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January 13th, 2020
The mission of the Purdue University Archives and Special Collections “is to support the discovery, learning, and engagement goals of Purdue University by identifying, collecting, preserving, and making available for research records and papers of enduring value created or received by the University and its employees.”
In more ways than one, the mission of the Archives and the university press are a perfect fit, and our work can come together to create something of unique value to the University.
The research for many Purdue University Press projects has started in the archives, including the two books published for Purdue’s 150th anniversary celebration, Ever True: 150 Year’s of Giant Leaps at Purdue University by John Norberg and Purdue at 150: A Visual History by David M. Hovde, Adriana Harmeyer, Neal Harmeyer, and Sammie L. Morris.
“The Purdue Virginia Kelly Karnes Archives and Special Collections Research Center is a portal through which the past speaks to us, where people long gone reach out to tell us who they were, how they lived, what they thought, and what they did,” says John Norberg, author of Ever True, “among the roles of a university are creating the future while preserving the past. We can’t know what the future holds. But the past comes back to life at the archives.”
Here’s more about some of our recent titles that are sourced heavily or entirely through the archives:
by David M. Hovde, Adriana Harmeyer, Neal Harmeyer, and Sammie L. Morris
This book tells Purdue’s story through rare images, artifacts, and words.
Authors, who have all worked for Purdue University, culled decades of student papers, from scrapbooks, yearbooks, letters, and newspapers to historical photographs and memorabilia preserved in the Purdue University Libraries Virginia Kelly Karnes Archives and Special Collections. Many of the images and artifacts included have never been published, presenting a unique history of Purdue University from the student perspective.
Read more about the process of research and writing this book in an interview with the authors.
by John Norberg
In this volume, Norberg takes readers beyond the iconic redbrick walls of Purdue University’s West Lafayette campus to delve into the stories of the faculty, alumni, and leaders who make up this remarkable institution’s distinguished history. Written to commemorate Purdue University’s sesquicentennial celebrations, Ever True picks up where prior histories leave off, bringing the intricacies of historic tales to the forefront, updating the Purdue story to the present, and looking to the future.
“In working on Ever True: 150 Years of Giant Leaps at Purdue University and other books, I spent many long hours in the archives. I was able to look at the material available online and request what I wanted to see. I sat at a table and the always very helpful archivists brought boxes to me. I opened the boxes and found letters, speeches, diaries and much more. History is the stories of people and in the Purdue Archives people came back to life, sat beside me and told me their victories and tragedies, joys and sorrows.”
by James R. Hansen
Today, some 75,000 of them letters to and from Neil Armstrong are preserved in the archives at Purdue University. This book publishes a careful sampling of these letters—roughly 400—reflecting the various kinds of correspondence that Armstrong received along with representative samples of his replies.
“There’s always more to know, to learn, to discover. For First Man, I did not have total access to Neil’s correspondence. For the past four or five years I did have access, in the Purdue Archives, and, as a result, I have a lot more to share with the world about Armstrong.”
Read the full interview with Hansen.
Frederick Whitford and Neal Harmeyer
This volume contains over 900 picturesque images, most never-before-seen, of men, women, and children working on the farm at the turn of the twentieth century, many of which come from the J.C. Allen and Sons Inc. Photographs and Negatives Collection in the archives.
John Calvin Allen, known as J.C., worked as a photographer for Purdue from 1909-1952, and operated his own photography business until his death in 1976.
You can get 30% all Purdue University Press titles by ordering from our website and using the discount code PURDUE30.
Filed under: UncategorizedMay 17th, 2019
Every story has untold pieces. Purdue University Archives and Special Collections contains millions of stories in the many papers, books, objects, items, and other memorabilia carefully preserved and stored there. Yet, it does not hold them all—particularly those that may have not been “judged to be…important,” as noted in the introduction of the new online exhibit, “Voices, Identities & Silences: Investigating 150 Years of Diversity in Purdue Archives.”
The exhibit is the result of a graduate course led by Purdue University Archivist and Professor Sammie Morris this past spring semester.
