MHS News

Staff Spotlight: Honors and Recognition

October has been an exciting month at the MHS, where a veteran editor was recognized for his accomplished career and a fledgling reference librarian received an exciting opportunity to expand his professional knowledge.

Gregg Lint, Senior Editor of the Adams Papers, was recently honored at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Documentary Editing in Springfield, Ill., with the prestigious Lyman H. Butterfield Award. Presented annually since 1985, the award is given to an individual, project, or institution for recent contributions in the areas of documentary publication, teaching, and service. The award is granted in memoriam of Lyman Henry Butterfield, whose editing career included the editing of the Adams Family Papers. The award was presented by Mary-Jo Kline, a well-respected documentary editor who worked with Gregg when he first started at the Adams Papers in 1975.

Introduced as “an unsung hero among today’s documentary editors who has long played a very behind-the-scenes role in promoting our profession,” Gregg was singled out for his exemplary contributions to the Adams Papers, where he has published 15 volumes of the Papers of John Adams over 34 years, as well as his ongoing efforts to promote the field of documentary editing through educational initiatives and service in the wider scholarly community. One of his colleagues remarked that “for Gregg the goal of documentary editing is not only to get the documents out but to bring people in.  It is not enough to make more primary sources more accessible; it is necessary to demonstrate their value to the advancement of historical understanding and to encourage others to take a look. … To this end, he has presented his findings at academic conferences and in teacher seminars, inspiring interest in the Adams Papers in particular while garnering respect for editors and their work in general.” Gregg was widely commended as a diplomatic historian of the highest order and a treasured colleague by his peers at the Adams Papers.

On a slightly different note, Assistant Reference Librarian Jeremy Dibbell was awarded a full-tuition scholarship for a course at the Rare Book School, a highly regarded independent non-profit educational institute supporting the study of the history of books and printing and related subjects. According to the scholarship committee, the competition this year was intense, and the selected recipients were particularly outstanding. Jeremy, who has been with the MHS for three years, completed the Simmons College Graduate School of Library and Information Science dual degree program in Archives Management and History in May 2008. When he is not assisting researchers, he manages the MHS blog, the Beehive, and posts tweets from John Quincy Adams's line-a-day diary to over 15,000 followers.

The MHS staff members congratulate their colleagues on their well-deserved recognition.