A copy of the Declaration of Independence from the Allen H. Schell Collection of Campaign Buttons, Pins, and Political Ephemera, box 19.

The Frank H. Blair diaries were recently processed in the Archives and Special Collections. There are many different types of diaries. Some give an account of day-to-day life. Blair’s diaries are mainly about his thoughts, with occasional descriptions of his activities. Diaries in the Archives and Special Collections by Thomas Hunter, Austin Horace and an unnamed Civil War soldier from the Union Army are available for viewing on the Digital Library of South Dakota. When reading a diary for historical research, it is useful to ask yourself the following questions: What was the diary’s context? What was the writer’s intent? Was it promotional? If so, what was the goal? Was it written while the events were occurring or later? Are there phrases borrowed from other literature of the time? Clichés may indicate that the writer was repeating common knowledge rather than writing personal observations and emotions. The photograph of the Class of 1891 is from the Volante, volume V, number 1, September 1891, page 30. Copy of photograph is from the Digital Library of South Dakota, accessed 9/23/2025. Please contact us if you know which person in this picture is Frank H. Blair.

On June 16, 2025, Dorothy Neuhaus passed away at the age of 101 years. Before coming to Vermillion, Dorothy was a scientist who had received a master’s degree in biochemistry from the University of Michigan. In 1966, Dorothy came to Vermillion with her husband, Otto Neuhaus, Ph.D. who was chair of the Department of Biochemistry in the University of South Dakota School of Medicine for 22 years. Dorothy was profoundly influential in Vermillion, as a founding member of the Friends of the W. H. Over Museum in 1967, manager of the museum gift shop, and curator. Initially the Friends of the W. H. Over Museum supported the museum by raising funds and developing museum activities. When the museum moved out of the Carnegie building in 1984, Dorothy spearheaded fundraising efforts to construct a new building and exhibits. By 1996, the Friends took on a bigger role of managing the museum when Dorothy became Director of the museum, a role she held for several years. As a community member, Dorothy was instrumental in the development of the recycling center in Vermillion. She was president of the Vermillion chapter of the League of Women Voters. Protection of Spirit Mound and strong ties to the Native American community over many years lead to Dorothy become an honorary tribal elder. She also had close ties to the Trinity Lutheran Church. For her hard work and innovation in so many ways and important contributions to the community, Dorothy was named Volunteer of Year on several occasions. In her later years, Dorothy and Otto had a business on Elm Street called Ot ‘n Dots that sold Native American artwork, antiques, and collectibles including parts of Otto’s extensive pewter collection. With her quiet, firm demeanor and amazing contributions to the community, she was a role model for individuals of all ages. As stated in her obituary: “She lived with purpose, grace, and an unwavering commitment to making the world a better place. She was, in every sense, a ‘force of nature’, a title she more than earned-and truly, a hard act to follow.” References: Interview on “Unplugged” when Dorothy Neuhaus was 100 Years: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uo8e6fK9jME Dorothy Neuhaus obituary. https://www.plaintalk.net/obituaries/article_5e811a1e-05df-470a-91b4-d3aa20ab100a.html A 1968 picture of Mrs. Byron Harrell (secretary of the Friends of the W. H. Over Museum), Dorothy Neuhaus (president of the Friends) and Dr. James Howard Director of the W. H. Over Museum standing before the David Barry photograph exhibit in the W. H. Over Museum. University of South Dakota Photograph Collection. Series 10; 9735.2.

