News from the DeGolyer Library June 2019

Every month, we highlight an item recently digitized by the incredible team at the Norwick Center for Digital Solutions–scroll down to see this month’s item. From capturing high resolution images, to gathering and recording the metadata which allows researchers to search for items, digitizing collections is a lengthy and detailed process. Our digital collection allows users from around the world the chance to explore the wide variety of materials housed here at the DeGolyer. A quick browse through the digital collections website takes you from SMU yearbooks, to rare photos of the Mexican Revolution, to diaries and letters of 19th century women in the American Southwest.

Meet Ada Negraru, librarian and archivist. Ada was born in Romania and attended college at the University of Bucharest, where she received a BA in History. Graduate school brought Ada to Dallas–she earned her MA in Art History here at SMU. She went on to earn her Masters in Library Science from Texas Woman’s University. Ada’s been in Dallas for nearly two decades, and says that moving to Texas brought with it an assortment of feelings regarding local food. Some parts of Southwestern cuisine took getting used to, but guacamole was love at first bite.

In her time at the DeGolyer Ada has worked with a variety of collections. She has come to specialize in business archives, having processed the Belo Corporation and Texas Instruments records. Ada is currently working on the papers of Congressman Sam Johnson, and recently used her foreign language skills to catalog French, Latin, Romanian, and Romansh books from the Donald J. Hobbs Sherlock Holmes collection.

Samantha Dodd marked Mother’s Day by highlighting a few of the many mothers whose papers are part of the DeGolyer’s Archives of Women of the Southwest.

Check out Remember the Mothers to read about some trailblazing Texas moms.

Click here to read about the Donald J. Hobbs Sherlock Holmes Collection at the DeGolyer.

In his post, Joel Eatmon describes the globe-spanning collection he’s spent the past nine months cataloging, which feature Sherlock stories written in 108 unique languages, from Afrikaans to Zulu!

It all begins with a question. In Turn On the Lights , Joan Gosnell recounts how a question about lamps on campus led to a quest that involved an influential women’s club, multiple Dallas libraries, and the Bard’s First Folio.

Wedding season may be wrapping up, but preserved in our collection of early Peruvian documents is the 1554 marriage record of Dona Beatriz Huaylas Nusta and Diego Hernandez de la Cuva, pictured here. It was a royal wedding, and a second marriage for the bride, who was the daughter of Huaya Capac, Sapa (ruler) of the Inca Empire.

We recently received a selection of Belgian movie posters for Hollywood Westerns from the 1940s-1970s. The films featured range from universally recognized classics to campy B-movies, but all document how this quintessential American artifact, and the broader idea of the mythical American West, was marketed and viewed overseas.

26 postcards from the 1890s through the 1950s were recently digitized by the Norwick Center for Digital Solutions and added to the the George W. Cook Dallas/Texas digital collection. The images feature iconic courthouses from across Texas.