Amanda J. Carter: Week 3 (June 18-22, 2012) @ the HistoryMakers

Chicago Skyline on Lake Michigan

After the first few weeks of trying to climb the mountain of knowledge made available to us, I think this week at The HistoryMakers I have found a small plateau.  As of Tuesday, our special collection projects were postponed so that we could catch up on the evaluations of the oral history interviews.  I still have not completely caught up, but I have definitely found a rhythm.  My next goal is to increase the pace of that rhythm, but that can be difficult because there is so much information found in these oral histories that it always seems such a struggle to determine how to concisely include it all. 

On Monday, we worked on evaluations before spending the afternoon arranging special collection records.  We were able to complete all but four boxes of the An Evening With Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee collection.  Tuesday we received feedback on our completed evaluations, so I was able to create my first two EAD and EAC-CPF finding aids for Norma White and Kenneth Crooks, Jr.  It took a few tries because I discovered I had incorrectly added the subject headings to FileMaker, but the end result of a printed finding aid is extremely satisfying.

We did pause our evaluations briefly on Tuesday to meet with Dr. Cecilia Salvatore, our archival sciences instructor.  This week we discussed arranging and describing of archival collections with special attention paid to Mark A. Greene and Dennis Meissner’s “More Product, Less Process.”  We also discussed the benefits and issues of certification through the Academy of Certified Archivists and how librarians and archivists do not always see themselves similarly.  I think the latter would be a great topic to continue at a later date.  On Wednesday, Dr. Christopher Reed was back to discuss abolitionism in the United States during the early to mid-nineteenth century.  This is the era I studied most rigorously for my minor in Women’s Studies when I was an undergraduate but it is always interesting to see how different textbooks demonstrate alternate perceptions.

The rest of the week I was busy evaluating HistoryMaker interviews.  After completing the Norma White and Kenneth Crooks finding aids, I moved on to complete evaluations for Louis Dinwiddie, Myrtis Dightman, Charlene Jordan, and Evangeline Hall.  I think I completed (or at least began) Dinwiddie the previous week, but it is all starting to meld together.  While I learned something from every interview, I was most enamored by Mr. Dightman being the first African American rodeo cowboy.   What a story he has to tell! 

During the rare extra few minutes here and there, I also contacted Dr. Smith at my host institution, Franklin Library at Fisk University, and she gave me the contact information for the Meharry Medical School Special Collections librarian.  I am looking forward to learning what is held in the archives of the first southern medical school for African Americans.  Next Monday, I also hope to be able to find out more about my host institution’s plan for my fellowship.  

On Friday evening, our office went next door for dinner.  It was great being able to socialize with everyone outside of work.  It even led to Julieanna giving a few of us a fabulous tour of Chicago the next day.  I learned that I am staying very close to the location where many African Americans disembarked from their train during the Great Migration.  I will definitely be checking that out soon! 

Until next week…

Amanda J. Carter

Franklin Library, Fisk University

2012-2013 The HistoryMakers IMLS Fellow

Skyla S. Hearn: Week 3@The HistoryMakers

(Breathe) Will I remember what I learned in the EAD/EAC-CPF workshop when I generate my first EAD/EAC-CPF finding aids? What is the difference between a traditional and a non-traditional (i.e. artificial) archive? Is an archival collection legitimate when the donor(s) was advised to maintain records for future generations? What are the pros and cons of the archivist certification? Is it possible for humans to present objective information? Can you grasp the significance of high-level records management systems? Water cooler topic: Library of Congress subject headings… Coffee Pot break: What number of finding aids have you completed? Finding Aid—Finding Aid or Evaluation Summary & Finding Aid? What about web clips?

The other day someone asked me if this (fellowship) is my dream job. Until I was asked that question, I hadn’t thought of doing what I love for a living as a dream job. I just thought about being a comfortable and fulfilled person. It might sound strange. I suppose much like listening to an older person being asked what his/her favorite food is and he/she responding that they never thought of it before. That he/she just liked to enjoy food and that no one food had to be singled out as a favorite. Since I have the opportunity to do what I love---processing African American archives & working with media---I suppose this is my dream job. It is where I want to be and I am doing what I want to do. What’s better than that? As Illinois House Representative Monique Davis said, "I saw a need and I filled it!" That's how I feel about my job = my work = my vocation.

In a group discussion with Dr. Salvatore during the weekly Archives Seminar, I surprised myself when I openly disagreed with her on the topic of defining principles of traditional and non-traditional archives.  I was a bit taken aback by my own actions but as a “budding” archivist and representative of the newest generation of information specialists, I felt it was important to share my views and to receive feedback. Dr. Salvatore was very encouraging in her response to my views. There are various types of archives, ones that only house traditional assets such as manuscripts, papers, books, etc. and there are archives that house non-traditional assets such as media (tapes, DVDs, born-digital materials), ephemera, photographs, etc. Our responsibility, as archivists, includes providing all-inclusive methods of access to the public.Working together to figure those methods out is the fun part...