The exhibit’s introduction notes that Purdue’s past, present, and future are comprised of much more than stories about feats associated with its engineering programs, its tales about athletic teams, or its strides in agricultural research and practice. It also explains why the student curators took on this effort:
[N]ot all of this history is (or will be) preserved in the University’s archive. Inevitably, some people and events are judged to be more important and thus more worthy of preservation. Our exhibit, then, aims to focus attention on elements of Purdue’s history that have been otherwise overlooked, not in order to ‘correct’ that history but rather to expand it and (if our aim is true) change our understanding of what ‘counts’ as that history in the first place. — Voices, Identities & Silences: Investigating 150 Years of Diversity in Purdue Archives
According to Morris, the idea for the course coincided with Purdue University’s faculty and staff members’ preparation for Purdue’s Sesquicentennial.
“As Purdue’s 150th anniversary approached, I often found myself reflecting on how the history of Purdue is preserved in the Archives, but not completely. There are many hidden gaps or silences representing people in Purdue history whose stories have not been widely known,” Morris said. “I began thinking about ways to fill in gaps in Purdue history, while engaging students in learning archival research skills.”
The course, too, coincided with Purdue Libraries’ expansion of its teaching mission through the creation of the new “Purdue University Libraries and School of Information Studies.”
“With digital humanities being one area the new school focuses on, the course offered the right opportunity to teach digital scholarship methods while providing students the opportunity to delve into Purdue’s lesser-known history,” Morris explained. “The overarching goal for students was to learn how to conduct archival research, but the broader goal was to benefit from the results of their research projects by highlighting diversity in Purdue’s past. Students in the course were encouraged to consider the identity of Purdue and how their experiences as students today are preserved. Students learned how the records of their experiences (that are preserved in the Archives) become sources of study for scholars in the future.”
Students in Morris’ class each focused on an individual era and/or topic in Purdue’s history, and the contents covered in the online exhibit are the result of each student’s work. For instance, Lee Hibbard, a third-year Ph.D. student in the Purdue Department of English studying rhetoric and composition, focused on queer life in the 2000s at Purdue.
“The work on the exhibit was entirely collaborative, with every person taking on distinct roles both on the front and back end of the exhibit’s appearance and contents,” Hibbard explained. “To come up with the title, we took a portion of class time and brainstormed some ideas together. The title came about as we played with the theme of the course and our process of research, as well as what we wanted viewers to take away from the exhibit. The wording was especially important to us as Purdue students wanting to tell a coherent narrative that depicted our goals for the exhibit, as well as the things we took away from the course as a whole,” he added.
“The three core pieces of archival work we focused on—voices, identities, and silences—became the first part of the title. The second half emphasized our process, which was very much a journey of going through the archives with an eye towards investigating diversity, rather than discovering,” Hibbard continued. “Discovery has an end point while Investigation is a process, and even though we all uncovered many interesting and fascinating examples of diversity, all of us felt by the end of the course that we had just scratched the surface of our areas, and could easily return to them to try and learn more.”
Hibbard, who is also interested in archival practices, noted that he found this course essential to unpacking the complex ideas he had for his dissertation.
“At the beginning of the semester, I knew I wanted to look at some archival things, but didn’t have the tools to do so. After a spring of reading complex theory, getting hands-on archival experience, and learning the importance of selection and curation in an exhibit setting, I feel more comfortable with the prospect of working with archives for my dissertation and my future scholarship as a whole,” he said.
Like his fellow students in the course, Hibbard chose to home in on a specific area of Purdue’s history because of his personal stake and interest in the selected topic and era.
“As a queer person, specifically a transgender man, I am very interested in the way support and networks for queer students developed at Purdue during the time that I was an undergraduate (2006-2010) at a similar large Midwestern university (University of Nebraska in Lincoln),” he explained.
Shortly before the end of the Spring 2019 semester, students in Morris’ course shared their personal stories about their work on the exhibit at a small, private reception held in the Archives and Special Collections. Below are more photos from that reception.
