Praxis Course: Museum Studies Fieldwork Seminar
Semester: Spring 2026
Faculty Advisor/Professor: Monique Scott
Community Partner: Historical Society of Pennsylvania
Praxis Site Supervisor: Anthony DiGiovanni
Praxis Poster:
HART_WillaBywater_compressed
Further Context:
This semester I worked at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. The Historical Society of Pennsylvania is a research library and archive and has one of the nation’s largest collections of American history. While it primarily functions as a research space, it also has exhibits in the lobby which are free to view, and often hosts events for the community or tours for interested local groups.
Although the museum is already in possession of over 600,000 printed materials and 400,000 graphic items (photographs, prints, etc), they’re still collecting new items! One of their recently acquired collections was the Louise G. Saxton Music Collection, donated by a board member in memory of her mother. The collection consists of primarily sheet music, but also a handful of other papers relating to music or church activities. It was my responsibility to start the cataloguing process–I’ve never done cataloguing before, so I learned a lot along the way!
As outlined in the poster, the process was complex, but pretty straightforward once I got it down. My boss would give me the stack of items to be catalogued, and I would go through and run a search in the library’s online catalog, Discover, to make sure we didn’t already have a copy of any of the items. Once I’d confirmed that, I would start the individual cataloguing process. The first step was to use the software OCLC Connexion to look through WorldCat to see whether anyone else had cataloged each item before. I had no idea that WorldCat existed, and it was
pretty incredible to see–it’s a massive database of cataloged items from libraries everywhere from the US to France and Germany and Denmark. It truly gave me an impression of how important sharing resources and information is to library work. Sometimes I would find a catalog for the item I was looking for that had been made in 2019–sometimes I would find one from 1995. One particular library kept popping up because they also had a music collection named for a specific donor who apparently had a lot of the same music taste as Louise G. Saxton!
If a catalog already existed–which usually it did–I would “copy catalog,” taking the existing information and editing whatever I needed to or adding information if it was missing. Often existing catalogues didn’t have a call number, for whatever reason, so I’d have to go search the Library of Congress list of call numbers to find the right one. (Fun fact: the system of records used for cataloguing, called MARC records, include numbered fields for specific information. There’s one field, 050, that’s used for only call numbers assigned by the actual Library of Congress themselves. Everyone else–even if they’re using the LoC system–has to use 090! No touching the Library’s special field!)
If no existing catalog for this item existed, this was very exciting–and scary, because it meant I had to “original catalog” and make it from scratch! Sometimes I wasn’t working entirely from scratch–once or twice there was a catalog for a copy of the item that was just from a different year, or had a different singer featured on the cover, and then I could essentially copy catalog even if I was making a new record. But there were a few times where I truly had to put in all the information by hand, and that took a long time. Either way, once that process was done, I would update the holdings and export the newly copied or created record to Alma, the library system that we used (shared with UPenn). I’d add the call number and location in Alma, release it to discover, and then write the call number down in the physical copy.
It sounds complicated all written out like this, but it was something like 75% copy cataloging, and it got pretty rote after a while. However, working at the Historical Society was never boring! I did all the work I mentioned above while sitting at the front desk with a reference librarian, so whenever a patron came up to us asking for help, I got to listen in. We get a lot of people coming to the Historical Society with questions, ranging from “I know the specific item I want, how do I get it?” to “I want to learn about this very broad topic. Give me everything!” (We can’t.) Generally, step one was to direct people to either our physical catalog or our online catalog, and help them narrow down their search. Once they had some items, we had them fill out a call slip, and then they’d go into the reading room, give the call slip to the person at the desk, and have their item paged for them so they could read it. Sometimes the items they wanted were in “open stacks” (still in the reading room, but accessible to anybody and not needing to be paged), and then they could go in there and read it themselves. I got a feel for this workflow eventually too, and started being able to help pick up the slack when we had multiple visitors wanting help at once. During my time at the reading desk, I helped a man search through our finding aids, helped a man export a scan of microfilm to a thumb drive (I got nervous when he asked for my help, because I knew nothing about microfilm, but thankfully I do know how thumb drives work!), and patiently explained to a very frustrated woman that there are numerous places called Christchurch in Pennsylvania, and if you’re looking for an ancestor buried in Christchurch Cemetery, it would be really helpful if you knew the county. Sometimes the help I could give people wasn’t related to the library at all–we had some elderly siblings come in with a fully fleshed-out genealogy inherited from their grandmother that they mostly wanted help formatting. We explained to them that we didn’t do that, but I recommended them a free website that they could use to visualize it (which I had used for a different class at Bryn Mawr). Sometimes the help we could give was sending people somewhere else–we had one couple who wanted to find more about the history of their house, which they thought was on the National Register of Historic Places. I navigated to that register’s website (used in a previous class!), and looked for it, but we couldn’t find it, much to all of our puzzlement. Then I had a thought–I went first to the Pennsylvania Register of Historic Places, and then to the Philadelphia Register, and it turned out to be this last level where their house had been registered. I directed them to the Philadelphia Register to find the records of their house and continue their research journey.
Ultimately, I feel very happy with my time at HSP. I feel that I was able to get some good work done, and I definitely learned a lot about the inner workings of a research library. Cataloging is an admittedly tedious but nonetheless important part of the archival process, and I’m glad to
have some experience in it under my belt–and I can tell a Library of Congress call number from a Dewey Decimal now! What I took away from the experience most of all, though, was the degree to which libraries and archives rely on each other, and on communities, to function.
People often think of archives as hoarders of information, taking it and putting it in a vault to keep, but really archives are in the business of sharing information, among themselves and to others. OCLC Connexion is rightly named–it’s connection that keeps archives running, and the
sharing of knowledge that is their ultimate purpose