Tuesday, March 27, 2007

Canaday Library at Bryn Mawr College

Here's an image of Bryn Mawr's Canaday Library taken on a bright and sunny, but sadly not spring, day. Soon there will be beautiful flowers on the trees in front of the library. They're difficult to see in this picture, but the library has a lovely new set of steps leading up to it.

We surveyed the collections in Bryn Mawr's archives in November, December, and January. We were there long enough to really feel at home. I was at Bryn Mawr previously as a student employee, so I was very happy to be back. Lorett, Marianne, Eric, Barbara and the rest of the staff at the library were all gracious hosts. The collections we surveyed at Bryn Mawr ranged from letters sent from a Red Cross canteen in France during the first World War to the notebooks and papers of a current member of Bryn Mawr's English faculty, and from suffrage ephemera to the course notebooks of a Bryn Mawr student from the 1890s. The largest collection we looked at was the papers of Harris Wofford, a former U.S. Senator from Pennsylvania and President of Bryn Mawr from 1970 to 1978. The smallest was a set of papers of an alumna, mainly personal correspondence and documents related to her estate.