Did you know that you can conduct research on Ernest Boyer from the comfort of your own home?  Yes, it’s true!  While we love hosting researchers in the archives on campus, we understand that for some people it is not feasible nor altogether necessary to travel to Messiah College.  That’s why over the past two years the Ernest L. Boyer Center Archives has made a major push to digitize its collection and make resources more accessible to researchers online.  While there is still a lot of work to be done and plenty of materials left to be scanned, major achievements have been made.  This post is to help walk you through the steps of researching the work of Ernest Boyer via the web.

To begin your research go to the Ernest L. Boyer Center Archives homepage.  Once there, click on “search the catalog.”  Once there, enter relevant search terms or keywords you hope to find in the collection.

The picture to the left is a screenshot of archival record #1000 0000 0038.  As you can see, the information available to researchers are as follows: catalog number, object name, the scope and content of the record, the date, the event this record is related to, collection, people, related search terms, and multimedia.  For those researching at home, the multimedia field will be the most useful.  Our goal is to give researchers the ability to read the exact drafts of speeches, manuscripts, articles, and other resources of that nature on their own computer screens.  So, if the PDF version of a document is available to researchers the last field will have a hyperlink, directing you to “click here” (see picture below).

Clicking on the hyperlink will direct you to the PDF version of a speech Dr. Boyer delivered on June 6, 1984, upon receiving the Distinguished Fellow Award of the Academy of Educational Development (AED).  You’ll notice that the speech is handwritten, so you can read (or try to read) the words Boyer actually wrote.

So, what are you waiting for?  Happy researching!