March/April Avery Research Center Updates

I have a few success stories to share

• Was able to create MARC records for some of my collections that I have done and those that were processed previously, but no record was created for it. Thus, one of the collections that was uploaded into the College of Charleston Library Catalog and WorldCat was William “Bill” Saunders. Saunders is a Civil Rights Activist here in Charleston and in South Carolina. It is quite exciting to see your work in the catalog and know that people can now locate it!

• My Black in the Lowcountry project is taking off the ground, finally. I was able to interview two Black women from the College of Charleston for about an hour about their childhood, education, and perspectives on various issues. It is quite interesting to hear the variety of experiences between these two women. I have another interview scheduled for tomorrow with another Black female and I am planning on scheduling another with a Black male to get their perspective. I think that it will a great avenue for people to hear from the first-hand experience about being a Black youth in the Lowcountry. On Monday, the high school students from St. John’s High School will be in and then over the next couple of weeks, I will be traveling out there to do their interviews. Thus, the next month and half will have me doing A LOT of transcriptions. 

•  Archival Processing
• March
• I spent March processing the personal collection of Ms. Lois Simms, an educator here in Charleston. She had quite an interesting collection that was comprised of her education material, professional material, personal items, including scrapbooks and correspondence. Two of the scrapbooks were falling apart, so I digitized them. Right now they are only for in-house use, but in the future they may be placed in the Lowcountry Digital Library. 
• April
• There are a lot of small collections here, that consist of 1-5 folders, and it does not make sense to make them each a collection by themselves, thus, I am creating a collection called Various Collections and each one will be a subseries. So, far I have about 45 of these subseries, and possibly more to come. Some of the interesting material in the collection includes records relating to African American firemen in Charleston, African American movie theater owners, Slave Bills of Sale, family genealogies, etc.
• The Avery Research Center's web site is up!  This has been a point of contention, which I will not go into here, but it denotes the significance of having a web presence.

Aaisha Haykal
IMLS Fellow
Avery Research Center