New Finding Aid | Bernice Leland papers

Special Collections and University Archives is pleased to announce a new finding aid published for the Bernice Leland papers (Ax 150). The finding aid is available on Archives West.

Bernice Leland was born in 1882, traveled to many countries and later studied learning and reading disorders at the Psychological Clinic in Detroit, Michigan. She traveled to Tahiti (from September to November of 1909) and New Zealand (November 1909 through March of 1910) with Winifred B. Chase.  They collected botanical specimens, especially algae, for Josephine E. Tilden of the Botanical Department, University of Minnesota.

The Bernice Leland papers includes a diary of Ms. Leland’s trip searching for botanicals in Tahiti and New Zealand, as well as correspondence concerning the trip.  Also included are trip reports, news clippings from local newspapers about Ms. Leland’s trip, and speeches and research notes and articles written by Ms. Leland on learning and reading disorders.

Notes on processing the collection

I absolutely loved the topic of Ms. Leland’s studies on reading disorders and plan to investigate her more closely in order to learn more about what she studied, especially her diagrams of the eye and the ideas she presented in various speeches.

Some of the challenges included that a lot of the data had obscured or hard to read dates. It was nice when everything was bound together in a way that made sense, with the notebooks.

–Danica Alexander, Processing Archivist