August 22nd, 2018
Purdue University Archives and Special Collections (ASC) latest exhibit highlights the physical growth and evolution of Purdue‘s West Lafayette campus since the University was founded in 1869. “Building Purdue: 150 Years of the West Lafayette Campus” will be on display from Monday, Aug. 27–Friday, Dec. 14 in the ASC (located on the fourth floor of the Humanities, Social Science, and Education, or HSSE, Library in Stewart Center). Exhibition hours are 10 a.m.-4:30 p.m. Monday-Friday, and it is free and open to the public.
According to Digital Archivist Neal Harmeyer, who curated the exhibit, the display will include selected maps, photographs, documents, and artifacts that tell the story of campus—with a focus on its construction—as Purdue nears the sesquicentennial.
“Prominent topics are the fire of Heavilon Hall that inspired ‘One Brick Higher,’ the creation of the Purdue Memorial Union, the University during and after the World Wars, and the ever-changing nature of the campus all Boilermakers call home,” Harmeyer noted.
Later this year, Archives and Special Collections will launch the Campus Buildings and Facilities Project, a searchable database documenting the full history of the physical West Lafayette campus.
The exhibit helps Purdue Archives and Special Collections, a division of Purdue Libraries, kick off Purdue University’s Sesquicentennial Campaign, 150 Years of Giant Leaps. The campaign is a yearlong celebration of Purdue, its remarkable people, its unique history, and its visionary drive to meet the world’s future challenges. From Homecoming 2018 through Homecoming 2019, the Purdue community will spend the year celebrating its unique legacy, which has included giant leaps across every field of endeavor, and further advancing the mission set forth since its founding as a land-grant university in 1869. With the campaign serving as a springboard for a renewed commitment to growth, innovation, and discovery, Purdue’s call is simple: Whatever your pursuit, take Giant Leaps.
For more information about “Building Purdue: 150 Years of the West Lafayette Campus,” contact Harmeyer at harmeyna@purdue.edu.
#TakeGiantLeaps
Filed under: collections, events, general, HSSE, SPECNovember 2nd, 2017
An Open House and Reception for the “Missing You: Navigating Amelia Earhart’s Last Flight and Enduring Legacy” exhibition at Purdue University Libraries’ Archives and Special Collections (ASC) is set from 1-4 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 18. The ASC is located in the Humanities, Social Science, and Education (HSSE) Library, Stewart Center, on the fourth floor.
The family-friendly event will offer activities for kids and a chance for individuals to visit the “Missing You” exhibit before it closes Friday, Dec. 8.
Refreshments will also be served, and paid parking will be available in the Grant Street Garage across the street from the Purdue Memorial Union.
For more information, contact Tracy Grimm at grimm3@purdue.edu.
Filed under: events, general, press_release, SPECSeptember 8th, 2017
The Archivist of the United States, David S. Ferriero, will share the many information preservation challenges and opportunities faced by the nation in the Inaugural Hiler Theater Lecture sponsored by the Purdue University Libraries.
Ferriero, confirmed as the 10th archivist of the United States in November 2009, will deliver, “Preserving the Past to Inform the Future: The View from the National Archives,” in the Hiler Theater, located in the Wilmeth Active Learning Center, at 6:30 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 28. The lecture is open free to the public.
At the entrance to the National Archives building in Washington, D.C., the monumental statues declare: “Study the Past” and “What is Past is Prologue.” According to Ferriero, in 1934, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the legislation that created the agency responsible for government records, he had in mind a vision of the power and responsibility of the American people to use those records in the ongoing work of creating a more perfect union.
“At the dedication of his Presidential Library, FDR stated, ‘It seems to me that the dedication of a library is itself an act of faith. To bring together the records of the past and to house them in a building where they will be preserved for the use of men and women in the future, a Nation must believe in three things. It must believe in the past. It must believe in the future. It must, above all, believe in the capacity of its own people so to learn from the past that they can gain in judgment in creating their own future.’ Now, 83 years later, the world is a very different place,” Ferriero noted. “The government has grown, the methods of creation and dissemination of information continue to multiply, the attitudes toward privacy and secrecy shift, citizen expectations for access and participation in their government increase, and the veracity of information available is under attack. This view from Washington will share the challenges and opportunities before us as we strengthen FDR’s original vision of the mission of the National Archives.”
