Welcome to the Kenneth Spencer Research Library blog! As the special collections and archives library at the University of Kansas, Spencer is home to remarkable and diverse collections of rare and unique items. Explore the blog to learn about the work we do and the materials we collect.
Henceforth, it’s 2024, and we’re back at it again! Over the past year, the manuscripts processing team has been hard at work describing and housing one-of-a-kind collections. As a processor, you never quite know what you’ll find when you first open a box of dusty old records, but it’s always sure to delight! (most of the time…) Last year, the processing team worked through collections across Kenneth Spencer Research Library’s four collecting areas: the Kansas Collection, the Wilcox Collection, University Archives, and Special Collections. We even had an opportunity to further showcase a few of our favorite collections, including a Reuter Organ Company exhibit, a remembrance of a former colleague, and an in-depth look at the 1970 police shooting of KU student Nick Rice. This year we’re all excited to continue the process of processing new collections and additions, but first, here’s a list of new finding aids the manuscripts processing team published in the last six months of 2023:
Production notes for a Reading Rainbow episode featuring Math Curse, a children’s book written by Joe Scieszka and illustrated by Lane Smith. The book was featured in the first episode of season 17 and originally aired on October 5, 1998. Take Ten, Inc. Records, Call Number: RH MS Q512. Click image to enlarge.
A 1923 watercolor painting created by M.H.A. Staring (1897-1929), a Dutch artist and ornithologist. The painting depicts the courtship display of three male ruffs, or calidris pugnax, towards one female ruff. Call Number: MS Q107. Click image to enlarge.
A photograph of a 1973 production of the popular kabuki play Kanjinchōby Namiki Gohei III. Kanjinchō was adapted from Ataka, a play in the noh theater style, and would later serve as the inspiration for Akira Kurosawa’s film The Men who Tread on the Tiger’s Tail. Personal Papers of Andrew Tsubaki. Call Number: PP 650. Click image to enlarge.
A print of the We All Live in Harrisburg collage created by R. Cenedella in 1979 as a response to the Three Mile Island accident that happened outside of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, on March 28, 1979. The collage used Andrew Wyeth’s painting Christina’s World with permission from the artist. Paul Schaefer Poster Collection. Call Number: RH WL MS R19. Click image to enlarge.
Folios from a 1150 A.H./1737 C.E. treatise containing two texts teaching and promoting the sport of archery. The texts are written in Persian in the Nasta’liq script, and the above folios feature a hand-drawn illustration of two bows with the names of various parts of the bows listed off to the side. Call Number: MS C33. Click image to enlarge.
While each year we at Spencer process many new collections, we are also adding to preexisting collections through the continued generosity of our donors. From Pulitzer Prize-winning authors to LGBTQIA2S+ activists, an individual’s history doesn’t end when their collection comes through our doors. Individual and organizational histories continue to evolve past the snapshots their historical records provide, and we at Spencer aim to provide as complete a picture as we can! One collection we’d like to draw particular attention to is an addition to the Reuter Organ Company photograph collection (Call Number: RH PH 68). Through this collection, patrons can follow the construction of uniquely hand-crafted pipe organs before they were built into their new homes in institutions all over the world. And now, with a 2023 addition, patrons can see even more of the grandeur of these massive instruments as well as the incredible skill and historical craftsmanship of this Lawrence-based company!
Reuter Organ Company’s Opus 2179 at the Elm Park Methodist Church in Scranton, Pennsylvania, 1995. Photo credit: Max Mayse. Reuter Organ Company Photograph Collection. Call Number: RH PH 68. Click image to enlarge.
The history of the Reuter Organ Company starts in 1917 when Adolph Reuter established the Reuter-Schwarz Organ Company with his business partner Earl Schwarz. After a disastrous tornado blew through the company factory, the company relocated to the Wilder Brothers Shirt Factory on New Hampshire Street in Lawrence, Kansas, after fulfilling a commission for the city’s Masonic Temple in 1919. Schwarz departed from the company shortly afterwards, and the company was renamed the Reuter Organ Company. In less than ten years, the company grew from a six-employee operation to over 50 full-time employees with over 50 commissions a year. However, after lean years during the Great Depression, the Reuter Organ Company faced a manufacturing ban on musical instruments during World War II and stayed afloat by producing government-sanctioned boxes for munitions materials with a skeletal crew. After the war, the company began to flourish again, and Reuter began hiring skilled staff with formal music education and expertise in organ construction. Through the knowledge base of its staff, the company began to experiment and further develop traditional construction techniques with new pipe organ technology to develop a signature “Reuter sound.”
