After more than 37 years of service to Stanford, Sara Timby will retire from Special Collections at the end of this month. Trained in anthropology and ethnobotany at UC-Berkeley, Sara joined the Stanford Libraries staff in 1976 as a Special Collections assistant, where her duties were various, including public service, technical processing, acquisition management, and paging. In 1979, she took a position in the Department of Manuscripts and Archives working initially for Maggie Kimball, former University Archivist. In those days, the department typically acquired less than 100 feet of manuscript materials. One of the first collections she processed was the Yvor Winters and Janet Lewis papers, 1920–1970.
We are pleased to welcome Pennington Ahlstrand to Special Collections. Penny has accepted a position as the Project Archivist for the Gordon Moore project and will be working primarily out of our new Redwood City location.
Penny has worked as a corporate archivist and archival consultant in the Bay Area since 1997. For over 10 years she worked part-time on large processing projects at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory – most notably the Web Wizards collection (the first US website was at SLAC), the papers of Nobel laureate and former SLAC director Burton Richter, and the papers of the man who built SLAC and was its first director: W.K.H. "Pief" Panofsky.
This is Penny’s third position in Special Collections. She began at Stanford working on the processing team for the Apple Computer Inc. records held by Stanford University Library. Most recently, she is completing a CLIR grant for the University Archives division to process the Stephen Schneider papers. She now comes full circle and returns to the Manuscripts division.
The Manuscripts Division is excited to announce that David Krah has been hired as the Road & Track Project Archivist.
Fred J. Buenzle papers. circa 1870-1946 (M1983)
Just after the earlier article announcing the opening of this collection came out, a photograph album in the collection was digitized. It contains eighty fading silver gelatin prints which include images of Naval training in Guantanamo Bay and other images in and around Havana, Cuba.
Processing is now complete for the following manuscript collections. Guides are available at the Online Archive of California.
Army Chaplain Walter Marvine papers, 1874-1936 (M1927)
Army Chaplain Walter Marvine, 1857-1945, served in the Philippines during the "Philippine Insurrection" (1899-1900), with the 9th Infantry in China at Tientsin during the "Boxer Rebellion" (1900-1901) and with the Expeditionary Brigade during World War One while serving with Coast Artillery Corps. The collection consists of nearly 3,000 letters, a diary, accounts, and sermons. Also included are lengthier accounts of his experiences, such as: "Sentinel Duty at Fort Shaw, MT, 1875," "A Story of the East TN Mountains,” "Some Incidents of My Experiences During the Campaign in China, 1900-01," and "Tome written from Ft. Huachuka from Grace to Walter in China, 2 Aug 1900."
Smedley Darlington Butler family correspondence, 1894-1957(M1975)
Smedley Butler’s Marine Corps career lasted from 1898-1932. He then became the author of a classic antiwar tract, "War is a Racket" (1935), and leader of a veteran’s peace movement. The collection includes over 1,000 letters, photographs, and ephemera. Of particular interest in this collection are Butler's letters written to his wife from Haiti which detail his adventures in that country. In 1915, rebel Haitians known as Cacos killed the Haitian dictator Vilbrun Guillaume Sam. In response, the United States ordered the USS Connecticut to Haiti with Major Butler and a group of Marines on board. Butler put down the rebellion and subsequently organized the Haitian Gendamerie. Social order was restored and several public works projects were completed. Many of the incoming correspondent's letters are from old Philadelphia Quaker family names, Such as Biddle, Butler, Darlington, Peters, Sharpless, Willig, etc.
The relocation for the Manuscripts Technical Unit is quickly approaching. After a few small delays, the dates have been set and our staff and collections will be moving the week of December 2nd immediately following the Thanksgiving holiday. Currently the room looks very large and very empty but the shelving (approx. 3,000 feet) will be installed over the next two weeks.
Because of pressing tasks necessary to preparing over 600 feet of collection materials and 10 staff members for the move, the Manuscripts Unit will suspend any normal activities between November 18th and December 13th – acquisitions, accessioning, cataloging, and processing. We will resume limited activities for the week before Stanford’s winter break - December 16-20.
SUL’s Special Collections received an Innovation Grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission to develop a software program (ePADD) for processing and making email archives discoverable. The end goal is to produce an open-source tool that will allow repositories and individuals to interact with email archives before and after they have been transferred to a repository. It would consist of four modules, each based on a different functional activity: Processing (arrangement and description), Appraisal (collection development), Discovery (online via the web), and Delivery (access).
The project website was launched in August 2013 and lists: project goals, work plan, team, and collaborators. A twitter feed for the project was just launched although project updates and news will primarily be posted in Special Collections Unbound.
In 1886, a sixteen-year-old named Fred Buenzle did what many boys had dreamed of: joining the Navy and sailing the high seas. Recognizing that the Navy was changing rapidly, he took note of the stories and lore of old salts and devoted himself to chronicling his own adventures; training in the Caribbean, briefly leaving the service in China, and in Cuba during the Spanish-American War. A stenographer who rose in rank to Chief Yeoman, Buenzle was the court reporter for the investigation of the sinking of the U.S.S. Maine, and took dictation for many of the Navy’s highest officers, including Theodore Roosevelt when he was briefly Secretary. Buenzle also founded and edited “The Bluejacket,” the first newsletter for enlisted men, and fought against discrimination of uniformed sailors.
Special Collections has recently acquired and processed the Fred J. Buenzle papers, which contain scrapbooks, unpublished manuscripts, and hundreds of photographs documenting his naval career, family, and subsequent retirement at his ranch in Los Gatos.
Albumen print of St. Thomas from Buenzle scrapbook, May 1891.
