On the Shelf: New items added to Center for Restoration Studies collections, November 2023

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In November our colleagues in Technical Services and Cataloging added 90 items to Special Collections holdings.  Continuing the work from summer, we added more language editions of Max Lucado’s books.  The Lucado team just sent us several more boxes of these editions, so there will be lots more coming into the collection soon.  (There are many, many of these titles that are also going into the circulating collection, giving us as an authoritative collection of Max’s books as can be found anywhere, in both Special Collections and in the circulating collections.)  Between tracts, bound periodicals, and monographs, the REST collection grew by about 70 items.  We added fourteen hymnals to the Taylor hymnal collection and the remainder went into the ACU Authors collection.

Meanwhile and in other news, to accommodate this growth our new students workers Emma and Hayley are working with Mac to shift some parts of the print collection.  Amanda has been processing manuscripts collections (look for announcements soon).  Erica has been fielding a lot of external research requests in addition to working with courses and professors to meet their reference needs.  Amanda and Erica have also been doing post-processing on audio files from Landon Saunders, generating transcriptions, and uploading them to DigitalCommons.  Mac’s work with HIST 353, Historical Methods, is almost complete for the semester.  We made excellent progress on processing the records of the Women for ACU.  It also seems like we have had more drop-in visitors and on-site researchers this summer and fall than we have had in recent memory.  It has been a full semester.

Library, Abilene Christian College, 1917. The library was in the Administration Building on the old downtown campus. The Prickly Pear Yearbook for 1917 is available at: https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth39970/m1/44/

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.

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

This Just In: Roy Osborne papers and tapes

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A few days ago John Harp rolled in to Abilene with a load of sermon tapes (some on reels, most on cassette), files and books from Roy Osborne, longtime minister at Sunset Ridge Church of Christ in San Antonio, Texas.  Pictured below are John and Mac after we unloaded and finished a tour of Special Collections.

 

In 1964 J. D. Thomas and Biblical Research Press published a volume of Roy’s sermons in the ‘Great Preachers of Today’ series.  They reissued it under a new title in 1983.   The Osborne Papers contain tapes from a fairly wide span of Roy’s preaching.  The collection should prove exceedingly useful to historians and rhetoricians because of the time span covered by the reels and tapes, as well as providing a complementary audio version of the kind of preaching committed to print in Roy’s book.  As samples of the kind of preaching held forth as exemplary by J. D. Thomas, these sermons will provide a fine window into the changing shape of homiletics and theology in post-war and late twentieth-century Churches of Christ.

They are currently in the queue for processing.  We will publicize the finding aid when it is complete.

 

On the Shelf: New items added to Center for Restoration Studies collections, October 2023

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In October our colleagues in Technical Services and Cataloging added 191 items to Special Collections holdings.  Continuing the work from summer, we added more language editions of Max Lucado’s books.  There will be many more of these coming into the collection soon, giving us as an authoritative collection of Max’s books as can be found anywhere.  Between tracts, bound periodicals, A/V materials, and monographs, the REST collection grew by almost 160 items.  We added one new hymnal to the Taylor hymnal collection and the remainder went into the ACU ARCH and ARCH A/V, two collections devoted to anything published or produced by the University.

Library, Abilene Christian College, 1917. The library was in the Administration Building on the old downtown campus. The Prickly Pear Yearbook for 1917 is available at: https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth39970/m1/44/

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.

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