Reuter Organ Company’s Opus 1741 at the Shryock Auditorium at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Illinois, 1970. Photo credit: Max Mayse. Reuter Organ Company Photograph Collection. Call Number: RH PH 68. Click image to enlarge.
After Adolph Reuter’s retirement in 1961, the company continued to evolve under the direction of longtime employee Franklin Mitchell. Mitchell, with then newly appointed production manager Albert Neutel, purchased the company in the early 1980s. Together, the two continued to refine the Reuter technical craft, particularly with the mechanical aspects of organ construction and the tonal sound of the company’s organs. After Mitchell’s retirement in 1997, Albert Neutel was joined in management by his son, Albert “J.R.” Neutel, a former longtime employee of the company. Under the Neutel family’s direction, the Reuter Organ Company moved operations from New Hampshire Street to a newly constructed and specially designed factory and administrative facility in northwest Lawrence in 2001. Sixteen years later, the company celebrated its 100th anniversary by holding a public open house in their newer facility and inviting old and new customers alike. By this time, the company had constructed over 2,200 pipe organs for public and private institutions around the world. The company had also built a respected name in organ rehabilitation within the pipe organ community. In 2022, amid the retirement of several longtime key staff members, J.R. Neutel, the company’s current president, decided to sell Reuter’s factory and administrative facility. A major selling point of the Reuter Organ Company is the institutional and craft knowledge of its staff. There is a strong tradition of old staff mentoring new staff and passing down historic pipe organ construction techniques. Operating at the same scale without that same level of institutional knowledge was deemed impossible. And in the beginning of 2023, the Reuter Organ Company further scaled back operations to only fulfilling the customary 11-year warranties offered to their past clients with special consideration for smaller projects.
Reuter Organ Company’s Opus 2044, 1982 in St. John’s Episcopal Church in Clearwater, Florida, 1982. Photo credit: Max Mayse. Reuter Organ Company Photograph Collection. Call Number: RH PH 68. Click image to enlarge.
To honor this historic company and to showcase a new addition to the Reuter Organ Company photograph collection, we here at Spencer have created a temporary exhibit to display images of a few of the beautiful pipe organs Reuter’s has constructed over the years and to dip into some pipe organ terminology. Have you ever wondered were the phrase “pulling out all stops” comes from or just how big the biggest musical instrument in the world can get? Come on by to learn more about this incredible company and the incredible instruments it made! The exhibit opened free to the public in Spencer’s North Gallery on November 1st and will continue to be on display until early January 2024. We hope you “stop” by!
Have you figured out how call numbers at the Spencer Research Library work yet?
Here are a couple of clues for manuscript collections; see if you can apply them when you review this listing of the front half of 2023’s new finding aids!
PP = Personal Papers, which are typically collected by the University Archives
MS = manuscript (can be found in call numbers for textual materials in both the Kansas Collection and Special Collections)
PH = photograph (you will only see this call number designation in the Kansas Collection)
WL = Wilcox (historically, the Wilcox Collection has been associated with the Kansas Collection, so you’ll typically see “RH WL” together)
It’s a bit like a mathematical formula, if you combine parts of these call numbers. For example, “RH WL MS” means it’s a Wilcox manuscript collection.
Spencer Research Library also typically houses material by size, most often by height for volume call numbers. “A” volumes will be some of the smallest (typically measuring between ten and 15 cm tall), while “H” volumes are frequently stored flat because they are so large (usually over 45 cm tall).
Spencer also uses letters to designate other sizes of materials. A “P” in a call number means that it’s so thin and/or such a small amount of material it’s stored in a single folder or small number of folders, not enough to fill a box or stand upright on a shelf by itself.
So, for another call number formula example: “MS P” means it’s a Special Collections manuscript collection in a single or small number of folders.
Armed with this information, do you think you can figure out which collections belong to which collecting areas and what kind of housing they might have from our listing of newly processed collections?
The cover of (above) and two pages in (below) a Pinckney School Parent Teacher Association (PTA) scrapbook, 1947-1948. School librarian Janet Reeder re-compiled the scrapbook at a later point, adding to it with reminiscences and other documents sent in from students who had attended Pinckney that year. Pinckney School Scrapbooks. Call Number: RH MS Q500. Click images to enlarge.
