How did you end up at the University of Illinois Archives? Tell us about your background.

In the summer of 2012, I held an internship at the National Music Museum in Vermillion, SD. This experience was a watershed moment for me, inspiring me to seek out as many archival experiences as I could. The following fall I enrolled in the musicology program at UIUC and in the summer of 2013, I took a course on Arrangement and Description. In the fall of 2013, I became a graduate assistant at the Sousa Archives and Center for American Music. Except for the 2018-2019 academic year, when I took a gap year to teach in the musicology department at Ball State University, I held this GA position until 2021. This was the year I earned my PhD in musicology. I explored many facets of archival work as a GA. I worked collaboratively with the other graduate assistants at Sousa, digitizing and writing metadata for the James Edward Myers WWI Sheet Music Collection, which can be seen in the digital library; processing faculty papers one summer; co-curating several exhibits on topics like campus protest music in 1970, SS Stewart banjos, Temperance-era sheet music, Bohumir Kryl’s Women’s Symphony Orchestra, and Hawaiian slide guitars; and assisting with programming for the One Community Together Soundstage and musical instrument “Petting Zoo” at the Urbana Sweetcorn Festival. My PhD research on concert life in Prairie Style architectural spaces was also influenced by the training I received as a GA, making use of materials found in more than thirty archives around the country.

After graduating with my PhD, I was offered a position as a lecturer in the musicology area here at UIUC. Fortunately, I was able to continue working at the Sousa Archives in a service-in-excess capacity until I earned this position earlier this year. Between 2021 and 2025, I have predominantly focused on exhibit curation and programming, working with Scott Schwartz to curate exhibits like the Imperfect Saxophone and Spaces Speak. During this time, I also worked as a consultant for the Old Town School of Folk Music, providing them with an assessment of their archives.

While this is a new position for me, the University of Illinois Archives has felt like my home for more than ten years.

What are your responsibilities?

Currently, I am responsible for processing our digital collections. The Sousa Archives hasn’t had a dedicated individual for digitized and digitally born materials for many years, so we have a bit of a backlog. I hope that I can process several of these collections over the summer and fall, providing online access to these collections within the Digital Library. In addition, we are performing a shelf-read this summer, confirming the locations of all our material at the Archives Research Center and barcoding all the collections there. After we finish this task, we will have exhibits and programming for American Music Month, the Uniting Pride Festival, and the Folk and Roots Festival to prepare. I’ll be working with Scott on programming for these events, plus a few more for the upcoming Semiquincentennial of the United States of America. As a “Center for American Music,” we’ll be preparing for this event soon. At some point I’ll need to tackle the stats for the summer, and we have three new collections that are in the queue, waiting to be processed.

I’m hitting the ground running!

What excites you most about your new role? What are some plans/ideas you have in mind?

I am most excited about potential programming and pedagogical opportunities. My goal is to develop pedagogical opportunities with local public schools and build upon my experience as a university educator to help guide course design at the University. One of the plans I have is establishing collaborative opportunities with courses on history within the College of FAA. The idea of an “imbedded archivist,” like an imbedded librarian, is really intriguing to me. Embedding archivists within specific courses would provide students with better access to our collections and would help demystify the act of archival research. Although my background is in musicology, I do not think this type of collaborative course design should only consider music history courses. Since I have active interests and contacts in art history, architectural history, landscape history, and media studies, I won’t preclude other history courses in the humanities when reaching out to potential instructors. My plan is to begin gauging potential interest among a few programs in FAA at the beginning of August, when instructors are planning their syllabi.

In terms of public-school programming, I hope to establish working relationships with local school music programs and history departments. For instance, I think we could make a compelling case for adding a class on Music Research and Museums during the 2026 Illinois Summer Youth Music schedule. This is a program that predominantly serves junior and high school students. I think Sousa does a great job already reaching some of these junior and high school groups, but we could do more, especially with non-music students. It has also been a long time since we have regularly worked with the local elementary schools. As a father of a soon-to-be third grader and soon-to-be kindergartener, building relationships with the elementary schools in the surrounding area is especially important to me.

