Week 16 at the Alabama Department of Archives and History

Greetings and happy holidays from Montgomery!

I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas with their families and loved ones, I know I did :). Well, this week has been much of the same as the last couple of weeks. I am still working on my public projects, inventorying the Charles Morgan papers, and scanning the Peppler collection. Nothing new has happened, but the holidays always bring good cheer!


Have a wonderfully blessed and prosperous new year!

Cheylon Woods
IMLS Fellow
Alabama Department of Archives and History.

Week Fifteen at Amistad

In preparation for next week’s archival workshop and tour, I attended a webinar entitled “Building Bridges #2: Community Outreach.”  The webinar focused on the importance of building and maintaining strong community partnerships and explains why these partnerships are integral to outreach and success.  Collaborations not only help us gain more outreach opportunities, but also help us operate more efficiently (save money) and communicate more effectively. The presenters introduced other benefits of partnerships, which include tapping into community assets/strengths; enabling knowledge and vision sharing; using technology for outreach opportunities; and most importantly, increasing respect for diversity. The webinar concluded with tips of how to find creative ways to be resourceful and how to drive partnerships with purpose, passion, gifts, and without setting limitations.

After the workshop I will leave for the holiday break and take the next “midnight train to Georgia.”

Until next year! Feliz Navidad!

Felicia

Week Fifteen at The Mayme A. Clayton Libray & Museum

This week I had the opportunity to process a scrapbook.  The scrapbook featured letters and notes from Samuel Brown. Brown was an African American musician from the Los Angeles region.  The most interesting item I found was a rejection letter from a Baltimore university that bluntly stated “this [teaching] position will have to go to a white person.”

This week I also cataloged visual art materials. Everything from movie posters to art prints. The most important part of cataloging in a database is to remember to add subjects to the items.  The subjects are pulled from the LOC authorities and the Getty Art and Architecture Thesaurus.  The AAT comes into often when dealing with obscure art materials that the LOC has not encountered. 

Week 14: December 12- 16th

This week, I completed processing section 1 of the Smith collection. I also submitted my report, which was pleasing, with a complete and detailed outline of the entire section. I labeled each box and folder to reflect what it contains. When the year arrives, I will work on the precise wording for the labeling.        Of course, I am at an academic institution...thus, the end of the semester has arrived. I will be out from December 19, 2011 through January 2, 2012. So, I say to you Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!!

Weeks Thirteen - Fourteen at Amistad

Series two of O’Neal’s papers is finally complete! During week thirteen, I finished processing the community organization series and wrote the second series description of John O’Neal papers to enter into Archon. The series encompasses 2.5 linear feet of materials documenting O’Neal’s contribution as a member of several art and community organizations located in New Orleans and the Southeast, and collected records of over 50 associations.

Second, I met with the Director of Library and Reference Services to discuss two digital collection projects, the submission of the proposals for each project, and the review of metadata for entry into the LOUISiana Digital Library.  The projects will highlight existing collections at Amistad, including the papers of noted civil rights attorney A.P. Tureaud, (dated from circa 1798 – 1929) and printed ephemera produced by civil rights organizations and student groups, documenting several aspects of the civil rights efforts in the United States.

Lastly, I spent the rest of the week preparing for Amistad’s board meeting and preparing to co-lead a tour and archival workshop for the Westbank United Seventh-Day Adventist Church youth group.  We will introduce the youth group to the basics of using archives for effective research and guide them on a tour of the archives and a tour of  "The Revolution Will Not Be...": Print Culture of the Civil Rights Movement Exhibition.

Week fourteen began with Amistad’s board meeting, where all staff from each department reported highlights of their recent projects. We also discussed our upcoming acquisitions and processing plans for the Center.  I met several board members and discussed the importance of my fellowship and my involvement as an archival fellow at Amistad, and interestingly, one of the board members was my former undergraduate school history professor. She currently teaches African American Studies at Georgia State University. I never thought I'd run into a former professor at the board meeting...click here for more information.

Felicia

Week 15 at the Alabama Department of Archives and History

This week I continued to process the Charles Morgan Collection, scanning the last book of Peppler negatives and registering participants for my exhibit design workshop. I am excited because it is almost full! I can't wait to present it! I also met the Bracy sisters, who came to identify people and places in their family's photographs in the Jim Peppler collection. The Southern Courier reported on their family after their house was firebombed in Wetumpka, Alabama. Sophia and her older sister Debra integrated the all white high school in Wetumpka, and her sister was arrested for an altercation she had with a white student at the high school. This incident resulted in her being expelled for 3 months until the federal government stepped in. their story is very interesting and I enjoyed my day with them.

