Last month the Project Team closed out the Spring 2014 semester by congratulating graduating senior Sarah Muenzer and master’s candidate Josh Arens.  Both have begun full-time jobs (not surprising given the great work they did for the Provenance Project!) and Josh is continuing to help out with the Project’s social media in his spare time.

Congratulations also go out to Evan Thompson who has been awarded both a Provost Fellowship (for Summer 2014) and a Hank Center for the Catholic Intellectual Heritage Fellowship (for Academic Year 2014-15) to continue working on the Provenance Project.  Dr Roberts and he recently found out that they will be presenting the Provenance Project at the Annual Meeting of the American Catholic Historical Association in New York City on the first weekend of January 2015.  Both recently presented the Project on the Community Libraries: Connecting Readers in the Atlantic World Conference held at the Newberry Library and Loyola University Chicago on May 30-June 1st.

This summer we welcome two new members to the team and shift our focus to a new segment of books from the original catalogue.  Jim Naughton is a rising senior and Helen Davies is a graduate of the Digital Humanities Master’s Program and currently works in the Graduate School.  Jim is interning for credit towards his History major (check out his blog here) and Helen is squeezing in a project before she begins a PhD program at the University of Mississippi in the fall.  Jim, Helen, and Evan are shifting their attention to the original library books that are in the University’s Rare Books collection.  We estimate about 600 of the possibly 1750 surviving original books are in Rare Books today.  Keep an eye out for regular updates on what they uncover!