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Vol. 26:3 ISSN 0160-8460 September 1998
From the Editor
You may recall that this newsletter is now a quarterly, and that the Commission does not meet four times a year. For that reason, this issue is the first ever not to include an account of a Commission meeting. However, we've managed to pack plenty of information on Commission business into these 20 pages.
In addition to our coverage of current Commission events, this issue is devoted to the NHPRC's efforts to preserve and make available to the public records relating to the nation's artistic and architectural heritage. Through its grants for archival preservation and publication, the Commission has helped save, preserve, and make accessible a number of valuable documentary collections in this area. While textual records comprise an important part of such collections, especially in terms of artists' records, the presence of drawings, plats, plans, and other record types among architectural records necessitates a more specialized approach to the preservation process and to the manner in which such records are presented to the public. The Commission has supported a number of projects to stabilize architectural records, to arrange and describe them, to produce appropriate finding aids, and to reproduce them in a publicly accessible format. It has also supported projects to collect, edit, and publish microform and book editions of the papers of prominent artists and architects. By providing new information and insights regarding artistic and architectural aspects of our nation's past, such Commission-supported projects foster greater appreciation for the accomplishments of the nation's artists and architects, increase opportunities for cultural enrichment at all levels of our society, and make possible an increased understanding of America's past.
We begin this issue with an account of a White House ceremony commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Marshall Plan. During the ceremony, Larry I. Bland and Sharon Ritenour Stevens, editors of The Papers of George Catlett Marshall, presented copies of the initial four volumes to President Clinton. Marshall was present when President Truman received the first copy of the first volume of The Papers of Thomas Jefferson during a similar ceremony in 1950.
Following the Executive Director's column is Sidney Hart's article on editing the Peale Family Papers. We then have a piece on The Art Institute of Chicago's efforts to preserve and make accessible through microfilming the papers of architect and city planner Edward H. Bennett, Sr., and to arrange and describe the papers of architect David Adler. Next we have Charles E. Beveridge's article on the use of the Frederick Law Olmsted Papers in the restoration of Olmsted's parks.
We then introduce you to Mark Conrad, our new Director for Technology Initiatives, and congratulate Dick Cameron, our Director for State Programs, on having been made a Fellow of the Society of American Archivists. Next comes a piece on the microfilm edition of the Papers of Robert Mills, the architect who designed the Washington Monument. After reviewing staff activities thus far in 1998, we turn to Tawny Ryan Nelb's article on the Documenting Michigan Architecture Project, the impact of which continues to be felt through the work of the Michigan Committee for the Preservation of Architectural Records (Mich COPAR). We then explore efforts to preserve the plans of the Nebraska State Capitol. Our back-page photograph reproduces Charles Willson Peale's The Exhumation of the Mastodon.
