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New Seton Guide Aids Business Research
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Business New Haven
8/6/2001
By: Priscilla Searles
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Studying the business success stories of the past - and past failures, too - can be an invaluable tool in helping to make today's businesses succeed. And learning about the development of the community in which your business is located in can also help business people understanding what makes their community tick. Thanks to a new guide, obtaining that information is now a lot easier.
The Seton Guide to Business & Industrial Holdings in the Whitney Library is the New Haven Colony Historical Society's newest resource for making research a little easier. It was made possible by a special grant to the NHCHS from the Phyliss Z. and Fenmore R. Seton Fund. The Setons saw the project as a valuable tool for researching the rich history of industry and commerce in the Elm City. Edited by Jennifer Julier, the guide took two years to complete.
“The Seton Guide is a road map to the business collections of the Whitney Library,” says James Campbell, the historical society's librarian and curator of manuscripts. “It goes a step beyond the card catalogue. It goes into more description of available material.
“For example,” Campbell says, “if someone is interested in clocks, the guide lists all references, including books, plans, manuscripts, architectural drawings and maps. If you are looking up Jerome Chauncey, a New Haven clockmaker, there is a reference in the Hotchkiss family papers to an 1853 warranty deed of 'Chauncey, Jerome.' This type of information might be difficult to obtain from a card catalogue.
“We have a broad collection of material, lots that people might not think of as being here,” continues Campbell. “In some cases we have material in depth - i.e., lots of material on certain topics such as the New Haven Railroad and the oyster industry.”
In all, the NHCHS collection includes 30,000 printed works, 260 manuscript collections, extensive architectural drawings, photos, newspapers, scrapbooks, maps and microfilm.
The Whitney Library collection documents the history of New Haven. If someone is looking for historical information on New Haven's past, they'll find architectural drawings such as the Douglas Orr collection. Orr designed the former SNET headquarters at 227 Church Street and the Quinnipiac Club.
“Although our genealogy collection is extensive and draws many people to the Whitney Library, there is a great deal more to the library than the genealogy collection and the Seton Guide shows how extensive our collection is,” Campbell says.
“One of the challenges facing our library, as all libraries face,” says Campbell, “is storage space. This has been addressed with modern compact shelving, doubling the amount of material that can be housed in one area. Primarily used for manuscripts, the materials in this collection are retrieved by staff for researchers.”
The Seton Guide has been distributed to more than 40 academic and public libraries in Connecticut. Copies are also available for sale at the Whitney Library. The library is open Tuesday through Friday in the afternoon and the first Saturday of each month. For further information about the library or the Seton Guide, call 203-562-4183.
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