We’ve been busy this past month. Aren’t we always? Here are some notes on what we’ve been up to, in addition to reference, processing, preservation, etc., & several other ongoing projects:
January 9 – Gino Pasi & Lisa Rickey gave a presentation about primary sources and a tour of Wright Brothers materials to a group of Cleveland-area middle school students, who came to Dayton for an aviation-themed field study.
January 11 – John Armstrong presented the “Researching Your Roots” genealogy workshop, as part of the Friends of the Libraries Workshop Series. (Dawne Dewey will be teaching another FOL workshop–“History through Newspapers”–this Saturday, Feb. 8, and there’s still time to register!)
January 13 – Dawne Dewey participated on an archives-themed panel at the AIAA SciTech Conference in Washington, DC.
January 16 – Dawne video-recorded a presentation by Dr. Malcolm Ritchie about his experiences as a World War II pilot. (You can learn more about Dr. Ritchie and his career in MS-390, Dr. Malcolm L. Ritchie Collection.)
Dr. Malcolm Ritchie and his wife, 16 Jan. 2014
January 19 – Gino participated (on behalf of SC&A) in an online auction held by the Artcurial Auction in Paris, France. He successfully bid on and won the rare aviation book Les Grands Raids D’Avions [Great Raids on Airplanes] (1936). We were all very excited when the book arrived on January 30th! The book is written in French and adds to our holdings of non-English aviation materials.
Archivists Dawne Dewey, Gino Pasi, and Toni Vanden Bos examine the recently-acquired Les Grands Raids D’Avions book, 30 Jan. 2014
January 21 – We welcomed a new #archivespuppy Isra, who, despite her dark hair, is actually a Golden Labrador (Golden Retriever + Labrador Retriever). Isra, a service-dog-in-training with 4Paws4Ability, comes to work in the archives with her handler Karis (one of our graduate student workers). Last semester, Karis brought A’Kos with her. Both dogs have been delightful to have around!
Isra’s first reference desk shift, 21 Jan. 2014
January 23 – Lisa gave a presentation and tour to an upper level history class. She provided an overview of what archives do, as well as specifics about SC&A’s policies and collections, then gave a tour of original materials pulled especially to coincide with students’ chosen research topics. (We are happy to do this for any course! If you are interested, please contact us for details.)
January 25 & 26 – We had a record-setting weekend on the Dayton Daily News Archive blog. That weekend marked the anniversary of the famed Blizzard of ’78, and consequently that blog post alone received over 1,300 views during those two days. Hits on that particular post seem to spike any time there’s a snowstorm in the Miami Valley, and with the winter we’ve been having, it’s not surprising that the post (and the blog itself) have had their most popular month ever: over 5,000 views on the Blizzard of ’78 in January (& more than 9,000 total views on the DDN Archive blog overall).
One of many Blizzard of 1978 photos you can find at the Dayton Daily News Archive blog.
January 31 – Gino conducted an activity about primary sources and Paul Laurence Dunbar with students at a Xenia elementary school.
This month also marked the start of the spring semester (however un-spring-like it might seem!), and most of our archivists are also teaching courses this term. Those courses include topics on archival processing, records management, historic site interpretation, preservation, and the Miami Valley’s aviation history.