In the gamut of one week, I viewed two interviews, completed one evaluation summary with five tapes, one An Evening with..., partially-processed one series within a special collection, learned that Luther Vandross covered Dionne Warwick original songs and that her style is comparable (heart breaking moment), attended one lecture facilitated by Dr. Reed, one seminar facilitated by Dr. Salvatore (pictured above, left), read three chapters on Abolitionism, six articles related to archival processing methods, completed one survey, one report, devised a processing schedule, etc. and managed to remain attentive, energetic and receptive during The HistoryMakers staff work-dinner Friday evening. 

Looking forward to the developments of week four...(Stop)

                                                                                               

Ardra Whitney: Week 3 @ The HistoryMakers

A sneak peek of my PowerPoint presentation for the host institution conference call with Avery Research Center on Monday, June 25^th

For the past couple of weeks, I have been corresponding with Georgette Mayo, Processing Archivist at Avery Research Center, about the structure, format and content of the conference call presentation we will be giving on Monday, June 25th. This Friday, June 22^nd, Ms. Mayo and I were able to touch base by phone to discuss: processing priorities for the archival collections I have been assigned; specific public/outreach programs I will be participating in or helping to plan; and the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT analyses) of Avery Research Center Archives, as well as its ongoing and planned public/outreach programs, and social media projects.

I completed two EAD/EAC-CPF finding aids for interviews with MediaMaker, Michele Norris and CivicMaker, Alvin Little. I was able to finish the EAD/EAC-CPF finding aid for Michele Norris with no problems, but the EAD finding aid I created for Alvin Little would not display the individual tape abstracts for the finding aids’ “Detailed Description of the Collection” section. However, once Daniel Johnson, Digital Archivist at The HistoryMakers, resolved the source of the issue, I was able to get my first two finding aids done this week. In addition, I have also completed two interview evaluations for EducationMaker, Crain Woods and CivicMaker, Frank Lumpkin. Lumpkin has the most unique interview that I have evaluated so far. Born on October of 1916; he was the third of ten children. Lumpkin began working with his family as a sharecropper in Florida’s orange groves when he was six years of age. While climbing trees with his friends as a teenager, he lost two fingers when he touched a live power line. As a young man, he learned to box and boxed well enough to fight professionally. “Lumpkin is known for winning a 17-year fight against a steel mill, but he also participated in numerous other struggles for social justice.” 

On Monday, June 18^th, fellows met with The HistoryMakers staff to discuss the Special Collections Processing Project. Then fellows split into groups of two and began processing fundraising, event and production documents from the interview programs, “An Evening with Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee” and “An Evening with Dionne Warwick”. On the following day, fellows attended Dr. Cecilia Salvatore’s archives seminar on arrangement and description. We reviewed how to assign relevant LCSHs using the twenty percent rule, which states: if a subject is covered in twenty percent or more of the text, then you can assign a subject heading for that subject. Fellows also completed a fun exercise which required us to take a virtual field trip of three websites: WorldCat, Amazon.com, and any library catalog system. The purpose of the exercise was to learn about the different practices used in describing information objects and to identify how categories of information are used in different contexts to describe information objects for various purposes.

At this week’s African American history lecture with Dr. Christopher Reed, fellows discussed readings from chapters seven through nine of Hine, Darlene Clark, et. al., The African American Odyssey (Comb. Vol.), on free African American communities in the United States, the Northern urban experience for free blacks, slave resistance and rebellion, the 19^th century anti-slavery movement, and the Underground Railroad. Much of the information from the readings and lecture was familiar to me from my work as project archivist at the Weeksville Heritage Center (WHC) in Brooklyn, New York. Weeksville is a historic settlement of national significance and one of the few remaining historical sites of pre-Civil War African-American communities. In 1838--just 11 years after the abolition of slavery in New York State--James Weeks, an African-American, purchased a plot of land from Henry C. Thompson, another free African-American, in the Ninth Ward of central Brooklyn. An article in the New York Age, recalling the period said that James Weeks, a stevedore and a respected member of the community, "owned a handsome dwelling at Schenectady and Atlantic Avenues." Weeksville, named after James Weeks, was home to ministers, teachers and other professionals, including the first female African-American physician in New York state, Dr. Susan Smith McKinney Steward, and the first African-American police officer in New York City, Wiley Overton. Weeksville had its own churches, a school, an orphanage, a cemetery, an old age home, an African-American benevolent society and one of the first African-American newspapers, the Freedman's Torchlight. During the violent New York Draft Riots of 1863, the community served as a refuge for many African-Americans who fled from Manhattan (Wikipedia, 2010).

