Early President’s Office Records

This collection is no longer planned for ingest into ACDC as part of the Bicentennial Project. 

In January 2019, roughly half-way through the Bicentennial Project, we assessed what we had done so far and what more we could do within our timeline. On account of this assessment, we removed 7 collections/portions of collections from our list of those we planned to complete by the end of the project (August 2020). This collection is one of those removed. We chose to remove this collection and prioritize others instead for several reasons:

  1. The content in this collection is valuable, but ultimately other collections were chosen as higher priorities because they align more with our original bicentennial priority criteria or because they represented aspects of College history that were otherwise not yet represented in ACDC. Many of the time periods represented in this collection are already represented in ACDC by other collections.
  2. This collection is currently being reprocessed, and by the time reprocessing is complete we may not have enough time to digitize and describe this collection or a portion from it before our project end date.
  3. The subset of this collection we were most interesting in adding to ACDC as part of the Bicentennial Project is the subset pertaining to Alexander Meiklejohn’s presidency.  We realized upon further discussion that this subset may represent a variety of copyright challenges for us and so copyright review will be a necessary step in project planning for this subset. The addition of this step in combination with continued reprocessing makes the subset less feasible to complete by our Bicentennial Project end date. We do hope to make this subset available in ACDC in the future however, and regardless of it’s availability online- the reprocessing taking place in Archives & Special Collections and the updates to the finding aid will enhance the findability and usability of the collection. In other words, the work being done during the Bicentennial Project on this collection, while not technically being a part of the Bicentennial Project, will still ultimately improve access to this collection.

Collection Overview page completed before removing this portion of a collection from the Bicentennial Project:

The Early President’s Office Records are being combined into a new records group called the Presidents’ Office Records as a result of changes in Archives & Special Collections’ handling of records from College offices. This sub-set of the Presidents’ Office records group focuses on the first seven presidents of Amherst College: Presidents Moore, Humphrey, Hitchcock, Stearns, Seelye, Gates, and Harris.

William Stearns faculty meeting notes, 1872
William Stearns faculty meeting notes, 1872

This records group contains clippings, correspondence, and other records documenting of the public face of the Amherst College President’s Office. It includes invitations and requests for information, as well as correspondence and other documents related to institutional associations such as the American Council on Education, Association of Colleges in New England and New England Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools.

Because of the re-organization happening in Archives, the Bicentennial Working Group has not yet determined whether we will digitize this entire records group, or some sub-set. Factors in this decision will include the size of the records group when processing is finished, how late into the three-year project processing is completed, and how much substantive material about each president is present in the records group.

This records group is scheduled for digitization and description in year three (2020) of our Bicentennial project.

For more information
  • This records group does not yet have a finding aid online.
  • You can view our technical documentation for this project.
Related Bicentennial collections
Related non-Bicentennial collections