THE HODSON TRUST was established by THOMAS S. HODSON, a Maryland lawyer and state senator. His son, CLARENCE HODSON (pictured), a lawyer and banker who was commissioned a colonel by the governor of Maryland, provided the trust’s assets. Colonel Hodson founded the Beneficial Loan Society in 1914 to make small loans available to working-class Americans. The company became Beneficial Corporation and in 1998, before it merged into Household International, Beneficial was the largest consumer credit company in the U.S. Since 1920, The Hodson Trust has donated millions of dollars to four Maryland colleges, including Johns Hopkins. In addition to its support for this directorship, the trust made a commitment in 1999 to Hopkins for a multi-use building on the Homewood campus, named Hodson Hall, and makes substantial annual gifts, in recent years supporting the Hodson Scholars program, the Hodson Success Awards, the Provost’s Undergraduate Research Awards, research in oncology, and the cancer buildings initiative.
Hodson University Archivist
Sheridan Libraries & University Museums
Established in 2005 by The Hodson Trust
Held by Jordon Steele
JORDON STEELE is Hodson Curator of the University Archives in the Sheridan Libraries. As University Archivist, he oversees the acquisition, preservation, organization, and access to university records, faculty papers, and manuscript collections acquired by the Libraries in both analog and born-digital form. Since his arrival in 2011, Mr. Steele has raised substantial external funding through federal grants and private philanthropy to support the salaries of full-time project archivists, graduate student internships, processing of collections, and digitization of frequently used and valuable materials.
Mr. Steele has an extensive record of service and leadership at the local, regional, and national level. He is past Chair of the Delaware Valley Archivists Group and past At-Large Member of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference. He has served on a variety of task forces and standing committees of the Society of American Archivists, the national professional organization of the Archives community. He regularly presents at conferences on topics related to archival administration. Mr. Steele has taught and developed courses on archives as an adjunct faculty member in Drexel University’s School of Information and Johns Hopkins University’s Master’s in Museum Studies program.
In 2016, with Mr. Steele’s oversight the Johns Hopkins University Archives was one of five institutions selected to serve as a host site for the prestigious National Digital Stewardship Residency program, a nationally-renowned initiative that matches qualified institutions with recent LIS graduates pursuing a career in the preservation of digital information. Before coming to JHU in 2011, Jordon served as Archivist at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. He holds a BA in English from Davidson College and a MSLS from University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill’s School of Library and Information Science.