Celebrating Innovation in Archives and Special Collections

It's hard to believe, but we're coming very close to the end of the PACSCL Consortial Survey Initiative. John and Jenny began surveying at our 22nd and final institution, the Athenaeum of Philadelphia, last week, and we've been making final visits to some of the participating institutions and tying up various loose ends.

One of those loose ends is really too exciting to be characterized as such. We're hosting a project-end conference celebrating not just the survey project, but innovation in archives and special collections more broadly. Titled "Something New for Something Old: Innovative Approaches to Managing Archives and Special Collections," the conference will take place from December 4-5 at the Union League of Philadelphia. We've got an incredible lineup of national speakers who will be sharing creative ideas about managing collections and making them available to researchers. More information is available at http://www.pacsclsurvey.org/snso.htm.

Anyone is welcome, and the registration fee is only $50, but space is very limited. At the time of this writing, only 15 tickets remained, so if you’d like to attend, please register at http://pacsclsurvey.eventbrite.com as soon as possible. We also plan to record the sessions and making them available on our website so that even if you can't be there in person, you can benefit from the discussions.

Thirty months, over 2,000 collections and nearly 20,000 linear feet later, we're thrilled to be wrapping things up with such a bang!

Records and Archives in the News

We aren't featured in the regular press very often, but our friends at Independence Seaport Museum managed to wrangle a feature in today's Philadelphia Bulletin that does a good job of explaining what we do in layman's terms. You can read all about it online and also check out a photo (currently toward the bottom of the homepage) of some of the great stuff the surveyors uncovered during their two stints of surveying at the Museum.