 Hey everybody, Shay here with Stacey in Alden. She's here to tell us about the 1802 charter document. Hi Stacey. Hi Shay. How are you? I'm good, how are you? That's good. Could you tell us what you do here in Alden? Yeah, so I'm the Digital Projects Librarian for Arts and Archives. I've been here since last August. So basically what my job is is I try to find materials in our special collections that would be good for digitization and putting online. So it's basically just about getting as much of our rare and unique materials online as possible. Awesome, that sounds great. So can you describe the project to highlight items from the MON Center? Yeah, so this is kind of a new thing we're working on, our highlights feature where we're trying to, it's mostly focusing on things that have been recently digitized. So really trying to promote our things that are available online now. But it's not limited to just that. It's basically about finding the things that are the coolest to us in archives and promoting them online just so everyone knows about our little hidden treasures here. Awesome. Yeah. So could you tell us about the 1802 charter? Yeah, so that's our first highlight is about the 1802 charter, which I can show you in person. This is it. So basically what this was, it was a precursor to the actual founding document of Ohio University, which was the 1804 charter. In 1802, Manasa Cutler, who's one of the founders of the university and part of the Ohio Company, wrote an act which he submitted to the state legislature which would establish a university in Athens. And so this act did get passed and it was for a university called American Western University or American West University or even just American University. They played with the name a lot. But basically that university was established but never became anything. They didn't do anything about it. So this document became sort of the founding, not founding, the document that they pulled from when they wrote the 1804 charter that actually was for OU. So how was it physically made? Can we see it again? Yeah. So you can see it's handwritten and cursive on paper. You can see the holes actually where they were sewn together. Probably you can't see them, but there's like little holes there. And you can see it really well online. And so they hand wrote down one side and then on the back side, if you can see that, it starts at the bottom and then goes up. And then they were all sewn together and taken to the state legislature. And then the last two pages of the document are actually the amendments that the legislature wrote and attached to it for it to be accepted. So how do you guys preserve this? Yeah. So the thing with paper, paper can actually last a really, really long time, hundreds of years easily. So the most important things you have to do is keep it dry. Mold is a big problem with paper and you want to keep it out of UV light as much as possible. What's that? Like from the sun, like UV rays. Yeah. So you don't want too much light on the paper. So what we do is we have a vault here in the Mont Center where all of our archival materials in our books are. And we keep them in acid free folders and then acid free boxes and they stay on shelves and we can control the humidity and temperature back there. So it's basically just to keep anything dangerous. Are like students allowed back there? How could someone see this? Well no, you can come and request items in the Mont Center and see them in person. But you can't go back in the vault in the stack. So we would go and pull that for you and bring it back out here. Yeah, you have to have a code to be able to get in the back back there. And how would you say, how can we access this kind of like information and documents like in the future? Well, hopefully online. More and more of them will be online. But I mean, so it's kind of a two pound thing. We want them to be available online in the future. But we also want to keep the physical objects safe too so that they're always accessible. But it is, you know, the case sometimes there are some things that get too fragile for that. So like this is in pretty good shape, even though the paper is really old. So we could let people handle that. But sometimes newspapers and stuff like that get really, really fragile. That paper is really acidic. And so I have worked with collections where, you know, the newspapers get digitized and then you access them online. And we don't let anyone look at the physical items anymore because they're too fragile. So it can kind of depend. But the goal is for both online and the real version to be accessible. But it's not online yet? This is online. Yeah, this is totally online. People can go and see it and look at it online. There's also a transcript with it online. So this is, you know, cursive handwriting. And I think it's pretty good, but I read cursive handwriting a lot. So if you're not comfortable with that, it might be a little tough. So if you look at it online, there are the transcripts there. So you can read those if you have trouble with the cursive. Where exactly online? Where exactly. If you go to the main library's website and then you go to the Archives and Special Collections site. And then there's Archives Highlights below that. Awesome. That's cool. A quick question. Who actually wrote that? Do you know? So Manasa Cutler, who's one of the founders, is the person who submitted it to the legislature. So we're pretty sure that this is his, I think he signed it at the end, but I might be wrong about that. Don't quote me on that. I learned cursive in elementary school, but is that Chinese? Yeah, I mean, so there are some differences, which this is not going to show up if I try to show people. Sometimes when there'd be a double S, one of the S's is really long and looks more like an F, which makes it hard to read. So there are differences in how people wrote cursive then to now. And I know a lot of people I don't think in school are even taught cursive now. So yeah, it can be kind of tough to read. Of the things we have, this is not one of the toughest, but yeah, it is still a little hard. Cool. Thank you for that information. Where can the audience find you if they want to get more information about this? I mean, I'm on the 5th floor on the Monsenner pretty much anytime, and then you could always email me too. Cool, yeah. Well, thank you guys. If you have any questions, just drop it in the comment box below or you can come visit Stacy yourself.