A university archival reading room evokes a familiar atmosphere: a quiet space filled with the soft sound of old papers rustling as a researcher combs through a treasured collection. The faint scent of aging paper and vanillin drifts through the air as documents are gently turned. Nearby, rows of carefully arranged archival boxes sit on carts, each holding the promise of discovery. Nearby, archivists are training interns in archival processing, and an emeritus professor is authoring a blog post about the university’s history. Its alumni-staff are transcribing oral history interviews, while an artist-photographer is teaching a student intern to image historical photographs. Not only does their work support a wide range of research inquiries, but it also provides hands-on training for a new generation of professionals. They also support a network of students, interns, and scholars who are collaborating beyond the reading room to produce resources like the Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi (CWRGM). When USD hired me to direct the development of digital scholarly editions, it was in part to increase engagement with and access to high-quality, edited archival materials, and in part to build on the ways the Archives & Special Collections, Digital Imaging Lab, and Oral History Center are preparing students for the professional workforce. Digital scholarly editions offer students from diverse academic backgrounds opportunities to apply their education in ways that build professional skills and workforce readiness through practical, transferable experience. CWRGM provides a few examples. Supported by a Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Sources grant, a local educator and I hosted an institute for social studies education and history students from USD, South Dakota State University, Augustana University, and the University of Sioux Falls. They experimented with an inquiry-based teaching approach that combines teaching the historical research process with digital museum exhibit curation while exploring emancipation in wartime and postwar Mississippi. Thanks to support from a Chiesman Center for Democracy Civic Education Grant, Sam Goldsmith, a doctoral student from the USD School of Education and middle and high school history teacher, is working as a summer researcher to write brief guides and discussion questions that help students interpret a collection of 21 primary sources from the Library of Congress and CWRGM. These sources are featured in Brine & Blood, CWRGM’s educational game designed to help students better understand the process of wartime emancipation through engagement with archival documents. Anushka Pokharel, a USD mathematics and computer science student, used a Monte Carlo simulation to mathematically validate the statistical balance of Brine & Blood. Through the project, she learned to think both mathematically and humanistically, offering game balance adjustments grounded not only in quantitative analysis but also in historical evidence and the lived experiences of people in Civil War-era Mississippi. She presented her research at the Upper Midwest Honors Conference and IdeaFest, where she received an Undergraduate Research Award recognizing her interdisciplinary research and its application to history education. CWRGM undergraduate and graduate student researchers and editors — as well as interns from USD and high schools and universities around the country — have also presented at national conferences such as the Library Publishing Coalition Conference on topics including their research, student learning and training, and scholarly editing. At the Association of Documentary Editing Annual Meeting, Elisabeth Kluin, a USD English graduate student, presented her National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)-funded research on collaborating with web developers to explore how artificial intelligence might assist with subject tagging large-scale digital library collections and scholarly editions. In part thanks to grant support from the NEH and the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, dozens of high school, undergraduate, and graduate students from a variety of disciplines have worked and interned on the project, producing its metadata, transcriptions, subject tags, and annotations. They are the team that makes the edition possible, learning to read and decipher cursive handwriting, investigating context clues within documents using online newspapers and census records so they can interpret, subject-tag, and annotate the collection. Along the way, they become stronger researchers and communicators. They are introduced to the workflows, best practices, and professional skills used in editing and publishing, libraries and information science, archives and special collections, and digital humanities, and beyond. They sharpen their contextual analysis, pattern recognition, and abductive reasoning skills as they master deciphering handwritten text from hundreds of different authors. Far removed from the reading room, they are the workforce incubator behind the digital collections — training, honing their skills as they research, edit, and interpret the archival materials they are helping make discoverable and accessible to anyone, from anywhere.

