IMPORTANT UNDERSTANDINGS ABOUT THIS SITE

The William Gray Purcell Papers form part of the holdings of the Northwest Architectural Archives at the University of Minnesota Libraries Archives and Special Collections.  The information presented on this web site facilitates research strategy, but does not substitute for actual access to the collection under the appropriate conditions of use established by the Northwest Architectural Archives.  Research requests and permission to use the collection must be directed to the curator and staff of the Northwest Architectural Archives.  CONTACT THEM HERE. 

ALSO: The facsimile documents shown here are provided for visual reference only to aid in use of the original sources.  Re-use of these images beyond this site is a violation of the permission by which they are presented here and is expressly disallowed.  Observance of these conditions permits this resource to remain available.  Your support is appreciated.

In a more friendly mode, this web site has several purposes.

First: 

I want to make available to interested researchers the fruits of a decade-long project to reorganize and describe the contents of the William Gray Purcell Papers.  The information presented here consists of the essential contents of the Guide to the William Gray Purcell Papers, whose presumptive final draft I completed in 1991.   This 452 page manuscript provides a reasonable means to plan research with the personal and professional records of architect William Gray Purcell (1880-1965).   Most people take interest in this archival collection because it holds the records of the Purcell and Elmslie, Architects (1907-1921), the second most commissioned Progressive, or Prairie School, firm after Frank Lloyd Wright.    The collection, however, also contains a wide array of valuable resources relating to other areas of American history, particularly in the Middle West, from 1699 to the mid 1960s.

The biographical essays, scope and content notes, provenance notes, and other writings published here inform potential users of relevant materials and provide citations for storage locators internal to the materials as of the early 1990s.   I include also a short history of development behind the Guide and how the manuscript came to be on the World Wide Web, plus important acknowledgements of the basis for my opportunity and ability to do this work.  Facsimile documents to be added over time, such as text transcriptions and images, will eventually display samples from most record groups of the Purcell Papers.  

Second:

I have authored an archival collections management application called HyperFind™.   The descriptions of the Purcell collection, together with thousands of other texts and photographs related to the Prairie School, are stored in a HyperFind™ database.  This allows a variety of indexing and views to the materials to be displayed on the Web.  The program is still a prototype under development, but has proven reliable enough over the past five years to be useful to researchers in its present state.    Additional information about HyperFind™ can be found here (links open new browser windows).  HyperFind™ creates not only hierarchical views directly from a database, but also can be used to develop didactic subsets, collations of references, and facsimile materials known as in the HyperFind™ system as exhibits.  An exhibit formed of general Prairie School references can be seen here.

As a result of these two purposes, there is a ongoing process underway on this site.   The Guide is being converted from the intellectual controls of a paper-based reference work (i.e., cross references using the collection locator system and pagination of the print form) to the point-and-click electronic environment.   Those changes inform further developments in the underlying HyperFind™ software.  Necessarily, users enter a site that is both experimental and in an "in-between" state.   Views may also change from day to day, so bookmarking within the web site is discouraged. 

Finally: 

This web site is a personal presentation, provided and maintained at my own expense and effort.  I am now actively drafting the biography of William Gray Purcell and George Grant Elmslie (praise Buddha).  The manuscript will be submitted to the publisher at the end of 2004.  Ultimately, this web site is intended to serve as an adjunct resource to that book.  In the interim, I share my research here in hopes that others may be moved to do the same with me.  Many of my writings, both published and in manuscript, can be found here.  If you would like to contact me, I can be reached here.   Please respect the copyright implicit through this site. 

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