One of several binding fragments removed from some of Spencer’s earliest published volumes, in this case Giovanni Sfortunati’s sixteenth-century Nuovo lume libro de arithmetica at Summerfield C990. Call Number: MS Q103. Click image to enlarge.
One of a small number of illustrations signed “Nicky Nichols.” They were presumably sketched and painted by Mary Evelyn Nichols Lee, a former University of Kansas student who later operated the Savoy Hotel in Kansas City, Missouri. Personal Papers of Mary Evelyn Nichols Lee. Call Number: PP 645. Click image to enlarge.
Becoming the Ringle Conservation Intern has been an incredible learning experience both on its own and as an expansion of the work I have been fortunate enough to do during my two years as a student employee at the Kenneth Spencer Research Library Conservation Lab. Since September of 2022, I have assessed, lightly cleaned, and re-housed over 900 individual glass plate negatives, and at least 100 flexible negatives, taken by the George Cornish Studio (based in Arkansas City, Kansas) between 1890 and 1945. With the guidance of Marcella Huggard, Charissa Pincock, Whitney Baker, and Roberta Woodrick, I have contributed 833 entries to the ongoing finding aid that include the subject of the photo (if identifiable) and the condition of each plate. My hope is that, when the collection is complete with its partner collection (the Hannah Scott Collection), history and photo enthusiasts will be able to enjoy the wide range of portraiture, landscape, and urban life photography contained within the collection.
Creating a spreadsheet with information about the negatives in the Cornish Studio collection.
The Ringle project began with a massive shifting project. Roberta Woodrick, Grace Awbrey, Hannah Johnson, Rory Sweedler, Sarah Jane Dahms, and I moved the Cornish, Scott, and several other glass plate negative collections in advance of the heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) updates in the stacks. During this shifting, we saw how both age and the heat from the old furnace, located under the floor where the glass plates had been held, had affected the collections. There were clear indicators that re-housing these collections was necessary. On some glass plates there was flaking emulsion and discoloration, and some flexible negatives were experiencing “vinegar syndrome” (the strong smell of deteriorating acetate film) and leaving liquid residue on the shelves (from the chemical separation of the emulsion on the plastic).
Glass plate negatives from the Cornish Studio collection housed in boxes in the stacks.
Flaking emulsion on one glass plate negative in the Cornish Studio Collection.
The Cornish Studio was located in Arkansas City, Kansas, 8 miles north of Chilocco, Oklahoma, where the Chilocco Indian School operated, and about 200 miles southwest of Lawrence. The studio was opened by George Cornish in 1905 and was run jointly from 1912 onward by Cornish and his assistant Edith Berrouth (to whom he would leave the practice in 1946 after his death.) In 1993, attorney Otis Morrow, whose practice was in the building that had once been Cornish’s studio, donated the 8 boxes of glass plates, photo registrars, and even George Cornish’s autobiography of running the studio (called “My Life on Fifth Avenue”) to the Kenneth Spencer Research Library. (More about the history of the collection can be found at the Collections Overview.)
Many of the glass plates in the Cornish collection have some degree of damage – they’ve existed through a wide range of temperature and humidity fluctuations – but at over 100 years old for many of them, they generally look remarkably good. The subjects in the photos are almost all visible, and the excitement on their faces in these century old photographs endures. It’s clear that the people who went to the Cornish Studio for their portraits, or for the portraits of their young children (babies make up a significant portion of the plates from the 1910s-20s), were happy to have the opportunity to have their photos taken. They couldn’t have known that their likeness would be preserved for longer than them, but I like to think it would make them happy to know their investment in a photograph might provide returns to scholars today.
Negative and reversed positive image of Letha Thomas and baby, circa 1919, Cornish Studio Collection.
Before me, several Ringle interns worked on an impressive collection of projects over timespans of six weeks to three months. So far, I have been working with the Cornish Collection for nine months and will continue to do so for another two. Having almost a full year has been immensely valuable – each plate must be placed individually into a four-fold wrapper before being re-housed in boxes, and many plates between 1917 and 1930 have subjects that could be researched (which I did, especially when there might be the opportunity to identify the women in couples’ portraits who were usually identified as Mrs. (Man’s Name.)). Having now completed the 5 x 7 plates, I continue to work on the 8 x 10 plates which represent a shift from traditional studio portraiture and into street scenes in Ark City and the surrounding area. These images, and this collection, offer a valuable slice-of-life view of Southwest Kansas across a period of American history with rapid changes.
