October Student Pop-Up Exhibit

The Second round of student-curated pop-up exhibits are now available to view at Special Collections!

Student Assistant Sarah Hunt and Intern Daniel Donahue collaborated on two exhibit cases that highlight the Big Little Book collection (MS 724) and Class of 1973 Homecoming.

The first exhibit looks at the Big Little Books collections. The Whitman Publishing Company in Racine, Wisconsin published Big Little Books from 1932 to 1949. Each book featured full-page illustrations opposite each page of text, with material mostly drawn from radio, comic strips, books, and movies. This exhibit not only shows some of the books they published but the guide to them as well.

A few of the items you’ll find in this case are Little Orphan Anne, Billy the Kid, Houdini, and many more.

The second exhibit features The Class of 1973 Homecoming. In celebration of the 50 year reunion for the class of 73, we have put up their Homecoming photos and year book. In the first case there is four photos showing the Homecoming floats and parade. The second case includes the yearbook for the class of 1973 and the Homecoming Queen from that year.

These two exhibit will be up until November 27th in the reading room at Special Collections.

Processing and Botanical Nomenclature

After a very involved and productive summer, I am still getting used to a school-in-session-schedule at Special Collections, with less hours, less shenanigans, and more student bonding activities (thanks Michelle!!). I’ve been working on many little projects and tasks here and there, like organizing our filing cabinets for our collections’ paperwork and shifting the oversize materials. I have also been processing an addition to the Howard Scott Gentry papers (MS 657). Gentry was a botanist whose research was concentrated on agaves in the Southwest and the broader North America. Much of the collection consists of photographic material, including slides, negatives, and prints. It has been incredibly interesting to sift through all the plant photographs.

Black and white prints of plants and southwestern landscapes.

A portion of this collection contains material from a study on agave epidermises. There are also small specimens of various agave we will be storing in the collection. Sorting through and organizing this collection, I have read and written many scientific names for these agave plants. Learning botanical nomenclature, specifically for agaves, has been entertaining (despite the spelling difficulty).

Slides of epidermises of agave from the agave epidermis study.

There is also a significant amount of information for Gentry’s book Agaves of Continental North America as well as many publications (very many!) from a variety of authors and earth science subjects. I’m very excited to be finishing up this collection and think the materials on Gentry’s agave research will be a great addition to the Gum tragacanth, Chia, Jojoba, and Red squill research in the original collection.

Boxes of all the publications in this addition. A lot of books!

Black and white photograph of Tucson landscape.

This semester has been wonderful so far and I am looking forward to whatever I’ll be working on next! (maybe the AZGS addition…hint lisa wink). I am also missing my favorite 23 year old coworker that unfortunately has an opposite schedule than me (come visit m.m.!).

Thanks for reading!

Bridgett