Archives and special collections have long connected users with the raw materials of our history. Researchers visiting our reading rooms encounter the past one page, photograph, and reel at a time. With collections so important to our cultural heritage, history, and future, we’ve been asking: How can university libraries expand access to these materials, help users understand them, and prepare the next generation of scholars and professionals? When the University of South Dakota Libraries hired me, part of that vision was to deepen the library’s commitment to archival access while also creating meaningful, hands-on professional development opportunities for humanities students. One powerful way archives and libraries are doing both is through digital scholarly editing. But what exactly are scholarly editions, and how do they differ from collections in digital libraries? What Is a Digital Scholarly Edition? A digital scholarly edition is more than a digital archive or scanned collection. Like digital libraries, scholarly editions provide users with access to large amounts of digitized archival materials. What distinguishes them is editorial interpretation. Researching the historical context, editors transcribe documents, identify and explain references, and create tools that help users discover and understand relationships across the collection. Through this work, scholarly editions transform historical documents from isolated records into a connected, searchable, and contextualized collection. The Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi (CWRGM) scholarly edition — a partnership between Susannah J. Ural at Mississippi State University and I — offers an excellent example of how this works in practice. CWRGM publishes annotated, searchable editions of correspondence sent to Mississippi’s governors during one of the most transformative periods in American history. At CWRGM, users can engage with the archive in multiple ways. They can keyword-search transcriptions and metadata to quickly sift through thousands of records. At the same time, they can browse documents using the archivist’s folder arrangement, which recreates aspects of the traditional reading room experience. Blog posts and podcasts introduce users to collection highlights and editorial discoveries, while the educator resources support meaningful use of archival materials in K-12, undergraduate, and graduate classrooms. The project’s open-access structured data supports digital humanities research by making relationships across people, events, and ideas visible at scale. While these features help users explore and engage with the collection in meaningful ways, focused at the document level, CWRGM’s editors and researchers use annotated subject tags to provide readers with historical interpretation and connection. Subject tags connect users to the people, places, events, and ideas that appear within documents. These annotations allow readers to move beyond simply reading a document toward understanding its broader historical context. At CWRGM, these subject tags appear directly within document transcriptions. When users hover over the hyperlinked tagged terms, they encounter editorial interpretation adding context, explaining who individuals were, what events are referenced, or why a concept matters. And with one click, users are taken down the rabbit hole. Looking for Rabbit In the spring of 1868, Rabbit received a letter from Mary Shaifer, the young white woman he had grown up alongside and whose family had once enslaved him. Just three years after the end of slavery, he read her letter while inside the “Walls” — the Mississippi State Penitentiary in Jackson where growing numbers of Black men like Rabbit found themselves incarcerated by a state increasingly profiting from their labor through convict leasing. By signing the letter with her full name, Mary Shaifer provided CWRGM researchers with enough evidence to identify her in the archive. As a white woman in antebellum Mississippi, her family’s names appear in the 1860 U.S. Federal census, unlike the 436,631 enslaved African Americans living in the state. With that information, her reference to “my poor blind brother” becomes Henry Frazer Shaifer, Jr. Hovering over the linked terminology, “blind,” adds additional historical context about blindness in the nineteenth century, including how it was understood and treated for interested readers. Selecting Mary’s description of Rabbit as different “from any other of your color” connects researchers with information about African American history and identity during the Civil War Era, while also discovering every document in the collection about African Americans. But who was Rabbit? Even though the link to Rabbit led users to a document written by Mary’s mother, Clarrissa, and another even authored by Rabbit himself, his name remained a mystery. Still, these now-connected letters uncover much about his life. Following the subject tag for Rabbit reveals a remarkable trail of documents identifying him as a freedman incarcerated in the Mississippi State Penitentiary who sought release by appealing to his former enslavers as a person and the governor as an American citizen. These letters provide insights into the complex nature and network of antebellum and postwar interracial relationships and how swiftly freed people adopted citizenship. Encountering Rabbit But if you’re a person who is reading an Archives & Special Collections blog because you like to cross your t’s and dot your i’s and sometimes your lowercase j’s, and you’re worried you won’t learn Rabbit’s name, never fear. On December 8, 1867, a heartfelt collection of letters accompanied a petition to the Circuit Court of Claiborne County seeking clemency in Rabbit’s case. Among the petition is a letter to his former enslaver pleading for information and assistance, signed “truly “Rabbitt” Harrison Turner.” Through this editorial work, CWRGM users can uncover Turner’s quest for freedom after emancipation. They will learn that Turner was born enslaved in Mississippi around 1846, he obtained his freedom with abolition in 1865 but became incarcerated, and that after being released, he worked as a laborer in Claiborne County, married Jane Ross, and had two children, Isaiah and Emily. He died in January 1929.

From Cleata B. Thorpe’s Education in South Dakota 1861-1961: Teachers will fill lamps, clean chimneys and trim wicks each day. Each teacher will bring a scuttle of coal and a bucket of water for the day’s use. Make your pens carefully. You may whittle nibs for the individual tastes of children. Men teachers may take one evening each week for courting purposes or two evenings a week if they go to church regularly. After ten hours in school, the teacher should spend the remaining time reading the Bible or other good books. Women teachers who marry or engage in other unseemly conduct will be dismissed. Every teacher should lay aside from his pay a goodly sum for his declining years so that he will not become a burden on society. Any teacher who smokes, uses liquor in any form, frequents a pool or public hall, or gets shaved in a barber shop will give good reason for suspecting his worth, intentions, integrity and honesty. The teacher who performs his labors faithfully and without fault for five years will be given an increase of 25 cents a week in his pay providing the board of education approves. You can find more from the South Dakota Historical Collections in the Chilson Collection in the USD Archives.

Today we got a lesson in photography. Sarah, the digitization and photographs associate at USD, taught us how to use the Archives’ Pentax digital camera to take high-resolution photographs for our student projects. She introduced us to the camera and helped us figure out everything from changing the lens cover to setting the light manually. We struggled at first but, with practice, we became more comfortable with the camera. As you can see in these before and after shots, we went from major lighting issues to near perfection in no time! before (photo credit: Hannah) after (photo credit: Kelly)

The Delzell Education Center sits where a small lake once existed? According to the Dedication for the School of Education Building (1963), Due to the type of soil it was necessary to drive 271 wooden pilings to a depth of about 35 feet. These wooden pilings, which are creosoted and approximately the size of large telephone poles, serve to stabilize the soil and support the building. The building rests entirely on these pilings. Crazy, huh?

Grete in the Digital Library of South Dakota About Grete