The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) preserves, and provides access to, the records of the U.S. Government and has 43 facilities across the country, including 14 Presidential Libraries, containing approximately 13 billion pages of textual records; 42 million photographs; miles and miles of film and video; and an ever-increasing number of electronic records. The Rotunda of the National Archives Building in downtown Washington, D.C., displays the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Declaration of Independence.
Before his 2009 confirmation as the 10th U.S. Archivist, Ferriero served as the Andrew W. Mellon Director of the New York Public Libraries and held top library positions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Duke University. Ferriero earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English literature from Northeastern University and a master’s degree from the Simmons College of Library and Information Science. He also served as a Navy hospital corpsman in Vietnam.
For more information, contact Teresa Koltzenburg, director of strategic communication, Purdue University Libraries, at (765) 494-0069 or via email at tkoltzen@purdue.edu.
Filed under: general, press_release, SPECAugust 27th, 2017
The From the Archives photo series returns with the start of the new school year. On alternating Mondays throughout the academic year, we will feature a photo from Purdue Libraries Archives and Special Collections in conjunction with Purdue Today and give readers a chance to answer what’s taking place in the image. The full story behind the photo will be revealed on the following Friday.
To kick off a new year, we look at a beginning. Can you identify this Purdue location and tell us what – aside from crowds of students – is missing from the finished space? Share your theories in the comments and we’ll reveal the full story on Friday!
UPDATE:
In 1954, construction began on Purdue’s Memorial Center, a new campus building that would incorporate the existing University Library, a newly reconstructed Fowler Hall, and new classroom and activity space. Construction finished in 1958 and crowds filled the new space for its dedication ceremony.
When Memorial Center first opened it was missing its most striking feature, “The Spirit of the Land Grant College” mural above what is now the entrance to the Humanities, Social Science, and Education Library. The mural was completed and dedicated on October 4, 1961.
In 1972, the building was renamed in honor of University Treasurer R.B. Stewart, becoming the Stewart Center we know today.
Congratulations to everyone who commented and recognized this building! Please join us again on Monday, September 11, and on alternating Mondays throughout the semester as we present mystery photos From the Archives.
Filed under: general, SPECJuly 13th, 2017
Courtesy of Megan Huckaby, Purdue University Marketing and Media
A new exhibit from Purdue Libraries, Archives and Special Collections (ASC), explores Amelia Earhart’s last adventure through letters, telegrams, photographs, and logs sent during her famous 1937 world flight attempt.
“Missing You” opened on June 29 to mark the 80-year anniversary of Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan’s world flight. It will remain open through Dec. 8.
“The mystery surrounding Earhart’s disappearance often overshadows her legacy as a pioneer aviator, vocal advocate for women’s opportunities in the workplace, as one of the first equal partners in a power-couple marriage and as a role model for young women,” says Tracy Grimm, Purdue’s Barron Hilton Archivist for Flight and Space Exploration. “‘Missing You’ explores Amelia Earhart’s last adventure through letters, telegrams, and logs sent home during the 1937 world flight and examines the unique role Earhart played to promote women’s rights during the 1920s and 1930s.”
The exhibit includes never-before-seen letters that Noonan sent home during the flight, photographs Earhart took with her own camera, and a telegram, Earhart’s last communication, sent from Lae, New Guinea, prior to their departure for Howland Island.
The exhibit, located in the Purdue Archives and Special Collections on the fourth floor of the Humanities, Social Science and Education (HSSE) Library in Stewart Center, is open free to the public.
Its summer hours are 10 a.m.-4:30 p.m. Monday-Thursday and 1-4:30 p.m. on Friday. Fall hours will be 10 a.m.-4:30 p.m. on Monday-Friday. Please note the ASC will be closed for inventory Monday-Friday, Aug. 7-11.
The exhibit is made possible through the support of Purdue Libraries’ Susan Bulkeley Butler Women’s Archives and the Barron Hilton Archives for Flight and Space Exploration.
