From the Vault: November 2020 Newsletter
As the quarter starts to wind down, we look back on what we've been up to in Archives & Special Collections
SCU students have embarked on their week of Thanksgiving break and SCU staff are looking forward to three generous days of administrative holiday. It has been a busy but fulfilling quarter for us, and we write now to wish our friends a happy Thanksgiving, whatever that tradition will entail for you and yours this year.
Thanksgiving is a time for practicing gratitude, and although this quarter continued to present the challenges, stress, and anxiety unique to educating students in the time of COVID-19, in Archives & Special Collections we all feel extremely grateful for being able to continue our work directly helping students discover and analyze primary sources and all the epiphanies that engenders, as well as being thankful for our health, our jobs, and for belonging to the mind-blowingly generous SCU community.
Indeed, many SCU Library staff have primarily worked from home this quarter, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. A selection of us visit campus on a weekly or biweekly basis to do essential functions, but all of our research support and instruction have occurred in the digital sphere.
Below are a couple pages from the 20th century women’s prison newspaper The Hour Glass, which describe the Thanksgiving celebrations of the women at Connecticut State Farm for Women in Niantic, Connecticut in 1935 and 1940. It’s amazing to see not much has changed from what we consider the traditional Thanksgiving meal eighty years on, and that these women were able to engage in such a rich tradition despite being incarcerated. Check out the blog post at the end of the newsletter to read more about this interesting primary source.
Embedded Model
This quarter Summer, Nadia, and Kelci worked with Amy Lueck’s ENGL 168/WGST 167AW Women’s Writing and Literature in an embedded model, meeting with the class over a span of 6 weeks to connect them with women-authored literature not included in the canon, and to coach them through research strategies related to working with these types of texts. Students are contributing to an anthology Dr. Lueck hopes to publish on an open access platform.
Additionally, Kelci worked with Michelle Burnham’s ENGL 11A Literatures of the World in an embedded model, chipping in research training modules, microlectures on book history and indigenous representation in the Santa Clara Mission Manuscripts, and many, many one-to-one research appointments with the students (30 at last count!). Students have been creating many different outputs from their research, including podcasts, recipes, playlists, and Neatline exhibits.
Many other classes. We have also worked with classes such as ETHN 165 (Fernandez), CTW 1 Honors (Keener), ENGL 151 Shakespeare (Keener), HIST 186 California History (Gudgeirsson), ARTS 36 Printmaking (Aoki), ENGL 168 Women’s Prison Writing (Leuner) and EDUC 289 (Hoyle) on a smaller scale this quarter, proving that the physical divide has not hampered our ability to connect with students.
Connecting Researchers with Materials
As an output of supporting distance reference requests and classes, we have added many items to our digital collections, including:
The complete Clay M. Greene Memoir, My Seventy Five Years Off and On. (Unexpurgated Copy), which was missing about 1/3 of its pages. Once we made the rest of the pages available, a grateful researcher noticed that the missing section contained Greene’s account of a legal dispute related to the play M’Liss starring Annie Pixley not recorded anywhere else.
The addition of several books and manuscripts in the Books from SCU's Special Collections digital collection, most of which were used by students in classes this quarter. Included are women’s diaries/commonplace books and works containing Phillis Wheatley’s poetry.
Catherine Bell’s draft manuscript, Believing and the Practice of Religion, which is not yet in the digital collections but is currently available by request.
A new digital collection, The Multicultural Center and Cultural Student Organizations at SCU. Read more in the blog post linked below.
Mentions in the News
Our work has been included in a variety of media outlets and scholarly activities, including:
Not a Moment, But a Movement. Article by Matt Morgan in the Santa Clara Magazine. Summer provided scans of materials to support Matt’s research, and Kelci helped him answer archival and historical puzzles presented by the material.
Finding the Gaps in History. Article by Matt Morgan on SCU News website describing aforementioned collaboration between Archives & Special Collections and Dr. Amy Lueck’s Women’s Writing and Literature course.
Digital Humanities Racial Justice Teaching Showcase. Recording of Zoom meeting where several faculty and students described their anti-racist scholarship that often utilized Archives & Special Collections materials.
From the Blog, Arthur’s Attic
American Prison Newspapers
In this blog post, Kelci shares two examples of newspapers/zines written by incarcerated women 80 years apart, The Hour Glass and Tenacious, which provided a rich learning experience for Dr. Leuner’s students in ENGL 68, Women’s Prison Writing, this quarter. The blog post also announces a new digital collection from Reveal Digital, to which SCU contributed funding.
Turning the Early Modern into the Modern: The experience of editorial work with the Santa Clara Early Modern Book Initiative (SCEMBI)
In this blog post, Sean Oblak and Jessica Joudy, student researchers, describe their work creating a critical edition of the 17th century text, The Elder Brother.
The Multicultural Center and Cultural Student Organizations at SCU Digital Collection
In this blog post, Summer announces the new digital collection, what went into its creation, how it is used by researchers and classes, and some other tips for navigating the organization of the curated collection.