Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

University Archives & Community Organizations: Ensuring Access Through Collaboration, Jessica R. Holden, Andrew Elder, Joanne Riley

Joseph P. Healey Library Publications

In 2011, to further our community-engaged mission, UASC began to focus on working with, promoting, and assisting community archives in the greater Boston area through facilitating cross-organization collaboration and access to informational, educational, and practical resources relevant to archival procedures and best practices.

The guiding tenets behind this continuing commitment emerged, in part, from UASC’s multifaceted collaboration with The Irish Ancestral Research Association (TIARA), a local nonprofit organization established to develop and promote the growth, study, and exchange of ideas among people and organizations interested in Irish genealogical and historical research and education. Our collaboration with TIARA formally began in …

University Archives And Community Organizations: Ensuring Access Through Collaboration, Jessica R. Holden, Andrew Elder, Joanne Riley

Joseph P. Healey Library Publications

How can a university archives establish a successful ongoing relationship with a community organization? What are the benefits and challenges of such a collaboration? University of Massachusetts Boston’s Archives and Special Collections (UASC) explored these questions while working with The Irish Ancestral Research Association (TIARA) to preserve and provide access to 79,000 mortuary records from the Massachusetts Catholic Order of Foresters. Elements of the collaboration included shifting stewardship of the records from the Foresters to TIARA to UMass Boston, integrating TIARA’s efforts in processing and indexing the records into the Archives’ workflow, providing in-person and electronic access to the records, …

Burns Like Dust: 1 House, 8 Collections, 7 Repositories, Ruth E. Bryan

Library Presentations

This case study is about collection development policies, both on the repository level as well as applying them within individual collections, specifically faculty papers. "Dust" is a metaphor for both the on-the-ground experience of archival appraisal as well as for the “dust” of people’s lives and events that historians are “breathing in” when they work with primary source material (Carol Steedman, Dust: The archive and cultural history, 2002). From the perspective of the cultural value of archives, this “dust” is what we select when we’re transforming a mountain of paper or electronic records into archives.