Although I am not teaching courses at the moment, I am hopeful that I can teach an occasional class that makes use of the collections at the Sousa Archives. Last semester I taught a class on exhibit curation and last summer I taught a summer MME class on the music of Illinois. Both of these classes spent several weeks at the archives, exploring the collections and developing unique projects based on the students’ findings. My Curating Communities class last semester designed a traveling exhibit on the Robert E. Brown Center for World Music that we took to Northern Illinois University’s Teaching World Music Symposium. The exhibit is currently on display in the Harding Band Building. My goal is to continue developing courses that make use of the materials at the Sousa Archives.

What are the most interesting/challenging/fun aspects of the job so far?

The thing I find most interesting or fun about working in the archives is that I get to learn new things every day. Last week, I was working on an alumni’s papers and found material relating to the UIUC Stunt Show in the 1960s. This event was new to me. On one of the Stunt Show programs, I learned that incidental music was provided by LeJaren Hiller (a chemist and composer that composed the first piece of computer-derived music). This event also included Bernard Goodman (Violinist with the Walden String Quartet), Stanley Fletcher (Professor emeritus in the Piano Faculty), and Jack McKenzie (Dean Emeritus of the College of FAA and Former Director of the UIUC Percussion Ensemble). After communicating with the donor, I learned quite a bit about this event and his involvement in the productions. I find that learning this type of information while processing collections can really help when working with patrons. The more you know the more you can help others.

• How did you end up at the University of Illinois Archives? Tell us about your background.

I’ve had a varied work history, but the short version is that I fell in love with all things paper while working at an auction house as a cataloger, writing catalog descriptions for rare books, ephemera, maps, and art. I decided to go to library school as a way to help preserve our shared history and knew that I wanted to work in higher education. Graduating in 2020 at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic led me to a job as a reference librarian, since special collections jobs were even harder to find than usual, but I’m happy to now be where I wanted to end up.

• What are your responsibilities?

As with everyone in the department, I have a mix of responsibilities, but I will primarily be focused on processing and accessions. Like all archives, we have a backlog, and our goal right now is to reduce that backlog—or at least keep it stable while taking in new accessions.

• What excites you most about your new role? What are some plans/ideas you have in mind?

I’m excited to be tackling challenges on a larger scale. I’ve already completed an inventory of our unprocessed collections in two of our locations, and I’m looking forward to creating a plan for processing these materials and making them accessible to researchers.

• What are the most interesting/challenging/fun aspects of the job so far?

Most of my work history has been in small businesses or smaller libraries, so it’s been challenging to adjust to the (often slow) pace of change in a large institution and the high level of inter-departmental collaboration that is required. It’s been fun to learn more about the history of the University. Even though I attended graduate school here, I am learning new fun facts every week.

By Evie McAllister

The University Archives at Illinois houses a collection of approximately 150 life-sized paintings of fruit. Created between 1903 and 1907, these paintings depict over 100 different varieties of apples and plums from multiple separate projects. One of these projects was a seven-month-long UIUC study on the effects of refrigeration on the longevity of fruit (Farm Home, 1904). In this study, the artist of the Agronomy Department at UIUC, Flora M. Sims appears to have painted a portrait of each fruit monitored by the scientists; in figures 1 and 2 below, the first depicts one of the study’s apples stored at 31° for 247 days, and the second depicts one stored at 35° for 231 days. The results demonstrated to local farming communities that refrigeration between 31° and 37° preserves fruit remarkably well.

This scientific study of fruit preservation occurred during the final decade of the second American Industrial Revolution, a time throughout which scientists were incentivized to develop technology that would improve industrial production. In July of 1902, Willis Carrier invented the “first modern cooling unit” (US Dept. of Energy, 2015). With this invention, departments across the U of I became increasingly involved in studies concerning cold storage preservation of produce. In December of 1902, the Horticulture Convention at UIUC featured a lecture titled “Results from Cool and Cold Storage Experiments” (Daily Illini, 1902). Farmers recognized that advancements in preservation technology would increase the shelf life of their produce and therefore extend its marketability far beyond harvesting season. With this in mind, many students joined in studies exploring aspects of refrigeration; research included finding the optimum conditions of cold storage, determining the efficacy of insulation materials, and similarly related topics (Daily Illini, 1904).

