Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Artifacts As Ambassadors: Sharing Special Collections Through Collaboration With Student Curators, Carolyn Sautter

All Musselman Library Staff Works

Special Collections and College Archives at Musselman Library, Gettysburg College, regularly collaborates with various academic departments to conduct class visits utilizing the primary sources in Special Collections Reading Room. In the last two years, some of these opportunity have grown into semester long student curation experiences both inside Special Collections and in collaboration with Schmucker Art Gallery at Gettysburg College.

The exhibits discussed included:

Slaves, Soldiers, Citizens: African American Artifacts of the Civil War Era

Slow to Heal: The Evolution of Medicine from the Civil War Era to WWI

Owl & Nightingale Players, 1914-2014: One Hundred Years of Drama

Art …

'A Blood-Stained Corpse In The Butler's Pantry’: The Queensland Bush Book Club, Robin Wagner

All Musselman Library Staff Works

Lending libraries were not the norm in 1934 when the Carnegie Corporation of New York sent American librarian, Ralph Munn, to conduct a study of the condition of Australian libraries. In his initial survey Munn learned of the Queensland Bush Book Club, an organization of well-to-do, philanthropic women from Brisbane who had established a book lending service for settlers in the Outback. They hoped to ease the drudgery and lighten the burden faced by isolated women and their families in the rural areas. The antidote was a regular parcel of “proper” reading matter which included books, newspapers and magazines. They …

'A Little Bit Of Love For Me And A Murder For My Old Man': The Queensland Bush Book Club, Robin Wagner

All Musselman Library Staff Works

This paper addresses rural book distribution in an era before free public libraries came to Australia. Well-to-do, city women established clubs, which solicited donations of “proper reading matter” and raised funds for the purchase of books for their “deprived sisters” in the Outback. They took advantage of a well-developed rail system to deliver book parcels to rural families. In New South Wales and Queensland they were known as Bush Book Clubs.

Testimonials found in the Clubs’ annual reports provide a snapshot of the hard scrabble frontier life and the gratitude with which these parcels were received. This paper looks at …