Recent News & Updates

Browse pages for Student Files, Images, Publications, and Lists & Rosters now include additional functionality to better support research and exploration. Users can now customize how many records are displayed per page, as well as their sort order. For instance, if you want to view files of students from a particular nation and list them in chronological order, the new browse options make this easy (Click on the image to view the example screenshot).

The improved browse pages also present statistics on the total number of records found matching particular criteria and what range is being currently displayed on the page. This makes it easy to discover how many student files currently available on the site represent students from a particular nation, or contain a particular document type.

We hope these features provide an improved research experience and open up new avenues for exploration. Let us know how you like them! You can click the feedback tab at the right of the screen to send us your comments.

The Summer 2014 issue of Dickinson Magazine includes an article that features the Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center. In “Reclaiming History,” Rick Kearns explains:

"Of those who attended, many entered careers as teachers, tradesmen and athletes — including Frank Mount Pleasant, Dickinson class of 1910, who competed in the 1908 summer Olympics in London. Others, cut off from their native languages, identities and families of origin, entered a legacy of trauma and disenfranchisement. All of them have stories to tell, and now, more than 130 years later, their descendants, as well as researchers and archivists, have unprecedented access to those stories."

The full article is available here as a PDF file.

On a thankfully uneventful Friday the 13th, another team of Dickinson researchers drove to Washington, D.C., to continue scanning student files at the National Archives (NARA). Three student interns - Linda Genser, Rachel Kruchten, and Michele Metcalf - as well as Friends of the Library Intern Caitlin Moriarty, will be at NARA for two weeks. In addition to scanning, all are looking forward to visiting various D.C. landmarks such as Eastern Market and Ben's Chili Bowl. After returning from D.C., Linda, Rachel, and Michele will work at the Dickinson College Archives for the remainder of June and July, continuing to process scanned materials for the website. 

Project co-leaders Susan Rose and Malinda Triller Doran will travel to Austin, TX to give a presentation about the Digital Resource Center at the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA) Conference held May 28-31.  NAISA is the "premiere international and interdisciplinary professional organization for scholars, graduate students, independent researchers, and community members interested in all aspects of Indigenous Studies." Last year's conference attracted almost 900 attendees.  We have created a brief flyer describing the project, which Rose and Triller Doran will also distribute during the conference. 

We are pleased to add a new photograph to our collection of Carlisle Indian School images, thanks to the generosity of James Herster.  This photograph depicts a group of 15 student printers in school uniforms circa 1888.  This image, along with the names and tribes of those pictured, is now available on our site.  We want to thank Mr. Herster for his generosity in donating this image to our collection.

On Wednesday, March 12, the Carlisle Indian Industrial School digital project was a featured story on the local news. Reporter Alex Hoff, with Harrisburg TV station ABC27, interviewed several of the people involved in the project, including undergraduate interns Frank Vitale and Xueyin Zha, Professor Susan Rose, local historian Barbara Landis, and Native American storyteller Dovie Thomason. We’re thrilled to have caught the attention of one of our area news outlets, and we want to thank Alex Hoff for helping to share the story of this project with our local audience.

We are pleased to announce the launching of new search pages to the website. Visitors to this Carlisle Indian School site now have the ability to search more specifically within each individual content type rather than only being able to search across the entire online collection. These new search capabilities are available for the Student Files, the Images, and the Publications. Just click on any of those three links from the navigation bar on the left, and you will see the new layout. The right side of the screen features a search box that combines keyword searching with additional options to limit your results by categories such as nation, date, or content format. The lower part of the screen will allow basic browsing using those same categories. (For broader searching, you may still search the entire site using the general search box at the top of the navigation bar on the left.)

We hope these changes will make the site easier for you to use, particularly when you are searching for a specific person. If you experience any difficulties with the new search pages, please let us know.

In order to make the "recent news & updates" section of our website easy to find, and in order to make the appearance of the site more visually appealing, we have launched an update to the look of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School project homepage. We now have a much shorter introductory text to the project positioned right in the center of the page, with a slideshow of select images on the righthand side. Blog entries providing updates on the project or other useful and interesting tidbits are provided just below the introductory text and slideshow. We hope our users will like these changes to the homepage, and we look forward to rolling out some other new looks and capabilities for the website in the coming weeks.

For two weeks in mid-January, a second group of researchers undertook a trip to the National Archives in Washington, DC to continue scanning the student files of those who attended the Carlisle Indian School. Tessa Cicak and Katie Walters, special projects assistants at the Waidner-Spahr Library, and Caitlin Moriarty, Friends of the Library Intern in the College Archives, were able to scan 1,550 more student files comprising more than 16,000 pages of documentation. After adding these to what was completed during last summer's research trip, almost half of the student files have now been scanned.

Tessa, Katie, and Caitlin enjoyed the experience of traveling to D.C. and doing research in the beautiful reading room of the National Archives. Throughout the fall, all three had contributed to expanding the Indian School website and processing student files. They were pleased to have this opportunity to gain an even greater understanding of the scope of the project and the Carlisle Indian School as a whole. The picture here shows the research team busily scanning documents from the student files.

The Carlisle Indian Industrial School digital humanities project received some attention recently, and comments and questions from new visitors to the project’s website have been rolling in ever since. The interest was sparked by a short article in the online publication “Indian Country Today.” Rick Kearns, author of the piece, spoke with the project’s three co-directors back in December, and he felt that a wide audience would be excited to learn about this new online resource. The article was posted on January 10, alerting an interested user community to our activities just as a team of interns arrived in Washington, DC to scan more documents (roughly 16,700 of them) at the U.S. National Archives.

As links to the article were shared by colleagues across the country via Facebook, Twitter, and Google+, we were pleased to see the high level of interest and enthusiasm for the project. In just the first week after the article appeared, the site registered 1655 visitors, while it had recorded only 337 visitors over the previous month.

Even more exciting than the general buzz, however, was this blog post by Larry Cebula, Associate Professor of History at Eastern Washington University. Dr. Cebula took some time to explore our website and discovered Lulu O’Hara, a student from Washington who was a member of the Spokane Tribe. In his post, Dr. Cebula used Lulu to demonstrate, in a very simple and straightforward way, how a researcher could examine the contents of a student’s digitized file and piece together a story of her time at the school. He then went a bit further by connecting Lulu to other materials available online, including a photograph on Flickr featuring Lulu’s school class from before she attended Carlisle, and a portion of an oral history included in a National Park Service educator’s guide.

Dr. Cebula’s post provides a great example of the potential for the project, demonstrating to users how a little additional searching can help turn a few interesting items into a larger story. For as much information as we plan to make readily available via the Carlisle Indian School website, we do not want people ever to assume that this is all there is to the story of the school, or to the stories of the 10,000 students who attended the school. Too often students and other researchers fail to take the next important steps to build upon what fragments of documentation they uncover, but Dr. Cebula shows how valuable and rich the stories can become with some additional effort. In the coming years, we look forward to assisting a broad public in bringing these stories to light.

--Jim Gerencser