Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Amplifying Civil Rights Collections With Oral Histories: A Collaboration With Alumni At Queens College, City University Of New York, Annie E. Tummino, Victoria Fernandez

Publications and Research

Representing a shift in archival methods, oral history is increasingly used alongside more traditional methods of documentation to capture institutional and community histories. In this article, the authors demonstrate how the Student Help Lived Experience Project at the Queens College Library’s Special Collections and Archives (SCA) provided a vital supplement to more traditional methods of archival documentation. SCA was able to leverage resources provided by a partnering organization and a newly established graduate fellowship to bolster its relationship with other entities on campus and to engage alumni in a participatory, collaborative effort that centered their knowledge and interests. This article …

The Personal Papers Of American Sailors, 1890s–1940s, Annie E. Tummino

Publications and Research

Personal papers in the archives at Maritime College, State University of New York, document the lives of alumni from the school’s founding in 1874 through the early decades of the 20th century. Journals, diaries, memoirs, and reminiscences located in these collections provide evidence of what it was like to work on a ship, far from home, travelling to foreign lands. In this article, I explore first-hand accounts of maritime life by Van Horne Morris, my maternal grandfather and a 1938 graduate of the Massachusetts Nautical School (now known as Massachusetts Maritime Academy), and several alumni of the New York Nautical …

Redesigning Program Assessment For Teaching With Primary Sources: Understanding The Impacts Of Our Work, Jen Hoyer, Kaitlin H. Holt, John Voiklis, Bennett Attaway, Rebecca Joy Norlander

Publications and Research

This article describes how redesigning a program’s assessment practices for teaching with primary sources (TPS) can provide a clear framework for talking about the impact of educators’ work in archives and can provide feedback on how to refine instruction practices for greater results. The authors share a description of their assessment redesign process accompanied by analysis of the implementation of our new assessment tool in the hope others will consider the design and goals of their own assessment practices. The authors’ work demonstrates that reflection on existing tools, development of new goals, and design of new assessment strategies can yield …

Uplifting Diverse And Marginalized Voices Through Community Archives And Public Programming, Annie E. Tummino, Jo-Ann Wong, Obden Mondésir

Urban Library Journal

Queens Memory is a local community archiving project co-administered by the Queens Public Library and Queens College Library. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Queens Memory embarked on a collaborative series of online programs that covered social justice, current events, and the creation of social change. This programming built upon ongoing community oral history and documentation efforts. This article explores how the public programs and oral history initiatives fueled one another, serving to uplift diverse voices within our communities and preserve those voices in the archives. Key ingredients of the programs are discussed, including technology, outreach, collaboration, consent, and format.

More Than Just Cataloging, In Three Acts: Reflections, Adrian Applin, Regina Carra, Sarah Nguyen

Urban Library Journal

This article contains proceedings from a performance-presentation at the 2021 LACUNY Institute called “More Than Just Cataloging, In Three Acts.” It features three performing artist-librarians, showcasing dance, music, and theatre while reflecting on connections between the performing arts and the information professions. Accompanying performance footage shared at the Institute is referenced in this article.

"Introduction" The Social Movement Archive, Nora Almeida, Jen Hoyer

Publications and Research

The Social Movement Archive examines the role of cultural production within social justice struggles and within archives. This book contains reproductions of political ephemera—zines, banners, stickers, posters, memes, and more—alongside 15 interviews with artists and activists who have worked across a broad range of movements including: women’s liberation, disability rights, housing justice, Black liberation, anti-war, Indigenous sovereignty, immigrant rights, and prisoner abolition, among others. These images and accompanying conversations illustrate the power of political art and ephemera to transform cultural practices, places, and communities; and its capacity to be a force for disruption in archival spaces.

Digital Exhibition: Romaniote Memories, A Jewish Journey From Ioannina, Greece To Manhattan, Annie E. Tummino, Nicholas Alexiou

Publications and Research

This article discusses creation of the digital exhibition, Romaniote Memories, a Jewish Journey from Ioannina, Greece to Manhattan: Photographs by Vincent Giordano at Queens College, City University of New York.

Disruption, Transition, Adaptation: Archivists Working Under Covid-19, Annie E. Tummino, Tomasz Gubernat, Jeanie Pai, Victoria Fernandez, Kuba Pieczarski, Patricia Reguyal, Caitlin Colban-Waldron

Publications and Research

In this lightning round session, panelists discuss how a small but spirited archive is adapting to work during the COVID-19 pandemic. Since Queens College Special Collections and Archives is largely staffed by current and recent graduates of the college's graduate program in Library and Information Studies, this is a special opportunity to hear from a diverse group of emerging professionals during a challenging and rapidly changing time in the field.