Until next time

Happy holidays

Cheylon Woods
IMLS Fellow
Alabama Department of Archives and History

Week Fifteen at the Maryland State Archives

I spent most of the past week record stripping from the Maryland State Colonization Society manumission and emigrant lists. I've highlighted a few potential case studies on my blog.

Happy holidays, everyone!

Krystal

“We Got Caught Up In the Movement:” Reflections on Princeton's Center for African American Studies' "Where Do We Go From Here?" Conversation

“We got caught up in the movement…I washed up on the shores of Mississippi [from the North]” proclaimed journalist and author Charles “Charlie” Cobb, as he discussed his organic entrée into the civil rights movement as a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) field secretary. Cobb’s sentiments were largely shared by the other panelists, which included Courtland Cox, Ivanhoe Donaldson, Larry Rubin, and Robert “Bob” Parris Moses—all of whom were northerners actively engaged in the herculean struggle for civil and human rights as it was waged by SNCC. During the classical phase of the black freedom struggle (ca. 1954-1968), SNCC emerged as one of the preeminent civil rights organizations, involving themselves in the era’s now iconic moments, such as the 1963 March on Washington and the student sit-in’s proliferating throughout the American South.

While these watershed episodes in history crystallized SNCC’s place within the pantheon of civil rights organizations, the aptly titled conversation “Where Do We Go From Here?” facilitated by Princeton’s Center for African American Studies (CAAS), urged its intellectual congregants to consider the quotidian struggles experienced by the architects of SNCC and the communities they served. This bottom-up approach to understanding the energizing force and relevance of SNCC, according to Professor Imani Perry, offers a “corrective” to the popular memory and historiography of the civil rights struggle and the tendency to privilege the movement’s heroes and its conspicuous victories. In other words, this community-centric rubric goes beyond expressing how the benevolent few rose to the mantle; rather, it demonstrates how communities of activists and community folks alike, were the real powerbrokers in the modern quest for civil and human rights.

Perhaps more salient than the trope of “getting caught up in the movement,” was the fact that these men lived to tell their stories. Their macabre tales of dodging death in the wilderness of the South’s most notorious states, stand as a testament to the physical and psychological costs of challenging systemic racism and inequality, a debt SNCC and its foot soldiers were all too willing to pay with their own lives. Their staggering display of courage—then and now—remind me of the stalwart shoulders on which this generation rests. In the midst of global socio-political unrest, the Occupy Wall Street campaign, and the troubling politics of the budding Voter ID laws, I wonder if we are up for the imminent challenges ahead? Are we capable of getting “caught up in the movement” in the same way that our foreparents did? Are we equipped to sustain this rich legacy of fearlessness in the face of adversity? How can scholars and archivists participate in the communities and movements that we seek to preserve in our scholarly and historical archives? Finally, to draw upon Courtland Cox’s appeal at the close of the conversation: Are you prepared to make justice your life’s work?

For more information on CAAS' programs related to SNCC, visit the following links:
http://www.princeton.edu/africanamericanstudies/events_archive/viewevent.xml?id=248
http://www.princeton.edu/africanamericanstudies/events_archive/viewevent.xml?id=236

Brenda Tindal
IMLS fellow
Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library
Princeton University

Week Fourteen at The Mayme A. Clayton Library & Museum

This week, the processing staff at MCLM had a meeting with Murtha Baca, the Head of Digital Art History Access at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, California. During this meeting we discussed what five broad categories to choose to catalog MCLM’s photograph collection. We settled on sports, entertainment, events, California and politics.  The Getty Arts and Architecture Thesaurus  was used to decipher which headings would be most relevant. 

This week I also attended a webinar, Digital Preservation: Fundamentals.  I believe that keeping current with the newest standards and technology in the archiving field is paramount to functioning as an effective archivist. Attending webinars and seminars is an convenient way to stay abreast of current standards in the archival profession.

