Hello! And welcome back to the Hall-Hoag Blog. We are excited to announce the return of the Hall Hoag blog with the news that big things are happening with the Hall Hoag Collection. My name is Ariel Flowers and I am the Project Archivist for the Divided America Project. I came to Brown in 2022 after working in Public and Academic Libraries. I received my B.A. in History and Gender Studies from the University of Arizona and my M.A. in Archival Management from Simmons University. 

“Friends of the Lepers” newsletter, 1967.

 Since 2022, with the help of student assistants, we have been working on a plan to digitize over 200,000 pages of material from the collection and make them accessible to researchers, scholars and the general public. Much of this material will be getting digitized for the first time. As part of the first stage of this process, a team of 10-12 students have been going through the collection file by file and preparing materials to be sent to the vendor for scanning.

Students processing Hall Hoag material.

This includes selecting and sorting materials and recording metadata. Among other things, the students work on making sure materials are the appropriate size for digitization, sorting out duplicated material and checking for dates on the material. Once materials are sorted and ready, they are stamped, their information recorded and filed away to go to the vendor.

Processing materials.