Filed under: collections, general, press_releaseMay 31st, 2017
The research paper is a fact of life in college. If you have completed a college-level class, it’s almost guaranteed you have received a syllabus that instructed you to format a paper according to a particular academic style and directed you to turn in a double-digit-page composition citing at least three-to-five (or more) sources. While many college students get hung up on the number of pages required, it’s likely there are just as many who lament how many sources—and about their type: primary or secondary—they will have to read and consult to meet the minimum source-number requirements for the assignment.
But for students in the Spring 2016 Purdue University Honors College course “Interdisciplinary Approaches to Writing” 199 (section 03), co-taught by Kristina Bross, associate professor in the English dept., and Neal Harmeyer, an archivist in Purdue Archives and Special Collections (ASC), the oft-dreaded assignment resulted in getting their work published by the Purdue University Press—an unexpected perk for the inevitable undergrad research paper assignment. According to Harmeyer, the book, “More Than a Memory: Exploring Purdue University’s History Through Objects” (which is also available as an e-book via e-Pubs, Purdue Libraries’ open access repository) was printed this spring and was recognized with a Purdue Honors College-sponsored book launch event in late April.
In the 2016 course, the students, through honing their writing, sought to understand the history of Purdue University and to recover the student experience at the turn of the 20th century. Harmeyer added the course also provided students with a way to learn about primary-source research and gain hands-on experience working with the collections and artifacts stored in the ASC.
“Over the course of the semester, we asked the students to go through the collections, pick an object—a photo, a personal memento of some sort, or a document, perhaps—and then ask and answer three questions: 1. What is in front of you? 2. What do you think about what you’re seeing? and 3. What could this mean? We used this approach as a scaffolded step of deliberation and archival research methodology to help inform their writing,” Harmeyer explained. “From the class, 10 of the 13 students agreed to have their works published. The book, ‘More Than a Memory,’ provides a snapshot of the sources they found and the final outcomes of their individual research.”
Each student who agreed to have their work published received a few copies of the book to keep and to share. Their individual compositions included the image (a scan or photo) of the object they each chose, a little bit of background about themselves, and about 900 words or so about their research, their insights, and the object itself.
According to Bross, when she was first approached about teaching the class, she knew she wanted to have students research issues/topics that would matter to them, that would feel “real.”
“Having students dive into special collections is a sure way to give them that experience,” Bross said. “I’ve asked students to do archival searches for years, so I know they respond well to such assignments, and I think it’s especially important for students to know something about the history of Purdue,” she added.
The collaboration between Bross and Harmeyer that went into the spring 2016 course “Interdisciplinary Approaches to Writing” 199 and the book, “More Than a Memory,” was not the first time they worked together to instruct students in this particular Honors course. In 2013, they co-taught the course with the same title, and through their students’ research, they published “Little Else Than a Memory: Purdue Students Search for the Class of 1904,” also printed by Purdue University Press.
“I had been somewhat involved in the course in 2013, but when one of our archivists took a position at another institution about halfway through the semester, I took over her role as co-instructor,” Harmeyer said. “While students in that class implemented a similar project, for the 2016 version of the course, Professor Bross and I planned to focus more on teaching students about archival research and primary-source research. One of our objectives was to get them more accustomed and familiar with the various research avenues they may need to undertake, for whatever their disciplines were, as we had majors enrolled from across the various disciplines in the 2016 version,” he added.
Bross noted the ASC provided a fruitful learning laboratory to accomplish the goals of the course.
“The Purdue Libraries’ Archives and Special Collections Division is ideal for undergraduate research, not only because it’s local, but also because its faculty and staff are so knowledgeable about Purdue’s history and our collections. In addition, they know how to introduce archival research to undergrads and help them understand the stakes involved in the work they are doing. Having a co-teacher from the ASC makes this course possible—and Neal is simply terrific in that role,” Bross said.
