Here is an update on our February activities here in Special Collections & Archives, in addition to our usual ongoing activities (reference, records management, collection development and manuscripts processing, digital initiatives, preservation, etc.):
February 8 – Dawne Dewey conducted a workshop on “History through Newspapers,” as part of the Friends of the Libraries’ workshop series.
February 20 & 21 – John Armstrong and Dawne Dewey gave presentations about the Archives to the Mad River Retirees’ Association and the Beavercreek Rotary, respectively.
February 26 – Gino Pasi installed a new exhibit about Phil Donahue on the first floor of the Dunbar Library. An accompanying blog post about Donahue can be found on our Dayton Daily News Archive blog, since most of the materials came from the DDN Archive. We were later thrilled on March 11 when the NHPRC — which funded our DDN Archive processing project — picked up the Donahue blog post and shared it on their Facebook page:
February 27 – Dawne and a group of Public History students attended the annual Ohio Statehood Day celebration at the Ohio Statehouse in Columbus. You can read about the students’ experiences in our March 10th blog post “Statehood Day Reflections.”
We also brought history into the classroom (or brought the classroom to us!) in February: Dawne brought her UH 4000: Dayton’s Aviation Heritage class to the Archives to conduct local history research in our aviation journals (learn more about what they found!). And Gino Pasi gave a presentation to Dr. Kathryn Meyer’s HST 4900: Research Seminar class about oral histories.