[Autumn Haag] We collaborate
in a couple of ways. You know, the first is sometimes there are researchers who are doing
work where they might need access to something in our department, but they would benefit from
work that the project has done. So, we always try to connect researchers who reach out to
us to the project as well. The project doesn’t deal with all the Seward papers, but the work
that you do with the family letters is just so wonderful that we want to make sure that
people who reach out to us with questions about the Seward papers know about the project.
There is some logistical work too, in terms of handing collection materials back and forth. So,
pulling things on our end, making sure everything is in good condition. One of my colleagues
who does preservation for our department she takes a look at everything that we send over
to the Seward project and if there is any work that needs to be done, if a letter needs to be
cleaned or repaired in some way, she will do that before it moves goes to the project. So,
it is a combination of logistical communications and the back and forth of materials,
but also that overlap in terms of researchers and helping people get access to material.
[Melinda Wallington] I facilitate access to the
collections. So, a member of the project sends a spread sheet of Seward family letters and diaries
needed for digitization and transcription, and I get to immerse myself in nineteenth-century
family correspondence, locating the letters and diaries, recording which ones are going over,
and putting them in acid-free archival boxes for their careful field trip over
to the project. Once the project is done with the materials, I check them in,
put them back in their temperature and humidity controlled forever homes. We are talking about a
great deal of collection material, so it takes a great deal of meticulous record-keeping and
attention to detail to know what is where. I’m really glad we can provide this level of access.
In addition to the family letters, the collection contains indexed correspondence,
mostly of political topics from the 1840s through the 1870s and huge ledgers of beautifully scripted
state correspondence, speech notes from when he was Secretary of State, pardons from when he
was Governor of New York, and artifacts, such as a turkey feather fan preserved in a shadow box frame
and a gold and enamel snuff box from around 1866, given to Seward by an unnamed lady.
[Haag] There’s just so many ways
that you can go into the collection. You could be interested in something really, really obscure,
something obscure event from nineteenth-century American history, but maybe William Henry Seward
was on a committee that discussed it or it was a company that he was investing in, or one of his
sons was involved in. They had their fingers in so many different aspects of the United States. So,
whether it is Alaska or it is his daughter’s diaries, it is huge intellectually to think about.