Our First Full Year
We completed our first full fiscal year at the end of June. Despite the challenges of starting a new organization, I think it is fair to call the year a success. The most notable activities of the year were the funding of a work-study scholarship at Mount Holyoke College, the implementation our website, and the launch of our Digital Repository. I’ll take these breifly, one at a time.
Dwight Hall,
Mount Holyoke College.
Location of Archives and
Special Collections.
Work-Study Scholarship — This project was overseen by Prof. Lan Wu of the History Department in coordination with Archives and Special Collections at the MHC library. Boxes of letters and archival filing supplies were delivered to the library, where a history major digitized and filed letters, working up to 10 hours per week during academic semesters. With our late start, the work began in December, but continued through the Spring term and then full-time during the summer term.
Over the course of the year the student digitized, labeled, and filed 475 letters and transcribed 35 of them. Many of the "letters" actually include more than one letter sent at the same time in the same envelope. There were 475 PDF files created from 2,273 page scans, and the transcribed files consisted of around 25,000 words. The number of words transcribed is an estimate, since the TXT files contain markup, and the command line utilities that do word count don't distinguish markup from content.
One of 4 Letter Boxes
containing filed and labeled letters digitized in our first year.
Letters that were digitized were put in polyester L-sleeves, labeled with the unique identifier for the letter. Multiple L-sleeves were put in one file folder, and those were put in a letter box. The letters are arranged in the filing system in chronological order. All materials are archival quality. Ultimately, these physical letters will be donated to Whitman College and Northwest Archives for their David Crockett Graham Collection.
Batch of Letters
to be digitized in coming year.
Digital Repository — The digital repository resides on a computer in our Executive Office in Amherst, MA. It has a directory structure with a D.C.Graham directory and 5 subdirectories – Diaries, Letters, Miscellaneous, Photographs, and Publications. The D.C.Graham directory with it's subdirectories is replicated to a Google drive under a davidcrockettgraham.org account, and that Google drive is shared with Read access to the general public — D.C.Graham, which is linked from our website menu.
At end of the summer, the contents of the repository included:
➤ 24 diaries,
➤ 674 letters (Mount Holyoke's work plus 199 digitized previously),
➤ 51 transcripts (Mount Holyoke's work plus 16 transcribed by others),
➤ 15 miscellaneous items, which include:
• photographs of some of DCG's medals,
• DCG's guest books from 1933 through 1961,
• The transcript of the 1941 XGOY Panda broadcast,
• A 1924 Chinese customs document itemizing the contents of the Smithsonian Collecting Kit,
• etc.
➤ 151 of DCG's publications (out of 244 that have been identified),
The Photographs directory is empty at the moment, pending identification of best original copies.
Wenchuan County Magistrate
Order directing everyone to protect David Crockett Graham and the live Panda on their journey from Wenchuan to Chengdu—among a group of letters concerning the pandas that were given to the U.S. by Madam Chiang in 1941.
Website — Our website was largely completed in the Fall of 2024. Since you are looking at it, I won’t try to say much about it. However, please do look around at the different sections, linked from the menu at the top, and see the wealth of material.
➤ As we launch into our second full fiscal year, you can help us make it even more successful. Please make a contribution today from our donate page.