Reference:  Wikipedia. "Weeksville Heritage Center." Last modified September 10, 2010. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weeksville_Heritage_Center.

Ardra Whitney
IMLS Fellow
Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture

Evaluations: Alex Champion's Week 3

Monday: Foray into processing THM's programming archives

The IMLS Fellows did not have any field trips this week. We had our typical lectures from Dr. “call me Mr.” Reed on black history and archives from Cecelia Salvatore of Dominican but we mainly caught up on HistoryMaker interview evaluations.

I’m starting to wonder at what point residents become Chicagoans. My best answer so far is when cross streets are less for navigation but more of a short-hand clueing others into your mentality. My latest oral history interview is for Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett circa 2006. Speaking of community redevelopment in north Kenwood, she remarked that she grew up one block from my sublet and “always remembered looking south.” Why was there an “invisible line” at 47^th Street and what could the city of Chicago do to make other people transcend that line, too?

Community was important to all of the HistoryMakers I evaluated this week. A Milwaukee publisher closed her interview with mournful words on the state of investment by local businesses who do not advertise,  allow paper racks in their stores, nor sponsor kids to camp; corporations like Miller and the community Perkins franchisees “get it” whereas small-time convenience stores saw no obligation to invest in the community from which they take so much. As we would hope from a presidential adviser, Ms. Jarrett saw the big picture of community development. She was very frank that some social policies of the 1960s—like aid to single mothers on the condition they never marry and high-rise housing projects like the one named after her grandfather Robert Taylor—contributed to poverty and high black male incarceration. She claimed community input inevitably improved redevelopment projects but I suspect that was partly because its members chafe less if they felt they had a say in the inevitable. Still, mixed income development is a bold idea.

Another HistoryMaker talked about community but in a different sense. He spoke glowingly about his time at Central State University in Wilberforce, Ohio and the lifelong friends he made there; he spoke about minority owned businesses and black entrepreneurs taking the initiative and advocating for themselves; he also spoke about the value of funding scholarships and sitting on education boards.

Looking back at all of my HistoryMakers I realized a pattern: They valued education because their parents stressed it; whether their father worked in a steel mill his entire adult life or the HistoryMaker was raised in a middle class family where even homemakers had a college education, education was stressed above all else. Typical to my sense of humor, I asked a fellow Fellow if they had evaluated any HistoryMakers whose parents told them education was a pointless exercise. It turned out the answer was no! 

Chiming in, officemate Ashley Howard took a break from her lesson planning and assumed a teacher-like tone of condescension. “And what does that tell you about how these people were able to achieve?” My hand rose and waved furiously as I shouted “ooh, ooh, Ms. Howard I know!” Ashley dutifully called on me but my answer was cautious. “Um…” I began, “because these people had parents who were supportive of them going to college, and, um…” my eyes searched her face to see if I was on the right track, “[often] paid for them, they were more likely to achieve good things?” Ashley praised me for my answer. “And class,” she spoke to our office mates who may or may not have been listening, “wouldn’t it also mean that if your family didn’t have money and didn’t value education that you would less likely achieve?”

“No!” I said disingenuously, breaking my character. I told her about an argument I had with a friend’s father many years ago about economic mobility and starting gate equality. After minutes of unproductive discussion, I posed what I thought to be an iron clad scenario that would make him admit he was wrong: Twins separated at birth and given to families on the opposite end of the economic spectrum. One gets a nanny, prep-school, and legacy enrollment with business connections upon graduation while the other is a latchkey kid, goes to a 35 student-per- room public school, and gets an Associate’s degree in business administration. Assuming they are just as intelligent and have the same degree of ambition, who will do better economically? My friend’s father insisted they would be equal. I called him a social Darwinist—a charge he denied. I suspect the amount of brain power necessary to sustain that degree of cognitive dissonance could power a small city.

Ashley’s response was probably the best response to that story to date: “Well then why doesn’t he send his kids to Compton schools?”

Indeed. Many of the HistoryMakers bemoaned their poor ambition. Valerie Jarrett admitted attending law school simply because she could think of nothing better to do. Because she had financially and emotionally supportive parents she bided her time long enough to find a place she could make a difference.  

Cynthia Lovett: Week 3 @ The HistoryMakers

Early this week, we shifted from working with oral history interviews to special collections documents.  Executive Director, Julieanna Richardson and Digital Archivist, Dan Johnson introduced us to the material we would be processing: it consisted of items like correspondence, contacts, bios, contributors, and printed materials representing the behind the scene efforts for the making of the HistoryMakers' An Evening With Programs.  As a group of six, we broke up into pairs to tackle the An Evening with Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee boxes. The files have a systematic numbering system and naming system for both the physical and digital files.

