By Jeremy Dibbell
Volunteers and interns are very important here at MHS (we couldn’t do it without them!), so in a series of posts over the next couple weeks I’ll highlight some of this summer’s assistants. We’ll begin today with the Collections Services crew, which this summer consisted of:
Christie Ellinger – Christie is a rising sophomore at Cornell University, and this was her fourth summer at MHS. She’s spent much of her time with Preservation Librarian Kathy Griffin, but also has worked with Reader Services at various times. This summer she worked on a whole slew of preservation projects, including rehousing microfilm reels and various manuscript collections (among them the Lodge-Eisenhower correspondence in the Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. Papers II, the May-Windship-Barker-Archbald papers, the Putnam-Blake papers, and the Massachusetts Reform Club papers). She also performed conservation treatments on several leatherbound volumes, and replaced worn-out cartons for collections stored offsite. Christie said her favorite find was a letter from Cornell’s president in the Lodge-Eisenhower collection.
Rebecca Hecht – Rebecca is a rising junior at Stanford University, and this was her second summer in Collections Services. She worked with Manuscript Processor Laura Lowell to process portions of the Saltonstall Family papers (as part of the grant we received late last year), concentrating on arranging and dating materials Rebecca also completed a preliminary inventory of another collection of family papers. Her favorite discovery was an oversized genealogical chart in the Saltonstall papers showing the family’s connections to early English and Scottish kings.
Michelle Prior – Michelle is a rising sophomore at Miami University (Ohio), and this was her first summer at MHS. She also worked on Saltonstall processing, entering metadata for the Leverett Saltonstall photograph collection. Beyond that, she was responsible for making preservation photocopies of news clippings from various collections, and completed a preliminary inventory of an unprocessed collection of family papers. When asked to name the most interesting thing she found this summer, she said it was a body of correspondence between a young woman and her father as the woman attended medical school in the early decades of the 20th century (when this collection is fully processed and available for research I’ll be able to highlight this at more length).
On behalf of all the staff at MHS, a big thank you to Christie, Rebecca and Michelle for their good work this summer! Next time, we’ll meet those helping out in the Publications Department.