I’ve already writ­ten about the dig­i­tal repub­li­ca­tion of the clas­sic William Penn Lec­ture series. But Philadel­phia Year­ly Meet­ing’s post con­tained this great quote from Jim Rose:

Pen­dle Hill had a prac­tice of ask­ing week-long stu­dents to take on a job on Wednes­day after­noon. One week my task was to clean/dust and arrange the books in the Upmeads library and in the process I found, high on an upper shelf, a whole series of dusty pam­phlets called the William Penn Lec­tures. Inac­ces­si­ble? You bet. A few months lat­er I sojourned at Pen­dle Hill while my late wife was tak­ing a week-long course. Dur­ing that week I sat with my com­put­er and scanned the text of those pam­phlets. My intent was to make that body of lit­er­a­ture more acces­si­ble to Quak­ers and oth­ers through­out the world on the inter­net. And recent­ly that goal has been achieved. 

I know Jim well from his time on Friends Jour­nal’s board of trustees and mak­ing Quak­er archives acces­si­ble is a great pas­sion of his. He helped us tremen­dous­ly in get­ting old­er arti­cles indexed. That com­bined with the Haver­ford Col­lege Library’s dig­i­tal­iza­tion of every­thing going back to 1955 means we’re rel­a­tive­ly acces­si­ble.

Speak­ing of archives, it looks like I’ve been remiss shar­ing anoth­er amaz­ing resource: the Salem (NJ) Quar­ter Tape Archive. Start­ing in the late 1970s, peo­ple start­ed tap­ing long inter­views with Friends. They’ve sat gath­er­ing dust until they were pulled out an dig­i­tized. Reg­u­lar read­ers will know I’m a huge fan of Rachel Davis DuBois and her inter­view by Charles Crabbe Thomas (num­ber 13) is absolute gold.