Artist, Scientist & Social Reformer: Flora E. Morris Sims

Flora E. Morris Sims was born on the 9th of March 1868, in Oakland, IL, to Reverend Nathan S. Morris and his wife, Matilda A. Morris (nee Patton). As a child, Flora attended Urbana High School where she pursued geometry, advanced English literature, history, composition and rhetoric, free hand drawing, zoology, botany, physiology, physics, and three years of Latin.

On the 16th of July 1889, Flora E. Morris changed her last name to Sims upon marrying Charles Blackburn Sims (Find a Grave, 2018). The couple had a son, Charles Blackburn Sims Jr., on April 26, 1892. This marriage was brief, however, and the couple divorced before Charles went on to marry Claire Sims Sims in 1898. Throughout the rest of her life, Flora retained her ex-husband’s last name.

During the summer of 1897, when Flora was 28 years old, she enrolled for the upcoming Fall Term at UIUC. Her student records indicate that between 1897 and 1899, she primarily studied Art and Design under the college of Liberal Arts and Science. To diversify her coursework, she participated in two courses in the Animal Husbandry Department during the Fall of 1899. Although her official student records list her as having left UIUC in 1900, she is listed in multiple sources as a member of the class of 1901. It is possible that she completed her course work in the fall term of 1900 but participated in the following spring convocation.

In the Alumni Record files at the University Archive at UIUC, a couple of newspaper clippings that describe Flora’s time at the university were found. A clipping from May of 1900 describes her as having spent the “past year” “studying stock judging at the University of Illinois.” In an article from September 8, 1948, the day after her passing, a colleague shared that Flora “studied art on the campus for three years” and “specialized in the painting of horses, in which she won recognition of art critics” (News Gazette, 1948). During her time as a student, she assisted professors Davenport and Holden by creating large agricultural illustrations for their projects. A 1900 article from The Illini reports that for these two professors, Flora made one 6’x8’ illustration of corn cultures and one 4’x6’ illustration of a “horse in motion” (The Illini, 1900).

From 1891 to 1898, Flora worked at UIUC as an Art and Design instructor (University of Illinois, 1897). After this period, in 1902 she became the official artist of the university’s Agronomy Department, retaining this title until 1914. For this department, she created soil survey maps that were the first of their kind in Illinois. She also created “Animal Charts” for the Dominion Department of Agriculture at Ottawa and for the Provincial Department of Agriculture at Halifax (The Illini, 1900). Throughout her career, she was often invited to give lectures and “chalk talks” across the Midwest by the Literary and Scientific circle of the Chautauqua and Lyceum Bureau (News Gazette, 1948; Urbana Daily Courier, 1910).

Outside of work, Flora kept herself busy with many projects related to the civil rights movement and her church. She dedicated much of her time to her church, the First Methodist Episcopal Church in Urbana, and was highly involved in their chapter of the Woman’s Home Missionary Society. She often filled positions on the chapter’s executive board and directed the group in playlets. Flora also frequently filled the role of Sunday school teacher. Later in life she became an honorary trustee of the church. Aside from churchwork, Flora served a term as the State Chairman of the Illinois Federation of Women’s Clubs and volunteered as a member of Cunningham Children’s home board.

On September 7, 1948, after an 11-month long battle with illness, Flora passed away at 80 years old. She was survived by her sister and son and interred in Mount Hope Cemetery.

Flora E. Morris Sims is remembered through her contributions to the Agronomy Department and her late-life efforts assisting Urbana’s Half Century Club as their secretary, during which she researched the history of Urbana and published a club brochure in 1947. Her work for the university is best recorded through the many newspaper articles from the Courier and Daily Illini that admire her work and through a series of paintings housed at the University Archives of UIUC. Series 8/12/16, “Fruit Paintings, 1903-1907,” contains life-sized paintings of plums, cherries, and apples that she illustrated alongside an unnamed individual, who signed their art only as “CNB.” It appears the paintings depict fruits at various stages of decay and were part of an agricultural study regarding the longevity of fruit.

Although a Courier article from September 8, 1948, found in the University Archive’s holdings cites her as an artist best known for her paintings of animals and sculptures, none of these artifacts are housed at the University Archives. If any of these pieces still survive, their locations are unknown.

