Archives & Preservation

At Emory University, Atlanta, students in Assistant Professor Maria Montalvo’s U.S. History Seminar class “Slavery and the Archive” learn how to excavate historical records: making connections between disparate sources and questioning not only what they find, but what they don’t.

During the American Library Association (ALA) Virtual Annual Meeting, Lauren Geiger, metadata librarian, and Emily D. Harrison, digital projects specialist, both from Mississippi State University Libraries, discussed how to ensure that accessibility in digital collections is not limited to discoverability.

On the Books: Using Algorithms of Resistance to Expose North Carolina’s Jim Crow Laws is a machine learning and collections as data project of the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill Libraries. Where does the “resistance” come in? Since 2019, the project team has been building an algorithm and searchable database for Jim Crow legislation signed into law in North Carolina between 1866 and 1967 (Reconstruction to Civil Rights era). 

When people get catalogs from Patagonia or REI in the mail, most throw them out or recycle them. But Utah State University’s (USU) Special Collections wants to collect these catalogs, magazines, and other ephemera to preserve the history of outdoor gear.

Before the COVID pandemic, Princeton University instructors Joshua Kotin and Irene Small were looking forward to coteaching an undergraduate class, “Language To Be Looked At,” exploring concrete and visual poetry. In concrete poetry, the visual elements of a poem—typography and symbols and their arrangement on the page, as well as the printed matter itself—are critical components of its meaning.

UPDATE:

After more than a year of uncertainty and threatened legal action, on April 8 the Biden administration stopped the sale of the Seattle National Archives, reversing the Office of Management and Budget's previous approval of the facility's sale in 2020. Selling the 10-acre property would have resulted in moving valuable records far from the tribal and regional communities that routinely accessed them.

The lives and experiences of African Americans past and present in California’s Silicon Valley will be featured in a new collection at Stanford Libraries. Set to debut online later this year, “Histories of African Americans in Silicon Valley” is a project within the university’s Silicon Valley Archives. Dedicated to documenting the scientific and technological innovations that define the Bay Area’s high-tech region, the archive has existed for more than 30 years.

The Mohegan tribe recently partnered with Cornell University Library to repatriate the papers of Fidelia Fielding, one of the last fluent speakers of the Mohegan language, as part of the tribe’s efforts to revive it as a spoken tongue. Below, tribal and library representatives share their story as a potential example to be adopted and adapted by other libraries, archives, and museums in collaboratively repatriating papers and artifacts.

In an effort to archive all aspects of America’s political life, the Smithsonian National Museum of American History is in the process of collecting items from the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol Building during the counting of the Electoral College votes.