of Minnesota’s Weisman Art Museum curator Diane Mullin with the Minnesota Carrying sign: intrigued by the project as both activism and art, Mullin requested that Wallace and Osborn deposit the sign in the Weisman’s collection, which focuses on public art and the emerging field of social art practice (http://www.weisman.umn.edu/).

design courtesy Whitman Carroll

Bryn Mawr College Special Collections is hosting four visual artists at the College for 24-hour residencies spanning Commencement and move-out day.

The participating artists are: printmaker and textile artist/sculptor Kay S. Healy (Philadelphia); new/digital media/installation artist James Johnson (Philadelphia); hand-drawn animation artist Jennifer Levonian (Philadelphia); large-format film and digital photographer Gilbert Plantinga (New York).

The artists and a slew of student ambassadors are beginning to make their way across campus today (keep an eye out for t-shirts bearing the project logo); we’ll share some updates, some links, and some images over the course of the weekend.

Selected artworks developed in response to this residency period will be exhibited in the fall of 2012 in the Class of 1912 Rare Book Room in Canaday Library and perhaps – depending upon format, scope, etc. of the works – elsewhere on campus.

It was a very busy week in Special Collections! Four separate classes worked with selected objects from the Art and Artifact collections (over 100 objects in all), we hosted several graduate students and independent researchers pursuing various investigations, and whenever we had a chance to look across the offices, we noted that Rare Books and Manuscripts was also quite busy with faculty, student, and outside researchers.

To top it all off, we participated in the first of three campus-wide admitted student events on Friday, introducing several dozen potential members of the class of 2016 to Bryn Mawr’s collections and the people who work with them.

Also on Friday, weaving her way through students and staff, University of Michigan Professor Artemis Leontis–fresh from her “Greek Dress and the Embodied Archaeology of Eva Palmer Sikelianos” lecture the previous evening–pored over materials from the college Archives as part of her ongoing research into the life and work of this fascinating woman.

We’ve spent the past few days installing Colors of Greece: The Art and Archaeology of Georg von Peschke: reconfiguring walls, painting the gallery, producing labels, and beginning to unwrap, check, and place the artworks.

Brian Wallace, Curator/Academic Liason for Art and Artifacts working with Kostis Kourelis, Exhibition Curator and Steve Tucker, Exhibition Designer

This morning, our guest curator Kostis Kourelis took a break from working with designer Steve Tucker and curator Brian Wallace to reflect on the experience of seeing years of research take the form of an exhibition.

Kourelis noted the advantages accruing to him, as a scholar, arising from the opportunity he has had to view Peschke’s artwork in this new context, just a few short weeks after the exhibition, presented in a different arrangement, closed at Franklin & Marshall College. “Links between the works—thematic, narrative, and formal connections—are so clearly articulated in the exhibition that new subjects—the cultural role of architecture, for example—have presented themselves to me as important topics for future research.”

Kourelis also made mention of the way in which the exhibition links the history and culture of Bryn Mawr to artistic, intellectual, and political developments in the world. Peschke’s connection with Bryn Mawr archaeologists, so well documented in the exhibition, is a kind of scaffolding onto which current students can bring together their knowledge of college and world.

Exhibition Designer Steve Tucker Installing Text

Students taking Intro to Classical Archaeology with Prof. Donohue have been learning how to examine objects from the collection as part of a class assignment.