Week 13 at Fisk Franklin Library

This week I continued to process section 1 of the Smith collection. I will be complete with it this week. It has three subsections: 1. Julius Rosenwald School Fund, 2. Julius Rosenwald Library Fund, and 3. Julius Rosenwald Memorial. I created the third section after finding so many correspondence and newspaper clippings. I found a letter signed by Mary McLeod Bethune, which was exciting. I also found statistical reports that direct linked Rosenwald Library Fund and the Carnegie Corporation working together on projects. I will do a report at the very end of the week for my supervisor on the process up to this point.
Of course, I am at an academic institution...thus, the end of the semester is coming I will be out from December 19, 2011 through January 3, 2012. So, I say to you Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!!

Week 14 at the Alabama department of Archives and History

Greeting from Montgomery!

This week has been a week of public programming! I sent out my first workshop invitation to almost 700 people and I have already begun to get very positive feedback! I am so excited for this opportunity! In addition to my exhibit design workshop, I also received a letter from SAA accepting my poster presentation! Again, I am so excited for this opportunity, but I am more excited for the museum I am partnering with to help host my Peppler event. The Tuskegee Multicultural Heritage Center and its staff has been so helpful, I cannot thank them enough! Well, that's all I have for now.

Have a great holiday season!
Cheylon Woods
IMLS Fellow

Week Fourteen at the Maryland State Archives

Last week was busy but quiet. I followed up with some people and ideas from the Bmore Historic Unconference. Thanks to one of the contacts I made there, I’ll be giving a presentation on African Americans in Maryland during the 1870s in the springtime at the Laurel Historical Society, which is in my own backyard. I’ve also been reaching out to different organizations that may be interested in having me give a presentation on careers in archives or on the work of the Study of the Legacy of Slavery in Maryland. I'm also drafting guidelines for social media use. Later in the week, I received training on the approval process for the MDSlavery.NET database and on creating cases studies. We also welcomed a new staff member, a dedicated programmer for the Study of the Legacy of Slavery in Maryland projects. 

Krystal

Week Eleven-Thirteen (or Twelve)

Sorry for the delayed postings, but things since the holiday has been very fast paced here and time to write a post has not presented itself.

So a few updates.

During the week of Thanksgiving, Avery staff and volunteers did some clean-up of our respective spaces. Ms. Mayo and I worked on the archives portion, where we organized some disparate collections and found collections that needed descriptions.

The following week I began working on describing these collections, fine tuning my public program, which is tentatively called Woke Up Black Charleston. The platform that we will probably use to develop this collection is the Omeka software and I am working with the library staff to make this occur. I will keep you guys updated about this. I am excited and the rest of the staff is too about this project and what it will mean for both Avery as well as for the students.

My time has also been spent working on the Avery website, which we hope to launch soon as well as the Avery blog updates. We changed the name from “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize” to “Not Just in February” and changed the image as well, from a picture of the Hospital Worker's Strike of 1969 to one of the Jenkins Orphanage Band.  

Read more here

Aaisha Haykal

IMLS Fellow

Avery Research Center

Week Thirteen at The Mayme A. Clayton Library & Museum

This week I enjoyed a site visit to California State University Northridge Oviatt Library.  The facility was very impressive housing the archives, special collections and stacks in one building.  Our tour of the facility was lead by Mr. Steve Kutay the digital specialist librarian at the Oviatt Library.  The most interesting aspect of the tour was the storage unit at the center of the library.  The storage unit spans two stories, is completely automated and houses infrequently used records and books. After the tour we went to a CSUN University Gallery to view Identity and Affirmation, Post War African American Photography. Being that MCLM is a museum it is important to stay abreast of current exhibits in the region. 

Week Thirteen at Maryland State Archivs

Last week was quite busy. I spent part of the week record stripping and conducting research of the Maryland State Colonization Society papers. On Tuesday, I led a portion of a teacher workshop in Prince George’s County. On Thursday, I attended a lunchtime lecture by local African American historian and genealogist, Agnes Kane Callum. I finished the week by attending Bmore Historic, an unconference on public history, historic preservation, and community development in Baltimore and throughout the state of Maryland. I liked this format as it was very conducive to networking and allowing attendees to share information. I led a session on social media, which was well attended and gave me some great ideas for implementing our social media initiative at the Maryland State Archives. For more on the week’s activities, please visit my blog.

