Earlier this year, I won a travel grant to visit the Othmer Library of Chemical History at Philadelphia’s Science History Institute. This allowed me to spend the last week in June combing through the library’s tremendous archives and exploring Old Town Philly.
This is me taking up residence in the Othmer Library.
The archives are located in a gorgeous historical building with lots of light for analyzing old documents.
Archiving is one of my all-time favorite things to do, even if it must be done without any water, food, or pens (to protect the documents). Usually the archives are also freezing cold (to protect the documents), but the Othmer Library was mercifully temperate.
These are just a few of the boxes that I explored. My great thanks go to archivists Kenton G. Jaehnig and Ashley Augustyniak for their fabulous help during my trip.
This is Oloch, the Othmer Library’s wooly mammoth book cart. I didn’t notice him at first, but once I did I couldn’t quite get him out of my head. Maybe now that you’ve seen him, you won’t be able to either.
I also took exactly 5,567 archive selfies.