The Unidentified Artist

While the vast majority of these works were painted by Flora Morris Sims, approximately 5% of them were painted by an unidentified artist who only signed their work with what appears to say “CNB,” as depicted in this close-up scan of an illustrated Charles Downing plum (fig. 4). Furthermore, while it appears that Flora labeled the back of each piece in pencil, marked with her signature S’s and D’s, approximately 20% of all the paintings are unsigned. This leaves an estimated 25% of the collection attributed to anonymous artists.

Works Cited:

Daily Illini. (1902, Dec. 16). “Fourth Annual Convention. That of Illinois State Horticulture Society.” Illinois Digital Newspaper Collections. https://idnc.library.illinois.edu/?a=d&d=DIL19021216.2.7&srpos=2&e=——190-en-20-DIL-1–txt-txIN-cold+storage+experiment—-1902—–

Daily Illini. (1904, Feb. 1). “Engineering Experiments. Some of the problems which are being studied.” Illinois Digital Newspaper Collections. https://idnc.library.illinois.edu/?a=d&d=DIL19040201.2.14&srpos=1&e=——190-en-20-DIL-1–txt-txIN-cold+storage+experiment—-1904—–

Farm Home. (1904, June 1). “Cold Storage for Farmers.” Illinois Digital Newspaper Collections. https://idnc.library.illinois.edu/?a=d&d=FFH19040601.1.3&e=——-en-20–1–txt-txIN———-

Gardens of Memory841. (2018, Nov. 21). “Charles Blackburn Sims.” Find A Grave. https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/194877342/charles_blackburn-sims

The Illini. (1900, May 23). “Flora M. Sims, Animal Artist.” Daily Illini. https://idnc.library.illinois.edu/?a=d&d=DIL19000523.2.7&e=——190-en-20-DIL-1–txt-txIN-flora+sims———

The Illini. (1899, Nov. 15). “Discussions by Representatives of Various Institutions.” Illinois Digital Newspaper Collections. https://idnc.library.illinois.edu/?a=d&d=DIL18991115.2.4&srpos=2&e=——189-en-20-DIL-1–txt-txIN-flora+sims———

News Gazette. (1948, Sept. 8). “Mrs. Sims, Artist Half Century Club Leader, Dies.” Illinois Digital Newspaper Collections.

University of Illinois. (1897). Course Catalog – 1897-1898. UIHistories Project. https://uihistories.library.illinois.edu/cgi-bin/rview_browsepdf?REPOSID=8&ID=8054&pagenum=291

Urbana Daily Courier. (1910, May 11). “An Urgent Meeting”. Illinois Digital Newspaper Collections.

US Department of Energy. (2015, July 20). “History of Air Conditioning.” Energy. https://www.energy.gov/articles/history-air-conditioning

By Jonas Kromer Yela

What comes to mind when you think of the history of computing? Turing Machines? The ILLIAC? Microsoft? What about astrology? The newly processed Michael Erlewine Papers document the role of astrology in the history of home computing and software development. Michael Erlewine was an astrologer, computer programmer, entrepreneur, and musician. His papers were donated to the Social Science, Health, and Education Library’s (SSHEL) Mandeville Collection of occult sciences, of which astrology is a strength, and are now housed in the University Archives. Read ahead to learn more about Erlewine’s fascinating life and work.

Erlewine grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and lived a somewhat bohemian life in early adulthood, playing folk music, hitchhiking with Bob Dylan, and playing in the Prime Movers Blues Band with his brother, luthier Dan Erlewine, and a young Iggy Pop on drums. In the early 1960s, Erlewine began studying astrology, and eventually became the house astrologer at Circle Books, his brother Stephen’s “metaphysical bookstore” in Ann Arbor.[1]

For the first several years of his astrological career, Erlewine produced charts by hand, manually consulting ephemerides (tables of the positions of celestial bodies) and log tables. [2] In the 1960s, computers were large mainframe machines that took up entire rooms and were only owned by universities and large corporations. The technically savvy user, like the astrologer Gary Duncan, whose papers are also housed in the Archives, could access these machines using a technology called “time sharing” that allowed multiple users to remotely access computing resources, but this was better suited to projects involving large amounts of data.

