Student research team discovers ancient bacteria in rare book collection

Posted on by
Reply

That could make a snappy headline, couldn’t it? Above the fold, even.

When Maddie Conatser, Caleb Horne, and Macee Valtr showed up after their biology class one afternoon back in March and pitched their idea, we immediately went back into the stacks and started working.  They came prepared with dry swabs, petri dishes, and a clipboard.  We had a great time browsing the stacks looking for interesting candidates to swab.  I selected books, I think Caleb took pictures and documented titles while Macee and Maddie  took turns preparing and executing the swabbing.  We collected samples from the spine or front cover, title page, and page 27 from each book.  The books I selected span the breadth of our collection: there is something here for everyone…American, African, and European…theology, hymnody, and history…from Coptic Christianity to the German Reformation to Abilene, Texas.

They went back to the lab, processed the samples, and wrote up their findings, which they presented in a poster session a few weeks hence.  Their findings, titled ‘Don’t Judge a Book by its Cover: An Analysis of Bacterial Presence on the Surface of Historical Books,’ didn’t surprise us (we expected to find something, and would have been surprised if there were none) but the experiment put them through all the paces of a sound research project.  The bonus is that it was just so much fun.  It was the first time they saw, much less handled, books of this age, and the opportunity to take a student research team back into the stacks for something like this was a highlight of my semester.  I am hopeful Dr. Jennifer Huddleston will assign another team to repeat this process on another batch of books next year.  Below are some pictures I took at their poster presentation:

And they graciously shared their paper! Enjoy!

This Just In: A congregational history of Western Hills Church of Christ, Temple, Texas, 1908-2022

Posted on by
2

Dr. Matthew Stephen put together a very nice congregational history for Western Hills Church of Christ in Temple, Texas.  To complement the book, he built this website to showcase photographs and to host the book in PDF form.  It is a well-done history published in an accessible form, freely available to any who are interested.

Cover page, A History of Western Hills Church of Christ, by Matthew Stephen

One of the pitfalls of writing congregational history is the conundrum of printing the fruits of research.  Often the print run needs to be small because the interest is localized; however, small print runs can be expensive and even if monetized, or subsidized the congregation, the costs can still be prohibitive.  Publishing online is the perfect solution.

I predict Matt will have a global readership.  Those who are interested in the subject matter or location will certainly be interested, but any who are engaged in congregational history will find his work a worthy model.  I like to browse congregational histories because, on the technical side, each one has some kind of approach or feature I find useful.  On the historical side, it is fascinating to see how principles and practice intersect on the ground in a local context.  Congregational history is a critical discipline…I’m a big fan (and wrote some about it here and Erma Jean Loveland wrote a helpful guide which we published here).

Congratulations to Dr. Stephen and Western Hills Church for saving the paper and telling their story!

 

On the Shelf: New items added to Center for Restoration Studies collections, June 2022

Posted on by
Reply

In June our colleagues in Technical Services and Cataloging added 424 items to Special Collections holdings.  Just over 400 items fed into the main print collection (which we call REST), with a few items going into ACU Authors and ACU Archive collections. And, we added catalog records for four new archival collections.  As has been the case for several months, most of the additions to REST are tracts and pamphlets.  As usual, we added several monographs which we either lacked altogether, or lacked in some variant of the edition or printing.  Some of the additions are newly published, others are new-to-us, and still others represent a second copy or a new-to-us edition or printing.  The tract project continues at a very good pace and we will have a fine set of tracts, all cataloged, when this project is complete.

Callie Faye Milliken (Special Collections Librarian) and Dr. John Stevens (President) at the beginning of the transfer of books from the ‘old’ library in Chambers Hall to the ‘new’ Brown Library. Dr. Stevens, holding a rare copy of Biblia Sacra, led a procession of students and faculty carrying volumes into the new facility. From https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth597528/?q=books

Our goal is to build a comprehensive research-level collection of print materials by, for, and about the Stone-Campbell Restoration Movement.  But beyond assembly and preservation, a collection should be discoverable by those who need the information.  Collecting and preserving is only part of our task; those objects must be described and made available.  Thanks to the close and careful work of our colleagues upstairs, who describe our holdings, these materials are now discoverable. By discoverable I mean a patron can utilize our online catalog (such as by searching by author, or title, or subject) to find these materials.

424 new items…cataloged, shelved, and ready for research:  Continue reading →