We have recently uploaded a new oral history to the National Bankruptcy Archives digital collections. Click here to listen to attorney Steven N. Cousins discuss his fascinating experiences in the field of bankruptcy, as well as his experience as the first African American attorney to join the law firm Armstrong Teasdale in St. Louis, MO.
Click here to follow along and read about all the recent happenings in Biddle's Archives and Special Collections Department. Biddle Law Library's news feed features newly processed collections, updates on research appointment procedures, exhibitions, and more!
We have recently uploaded a new oral history to the National Bankruptcy Archives digital collections. Click here to listen to attorney Michael H. Reed (senior counsel at Troutman Pepper) discuss his career during the formative years of the of the Bankruptcy Reform Act of 1978 and Bankruptcy Act of 1984.
Greetings!
My name is Kathryn Gstalder, and I’ve spent the 2020-2021 academic year as an archives intern with Archivist Sarah Oswald at the Biddle Law Library. My work has been focused on providing greater searchability of, and access to, the National Bankruptcy Archives (NBA) Oral History Collection.
As a brief introduction, here a few things about me:
While working with the NBA Oral History Collection, I have had the opportunity to contribute to several areas of the collection’s archival processes. My first assignment was to research metadata templates for oral history collections, and to come up with a metadata template for the NBA oral histories.
Using Box, Sarah and I organized our shared files in three areas—master files, project files, and access files. I came up with file naming schemes both for our master object files and for our access metadata files. Sarah uploaded master videos and audio clips to Box from YouTube. Finalized transcripts were also housed in the master files folder.
Below is an image from the NBA oral history interview with Norma Hamnes and Ike Shulman, co-founders of the National Association of Consumer Bankruptcy Attorneys (NACBA).
Once the interviews were in Box, I screened them in order to understand their contents so that I could write useful metadata description. Once the metadata was filled into an excel spreadsheet and saved as a tab-delimited text file, it was added to our access metadata files in Box. Here are some of the metadata elements created for the NBA oral history interview with Judge Judith Jones:
Before ingesting the master object files and access metadata to CONTENTdm, I checked to make sure we had the interviewee’s signed release form on file. When all the above had been completed, we ingested the items into the CONTENTdm Project Client and then Sarah approved the items for upload to the server. Then the interviews became widely accessible online through the library’s Digital Collections.
We kept track of individual interviews’ workflow progress through a spreadsheet on Box, located in our project files folder.
I also created a poster presentation for the Spring 2021 Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference about how working remotely due to the Covid-19 pandemic impacted the way in which we worked on this collection. Here is a link to a YouTube playlist containing that presentation and others from the conference: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7gSvOZUOKE4zkd6OUBGVcSI_sYfFMkhL
I’ve really enjoyed diving into these oral histories and learning about the individuals involved in the field of bankruptcy law. Moving forward I will be working on creating a manual for the oral history collection, as well as continuing to add incoming oral history interviews to the library’s Digital Collection.
"Benchmark: Penn Carey Law Women and the Federal Courts" highlights the careers of Penn Carey Law alumnae who have served or are currently serving on the federal judicial court system. The women featured in this digital exhibition provide a wide lens of exemplary accomplishments, and by highlighting their careers it also provides greater insight into the evolving historical context of women entering federal judicial service. Click here to view this exhibition.
This digital exhibition was inspired by the exhibition "Phyllis A. Kravitch: Breaking Precedent," currently on display in Biddle Law Library's Rare Book Room, T-253.
Penn Carey Law has been celebrating Black accomplishments since 1888 when Aaron Albert Mossell became the first Black man to graduate from Penn Carey Law. This exhibition provides a list and an accompanying visual timeline to mark Black history firsts here at Penn Carey Law. Click here to view the exhibition.
In addition, this exhibition is Biddle Law Library's inaugural exhibition using the platform Omeka.
*Beginning 3/12/2020 Biddle Archives is canceling all on-site research visits until further notice and will have limited availability for remote research requests.
Hello everyone! My name is Laura Dees, and I work as an archive assistant in the Biddle Law Library. Here are a few things about me:
Now that my introduction is over, here are some things I have to say about my job. As an assistant to the archivist, I help with inventorying and processing collection items as well as helping to work on the LibGuide. I have never had archival experience before this position, so the things I have learned from working at Biddle are initially always foreign to me. Working on the recently donated George Treister Papers collection was maybe the first truly independent project I have had so far, as I was involved or handled all aspects of dealing with, processing, and storing the collection other than the initial accession.
I feel that both the experience working at Biddle, and more specifically the ability to work with a collection like this on my own has challenged me to improve my abilities to organize things both in physical space and in a mental layout. I also feel that as an anthropology major, the attitude I need to use to approach both an unfamiliar collection or the artifacts from another society is the same; I go in with no assumptions, and try to discern what the materials are telling me rather than what I want them to say.
To go in so blindly can sometimes be very challenging, especially when dealing with complex or confusing materials. I did experience something similar to that when working with the George Treister Papers in that there were materials I had an incredibly difficult time understanding. For example, included in the collection are things such as handwritten notes taken during conference presentations, correspondence with people in his field, or brochures from various conferences he attended. These items are not placed in any obvious physical, causal, or chronological order, so weeding through every piece of paper and being able to connect the ties proved to be a very daunting task. However, once the pieces finally came together, I had an idea of the order of correspondence and which notes go with which brochures, and they actually began to paint a very rich picture of creating, going to, and reflecting on these conferences he attended. Much like in the way anthropologists must create a narrative from the objects they have of the pasts, archivists do the same in that creating an intellectual order or relationship between the pieces of a collection conjures a narrative about the individuals involved in its creation.
In short, I see that my time with Biddle, working on the numerous things that I have, has enabled my ability to create strong ties between items as well as intellectual concepts about them. Despite the challenges, I really enjoy my work here, and feel that it is helpful for the perpetuity of the study of the past and am looking forward to the things ahead.