Category: Uncategorized

Posted on

New IDHH Collection of Architectural Drawings

The IDHH has continued to grow, with new collections added each quarterly harvest!

This month we’re featuring a new collection full of architectural drawings and related materials: the Frederick Wainwright Perkins Papers, from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Library. A Chicagoan architect, Frederick Wainwright Perkins (1866–1928) designed residences and buildings throughout the Midwest, including Illinois, Indiana, and Michigan. Among other drawings and photographs, this digital collection includes architectural drawings for the Charles H. Schweppe residence, commissioned in the early 20th Century by Marshall Field & Co. Chairman John G. Shedd (also known for gifting the funds to create the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago) as a wedding present for his daughter Laura and her husband Charles Schweppe.

Here are a few of our favorite items from this new collection:

color blueprint with white ink on blue paper
Charles H. Schweppe Residence – South Elevation, January 28, 1915. January 28, 1915. University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Library. Frederick Wainwright Perkins Papers. Courtesy of University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Library.

color image of architectural drawing, blue and red ink on aged white paper with some bleed-through.
J. H. Barker Residence – Plan of Attic, Sections, and Entrance Porch, circa 1905 [front]. 1905. University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Library. Frederick Wainwright Perkins Papers. Courtesy of University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Library.
color image of architectural drawing, black and red ink on aged white paper
A Group of Buildings for Charles H. Schweppe – First Floor Plan, January 7, 1914 [front]. January 7, 1914. University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Library. Frederick Wainwright Perkins Papers. Courtesy of University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Library.

black and white photograph of three people standing in front of a house construction frame on a snowy day.
Photograph of three people outside of Cudahy residence, under construction, 1904. 1904. University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Library. Frederick Wainwright Perkins Papers. Courtesy of University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Library.
color image of architectural drawing, black and red ink on aged white paper
Cellar Plan, circa 1896. 1896. University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Library. Frederick Wainwright Perkins Papers. Courtesy of University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Library.

Want to see more?

Visit the IDHH to view more collections and items from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Library or to view more items related to architecture and architectural drawings.

 

Posted on

Technical Updates in the IDHH

Exciting technical updates in the IDHH!

In order to improve our internal workflows, the IDHH migrated to a new aggregation server in the October 2024 quarterly harvest. If your library is a contributor to the IDHH, you do not need to do anything to your collections, metadata, or your OAI feed. The IDHH will continue our usual workflow, where we harvest and aggregate collection metadata from all contributing institutions into a single stream of metadata for DPLA to ingest into the DPLA and IDHH catalogs.

However, this migration will change direct links to item records in the DPLA and IDHH sites (for example, a URL like https://idhh.dp.la/item/7bcdb6b16968d22a6457bbffbfa7d1fd). While it is unlikely, if you have any direct links in your social media or websites to specific items using DPLA or IDHH URLs, you will need to update them now that the October harvest has concluded.

Don’t hesitate to reach out to the IDHH with any questions!

Two men moving a card catalog cabinet on a dolly.
Staley Library – 1985. 1985. Millikin University. Big Blue Photograph Collection. Courtesy of Millikin University.
Posted on

Hello Illinois Highlights!

My Name is Tath Haver. I’m a Graduate Student at the School of Information Sciences at The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a Graduate Assistant working closely with the Illinois Digital Heritage Hub, and now one of the authors of the Illinois Highlights blog.

I’m working on maintaining and increasing the IDHH’s visibility, in part by authoring posts on the blog, developing new site features, and participating in broader hub outreach as ways to encourage access. I will also be assisting in assessing the metadata from our partner’s contributions and assisting in user testing.

Searching through our partner’s digital collections, I’m especially interested in the ways people have documented their civic and everyday lives in Illinois. I’m curious about how their everyday lives reflected their community at a specific point in history, and how this hyper-locality is something that can be highlighted, learned about, and celebrated throughout every part of Illinois. What was a parade in the 1920s like? How did people document their new lawnmower, corn combine, or house?  How did communities make sense of changes and stories in their town and across the state?

I’m looking forward to sharing what I find with you as I continue to work through our collections and build a better picture of Illinois. If there are ever any topics you’d like to see highlighted, or if anything else seems exciting, please make full use of the comments section below.