Amplifying Collections With Oral Histories In A Virtual World: The Student Help Lived Experience Project At Queens College Cuny, Annie E. Tummino, Victoria Fernandez

Publications and Research

In response to the challenges brought on by the onset of the pandemic, the Queens College Special Collection and Archives (SCA) created the “Student Help: Lived Experience” student fellowship, designed to be completely remote. The project is an initiative to further document the activities of Queens College students who participated in both the Virginia and South Jamaica Student Help Projects in the early to mid-1960s. The Virginia Student Help Project was an intensive education effort during the summer of 1963 in Prince Edward County, Virginia where public schools were closed for five years in massive resistance to integration. The Jamaica …

Advocating For Social Justice And Diverse Voices In The Virtual World, Annie E. Tummino, Jo-Ann Wong

Publications and Research

Queens Memory is a local community archiving and oral history project, co-administered by Queens Public Library and Queens College, CUNY. Due to COVID-19 safety protocols, all projects and programs were required to move to a virtual setting. While under these restricted measures, members from both institutions found an opportunity to embark on a collaborative virtual event series for our respective library communities. The programs covered current events and their historical contexts, social justice, and creating positive social change. Key ingredients fueling the success of this initiative included building relationships with multiple co-sponsors; bringing together multigenerational, diverse panelists; and creative use …

Working Remotely, Working Effectively: Improving Collection Access During A Global Pandemic, Colleen Bradley-Sanders

Publications and Research

This article looks at how one college archive responded to the shutdown of its campus in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The Archivist and Associate Archivist worked together to develop work assignments that could be done from home. While collection processing was halted, the tasks assigned to staff all aimed to improve informational access to the collections, through an expanded effort to convert PDF finding aids to EAD for placement in an ArchivesSpace site, a project to create a searchable listing of collections that includes a brief description of content and links to finding aids, and planning for digitization of …

Against Whitewashing: The Recent History Of Anti-Racist Action In The British Archives Sector, Alicia Chilcott, Kirsty Fife, James Lowry, Jenny Moran, Arike Oke, Anna Sexton, Jass Thethi

Publications and Research

This article is an account of recent activity in the U.K. archives sector against white supremacy which is written by a number of people active in the work. Through our work, we are aware of previous initiatives in this area, but written sources about the history of this work are patchy at best. This account offers a description of recent activity so that it is "on record". We recognise that a historical account of previous efforts would be valuable, but that is not our objective here. This article offers a statement of the problem of white supremacy in the U.K.’s …

Review Of Memory Lab Network Resources, Annie E. Tummino, Tomasz Gubernat, Jeanie Pai

Publications and Research

Review of Memory Lab Network resources for American Archivist Reviews, a portal which highlights websites, digital collections, and technologies that have an impact on the archives profession. The authors review the resources published by the Memory Lab Network and discuss their own work building a Memory Lab at the Benjamin S. Rosenthal Library of Queens College, CUNY.

Commemorating A Legacy Of Dissent: Revisiting Campus Activism 1968-1970, Annie E. Tummino

Publications and Research

On the heels of the student revolt at Columbia in 1968, Queens College students launched their own militant actions and demands for change on campus. Using primary source materials from the Benjamin Rosenthal Library’s Special Collections and Archives, the presentation covers the New Left and Anti-War movements, as well as an uprising led by Black and Puerto Rican students influenced by the ideologies of Black Power and self-determination. The role of archives in preserving activist history and educating current and future generations is also touched on.

The Afterlives Of Government Documents: Information Labor, Archival Power, And The Visibility Of U.S. Human Rights Violations In The “War On Terror”, Rachel Daniell

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is about access to information.

It examines the different ways that access to U.S. government records related to the “War on Terror” is generated through the intersection of law, bureaucratic policy and procedure norms, and the everyday work of archivists and transparency advocates. I argue that, both through their labor pushing for access to government records via complex records searches, Freedom of Information Act requests, and legal action, and also through their labor layering those records with new forms of metadata in public digital circulation platforms, these individuals, in the context of their organizations, generate new forms of …

Visualizing Archives And Library Collections, Thomas Cleary

Publications and Research

Archivists and special collections librarians have struggled for a long time with how to show patrons what we have in our holdings. Collections have been made accessible through container lists, finding aids, and collection and content management systems such as ArchivesSpace, Islandora, and CONTENTdm. Each of these documents and systems also has its own learning curve and different functions, but even then the scale of some topics in collections or the connectedness between collections is not always apparent.

This article showcases two projects the author has worked on to assist in creating data visualizations in a library/archives context. The GLAMViz …

Records Of A School At Sea, Annie E. Tummino

Publications and Research

This presentation is largely about strategies for dealing with archival legacy description. Not just in terms of data migration or updating standards, but what to do when you inherit a large scale collection that was organized using a methodology that no longer works in a 21st century context. How do you move forward, and how do you document your interventions and decisions? This is what happened to me at SUNY Maritime with the college’s institutional records.

Connecting Wikipedia And The Archive: Building A Public History Of Hiv/Aids In New York City., Ann Matsuuchi

Publications and Research

This is an overview of a project that was started in 2015 that was collaboratively designed by archivists and historians with the La Guardia & Wagner Archives and LaGuardia Community College’s faculty/librarians. It involves students in the production of a needed public history of the outbreak and impact of HIV/AIDS in New York City via writing and researching contributions to Wikipedia.

