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Welcome to the Penn Museum blog. First launched in January 2009, the Museum blog now has over 800 posts covering a range of topics in the categories of Museum, Collection, Exhibitions, Research, and By Location. Here you’ll hear directly from our staff and Penn students about their work, research, experiences, and discoveries. To explore the Museum's other digital content, visit The Digital Penn Museum.


Intimate Moments in the Archives

By: Maureen Callahan

This week’s FFIOW is an image by Jotham Johnson, a classical archaeologist and later the president of the Archaeological Institute of America, and was taken at the site of Minturnae, in Italy. The woman in this photograph is Agnes K. Lake, a scholar of Roman religion, and member of the faculty at Bryn Mawr College. […]

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Converting Legacy Finding Aids to EAD (Forgive the Archival Mumbo-Jumbo — Pretty Pictures Coming Soon)

By: Maureen Callahan

At our archives (as at any archives) public access is the goal and the grail — while our collections provide us joy in their very existence, we understand that their value is greatly diminished when they are inaccessible and under-studied. Our current approach to resource discovery is decidedly analog — finding aids live in folders […]

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Groupe de Bedouines Syriennes (Group of Bedouin Women)

By: Maureen Callahan

Cross-posted to the International Council on Archives’ “Young Professionals, New Archivists” blog. This image, produced at some point between 1876 and 1885, was the work of Maison Bonfils, a photography studio in Beirut. A studio image, obviously staged, this photograph shows a group of Bedouin women from Syria. Bonfils is credited with introducing the genre […]

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Welcome to the Archives

By: Maureen Callahan

Welcome to the weblog of the University of Pennsylvania Museum Archives, our latest effort to give glimpses into our wonderful collections and to share news about upcoming projects. The archives’ collections document archaeological and anthropological fieldwork as well as the administrative and collections history of the University of Pennsylvania Museum. Archival organization reflects the museum’s […]

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