Krystal

Weeks Eleven and Twelve at Amistad

I spent most of my time working on my processing projects and analyzing the content of the materials.  Based upon the many art AND community organizations I discovered in this series, I decided to change the name of the series from community arts organizations to community organizations in order to make the arrangement and series description of the materials easier for researchers. For this purpose, I will continue to identify, analyze the content, and describe materials in this collection deemed to have significant historical value.

Week twelve was a short week for me because of the Thanksgiving holiday. During the week I continued to process the O’Neal papers by arranging the second series, which is almost complete.  I plan to complete this series and write the series description soon.

Felicia 

Week thirteen at the Alabama Department of Archives and History.

This week has been pretty uneventful for me, but it has been very busy around the archives. Like always, we had a number of school groups to come visit, but this is also the week when we start to prepare for the volunteer's tea and the annual Christmas party! Because we have a smaller staff, everyone is doing double duty to make sure that all of the events go off nicely in addition to the previous assignments.


Well, That's all I have for now!

Until next time!
Cheylon Woods
IMLS Fellow
Alabama Department of Archives and History

Week 12 at Fisk Franklin Library

Hello all,

This week was a very exciting week. My first publication came out and my proposal for the National Roswenwald School Conference was accepted.  I have continued to work on the Smith collection and I am aiming to have section 1 of the collection complete by December 15th. It is a more than interesting section with correspondence between Smith, Rosenwald, Booker T. Washington, and many other early influences in education. I am having a grand time processing this collection as well as learning different techniques. Fisk Archives does not use a technical program to process the collections like Archon or Archival Toolkit. So, it is interesting working first hand creating inventories and myself by hand. But, it is teaching my original processing techniques and given me a more keen eye to detail. I am thankful.

Week 12 at The Mayme A. Clayton Library & Museum

The inventory of all identified photos is complete! MCLM’s collection of processed photos consists of 13,485 photographs that range in date from the mid 1800’s to the early 2000’s. These photographs account for 2,579 folders of different people and places. Successfully completing this task allowed me to utilize my organizational and people management skills.

Every fourth Saturday of the month MCLM hosts a movie event called Black Talkies on Parade featuring a vintage African American film.  This month the movie was The World, The Flesh and The Devil featuring Harry Belafonte.  In preparation for this event I helped put together a one case exhibit.  The items that were pulled for the exhibit pertained to Harry Belafonte and Black Hollywood. 

Week Twelve at the Alabama Department of Archives and History

Hello and greetings from Montgomery! I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday!

Here at the Alabama Department of Archives and History, I am still inventorying the Charles Morgan collection and scanning the remaining negatives from the Peppler collection, in addition to the three programs I am working on. At the moment, the tentative dates for these programs are January, February, March, and April,  so it looks like I will have a very busy Spring! I really don't have anymore to add, except that next week I will be attending a photo preservation workshop at Trenholm College.

Until next week!!!!

Cheylon Woods
IMLS Fellow
Alabama Department of Archives and History

Week Twelve at the Maryland State Archives

Last week I gave my first presentation to a class of undergraduates about the Legacy of Slavery in Maryland project and using the records of the Maryland State Archives. The students, history majors at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, were very engaged and asked interesting questions. The professor appreciated that I showed them (digitized) primary sources, something that even history majors don’t always have a chance to work with frequently. I spent the rest of the week record stripping U.S. census records and Maryland State Colonization Society records for the mdslavery.net database. My work with the Colonization Society focuses on two counties, Kent and Queen Anne’s, of Maryland's Eastern Shore, a heavily agricultural area where slavery maintained a stronghold even while the institution was phasing out in other (less agricultural) areas of the state. I've come across only a few manumissions in Kent County but haven't yet encountered any emigrants from Kent County to Liberia, and I look forward into delving into the reasons why. 

Krystal

Week 11 at the Mayme A. Clayton Library & Museum

Lately I’ve been working on inventorying MCLM’s extensive collection of sheet music.  Inventorying is a step that occurs at MCLM before processing.  This is a necessary step because the museum needs to establish control over each item in the collection. The Society of American Archivists defines inventorying as “A listing of the contents and condition of a collection made before processing.”  The items that are being inventoried are the aforementioned sheet music, photographs, art work, and movie posters. 

This week I also gave a presentation to The California African American Genealogical Society.  My presentation went over preservation practices for paper and photographs. CAAGS was very receptive and I was excited to field their questions. 

Lastly,  be sure to look out for MCLM in Carter Magazine, we are going to be a featured institution!

