Welcome back to another Hagley Staff Favorites article! Every quarter, we share with you stories from our collections staff, giving you the opportunity to hear from the experts, the people who first lay hands on our archives and objects, about the items that made a mark. Maybe you'll find something new to investigate.
This quarter's Staff Favorites interviewee is Diane E. Bockrath, the Processing and Collections Archivist at the Hagley Library, speaking about the Philadelphia Commercial Museum records.
Q: What is your role here at Hagley?
A: My title is Processing and Collections Archivist, which means I’m part of the Technical Services staff here at the Hagley Library. We work behind the scenes to create tools that help researchers and the public discover and enjoy the materials held in our collections.
Q: How do you engage with the materials Hagley collects?
A: I specialize in processing large and complex archival collections. Imagine boxes and boxes of physical materials, or thousands and thousands of digital files, that have arrived at the Library as part of a collection. You know there’s important stuff in there, but how on earth will anyone make sense of it all, much less find the needle they’re looking for in that haystack? That’s my job, and I love it because it requires both high-level conceptual thinking and attention to detail. To process a collection well, you have to be able to see the forest AND the trees at the same time. It can be quite labor-intensive, but there’s nothing more satisfying than presenting a well arranged and described collection to the world. I’m always amazed by what our researchers discover when they work with our holdings and the connections they make!
Q: What is one of your favorite collections?
A: Last fall, I finished up the finding aid for the Philadelphia Commercial Museum records, a collection that one of our summer interns started after completing her main project early. The Philadelphia Commercial Museum (PCM) was founded in 1894 with the goal of housing objects from the Centennial International Exhibition, held in Philadelphia in 1876, and the World's Columbian Exposition, held in Chicago in 1893. Its collections were focused on worldwide manufacturing and trade, with an emphasis on domestic and foreign commerce relations. Later, it became the Philadelphia Civic Center Museum, as part of Philadelphia’s convention center. After closing in 1994, the museum’s records remained in storage before eventually being acquired by Hagley.
Initially, we thought this collection would be composed solely of administrative documents, but it turned out to be a bit of a “sleeper”! It includes photographs of exhibitions, educational programming, and events, as well as publicity materials, advertisements, and media coverage related to major city happenings like the Philadelphia Panorama installation during the 1950s and 1960s—a giant mechanical model showcasing the Philadelphia City Planning Commission’s proposed improvements for Center City. Or the Design for Fun exhibition built for the city’s 1976 Bicentennial celebrations, which featured whimsical, immersive exhibits about design and mass media, plus a lot 1970s style.
Q: Why does this material stand out to you?
A: This little collection is a fascinating glimpse into Philadelphia’s cultural past. The Philadelphia Commercial Museum strikes me as having been a bit of an oddball institution, and those are near and dear to my heart. Yet it also provided high-quality educational and scholarly resources for area residents and built a sense of community. One of my favorite images is this one (see above) of a class from Temple University visiting the PCM in 1924. I don’t know who the students were or what they were studying, but I hope they had a great day at the museum!
To learn more about the Philadelphia Commercial Museum records, visit the Hagley Finding Aids Database. For more information on using Hagley collections, please reach out to our Reference Services staff at askhagley@hagley.org.
Hannah Spring Pfeifer is the Library Coordinator and interviewer for Staff Favorites at Hagley Museum and Library