I’ve already written about the digital republication of the classic William Penn Lecture series. But Philadelphia Yearly Meeting’s post contained this great quote from Jim Rose:
Pendle Hill had a practice of asking week-long students to take on a job on Wednesday afternoon. One week my task was to clean/dust and arrange the books in the Upmeads library and in the process I found, high on an upper shelf, a whole series of dusty pamphlets called the William Penn Lectures. Inaccessible? You bet. A few months later I sojourned at Pendle Hill while my late wife was taking a week-long course. During that week I sat with my computer and scanned the text of those pamphlets. My intent was to make that body of literature more accessible to Quakers and others throughout the world on the internet. And recently that goal has been achieved.
I know Jim well from his time on Friends Journal’s board of trustees and making Quaker archives accessible is a great passion of his. He helped us tremendously in getting older articles indexed. That combined with the Haverford College Library’s digitalization of everything going back to 1955 means we’re relatively accessible.
Speaking of archives, it looks like I’ve been remiss sharing another amazing resource: the Salem (NJ) Quarter Tape Archive. Starting in the late 1970s, people started taping long interviews with Friends. They’ve sat gathering dust until they were pulled out an digitized. Regular readers will know I’m a huge fan of Rachel Davis DuBois and her interview by Charles Crabbe Thomas (number 13) is absolute gold.