Alyss Hardin
IMLS Fellow, M.L.I.S.
Mayme A. Clayton Library & Museum

Week Eleven at the Maryland State Archives

Last week was pretty low key. I continued record stripping of the manumission records in the Maryland State Colonization Society and prepared a presentation to give to undergraduate history majors at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. I also attended a meeting of the Maryland Hall of Records Commission, an advisory body to MSA.

While prepping for my presentation, I came across a curious committal notice in our database. A suspected runaway slave, “a Negro man, who calls himself Mary Ann Waters,” was detained, leading the sheriff to advertise a committal notice in newspapers. The committal notice describes a well-dressed person wearing garments of satin, velvet, and fine wool, who had “been hiring out … as a woman for the last three years.” The only other record linked to this person in our database is for a release from jail four months after the committal. This advertisement raises some fascinating, and likely unanswerable, questions in the field of gender studies.

Week Eleven at Alabama Department of Archives and History

Hello and greetings from Montgomery!!!!

This week has been full of meetings and follow up phone calls! There has been so much going on around here as of late, with the planning meetings,  budget meetings and board meetings, but it is always wonderful to see progress in a state archive, especially in light of the current budget situation. As always, I am still diligently working on my three workshops for the year and I am also helping a couple of local organizations plan oral history and ethnography projects, as well as preparing a National Register Nomination, a museum interpretation plan, and inventorying the Charles Morgan Collection.

earlier this week the radio interview I did aired on local radio stations and online. This interview was done by the Alabama Arts Radio group. I was also interviewed by for the Archive's newsletter, which will come out in January.

For more information about my work in Alabama, visit:  http://cheylonkwoods.wordpress.com

Here is the link for the radio interview if you are interested: http://arts.state.al.us/actc/1/listserverindividual/20111113cheylonwoods.htm

Well, that's all for now.

Have a wonderful week and explore your surroundings!!!!

Cheylon Woods
IMLS Fellow
Alabama Department of Archives and History

Week Ten at Amistad

Last week was all about processing and planning of future projects at the Center. I continued to work diligently on processing the John O’Neal papers (now approximately 37 linear feet) and participated in Amistad Research Center’s Staff Planning Day. We discussed our organizational goals for 2012, including innovative and effective utilization of the repository’s resources to make them available for use and how to help engage and empower new and existing researchers. I also look forward to curating an exhibition for the first quarter of 2012 and other digitization projects.

Until next week!

Felicia

Week Ten at Avery Research Center

This week I have been busy getting my public program proposal together to submit to Dr. Williams-Lessane. Last week the Avery staff watched a documentary called Woke Up Black, which followed five African-American youth in the Chicago area. The film talks about a variety of issues that impact African-American youth including education, media representation, family life, sexuality, identity, etc. The film will be shown here in Charleston in February to at least three different schools and the director Mary Morten and the person who runs Black Youth Project (BYP), which is also out of Chicago, will talk to these students. However, while I was talking with Dr. Chase, Avery’s Public Historian, we began thought about maybe using the film as a starting point for having a Woke Up Black Charleston edition, where students can either be interviewed by a Avery staff person or they could submit their own interview (visual art, written, etc). The purpose of this would be to understand what it means to be an African-American youth in Charleston. This is not something that is evident in the current collections that we have here at Avery, so it would fulfilling a need and document a community that is not being documented. Nothing is set in stone, but I hope that it all works out.

In the hopes that this will come to fruition I have created sample questions that the students may answer, as well as investigating what types of sites would I use for my interface. I originally thought about doing a Wordpress blog, but then that got complicated about what types of permissions people would have and if people would have access to edit or delete someone’s story. Other platforms I have been investigating are Google Sites, Weebly.com, and Wikispaces. Some of the elements that I am looking at are the upload size, total storage size, possibility of having people upload their own material, but not being able to touch other people’s stuff. This is still a work in progress, so if you have any suggestions please let me know!!

To learn about my other project and about an important loss to the Charleston community, visit my blog.

Aaisha Haykal

IMLS Fellow

Avery Research Center

Week 10 at the Mayme A. Clayton Library & Museum

This week The California Library Association Black Caucus honored the Mayme A. Clayton Library & Museum.  The certificate was presented to Cara representing MCLM by a former volunteer, who is now working for Los Angeles Public Libraries.  MCLM was also presented with two books; the first was a signed copy of the children’s book Jemmie’s Big Day and a reference book entitled African American Librarians in the Far West.  The children’s book is a wonderful addition to our collection and will hopefully become apart of the children’s summer reading program MCLM is hoping to implement.  Also, this week at MCLM I began digitizing images that will be included on our website. I saved the images as TIFF files at 600 dpi, the archival standard for digital images.  

