MHS News

ScanPro 2000: Not Your Mother's Microfilm Machine

The MHS recently acquired an exciting new piece of hardware through a grant from the Ruby W. and LaVon P. Linn Foundation: the ScanPro 2000, a compact microfilm viewer, scanner, and printer. Fundraising efforts led by MHS Fellow Frederic D. Grant resulted in the generous gifts of four donors and one charitable trust that have enabled the MHS to order two additional machines, which we expect to receive this fall. Light years ahead of the older, analog machines currently used at the MHS, the ScanPro, and its accompanying PowerScan software, will make the MHS collections more accessible to researchers.

The enhanced features include superior printing, digital scanning, image editing, and incredible zoom capabilities that create a much more user friendly, and potentially more fruitful, research trip to the library. The library staff was very impressed during the first demonstration of the machine when a microfilm reel containing pre-Revolutionary War diaries with dark images not legible on other machines was quickly adjusted to create clear, readable images.

The most extraordinary feature of the ScanPro is the printing and scanning capability. With a single mouse click the machine creates either a print out or a scan of the selected area in just a fraction of a second.  The scans can be loaded onto a flash drive and brought home, or e-mailed directly from the work station to a personal e-mail account. The quality of the printouts and scanned images is vastly superior to the quality of the printouts provided on our non-digital machines. 

In order to create such beautiful scans, the ScanPro allows researchers to edit the individual frames of the microfilm by cropping and rotating and adjusting the brightness and contrast of the images. The spot editing feature allows researchers to enhance a selected area of a frame, adjusting the brightness and contrast of a particularly dark spot to make a cohesive, legible image. This is particularly helpful for newspaper images, where the illustrative matter tends to be much darker on microfilm than the text. Finally, the powerful zoom feature allows researchers to see things in the microfilm that can barely be seen in the original document.

The ScanPro 2000 is currently available for use in the MHS library. Researchers that cannot visit the library can request digital files to be e-mailed to them by the library staff. Please see details at http://www.masshist.org/library/visit.cfm#reproduction under "low resolution digital files."

"Precious Metals: From Au to Zn" Opens 2 August

On 2 August the MHS will open a new exhibition Precious Metals: from Au to Zn.  The Massachusetts Historical Society (MHS) is taking the opportunity to show off some of its numismatic treasures while the American Numismatic Association (ANA) is in Boston hosting the World's Fair of Money at the Hynes Convention Center. 

Special guest curator John W. Adams and MHS Curator of Art Anne E. Bentley have planned an exhibition to highlight many of the rare and unique pieces in the collection. A sampling of what will be on view includes the New England three pence and shilling, the 1776 Massachusetts Pine Tree copper penny, a piece of original Massachusetts Bay stock, the February 1690/1 Massachusetts Bill of Credit, the full set of Washington-Webster silver Comitia Americana medals, Indian Peace Medals of colonial and federal issue, a number of Washington medals from the Baker series, and some fascinating pieces from the Vernon medal series. Precious Metals: From Au to Zn will open on 2 August and remain on view into September in the Society’s building at 1154 Boylston Street. 

Regular public hours are from 1 to 4 PM Monday through Saturday.  There are special ANA morning hours from 9 AM to noon on August 10-14.  If convention attendees plan to research the MHS collection while in town, please contact Anne Bentley (abentley@masshist.org or call 617-646-0508) in advance to make an appointment, as time and space are limited.

MHS Receives NEH Sustaining Cultural Heritage Collections Grant

We are pleased to announce that we have received a Sustaining Cultural Heritage Collections grant for $351,784 from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). The grant will be used in a multi-phase effort to analyze risks to the collections and to identify appropriate preventive preservation actions necessary for collection protection. As well, we are very proud to announce that the project has been designated a National Endowment for the Humanities “We the People” project. “We the People” is an initiative that encourages and strengthens the teaching, study, and understanding of American history and culture through the support of projects that explore significant events and themes in our nation's history and culture and that advance knowledge of the principles that define America.

“The MHS is pleased that the NEH has recognized the importance of our collections in this way as we would not be able to properly fulfill our mission if our collections were lost or damaged due to disaster or theft,” commented MHS President Dennis Fiori.  “Maintaining access to our collections through proper preservation and continued security measures is of utmost importance as we experience growing use from researchers visiting the library and interested citizens attending public programs and exhibitions.”

About the National Endowment for the Humanities
Created in 1965 as an independent federal agency, the National Endowment for the Humanities supports learning in history, literature, philosophy, and other areas of the humanities. Additional information about the National Endowment for the Humanities and its grant programs is available at www.neh.gov.  Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this release do not necessarily reflect those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

New 2010 Fellows Elected

The election of the following Fellow nominees was approved by the Fellows of the Massachusetts Historical Society at the Annual Meeting on 19 May 2010:

Elizabeth Blackmar
Elizabeth Blackmar is a professor of history at Columbia University, where she has taught since 1983.  A graduate of Smith College and a recipient of the Ph.D. from Harvard, she is an urban historian.  Her first book, Manhattan for Rent, 1785-1850 (Cornell University Press), won the Abbott Lowell Cummings Book Award of the Vernacular Architects Forum.  Her second book, The Park and the People: A History of Central Park (Cornell University Press), co-written with Roy Rosenzweig, received half a dozen honors.  She spent much of the summer of 2009 in the Society’s reading room, where she was conducting research with the support of a grant from the New England Regional Fellowship Consortium for a book on family property and inheritance in the nineteenth century.

