News Release

Student efforts enhance Civil War museum’s archives, library

June 9, 2009

It’s difficult to determine who gained the most from the work of three Penn State Harrisburg American Studies majors at the National Civil War Museum in Harrisburg – the facility itself or the graduate students.

Two interns from the college – Emily DeSilva and Janie Cozzoli – and student volunteer Todd Klokis tackled individual projects during the spring semester which museum staff describe as “big and important.”

All three students agree the museum experiences enabled them to put knowledge learned in the classroom to practical use, enhancing their curatorial abilities and better preparing them for the professional workplace.

Penn State Harrisburg’s extensive internship and volunteer focus is geared to provide students with continuous exposure to the working environment while lending talents acquired in the classroom to business, industrial, and public enterprises.  The Office of Career Services estimates nearly 40 percent of the college’s 3,900 undergraduate and graduate students participate in an external learning experience.

Seeking further knowledge on museum libraries, Klokis “signed on as a volunteer to get the ball rolling” in the museum’s effort to organize its 3,000-volume library collection. Termed by Klokis as an invaluable resource for researchers, the collection was not organized or catalogued until he took over the project.

The Lewisburg native who is a full time master’s degree student, says he had little exposure to library work and first sought advice from Penn State Harrisburg librarians before deciding to proceed. Using a special software, Klokis archived the volumes and documents electronically into a database that is searchable and that will eventually include other holdings of the museum.

This summer, he is expanding his archival knowledge as an intern at the State Museum.

Museum director Janice Mullin says DeSilva worked on a collection of letters in the museum’s collection from Joseph and Carrie Young. “He was a newsman during the Civil War and located in Charlottesville. She was in Richmond. There are 34 letters which Emily transcribed and scanned into high-resolution digital images for cataloging.”

Very fragile, the letters will now be available electronically, removing the danger of more damage to the originals.

Cozzoli also worked on a series to letters – hers written by a New York soldier to his family during the war.  Curator of Collections Brett Kelley says, “Janie’s work was quite difficult because the rural New Yorker was not well-educated and his handwriting is poor. Using a magnifying glass and a lot of patience, she started by identifying words and then looking for similar letters in other words to transcribe the letters.”

This will again permit access to copies of the letters without the need to handle the originals. “Preservation of original documents is critical,” Kelley says, “Handling artifacts improperly can destroy them in time.” Mullin adds that in transcribing the letters and cataloging the library holdings, the students are returning “things that belonged to people and the stores in them” to the public.