Thursday, June 29, 2017

Local history - gas lighting history Brockport

Student writing a paper for Moyer in History, development of gas lighting in the village etc. Showed him some of the things online, like Elwell's columns, the 1913 supplement, nyshistoricnewspapers.org etc. Sent email to him while he was here with various links, encouraged him to stay in touch.

Migrant Education "TASC"

Got a call from the current permutation of the old Migrant Education office. They focus more on professional development etc., not so much the childhood education etc of the earlier version. They have some boxes of materials they'd like to archive, had questions about what to send, what to dispose of, how they would be handled once in the archives and so on. Am working with them now on all this. Better find some more space on the shelves!

Tuesday, June 27, 2017

Bud Meade "Updates"

   From an email sent yesterday to The Port editors:


   I just uploaded a consolidated version of Bud Meade's "Updates" onto the Digital Commons, see link below. If you aren't familiar with them, they're an amazing collection, an email newsletter emeriti Bud Meade has been doing for many years. It has collected and distributed and connected so many college retirees. It was something Bud started on his own initiative too, if he hadn't done it it just wouldn't have happened. It's invaluable in part because it documents so many of the people who built the college up in the years after we transitioned away from being a Teachers college to a comprehensive liberal arts school.

Tom Buntich 1970

From Athletics, he was a two sport star (wrestling & football,) is being nominated for hall of fame, want info. Will go thru Stylus, find, merge some articles and send to them.

Tuesday, June 20, 2017

Ray Tuttle columns

Recently finished digitizing the manuscripts of Ray Tuttle's local history columns from the '50s and '60s. Great stuff, posted about it on Facebook, the document has been downloaded over 50 times already!

Vietnam era activism

Design and Production staff wanted higher res images of some I'd sent over a while back, scans of pictures in the 1970 Saga. Rescanned the relevant pages at 400dpi and saved as .tiff files, sent via Dropbox. Wish I had the original negatives, some great shots there, but other than the old 4x5s from the '50s, early '60s, have never come across Saga, or Stylus, original photos.

Tuesday, June 13, 2017

NY Archives Conference

Was away part of last week at the NY Archives conference in Utica. One interesting presentation was on "resurrecting" college archives that had been neglected, closed... An intriguing aspect of that was the attention given to the history of the archives themselves, where they had been and so forth. I need to write up something on that for these archives!


Something else that came up was the history of the conference itself. By coincidence I was exchanging emails with Karl Kabelac, a retired area cataloger and local history person (Karl worked at Drake a few years in the '60s, then went to Univ Rochester.) Turned out that Karl had been at the first conference in 1969! I checked with Debra Kimok who is current president and they had not actually had the fact the groups 50th is coming up in 2019, so that is something to help with.

Doug Hickerson columns

Doug Hickerson is a retired college staff member who has for a number of years written articles for the local Suburban/Westside News on all sorts of topics of area interest, the restoration of the Methodist church clock tower, area personalities etc.


We've talked and he is bringing me his portfolios of his articles, 20+ years worth. I am going to digitize them and place them in Digital Commons, they should be a wonderful local history resource for years to come.

Tuesday, June 6, 2017

Phillip Hewitt

Received phone call from someone at US Geological Survey inquiring about Phil Hewitt, who was here 1967-1997. Hewitt was founder of the Geology/Earth Sciences department when we were transitioning from a teachers college to a comprehensive liberal arts school with separate departments, degrees etc. RG26 file had some info, found some more in Stylus, GeoRef...

Friday, June 2, 2017

Clock tower

Reporter working on story on Methodist church tower clock needing a more printable version of the 1914 Brockport Republic story. Edited same in Photoshop and sent to him as a pdf.

Painting restoration

Contacted by village Knapp Museum asking who restored the ee cummings paintings. Wasn't sure, am asking around, they are looking to restore some of those Hastings paintings they've discovered.

Photo request

Athletics, looking for images of 7 football players who were All Americans c2000-2015. Off to the photo archives I go!