Cynthia Lovett: Week 4 @ The HistoryMakers

This week I evaluated the interview of Earlean Collins, the first African American woman and the first woman to serve as an Illinois State Senator in 1976.  I also evaluated Dori Wilson's interview. Wilson, originally from Winona Mississippi, migrated with her family to Chicago and became one of the early African American runway models in the 1960s.  She also was the prototype for the first African American mannequin at the Marshall Field's department store in Chicago Illinois.

In Dr. Christopher Reed's African American History seminar, we continued to look at conflicts and contrasts between the north and south and especially during the civil war.  Although there were many abolitionists in the northern states, there was also latent racism.  There were concerns about arming blacks fighting for the north because people were worried about them becoming revolutionary.  Even though in the south, about 10 percent of the population had large plantations, their lifestyle was heavily dependent on slavery.  

Our trip to the University of Chicago Special Collections Research Center  was fantastic opportunity to see some of the how some of the ideas discussed over the last few weeks in our Archives Seminar with Cecilia Salvatore can be put into practice. We had been discussing traditional concepts of archives as well as the some of the more recent changes as characterized by Mark Greene and MPLP (More Product, Less Process).  At the University of Chicago, the Special Collections Research Center's approach to archives underwent a change in the 1990s, where their main focus moved towards making collections available to researchers and students.  This meant that even though they cannot process all collections fully, they would still be made available.  They use what they call a "tiered" approach where first processing occurs at the collection level, then if necessary, at the series level.  Also the level of processing is determined by the collection; there is no one size fits all methodology.  Having a backlog was considered the natural state of things, but they don't allow that to prevent people from accessing their materials.  One of the things they do is create a basic inventory and post that online as soon as possible so that people can know it is available.

The Special Collections Center also had a relatively new exhibit space where they have a new show every quarter.  

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.