Cornish Studio ledgers that record information about some of the subjects featured on the negatives in the collection.
This is the latest installment in a series of posts introducing readers to student employees who make important contributions to the work of Spencer Research Library. Today’s profile features student assistantJenna Bellemere, who is the Cataloging and Archival Processing Department’s G. Baley Price Fellow this year. This is a student assistant position for undergraduate or graduate students interested in pursuing a career in archives and special collections or a career in which research in archives and special collections will play a prominent role. The fellowship is designed to give students hands-on experience organizing, cataloging, and preserving Kenneth Spencer Research Library’s materials and making them accessible to others. Jenna answered a few questions about the projects she works on at Spencer. Some editorial or clarifying comments from Spencer staff are [in brackets].
Jenna Bellemere inspects some of the many architectural drawings in University Archives for buildings that have been and still are on campus. These drawings will be added to the General record group (RG 0) finding aid soon; check back later to find out more! Click image to enlarge.
Please provide some brief biographical information about yourself.
I’m a junior at KU, majoring in Anthropology and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. I started working at Spencer in February 2022.
What does your job at Spencer entail?
I’m working on updating our inventory of the University Archives, which means I spend a lot of time going through the documents we have in storage here and making sure that they’re all accounted for in our database [ArchivesSpace, our collection management system]. It’s been several years since the last update, which means there are a lot of new records in the archives that haven’t been fully catalogued yet. It’s my job to go through those records and write down all the important information about them so that researchers and the public can come to the Spencer and access them. I also write parts of the historical notes and finding aids summarizing our collections’ history and their contents.
Why did you want to work at Spencer Research Library?
In fall of 2021, I knew I wanted to get a job somewhere on campus, but I wasn’t sure where. I was looking for a job in one of the libraries on campus because I love to read and I wanted to work around books, and I stumbled across the posting from the Spencer. It wasn’t exactly what I had started out looking for, but I thought it looked interesting, so I applied. I’m interested in history, and the idea of getting to work directly with primary sources was interesting to me, so I felt confident it would be a good fit if I got the job.
What has been most interesting to you about your work?
When I have to explain to my friends why I think my job is so interesting, there’s one story I always tell them. It might be a little morbid, but it’s also a great demonstration of why I find archival work rewarding.
I was sorting through a fairly big series of faculty records [probably a series in the Faculty and Staff record group] and looking at some of the documents in more detail to get a better idea of what types of records researchers might expect to find there. Because I hadn’t been working at the archives for very long at that point, I was taking it pretty slow, and I remember pulling out one folder of records that had been kept by a professor during her time at KU. The first document was a typewritten rough draft of a speech she was planning to give, with revisions in notes scribbled in the margins in pencil. The second document was a handwritten note from her friends thanking her for helping them move into their new house. The third document was her obituary. Each paper was presented the same way: loose in the folder, with no extraneous labels or documentation. Completely matter of fact.
I think this memory epitomizes why I love places like the Spencer. The documents I found that day originated years apart from each other – decades of someone’s life, captured in the notes and paper scraps that she may have completely forgotten she had. We tend to talk about history on the biggest scale possible, focusing on the rousing speeches and the achievements of great leaders, but getting to see those stories in such a personal way, through the insignificant, interstitial moments of a subject’s life – worrying over their word choice in a speech, helping friends move into their new home – is a much rarer and more special experience. It may seem banal, but I don’t think I have ever experienced history in a way more unadulteratedly human than that moment.
What part of your job do you like best?
See my answer to the above question. Also, sometimes they have free snacks in the break room.
What advice would you offer other students thinking about working at Spencer Research Library?
Go for it! I wasn’t really thinking about the Spencer when I started applying for jobs at KU, but I’m so glad I applied here. I really only work in one small part of the archives – there’s so much more here, like the Kansas Collection [as well as Special Collections and the Wilcox Collection], that I haven’t even touched on. If you’re at all interested in history or museum studies – or if anything you’ve seen here just seems cool to you – I definitely recommend looking for a chance to work here.
Jenna Bellemere Cataloging and Archival Processing student assistant and G. Baley Price Fellow
