By Kathryn Ombam
As we mentioned in our inaugural blog post, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania Small Repositories project (HCI-PSAR) visited Tyler Arboretum to survey our archival materials on March 20, 2014. The project, funded by the Mellon Foundation, is designed to make more accessible the over 200 small archival holdings in the five-county Philadelphia area. The project manager and archivists visit each site, document what they find in a blog post, create online finding aids and make recommendations to the institution for the care of their archival collection.
The importance of the HCI-PSAR project to small, volunteer-run archives and collections like Tyler is significant. With small budgets, the challenges of historic buildings and rapid changes in research technologies, most small institutions do not have the resources to create these kinds of finding aids for themselves. While the HCI-PSAR staff will complete their work on the final analysis and finding aids for Tyler Arboretum throughout the summer, their wonderful blog post was published on their website last week! For more information on the other small archives participating in the project, visit their website or the HCI-PSAR Facebook page.
For anyone interested in learning more about the history of the Arboretum, a good first step is to join us for one of our Historical Buildings Tours, the first Sunday of each month, which are free with admission. Tyler Arboretum has been enormously assisted by the dedicated volunteers that have catalogued, researched and written about the collections here for many decades. We hope to highlight some of the tremendous work of these volunteers and their personal favorites over the next few weeks.
And no discussion about the history and archival materials related to Tyler Arboretum would be complete without mentioning the Friends Historical Library of Swarthmore College. The Friends Library has housed the Painter Family Papers since 2009. They have created an extensive index of their holdings, have examined and documented the genealogy of the family and other important local figures and have provided excellent research support. You can find the complete index of their holdings at here.
Tyler Tales 