Painless Portal Partnerships: Collaboration And Its Challenges For Small Organizations, Christine Mcevilly

Publications and Research

This article addresses challenges inherent in collaborative archival projects involving both large institutions and small historical societies. It identifies these unique problems and outlines potential solutions to overcome these issues. Examples are drawn from the Portal to American Jewish History project and contextualized within the professional literature on ethnic or community archives and archival collaboration. This project collected metadata from a wide range of Jewish history archives and aggregated the records in a single searchable website.

Opening Cuny: Academic Works At Work, Megan Wacha, Miriam Deutch, William A. Casari, Jill Cirasella

Publications and Research

Academic Works, CUNY’s new open access institutional repository, collects and provides public access to the scholarly and creative works produced by CUNY faculty, students and staff. This program will show how opening content to the world impacts CUNY, as each speaker addresses collections at their institution: dissertations at The Graduate Center, Open Educational Resources at Brooklyn College, the “Save Hostos” archival collection at Hostos Community College and faculty research from across CUNY.

Git And Github For Librarians, Robin Camille Davis

Publications and Research

One of the fastest-growing professional social networks is GitHub, an online space to share code. GitHub is based on free and open-source software called Git, a version control system used in many digital projects, from library websites to government data portals to scientific research. For projects that involve developing code and collaborating with others, Git is an invaluable tool; it also creates a backup system and structured documentation. In this article, we examine version control, the particulars of Git, the burgeoning social network of GitHub, and how Git can be an archival tool.

Libraries Of New York: The Bronx Institute Archives Of Lehman College Library, Janet Butler Munch

Urban Library Journal

The Bronx Institute Archives is a unique collection of primary and secondary sources assembled to document the history and development of the Bronx. This article describes its various collections, outreach and publicity methods, library support and collection use.

The Use And Availability Of Environmental Activism Collections In Academic Archives, Amy F. Stempler

Publications and Research

This study seeks to reveal the current state of environmental research in academic special collections and archives, with an emphasis on materials associated with environmental activism. The use and availability of archival environmental activism collections were assessed in a two-fold process. The use of such collections was evaluated through a citation analysis of related research articles published in Environmental History, the premier scholarly journal in the field of environmental history. The citation analysis reviewed the prevalence of archival collections sourced, and examined citations by repository type and material type in order to gain insight into the kinds of items used …

The Student As Subaltern: Reconsidering The Role Of Student Life Material Collections At North American Universities, Jessica L. Wagner

Publications and Research

This article argues for college and university archivists to undertake advocacy and activism to better document student life. It discusses key shifts in archival and historical theory that supported an interest in collecting from a wide variety of people rather than just elites. Next, it describes recent archival scholarship on student life materials and considers the extent to which college and university archives are actively documenting the student experience via the collection of these materials. Analysis of the results of a survey of college and university archivists about the nature of these collections sheds further light on prevailing opinions of …

Students As Donors To University Archives: A Study Of Student Perceptions With Recommendations, Jessica Wagner, Debbi A. Smith

Publications and Research

Most of the literature that explores the relationship between students and university archives focuses on how to integrate archival materials into the undergraduate curriculum. Little exists that analyzes student perceptions of the types of materials that are found in archives; even less discusses how to induce students to donate materials that document life on campus. This case study examines student perceptions of various aspects of university archives, with the goal of developing better methods of reaching out to encourage donation of student life materials.

Videos In The Kitchen: The Lesbian Herstory Archives As A Moving-Herstorical-Image, Shawn(Ta) D. Smith

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Digital Repository Adoption In New York City Research Institutions, David J. Williams

Student Theses

As more scholarly and research materials are created in digital formats, institutions charged with managing, preserving, and disseminating these materials are increasingly adopting specialized software tools and environments created to fulfill these functions. Concurrently, subscriptions to serials databases provided by academic publishers are increasingly prohibitive and problematic. This paper surveys the adoption of digital institutional repositories by research institutions in the New York City region as of the Spring of 2009, and concludes that in spite of their potential advantages these systems are still not widely applied toward addressing the issues of preservation and access to their fullest potential.

Image Collections At The City College Of New York: Collaborative Efforts At A Public Urban College Campus, Ching-Jung Chen, Sydney Van Nort

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Crime In The Library! The Special Collections Of Lloyd Sealy Library, John Jay College Of Criminal Justice/Cuny: A Repository Profile., Ellen H. Belcher

Publications and Research

Started as a small collection of books to support the New York Police Department (NYPD), Police Academy, the library of John Jay College of Criminal Justice has a rich history and built important collections in just over four decades.

Standing On The Shoulders Of Giants: Reflections From A Young Scholar, Taylor Black

Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS)

Back in November 2005, I was working on a paper for Ros Petchetsky's "Body Politics" class at Hunter College and I found myself running into all sorts of problems in accessing information about queer political movements and the discourses surrounding them. In a frenzied moment, I emailed Paisley Currah, and he was kind enough to offer his time as well as CLAGS's materials for my research.