For the rest of the week we focused on our oral history evaluations and finding aids.  It was a lot of fun listening to interview of Henry Presswood, baseball player from the Negro Leagues.  He was a shortstop with the Cleveland Buckeyes (1948-1950) and the Kansas City Monarchs (1950-1952).  He described what it was like being in games with players like pitcher Leroy Robert "Satchel" Paige, and catcher, Joe "Pig" Greene,  Luke Easter, and Jackie Robinson.  Presswood came from the town of Electric Mills, Mississippi, home to the first electric lumber mill in the country. His father worked at the sawmill, which had a company baseball team called the Mill City Jitterbugs.  It was through this saw mill, and its baseball team, that Presswood first came in contact the sport.

We had a lively discussion in our archives seminar with Dominican University Professor, Cecilia Salvatore about MPLP--More Product Less Process, an article written by Marc A.Green from the University of Wyoming.  The article calls for the archivists to consider varying the formula for arrangement description according to the collection and its needs with the hope of increasing user access of archival materials.  This topic led to another talk about the archives profession and concepts behind traditional archives and non-traditional archives.  We also learned a bit about the certification process.

In our African American seminar with Christopher Reed, we looked at the forms of resistance of antislavery movements in the north and the south from about 1830-1850.  Meetings and petitions characterized the northern movements, which were often biracial with less violence; whereas in the south, the resistance tended to be black-led and more militant.  These contrasting responses echoed the different levels of urgency felt in the north and south: In the north there were institutions being built by both blacks and whites, while the south was a slave society with slavery as its main institution; the south depended on it—a tighter grip on slavery perhaps called for a greater force to break free.

Chaitra Powell: Week 3 @ The HistoryMakers

Since graduating from the University of Arizona with my masters in library science, in 2010, I have learned that having a degree, while nice, is not the most important thing that a job applicant can have. In the words of the over used cliché, it is not what you know, it is who you know. If “knowing” people are the objective, how can one go about “knowing” people in sincere and meaningful ways in these times of limited resources and ever increasing demand? I’m on Facebook and Linked-in but I can attest that these digital connections are not substitutes for the benefits of taking the time to really become acquainted with someone in person.

This year long fellowship is giving us an amazing opportunity to showcase our professional interest in archives, our personalities and our abilities with some amazing individuals in the industry. I have a natural inclination to keep my mouth closed, but when I think about all of the missed opportunities to show the world how awesome I am, I get over my shyness and join the conversation. It usually works out for the best. Sometimes I think about Alex, Amanda, Ardra, Cynthia and Skyla what they will accomplish in their careers, I am so grateful to have a chance to be in the trenches with them now. We are laughing, working, learning and growing together in this fellowship and it will be a pleasure to reflect on these experiences when we collaborate in the future. 

British Studies Students at Kings Cross in London, England

The same is true for other individuals that I have met on my journey in archives. During my last year in graduate school, I traveled to London, England for four weeks to participate in British Studies Program through The University of Southern Mississippi. I received 6 graduate credits for Dr. Teresa Welsh’s course on British Libraries and Information Centers. Dr. Welsh wrote one of my recommendation letters for my application to The HistoryMakers and I am sharing my experience here to help her to write a grant for a similar program at The University of Southern Mississippi. The first night in London, after we had settled in, a few of my classmates and I took Dr. Welsh up on her offer to show us around the city, mainly how to use the Tube and where to get tickets to the theater, and it set a very positive tone for the entire trip. She also bought me dessert in Edinburgh, when she found out that it was my birthday. Getting to know her in these organic and low stakes scenarios has given me a sincere level of comfort with her, and has made it easier to ask her for assistance today.

Dr. Welsh giving a presentation

This week at the HistoryMakers, I went to town on my finding aids. Up until now, I thought I was doing something, when I finished the evaluation forms, but now I know that is hardly the end of the process. I made corrections to the evaluation forms based on Julieanna’s feedback, worked with Dan on my subject headings, updated Filemaker Pro, edited the EAC-CPF and EAD in Oxygen and cranked out four complete finding aids by Wednesday. I also finished Sheila Grimes, the veterinary pathologist and started watching the playwright, Suzan-Lori Parks. I went through a box of the Diahann Carroll special collections documents and worked on my Mayme Clayton presentation. Dr. Salvatore talked with us about arrangement and description, as well as “more product, less process”. Dr. Reed led an interesting discussion on the attitudes of the northerners and the southerners when it came to slavery and the humanity of blacks in the 1800s, before the Civil War.