Alyss Hardin
IMLS Fellow, M.L.I.S.
Mayme A. Clayton Library & Museum

Week 10 at Fisk University Franklin Library

Hello all. I am continuously working on the Smith collection here at Fisk. Specifically, I aim to complete section 1: Julius Rosenwald related by the Christmas holiday break. Next week is the Thanksgiving break week break. I will visit the Atlanta University Center Archive for personal research and will let you know how it goes in my week 12 post. I wish you all well.

Aisha Johnson
Archival fellow
Fisk University

Week Ten at the Alabama Department of Archives and History!

Hello and greetings from Montgomery!!!!

Last week was a pretty uneventful week. I spent most of my time inventorying the Charles Morgan collection and scanning negatives from the Peppler Collection and worked on my ATC workshop, which seems to be causing a lot of buzz around here. I, personally, am very excited for this opportunity, and I am having a great time planning it! Last sunday the radio interview I did with the Alabama Art Council was aired. I have gotten alot of good feedback from it, so that has been a wonderful experience. Here is the link to the interview if you are interested in hearing what I said : http://arts.state.al.us/actc/1/listserverindividual/20111113cheylonwoods.htm 

Here are some other links to the organization's website and other interviews they have done: alabamaartsradio.com

Have a great day and a wonderful week! Until next time!

Cheylon Woods
IMLS Fellow
Alabama Department of Archives and History

Week Ten at the Maryland State Archives

Last week was another busy week! I started out by observing LOSIM* staff give a presentation on the division’s history and research to a group of about 60 juniors at a local school. Later in the week, I participated in Higher Education Day at Martin Luther King, Jr., Middle School in Beltsville, MD. I spoke to three classes of about 25 students about college life, careers in archives, and LOSIM’s research. I finished out the week by joining a contingent of MSA staff at Morgan State University’s Founders Day, where Congressman John Lewis was the keynote speaker. The culmination of the day was the unveiling of a permanent exhibit which described Morgan State students’ role in the Civil Rights Movement. Staff of the Maryland State Archives researched many of the exhibit’s photographs, helping bring it to life. It was great to see these foot soldiers and pioneers honored while they are still living and to see them inspire current students. It was a very exciting week, and I enjoyed getting out into the community more.

Krystal

*LOSIM=Legacy of Slavery in Maryland

Week Nine at Amistad

Last week, I was consumed with the mission of processing series two of the John O’Neal papers at the Amistad Research Center. Series two, community arts organizations, comprises documents from arts associations that were mainly located in the South, including Alternate ROOTS, Southern Black Cultural Alliance, the Art Council of Greater New Orleans, and Voices of the New Orleans Movement. Of note are correspondence from Oretha Castle Haley (1939-1987), the cofounder of New Orleans’ Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and an activist for women and human rights. Later in Haley’s career, she established the New Orleans’ Sickle Cell Anemia Foundation.

As I continue to process this large collection, I am sure I will find other documents about community arts organizations and interesting facts to share.

Felicia

National Archives' Citizen Archivist Dashboard

Dear Fellows:

Im certain you have heard about the National Archives and Records Administration’s (NARA) plans to launch the Citizen Archivist Dashboard. In your opinion, does this effort signal a democratization of the profession? How does it re-conceptualize the work of an archivist? Access? (See the link below)

http://www.nextgov.com/nextgov/ng_20111107_7329.php

I can't wait to hear your opinions regarding this matter!

Brenda Tindal, IMLS Fellow
Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library
Princeton University

Week 9 at The Mayme A. Clayton Library & Museum

This week MCLM hosted two events, the closing reception for The Get on Board exhibit and Nothing but the Chicago Style Blues.  The turn out for the closing reception for the Get on Board exhibit was phenomenal!  This event featured a panel discussion with Freedom Riders Robert Farell, Robert Singleton, Rita Matinson and Woodrow Coleman.  The second event at MCLM this week was Nothing But the Chicago Style Blues.  This event featured The Legendary Melvin Eddy Blues Band.  Mr. Eddy sporadically comes out of retirement to perform, he was amazing!  Along with this blues event MCLM sold food tickets as a fundraiser for the institution. A busy week, but I definitely learned a lot about how to manage multiple events in small amount of time.  