Astrologers like Erlewine would have to wait until the advent of microcomputers and programmable calculators in the early 1970s. Several astrologers, like Rex Shudde (a.k.a. James Neely) and Robert Hand, began programming on these machines as soon as they hit the market, making astrologers among the first groups of people to make use of personal computers. Erlewine first got into programming using a Hewlett-Packard programmable calculator. He got his first personal computer, a Commodore PET, in 1977, and founded Matrix Software the same year.[3] The PET was featured on the cover of the 1979 Circle Books calendar, which also included a guide on astrology calculations for programmable calculators, marking a significant shift in the way astrologers performed their work.[4]

The rise of personal computers also created a consumer market for astrology software. When Matrix began, Erlewine was producing programs for professional astrologers to use in their work and distributing these for free on tape cassettes.  But as personal home computers became cheaper through the 1980s and machines from Apple, Commodore, IBM, and Radio Shack found their way into people’s homes, Matrix began producing programs for the consumer market. The Matrix catalogs in the Erlewine papers show the company branching out from the professional software market (“Make money with your home computer!” exclaims the 1985 catalog) to making astrology software for amateurs to explore what the stars held in store for them (“Computer-assisted astrology has never been easier, or more fun!” promises their 1987 catalog[5]). Products like Friends and Lovers, Lucky Lotto!, and Biowriter could tell you of your fortunes in romance, the best time to gamble, or the cycles of your body’s own energy, respectively. A similar shift took place in the first decade of the 21^st century: as the expansion of the World Wide Web turned the computer into a fixture in many American homes, Matrix further expanded its catalog of consumer software and increased its consumer marketing efforts.

Erlewine was a central figure in the astrology world beyond his work in software. He and his wife Margaret founded the Heart Center in 1972 as a “communion center,” a place for astrologers and people of various spiritual persuasions to gather, share ideas, meditate, and study. The Center operated out of their home and eventually moved into a house next door in Big Rapids. Here, the Center began building an exhaustive collection of texts and other media on astrology (this collection was also donated to SSHEL and can be searched in the library catalog). With the knowledgebase of the Heart Center Library, the Center became a nexus for astrological study and spiritual life, hosting a number of famous astrologers and Buddhist teachers over the years.[6]

In 1991, Erlewine founded the All-Music Guide, an ambitious project that sought to provide an online database of all recorded music. Initially housed under the Matrix umbrella, AMG branched into movies, books, and video games before being acquired by Alliance Media Group in 1996.[7] Erlewine left AMG shortly thereafter, and around the same time took a hiatus from Matrix. He returned in 2008, and a few years later, the company merged with Cosmic Patterns Software and continues to operate to this day.[8]

This post only scratches the surface of this broad and fascinating collection. The Erlewine Papers consist mostly of the records of Matrix Software and Erlewine’s other business ventures, including correspondence, research papers, project notes, newsletters, software packages and manuals, and much more. If you are interested in learning more about computers and astrology, or how Matrix and the Heart Center became significant vehicles for a broad range of astrological research, you can request these materials from the Archives and come to see them in our reading room.

Images curated by Chloe Attrell and Jonas Kromer Yela.

[1] Tenzin Nyima, “Interview with Astrologer Michael Erlewine,” Matrix Software, December 23, 2008. https://www.astrologysoftware.com/community/interviews/michael_erlewine.html

[2] Nyima, “Interview with Astrologer Michael Erlewine.”

[3] Nyima, “Interview with Astrologer Michael Erlewine.”

[4] The Michael Erlewine Papers, record series 35/3/419, Series 1, Sub-series 7, Box 11, Folder 2: Circle Books Calendars, 1979-1990.

[5] The Michael Erlewine Papers, record series 35/3/419, Series 1, Sub-series 3, Box 8, Folder 27: Matrix Catalog, 1988; Series 1, Sub-series 3, Box 8, Folder 28: Matrix Catalogs – “AstroTalk”, ca. 1987-1992

[6] Michael Erlewine, “The Heart Center – A Mandala (23 Photos),” Spirit Grooves Archive, July 11, 2010. https://michaelerlewine.com/viewtopic.php?f=323&t=2715&sid=9a2b1e21a0cbd95b9ce2765e21748248

[7] The Michael Erlewine Papers, record series 35/3/419, Series 1, Sub-series 1, Box 6, Folder 7: Alliance Group Matrix Purchase Terms, 1996

[8] “A Brief History of Matrix Software,” Matrix Software. https://www.astrologysoftware.com/about/about.html