All Posts

I find my joy browsing the library stacks. This month, I looked for books with fore-edge printing and fore-edge painting. These are methods of applying images to the edges of book pages. Sometimes the image is visible when the book is closed, and sometimes the image is only visible when the pages are fanned. Fore-edge is the edge of a book opposite the spine or the bound edge. I found fore-edge printing on a few art books and science fiction books in the I.D. Weeks Library, b

A library book that is 50+ years overdue is a common trope in books and movies. Though it is not common here, the library recently (and happily) received an overdue book that was checked out for 56 years. This image of the check-out slip for the overdue book shows that it was checked out in 1970. Guinness world record for the most years that a returned library book had been overdue is 288 years.

Finding aids finished during 2025: Shane Balkowitsch Ambrotypes Robert Blachnik photographs Rex Butler Collection of Henry and Frank H. Butler photographs Lea Rosson DeLong papers on Wilber M. Stilwell Dephane Hammond papers Nikki Heidepriem collection on Edith and Margaret Reeves Gilbert Monell Hitchcock papers Richard Holm notebook Arthur Leslie Keith papers Henry Langford Loucks papers Albert J. Maag papers Department of Psychology Richardson Phonograph collection Gretchen

Help us transcribe our collections! https://fromthepage.com/usdarchives FromThePage is a software designed for transcribing documents. The platform enables users to view an image of a page and transcribe the corresponding text. More information https://libguides.usd.edu/fromthepage Questions? Email us at library@usd.edu Recently our work in FromThePage was featured on KTIV news. https://www.ktiv.com/2026/01/13/becoming-digital-archivist-vermillion-libraries-seek-volunteers-h

We are tracing the history of a troll figurine which stands on the top of a filing cabinet in the Archives and Special Collections. Because it is not associated with an archival collection, we think it belonged to someone who worked in the library or archives. Our first full-time archivist writes that it was here […]

ARCHIVESSPACE GAME – BEGINNER’S LEVEL 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ DIRECTIONS : I found this questionnaire format in the South Dakota Academy of Science papers. Write the numbers 1 through 7 on a piece of paper. Use the search […]

Our first issue of FromthePage Newsletter is now available. See what we are doing with transcription projects. https://libguides.usd.edu/fromthepage/newsletter

The South Dakota Oral History Project is transcribing thousands of digitized interviews to enhance accessibility and citation accuracy. The transcription process includes multiple listen-throughs for correcting grammar and understanding speech patterns, ensuring speakers’ voices are preserved. This meticulous approach culminates in a final review, promoting continuous growth in transcription skills.

The archivist and staff of the Archives and Special Collections write guides to our collections, papers, and records called finding aids and collection inventories. Some of the finding aids and collection inventories finished during 2024: Crow Creek Site collection Day (John) collection on Arthur Amiotte Fahsing (William Frederick) papers Gallup-Livingston (Mary) papers Holm (Richard) notebook […]

The archivist and the staff of the Archives and Special Collections write guides to our collections, papers, and records called finding aids. These are the finding aids we finished during October, November, and December 2023: Cathy Beard Correspondence with Linda Hasselstrom Beresford Train Depot records Tom Brokaw papers Bulow House records John Davidson Missouri River […]

If you have wondered what it is like to work in an archive, here is an opportunity to do one of our common tasks, which is researching for dates of undated material. Help us research when the attached maps were made. One way to assign dates to the maps would be to read an USD […]

Come visit us and check out the view from our new space in the library at the University of South Dakota.

While doing research in an archival collection, have you ever come across intriguing, but completely off-topic items that have nothing to do with your research? For example, while working with the Edward Perry Churchill collection I found a research paper he wrote in 1916 on “The Learning of a Maze by Goldfish.” What do you […]

Recently added to the Archives and Special Collections website are instructions for navigating and searching through finding aids on ArchivesSpace: The Archives and Special Collections department is moving our Richardson Collection finding aids to ArchivesSpace. Though the physical location and the format of the finding aids are changing, you can continue to access the finding […]

To inspire us, this “Library Work” poster from the American Library Association is hanging up in the Archives and Special Collections. ALA believes the poster is from 1926.

Check out this Library of Congress blog post containing great advice for people organizing their own family papers. “Your own personal archiving project: where do you start?” by Mike Ashenfelder, May 11, 2016. On the Library of Congress blog The Signal. https://blogs.loc.gov/thesignal/2016/05/how-to-begin-a-personal-archiving-project/ (accessed 10/09/2019). It tells you to start simply, evaluate material for broad categories […]

In honor of National Library Week (April 7-13, 2019), I present Passion in the Library: An Apocalyptic Comedy in Flames and Shadows. The play “is a multimedia drama revealing a new emotional perspective on the human confrontation with human knowledge …” The script is in the George Prescott Scott papers in the Archives and Special […]

When I took the graduate class in historiography in Fall 2016 as a requirement of the Master’s degree program in USD’s history department, I was very excited when my professor Dr. Molly Rozum announced that the class would be working directly with historical materials in the USD archives. My class had the responsibility of doing […]

“Books remain one of the strongest bulwarks we have against tyranny – but only as long as people are free to read all different kinds of books, and only as long as they actually do so.” Books for Living by Will Schwalbe, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2017, p.257. National Library Week is April 9 […]

To me every trip to a library or archive is like a small detective story. There are always little moments on such trips when the past flares to life, like a match in the darkness. Larson, Erik. The devil in the white city: murder, magic, and madness at the fair that changed America. New York: […]