Edward S. Cooke, Jr.
Edward S. Cooke, Jr., is the Charles S. Montgomery Professor of American Decorative Arts in the Department of the History of Art at Yale University.  A B.A. graduate of Yale, he earned an M.A. from the University of Delaware through the Winterthur Program in Early American Culture and a Ph.D. from Boston University in American and New England Studies.  Prior to his appointment at Yale in 1992, between 1985 and 1992 he was an Assistant then an Associate Curator in the American Decorative Arts Department of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.  In this capacity he played a role in the Society’s 1991 bicentennial exhibition at the museum.  In addition to many articles and scholarly catalogs his publications include Making Furniture in Pre-industrial America: The Social Economy of Newtown and Woodbury, Connecticut (Johns Hopkins University Press).  He has accepted an invitation to serve as an Overseer of the Society.

Curt Jonathan DiCamillo
Curt Jonathan DiCamillo is the executive director of the National Trust for Scotland Foundation USA.  In this capacity he is responsible for all aspects of the work of this organization, a support group for historic preservation activities in Scotland.  Mr. DiCamillo is the founder and author of The DiCamillo Companion to British & Irish Country Houses, a web site with information on 7,000 buildings.  He remains actively engaged in this research, with a goal of documenting every British or Irish house ever built, together with a history of the architecture, gardens, and occupants.  He has also lectured widely on historic houses and the decorative arts.  He looks forward to drawing on the Society’s collections for research for a book on the early and continuing influence of Britain in Massachusetts.  Prior to undertaking his present positions, between 1991-2004 Mr. DiCamillo worked for the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in several capacities, including Planning and Project Manager for the Department of Conservation and Collections Management and Documentation Coordinator for the Information Resources Department. 

Eliga H. Gould
Eliga H. Gould is an associate professor of history at the University of New Hampshire, where he has taught since 1992.  He received the A.B. degree from Princeton University and the Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University. Professor Gould’s first book, The Persistence of Empire: British Political Culture in the Age of the American Revolution (University of North Carolina Press) won the Jamestown Prize of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture.  In 2010, Harvard University Press will publish his second monograph, An Unfinished Peace: The American Revolution and the Legal Transformation of the European Atlantic.  With Peter Onuf he is also co-editor of Empire and Nation: The American Revolution and the Atlantic World (Johns Hopkins University Press).  He has presented papers twice and commented at the Society’s Boston Area Seminar on Early American History.  He has also served twice on the selection committee for the Society’s short-term fellowships.

David J. Hancock
David J. Hancock is a professor of history at the University of Michigan, where he has taught since 1996.  Prior to this appointment, he taught at Harvard University, 1990-1996.  He holds an A.B. in history and music from the College of William and Mary, an A.M. in music from Yale University, and both an A.M. and a Ph.D. in history from Harvard.  Professor Hancock’s research focuses on transatlantic business and economic history.  He is the author of Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Community, 1735-1785 (Cambridge University Press) and Oceans of Wine: Madeira and the Emergence of American Trade and Taste (Yale University Press).  Professor Hancock took part in our conference in 1994 on the Boston business community; the essay he presented on that occasion appeared in 1997 in the edited collection of essays the Society published, Wright and Viens, eds., Entrepreneurs: The Boston Business Community, 1700-1850.  He has also served on our committee to select long-term fellows and led a week-long teacher seminar for the Society.

Barbara L. Packer
Barbara L. Packer is a professor of English at UCLA.  The recipient of a B.A. from Stanford University, she earned an M.Phil. and a Ph.D. from Yale University.  Professor Packer’s research focuses on nineteenth-century American literature, with a special interest in the Transcendentalists.  Her publications include Emerson’s Fall: A New Interpretation of the Major Essays (Continuum Books) and volume 2, “The Transcendentalists,” in The Cambridge History of American Literature.  She took part in our scholarly conferences on the Transcendentalists (in 1997) and on Ralph Waldo Emerson (in 2003).  In each case, the piece she presented later appeared in the conference essay collection.  She has also chaired the committee to select our NEH-funded long-term fellows.

Margaret R. Sullivan
Margaret R. Sullivan is the records manager and archivist of the Boston Police Department, where she has worked since 2008.  She received her B.A. from Brandeis University and an Ed.M. in Policy. Planning, and Administration from Boston University, where she worked in a variety of administrative positions before accepting her present appointment.  In her work at the Boston Police Department she devotes much of her time to retrieving and reconstituting historical records that have been lost or ended up in private hands.

William P. Veillette
William P. Veillette became the executive director of the Northeast Document Conservation Center in September after a career in business and several years as the executive director of the New Hampshire Historical Society, where he focused on the care of collections and providing services to local historical societies.  An active advocate for local, state, and regional historical organizations, he served as both the treasurer and chairman of the New Hampshire Preservation Alliance and is currently both a trustee of Historic New England and a board member of New Hampshire’s Land and Community Investment Program.