“The interdisciplinary part of the course title is represented by the Archives and the primary sources, and the writing part is Professor Bross helping the students hone their writing,” Harmeyer added. “Over the course, she assigned the students primary sources, dating back centuries, such as diaries and first-person accounts, along with secondary source materials, and she asked them to write about and respond to those. So the two things met in the middle—our idea was they would learn about writing along the way, they would learn about research along the way, and at the end, they would have a research paper.”
As part of the research and writing process, the students also contributed to a blog (see http://ascblogs.lib.purdue.edu/spring2016-honors19903/), “a site devoted to the sharing of undergraduate archival research and scholarship.” The blog was a fundamental component of the course; during the semester, the students composed three responses to their findings, which in turn were posted on the site, Harmeyer said.
“This blog allowed us to see their work in progress. Through it, too—because we encouraged comments on the site—they were able to communicate with one another and experience feedback from the larger community, as well. This site also enabled students to get their research out and think more critically as they were writing,” Harmeyer explained.
“The blog posts were just as—perhaps more important than—their final publications,” Bross added. “Neal was absolutely central to making the website excellent. It was interesting asking them to write about their individual processes, as well as to represent their findings. If we get the chance to teach this class or another like it, I want to think some more about the best way to use in-process digital media to publish their work.”
According to Harmeyer, ASC personnel are committed to keeping the blog site available for future research purposes.
“Not only do the final essays showcase the students’ work, but the research they compiled and shared on in their papers and through their blog posts, also serve as secondary sources. Later, students may be able to build and use their research.”
Harmeyer noted he thinks the course will be offered again, with the Purdue Archives and Special Collections again serving as a laboratory for Purdue students who enroll in it.
“For many of them, it was only their second semester in college, and I could see the light-bulb moments expressed in their faces and in their words: ‘Wow, this is hard… but interesting.’ Overall, I think most of them had that feeling and were extremely rewarded by it.”
Download the full text of “More Than a Memory” at http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/sps_ebooks/9/
Filed under: faculty_staff, general, SPECMay 21st, 2017
The academic year has ended and summer is upon us. For our final From the Archives post until fall, we present a campus photo that fully embodies summer. Do you remember where on campus you could find this scene? What’s there now?
UPDATE:
This outdoor swimming pool was part of the Recreational Gymnasium, which was completed in 1957 and later renamed the Recreational Sports Center. The pool’s site west of the center now is occupied by the Morgan J. Burke Boilermaker Aquatic Center, which was completed in 2001 and adjoins the Co-Rec. The Co-Rec underwent a major renovation and expansion approved in 2008, and it was rededicated in 2012 as the France A. Córdova Recreational Sports Center.
Recreational Sports Center, circa 1960s
The pool photograph was taken on August 27, 1980, just as these students had arrived on campus for the academic year. Beyond the pool at right is the Purdue fire station, and across Third Street are Meredith and Shreve Residence Halls. Both are visible in the background of the full photo.
When the anniversary of this photo rolls around in three months, we’ll be back with more From the Archives.
Filed under: general, SPECApril 9th, 2017
Today we share the second photograph in our From the Archives series. This photo shows a moment that changed the face of Purdue’s campus.
What exactly is happening in this image and what was its result?
UPDATE:
On Jan. 19, 1894, Purdue dedicated a new mechanical engineering laboratory building on campus named after benefactor Amos Heavilon. The new structure was the pride of campus with state-of-the-art equipment and an eye-catching tower. Only four days after its dedication, however, a gas explosion in the boiler room sparked a fire that quickly spread throughout the building. Helpless crowds gathered to watch Purdue’s newest building burn to the ground. Aside from a few salvaged pieces of machinery, the building was a total loss.
The day after the fire, Purdue President James H. Smart drew upon the imagery of the Heavilon tower and vowed that it would be rebuilt “one brick higher.” Thanks to generous donations and fundraising efforts, the second Heavilon Hall was dedicated on December 4, 1895, less than two years after the fire. Ever since Smart’s speech in 1894, “one brick higher” has been a rallying cry spurring the Purdue community to ever greater heights.
Congratulations to the many respondents who knew the answer!
Filed under: general, SPEC