One of my favorite places for doing railroad research is the Hagley Museum and Library in Wilmington DE. (http://www.hagley.org/library/) The museum and library are situated on the grounds of the original Dupont powderworks dating back to the early 1800's and is a beautiful setting anytime of the year. The library is one of the premier centers for the study of industry in the United States and houses collections from amny large corporations, Bethlehem Steel, and Dupont to name a few. Over the last few years the Hagley has really been on the forefront in digitizing various aspects of their collection to make them available to a much wider audience. At some later point I will review those efforts. Today however I thought I would walk people through what is involved in accessing the collections at the Hagley. While much of the searches can be done online, only a very tiny portion of the archives have actually been digitized, thus eventually necessitating a trip to the Hagley Nevertheless, most folks would like some reassurance that before they make the trip there will be something of interest for them.
A friend of mine Dick Foley, a Reading Railroad enthusiast, came to visit me and I suggested that we go to the Hagley and see whether they would have some information that would be useful for his modeling. Since I had not done a lot of research on the Reading Railroad myself I thought this would be a nice test case for starting at the beginning and essentially walking through the search process. Dick has been building a layout depicting the Reading City Line and the Willow St. Branch in Philadelphia, so information on those areas would be of interest to him. Naturally for most modelers visuals, meaning pictures, are probably the most valuable source of information. After signing in at the front desk of the library we proceeded down the hall to Jon Williams, chief archivist of the Hagley pictorial collection. After a brief discussion of Dick's interests, we sat down at the computer and began our search. Obviously we could have done this initial search at home but for illustrative purposes I'll just describe what we did at Jon's office.
First we go the Hagley homepage and click online catalog. Before we type in something to search for, we go down and in the Quick Limits menu box we click on photographs, prints and moving images since we really want to look through the pictorial collection. We wouldn't necessarily need to do that but if one does a general search you are probably going to get many more hits than what you want to scroll through. Once we clicked photographs we were ready to type in our search terms. A word about searches. Often as prototype model railroaders we usually want to find details on very specific items. The problem is that catalogs and finding aids don't necessarily capture every last detail, so that by typing in something very specific you might not find anything. I speak from personal experience. The best is to cast a very broad net first, and then from those hits try and focus the search down. In this case we just entered Reading in our search. With that we got 34 hits that represented a number of different photographic collections.
Now when you are faced with all these different collections which one do you decide to look at? Simply by clicking on the title of the collection you will get a description of what is in the collection. These descriptions are by no means all encompassing but they will give you a general idea of whether you are on the right track or not. For instance we clicked on Reading Company photographs. These tended to be smaller collections and for the purposes of this search were of places outside the Philadelphia area. We finally settled on the Reading Company photograph collection which appeared to have the most photographs and that would also include photographs from the Philadelphia area.
Once we decided on this collection what do next? We now come to the topic Nick spoke about in his first blog, the finding aid. For each collection there is a detailed accounting of what is in every box of the collection. Unfortunately not all finding aids are online, and the one we were interested in is still hardcopy which Jon handed to us to look through. At this point I will interject a comment about what Nick calls the quid pro quo of doing research. Obviously putting finding aids online is time consuming and in general there is not sufficient staff to do this along with all the other work associated with maintaining archives. The Reading Company photographic collection represents nearly 5000 different photographs. Yes, I'm suggesting that this would be one of those jobs for volunteers to help put this finding aid online.
The finding aid then gave a fairly detailed listing of all the items in the collection. Basically by reading the brief description we could zero in on the box of interest. We filled out the requisite card for obtaining the box and within a few minutes Jon returned from the stacks with the appropriate box. Needless to say Dick found some great photographs!
A final note. When you go into places like the Hagley Library you seen realize this is not your local library, you just can't walk around and browse. The collections in these places are far to large and complex to allow people to simply pull items off the shelf. Nevertheless when you order a box like Dick and I did, it usually contains more than the folder you are specifically interested in. In many cases it is closely related material. So for me its always like Christmas morning when the box arrives. Its got the folder you requested, like the present your ordered, but then there are all these other delightful surprises. Just remember in your excitement, only remove ONE folder from the box at one time, and always make sure it is put back in the order your received it. Well by the time we had gone through the folder it was lunch time so we took a break and when we return we'll go down to the Hagley Soda House (no they don't sell beverages there) where there are a different type of railroad archives.
Ron
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