What's New

Digitizing Rochester Advocate Books

We were very generously awarded a historical preservation grant by The Community Foundation to preserve and digitize our entire Rochester Advocate book collection. The project is currently underway. Stay tuned for details.

MSSE Student Projects

During January and February 2009 we had a lot of fun helping 26 Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) students in the Master of Science in Secondary Education (MSSE) program at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf (NTID) to find material for their special group mini-projects regarding RSD’s history. These students were enrolled in a Deaf History course with Dr. Chris Kurz at RIT/NTID.

On January 8, once they all made their way through the snow to RSD, they were welcomed by Dr. Mowl and then treated to a narrated slide show by Allis D’Amanda about RSD’s history. Allis is a descendent of one of the founding families of RSD, the Lyons family. Afterwards, they were given a tour of Perkins Hall, the Archive Center, and the archive museum thanks to Fred Koch, Peter Simpkins, Marilyn Fedele, Allis D’Amanda and Pat DeCaro who all came in on an off-day to help out! Student groups selected topics for research and over the next few weeks visited us independently to gather data in the following areas:

1. Deaf Artists in Residence at RSD
2. Notable historical persons at RSD including Westervelt, Lyons, AG Bell, and “significant women behind the men”
3. The China connection to RSD
4. History of sports at RSD
5. Timeline of educational technologies used at the school
6. Student demographics and changes over a 10 year period

Students were asked to give a copy of their presentations to the archives when they are done, for documentation here and to use to show RSD classes and encourage them to do similar projects.

Little Visitors

On February 22, 2009, Mrs. Paula Mauro brought her second/third grade class over to see the museum. They were fascinated by the awards, the uniforms, and the photos of faculty. Peter Simpkins came in on a “non-archive” day to show the class around. Mrs. Mauro herself was interested in the Helen Keller connection to RSD. We hope that these students will return when they are older to work on projects themselves.

Ongoing Projects

The archive center continues to digitizing older films and photographs to create an online catalog system with the goal of making items of this nature more accessible in the future. Additionally, we are creating displays to be placed around the RSD campus to highlight the past and the present. From time to time we meet with RSD alumni to learn their stories and to solicit their help with identification of people and events in photos we have in our collection.

We continue to receive and respond to numerous requests for information by researchers, RSD alumni, teachers and college students who are exploring specific topics on the history of RSD and the history of the education of deaf and hard of hearing children in America and around the world. In short, we are having fun and invite you to join us!