Alyss Hardin
IMLS Fellow, M.L.I.S.
Mayme A. Clayton Library & Museum

Week Nine at the Maryland State Archives

It was quite a busy week! Collaborating with another staff member, we completed an updated brochure for the Legacy of Slavery project. In addition to my record stripping of Maryland State Colonization Society records, I attended several events. I attended the opening of the Maryland State Archives exhibit, Flee! Stories of Flight from Maryland in Black and White, at the Banneker-Douglas Museum. At the exhibit reception, I met historian Dr. Ira Berlin. Commissioner Theodore Mack, and Commissioner and anthropologist Dr. Cheryl LaRoche. Later in the week, I attended an OCLC webinar about ArchiveGrid, an archival discovery system. It’s meant to be a one-stop shop for researchers to search for archival collections around the world. To end the week, I attended a forum on social media and the government at the National Archives in D.C. For more details on these events, please visit my blog.

Krystal

Week 9 at Fisk University Franklin Library

This week, I continued to process the S.L. Smith collection. Smith was the Director of the Julius Rosenwald Fund's Southern Office. As you can imagine, there is a lot of items pertaining to the Fund. Consequently, the Smith collection will be divided into two (unequal) sections. The first section is the Julius Rosenwald "related" section and this is what I am currently arranging. I plan to have this section completed by Christmas break. The second section is strictly the Smith section including papers of many organizations he was involved with. I look forward to the entire process. I am still having an amazing time here at Fisk.

Aisha Johnson
IMLS Fellow
Fisk University John Hope and Aurelia E. Franklin Library

Week Eight at Amistad

During week eight, I was a “busy bee.” I finally completed the civil rights organizations series for the John O’Neal papers and composed a series description (yeah); attended a digital projects meeting to discuss metadata guidelines; participated in a collection development meeting; and joined fellow co-workers to a book signing on Tulane’s campus.

I decided to process O’Neal’s community art organizations series as my second adventure! So far, this series encompass files of art and local community organizations in the Southeast and New Orleans, including committee minutes and agendas for Alternate ROOTS (Regional Organization of Theaters South)...click here for more information.

Felicia

Weeki Nine at The Alabama Department of Archives and History

Hello and greetings from Montgomery!

This week was a short week for me, because we had a big geneological workshop and I had to go to back to Jackson for a second round of training. The workshop went over very well, and we had 80 participants. I enjoyed my three day training in Jackson, Mississippi, and got to meet other ATC trainers across the tri-state area. Everyone was so energetic and full of ideas! I am continuing my work inventorying the Charles Morgan collection and scanning the last book of the Peppler/ Southern Courier photo collection. Other than that, everything has been pretty calm around here.

Until next week!
Cheylon Woods
IMLS Fellow
Alabama Department of Archives and History

Week Eight and Nine

The past week and half has been low key, so I am just going to combine them.

I have been putting the finishing touches on my collections that I have done so far here, the Lecque Family Papers, the Humane and Friendly Society, and Prince Hall Chapter No. 41 Order of the Eastern Star. In addition, I created the finding aids for them using Notetab, overall the process has been easy (with a few frustrations).

On Wednesday, November 2^nd, Ms. Mayo and I led a workshop on what are archives, the benefits of them, what supplies are needed, online/virtual exhibits, and on LibraryThing, a personal library catalog for the Ravenel Caw Caw Interpretive Center. An employee there, Erica, who is the cultural interpreter formerly worked here at Avery and asked if we could come out and talk to her colleagues about the benefits of an archive for both the institution and for them. The Ravenel Caw Caw Interpretive Center, is both a nature and history interpretive center. The land that the Center is on “was once part of several rice plantations and home to enslaved Africans who applied their technology and skills in agriculture to carve the series of rice fields out of cypress swamps.” Unfortunately, we did not have time to tour the site, but hopefully before I leave I can go back there and do a tour and/or participate in one of their group activities. The workshop went really well and the staff was receptive to what we had to say and I think that they began to see the value in the need to document, preserve, arrange, and describe what they have their collection (books, papers, and artifacts). 

Read more here

Aaisha Haykal

IMLS Fellow

Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture