Wow – our members are out there doing such awesome things!!
“Materials curated by the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library (HMML) at Saint John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota are featured in the December 2018 issue of National Geographic magazine: “The Bible Hunters: inside the cloak-and-dagger search for sacred texts.” HMML executive director, Father Columba Stewart is mentioned; his photograph is included in the online version of the article. The article highlights the history of Bible hunting and includes nineteenth century figures like Constantine von Tischendorf and contemporary figures like Hobby Lobby’s president Steve Green.
Items from the HMML collections help illustrate the circulation of the Bible across centuries and cultural regions: from glimpses of the Bible in a Carolingian fragment of the Gospel of John to a fragment of a Coptic Psalter—both from the 9th century; from a beautiful Bible in many languages printed in Antwerp (1569-1573) to an 18th-century Ethiopian Psalter; and even from a late 13th-century Latin New Testament to The Saint John’s Bible of the 21st century.
If you have not visited this amazing collection – you are in store for a treat! It is located in the newly renovated library on St John’s campus – so you can visit both. Prepare to be impressed; I certainly was when I visited!!
We always enjoy visits to our CMLE members, and this visit was extra interesting! One of our members that is not a typical library is the Stearns History Museum. The Museum has an extensive archive and we were lucky enough to be shown around by archivist Jessie Storlien.
As you can see from these photos, she showed us a ton of cool information, and as a Stearns County native myself, I really appreciated seeing all the history available about this area. And it’s all available to the public, although if you have any questions or need to see the archives, the experts like Jessie are available to assist you. Other archivists at the Museum include Steve Penick, John Decker, and Heidi Heller.
Mission and Vision of Stearns History Museum
A view of the Stearns History Museum workspace
Stearns County Plat Book Index from 1896
From left: Gig Young (St. Cloud native), Charles Boyer, and David Niven
An early St. Cloud newspaper “Der Nordstern”
Very early history of Stearns County, hunters and gatherers
Family histories and biographies
Fireplace from St. Cloud’s Carnegie Library
An area for visitors to view microfilm
As you can see from the photos above, there are all sorts of different resources available to the public. You can find your family history (if you are from this area you will see some familiar names!), scroll through microfilm, or check out an exhibition about the first people to ever live in Stearns County. Do you live on a family farm? Check out your eligibility for the Century Farms program! And one of St. Cloud’s early newspapers, Der Nordstern, is in German so you may want to keep your Google Translate handy!
Welcome to the archives!
Many photographs are kept here, still in their frames
Myron Hall was a photographer for the St. Cloud Times between 1937-1976
They are working on indexing and preserving his collection!
Information available about town, parish, and county histories
There are many Oral Histories available from residents of Stearns County
An example of one of the drawers of Oral Histories
More of the donated Myron Hall collection
A map of St. Cloud from 1869!
It was exciting to see the archives where additional resources are kept, including photographs, oral histories, the Myron Hall collection, and even more maps! It was easy to see that there was a lot of work being done to make sure historical documents are preserved in a way that will allow them to be accessed in the future. We got to learn about some of the challenges that face archivists, like rapidly changing technology and processing donated materials.
The room for kids looked like a very fun spot, with plenty of good reading material
We were amazed by the gorgeous quilts on display
This quilt was made by an artist in St. Cloud
More quilts!
Beautiful grounds, and Heritage Park is steps away!
On our way out, we stopped to visit the room for kids, which had some historical photos of children from Stearns County! We got to admire some beautiful quilts made by artists from the area, and of course enjoyed the grounds outside the museum.
If you have any interest in local or family history, I’d definitely recommend taking advantage of the Stearns History Museum! Keep in mind that the museum is open Monday – Friday 10 AM – 5 PM, and Saturdays too, from 10AM – 4 PM!
A huge thank you to Jessie for a fantastic tour and for sharing all of her knowledge!
“I suspected it was special as soon as I saw it,” said Erika Delbecque, a special collections librarian at the University of Reading, who found the paper hidden in an archive. “It is incredibly rare to find an unknown Caxton leaf, and astonishing that it has been under our noses for so long.”
The double-sided page has black-letter typeface and red paragraph marks that gave it away as an early western European printing, according to the university.
“The leaf had previously been pasted into another book for the undignified purpose of reinforcing its spine,” Delbecque said in the statement. Delbecque and her colleagues figured out that in 1820 a librarian at the University of Cambridge saved the page from the book spine but apparently didn’t realize its worth. The 15th-century leaf then ended up in a private collection that was purchased by the University of Reading 20 years ago. ”
Are you interested in archives, digitization projects, or art? Then you will definitely appreciate this news from the Delaware Art Museum!
Recently, they launched their new web-based platform which allows selections of their archival material to be viewed online. Some of this material includes “original letters from Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti to his mistress, photographs of artist and illustrator John Sloan in his studio, and scrapbooks chronicling the Museum’s history.”
Through the Delaware Heritage Collection, The Helen Farr Sloan Library & Archives has digitized for free access some of their most famous collections, including the “John Sloan, Howard Pyle, and Samuel and Mary R. Bancroft, Jr. Pre-Raphaelite Manuscript Collections.”
There are currently 500 archival items available online, with more being added daily and plans for hundreds more to be added this summer. The museum is excited to reach more members of their audience and to be better equipped to handle research and reference requests.
WORCESTER – An effort by local historians to put faces to the names on the city’s World War I memorial recently encountered an expensive hurdle in an unexpected place – the Massachusetts State Library.
The issue, concerning usage fees for images in the State Library’s collection, appeared on its way to being resolved this week, ending what had been, for the historians, a potentially costly predicament.
More than 60 photos of Worcester veterans who gave their lives in the “War to End All Wars” are in the State Library’s digitized archive of World War I photos. Some are likely the only images of these men in uniform.
Are you interested in archives, digitization projects, or art? Then you will definitely appreciate 