Last week was uneventful compared to previous weeks. During the last week of class (2/20-2/24), I got a little bit behind due to being able to work only 3 hours. As a result, I will be spending 7 hours this week working on searching things in Pegasus from the catalogue and working on a few scans in University Archives. I will also likely work on the various course catalogues up until 1930.

Last week, I spent about an hour and 15 minutes in the University Archives Office working on the course catalogue/bulletin and progressed from 1906-07 to 1913-14. While there was relatively little information for this period, it was interesting to see the rapid progression of volumes in the St. Ignatius College library. In the 1906-1907 academic year, the library claimed possession of 25000 volumes. By 1909-10, the library was up to 38000 volumes. By 1913-1914, the library suddenly had 50000 volumes. In only 7 years, the amount of volumes in the library doubled.

I also learned from the course catalogue about the creation of the law school, engineering school, and the merger of St. Ignatius with a medical school and pharmacy school. It was interesting to see St. Ignatius' rapid expansion from a school which only had Arts and Sciences courses to a school which suddenly had all of these programs only 5 years later.

Finally, for the rest of the week, I worked on searching books from the 1870s library catalogue. I found a French biography of Charlemagne, Charlemagne et son siecle, from the 19th century. I also found a biography of Otto von Bismarck from during his life. I actually found this pretty cool, because I would assume that despite Bismarck's extraordinary reputation worldwide, he probably did not have many biographies written of him during his life. Here is a link to information on that book, which was published in 1870, a year before Germany officially unified. http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=5989579341&searchurl=an%3Dhesekiel%2Bjohn%2Bgeorge%2Blouis

Anyway, that is all for this week. Hopefully I will have a little more to elaborate on next week since I will be working more hours this week. Thanks for reading!

This week was spent researching the books listed in the original catalogue of St. Ignatius College. I was unable to get to the Archives Office due to a pretty hectic schedule of papers and exams, and as a result, I did most of my work this weekend. I had kind of skipped around in my previous week's research, and as a result, much of my work this week was spent trying to decipher the books and authors which I had skipped previously. I was originally working on 2 pages which I had taken pictures of with my phone. I finished those two except for a couple texts which I had problems with and then proceeded to work on the 5 additional pages that Dr. Roberts had sent me earlier in the week. I got bits and pieces of these 5 pages done, but I probably have the equivalent of 1 1/2 to 2 pages done. It has been a struggle trying to get used to the writing, especially on a sometimes slightly blurry photo.

My biggest difficulty in trying to figure out what the name of the book and who the author is has been the fact that many of the titles are in different languages. Some titles are Latin, I've also run across French, and most simply aren't English titles. This causes a lot of problems because while I do know some Latin, I am not an expert in Latin and do not know many of the Latin words. French has been an absolute struggle due to the language barrier. An example of two titles I have found are: Dictionnaire de theologie by Bergier, a French title which Loyola still owns and it is currently in Pegasus, and De locis theologicis by Stattler, a Latin title which I was unable to find in Pegasus.

Hopefully when I find the hard copies of the books instead of merely searching them on Pegasus, I can post some of the images of the books. In the meantime, thanks for reading! 

This past week, my fourth at the University Archives Office, I mostly worked on the St. Ignatius College catalogues. I also did a little research on the titles included on the two pages I posted images of last week. I do not have my notes with me at the moment for those, but I will post an update on what I did for those sometime early this week (probably Tuesday night). 

While searching through the catalogues this week, I progressed from years 1892-1893 through 1906-1907. These catalogues contain information on the students in each class, the professors and instructors and their various positions, the Board of Managers of St. Ignatius College during each year, and the library and the donations to the library each year. Most of my research has focused on the library and who the librarian was during each school year, how many volumes the school had during each school year, and what books were donated to the library during each year and by whom were these books donated. It is particularly interesting to see how the library evolved from a library of 8000 volumes at its inception to over 25000 in the 1902-1903 academic year. Another part of my research was researching the prominent donors. John Naghten and William J. Onahan were by far the largest donors to the school in its opening decades. I tried to do some research into both men, but I was not able to come up with any information on John Naghten. Onahan, in contrast, seemed to have been a prominent figure in Chicago and Illinois during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. He served as President of the Illinois Catholic Historical Society and had other prominent posts throughout Chicago and the state of Illinois. More information can be found in this article, if you are interested: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40194518?seq=1. Onahan seems to have been a wealthy man who was interested in donating to the school due to his own Catholic faith and his position within the Illinois Catholic Historical Society. 

Finally this week, Kathy found another folder full of photos from St. Ignatius. It was hard to figure out what the exact date on many of the photos was, because many seemed to be more recent than we are researching (1970s-80s), but there seemed to be at least a few photos of the library from the early-twentieth century.

Overall, it was an interesting week. As I said, I'll update when I have access to my information on the two pages from last week, probably on Tuesday night. Thanks for reading!

In the third week of my History Internship at the Archives Office in Cudahy Library, we were finally able to get the scanner to work! Hooray! Once it was working, Zorian and I got to work and managed to get about half of the catalogue scanned in the first couple hours after we got the scanner working. Around the time Zorian left for the day, the cameras on the scanner, which were set to manual focus because otherwise they frequently have problems, began to take blurry pictures of the pages of the catalogue. Sadly, I didn't notice this until about an hour after it started, and as a result, a lot of my work was wasted. When I realized the problem, I talked to Kathy and Ashley, and they fixed the problem. I was able to figure out the page the blurriness seemed to begin on, so I did not have to start over completely, but over 100 pages of scans were wasted. After the problem with the cameras was corrected, I managed to get to page 300 in the catalogue of around 500 pages.

Later in the week, I went back to the University Archives Office, and Zorian and I were able to get half of the rest of the work done before he had to leave. I finished out the rest of the work, and despite lots of problems with the cameras taking blurry pictures and having to readjust the focus repeatedly after only a few scans, I got the whole rest of the catalogue done. Now Zorian and I just have to wait for Dr. Roberts to check all of the images and see if we need to redo any of them.

While working on the scans this week, I have also been slowly pacing through the documents listed on 2 pages that we took a picture of while we were having problems with the scanner. I have included these two pictures below this paragraph. I haven't had a ton of luck just yet, but I have only just begun, and I will hopefully have these first two pages done within the next couple days and be able to make more progress on other pages within the catalogue. It has been difficult for me to get used to reading the handwriting, but it is not something I have much experience with, and I am sure I will get better at it with time. 

Thats all for this week. Thank you for reading, and I hope you'll continue to read my progress on the catalogue in the future.

Brian