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Processing the Zines Collection!
By Aria Black, English ‘26, Fall 2024 Intern in Rare Books In fall 2024, I was selected to spend my internship working with the Mahn Center’s Zines Collection. My supervisor is Dr. Miriam Intrator, who had also been my HTC tutorial instructor in spring of 2024, where we discussed what exactly went into being a…
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Re-contextualizing How I View Public Education: An Exploration of the Ohio Coalition for Equity & Adequacy of School Funding
By Lizzy Daly, Communication Studies ’23, Margaret Boyd Scholar, Archives Assistant As an Archives Assistant for the manuscript collection in the Mahn Center, I have spent the majority of my time processing the Ohio Coalition for Equity and Adequacy of School Funding (OCEASF) collection, which was donated by its founder Bill Phillis. Spending time with…
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Dissecting Anatomical Structures: Curating an Exhibit on Books & Bodies
By Alex Rienerth, ’25, MA in Literary History, 2024-2025 Graduate Assistant in Rare Books At the beginning of my graduate assistantship in the rare books department, part of my training included watching “The Anatomy of a Book,” a wonderful instructional video captured from an early 1990s VHS tape. Though the video is a bit peculiar,…
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Making 20th Century Patterns with 21st Century Materials: A Semester of Following Patterns Designed by Maud Churchill Nicoll
By Jessica Licker, Digital Literacy Librarian, Athens County Public Libraries, Master’s in Literary History, ’24, Rare Books Graduate Assistant, 2023-2024 At the end of the fall 2023 semester I began searching the Mahn Center rare book collection for anything related to fiber crafting. I was interested in experimenting with historic knitting or sewing patterns through…
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Welcome to Fall 2024!
By Miriam Intrator, Special Collections Librarian As a new semester and new academic year are once again upon us, there are many new events and opportunities for students, faculty, staff, and the broader OHIO and Athens communities. Below is an overview of some of what’s available this coming fall. We encourage you to reach out…
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Objects of Interest and Reflections on the Frank Buhla Collection
By Aurora Charlow, recent MS graduate of Simmons University, Metadata Assistant at Ohio University Libraries during the 2023-2024 academic year. In its heyday, from about 1880 to 1920, mines in the Hocking Valley Coal Field produced hundreds of thousands of tons of coal every year. It was pried from the ground, processed through mining tipples,…
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The Athens Mental Health Center records – The Patients
By Julian Earley, BA ’26 Classical Civilizations, Digital Initiatives Assistant Everyone loves a good haunting. I too have been interested in ghost-hunting and wanted to know what lies in the Asylum here in Athens. But I think it’s important when we talk about the history of institutions like The Athens Mental Health Center to humanize…
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Updating Descriptions for Coal Mining Collections
Text and images by Samuel Coletta-Bates, Film ’25, Spring 2024 Manuscript Archives Assistant This semester, my job as Archives Assistant within the Mahn Center has been to research and update finding aid descriptions for mining related collections. This has included delving into the collections themselves, as well as other supplemental resources to revise their content…
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From Satire to Advertisement: A Literary Record of the 1893 World’s Fair
By Jessica Licker, Master’s in Literary History, ’24, Rare Books Graduate Assistant When I first started conceptualizing this exhibit, I was spoiled for choice of topics. I was quickly taken with the Juvenile Literature Collection, and the whimsy of some of the 19th and 20th century children’s book bindings…
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Creating a Virginia Woolf Author Collection in Rare Books
By Cali Weber, ’24, English Major, Classical Civilizations Minor, Written as part of English 4940: Research Apprenticeship, Fall 2023 In the fall of my junior year, I took one of my favorite classes in the Ohio University English department; ENG 3490 History of Books and Printing. In this class, I was lucky enough to do…