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Digitizing Rare Collection Of Susan B. Anthony Letters

Kodak Alaris/University of Rochester

The University of Rochester is going to provide online access to a rare collection of correspondence between women’s suffrage leader Susan B. Anthony and her friend and colleague, Rachel Foster Avery.

Last summer, the U of R’s River Campus libraries purchased a large collection of those letters after a family member of Avery’s uncovered the collection in his parents’ home and contacted the university.

“This is an outstanding acquisition for the libraries and for the Rochester community,” said Mary Ann Mavrinac, Vice Provost and Andrew H. and Janet Dayton Neilly Dean of the River Campus Libraries. “It augments what is arguably the nation’s strongest manuscript collection related to the long working and personal relationship between Anthony and Avery.”

One of the challenges was to carefully preserve the collect of fragile handwritten letters, and Kodak Alaris’ Worldwide Product and Integration Manager for Photo Capture Products, Bruce Holroyd, heard about the university’s plans to digitize the new collection.

Holroyd is an expert at photo scanning, and decided to use a Kodak picture scanning system with a flatbed accessory. Holroyd says they considered using even faster and higher resolution options, but the flatbed allowed for greater flexibility.

The total collection spans from the 1880s to 1919, and the university believes this is the largest collection of letters written by Susan B. Anthony to any single person. 

The images are now being linked directly to an inventory of the library’s manuscript collection http://bit.ly/anthonyaveryletters and others can be found in an online exhibit http://bit.ly/sbaheroiclife.

You can find more information about Kodak Alaris' involvement here.

Randy Gorbman is WXXI's director of news and public affairs. Randy manages the day-to-day operations of WXXI News on radio, television, and online.