Archives Reveal, Archives Inspire, Archives OPEN

ArchivesOpenFlyerFinalCMYKJoin us for an after-hours Open-House to mark the grand opening of Spring exhibitions in Archives and Special Collections, Thursday, March 10, 4:00 – 6:00 pm in the McDonald Reading Room at the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center.

Archives Reveal, Archives Inspire, Archives Open is a special invitation to explore the new and the rarely-seen assembled and animated by guest curators.  Hear talks and commentary by exhibition curators, browse collection materials first-hand, and catch up on news happening behind the scenes with archivists from UConn’s Archives and Special Collections.  Sponsored by the UConn Libraries and the Office of Undergraduate Research IDEA Grants Program, the event is free and open to the public.  Spring 2016 exhibitions include:

Seeing Comes Before Words: Artists’ Use of the Male Nude

Elizabeth Barbeau (curator)

Inspired by the collection of artist and teacher Roger Crossgrove, and drawing from materials across the Archives’ holdings, this exhibition explores collaboration and the creative process through the lens of the male nude.  Featuring photography, artists’s books, broadsides, and posters from Archives and Special Collections, materials on display emphasize the relationships between (and among) artists and their models, and art and its audiences, and illustrate ways “the male nude” is used in different mediums for a variety of political, social, and cultural purposes.

Woman a Machine: Gender, Automation, and Created Beings

Giorgina S. Paiella (curator)

Featuring a variety of materials sourced from Archives and Special Collections, and archives external to the University of Connecticut, Woman a Machine will explore the intersection of gender and automation from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century. This exhibition will explore the intertwined history of female created beings and human female embodiment, including representations of eighteenth and nineteenth century female android automata, the twentieth-century mechanized housewife, and cyborg imagery in twentieth and twenty-first century visual culture.

#ArchivesReveal

We look forward to seeing you in the Archives!

 

Water: Pollution / Protection and Play

Ca4WHLTW4AIJNTh2On display now in the McDonald Reading Room, and through February, a new exhibition by Archivist Graham Stinnett examines the role that water plays in our daily lives.  From consumption and utility to containment and disposal, clean water relies heavily on human impact on the ecosystem.  As archival documents reveal, water protection and access to clean drinking water has been a rallying cry for decades, long before it made national headlines, again, last month.

Since the breaking news of the Flint Water Crisis began, a state of emergency within the city of Flint, Michigan was called on January 5, 2016.  The city had incorporated its drinking water from the nearby contaminated Flint River which led to the corrosion of aging lead pipes in the city’s waterworks.  This leaching of lead began in April of 2014, exposing the population to health risks associated with drinking and bathing in the water unbeknownst to them.

This exhibition draws from collections in Archives and Special Collections, including the Connecticut Citizens Action Group Records and the Alternative Press Collection, relating to water and our demands upon it as a resource and a necessity. The materials document that water protection is not a new social issue in the US.  Since the 1960s, as the historical record illustrates, failing economies, and lack of investments in cleanup in the long term, have lead to crises for already marginalized communities.  Materials in the exhibition, encompassing photographs, leaflets, serials, clippings, and government documents, examine how people in those communities have responded through time.

 

Today: Of Mice and Men – Emerging Infectious Disease in a Warmer, More Fragmented World

Today February 4 at 4:00pm in UConn’s Konover Auditorium, the Edwin Way Teale Lecture Series on Nature and the Environment presents disease ecologist Dr. Richard S. Ostfeld of the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies for his lecture  “Of Mice and Men: Emerging Infectious Disease in a Warmer, More Fragmented World.”

ostfeldWe are living in an age of emerging infectious diseases, scientists and health officials agree.  Most of these diseases are transmitted from wildlife to humans, but scientists are only beginning to understand the ecological causes of disease emergence in the 21st Century.  In this talk, Ostfeld will describe the ecology of three emerging tick-borne diseases in the northeastern United States, most prominently Lyme disease.  He will show how small mammals, such as white-footed mice, are instrumental in fostering both blacklegged ticks and the pathogens they transmit.

More than 20 years of ecological research in Ostfeld’s lab reveal how anthropogenic environmental changes, such as reduced biodiversity and global warming, affect our risk of exposure to infectious diseases both locally and globally.  The presentation will demonstrate the importance of ecology as a health science.

Co-sponsored by UConn’s Junior Faculty Forum of the Humanities Institute, the Dodd Research Center, and several UConn departments, the event is free and open to the public.

Since 1995, UConn presents the award-winning Edwin Way Teale Lecture Series that brings distinguished speakers to the University to speak in public lectures on various aspects of nature and the environment.  The Lecture Series is named in honor of the Pulitzer-prize winning naturalist and author, Edwin Way Teale, whose vast archive of literary manuscripts, letters, diaries and photographs is preserved and accessible at UConn’s Archives and Special Collections.

A new semester, and a poem by Marilyn Nelson

 

No work is insignificant. All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence.  – Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

 

As classes begin today, we welcome back students, faculty and staff to the University by sharing the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and a poem by Marilyn Nelson.

faculty_nelsonBorn in Cleveland, Ohio, the daughter of a Tuskegee Airman, Marilyn Nelson is an accomplished and award-winning poet, children’s book author, and translator of over fourteen books of poetry. A professor emeritus at the University of Connecticut and Connecticut’s poet laureate from 2001 to 2006, Marilyn Nelson has won two Pushcart Prizes, fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, and the 2012 Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America.  In 2013, she was elected as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.  Today she is listed among the faculty of the  Cave Canem Foundation for young African American poets.  Marilyn Nelson’s literary manuscripts, letters, photographs and publications are being preserved and made accessible at the University of Connecticut in Archives and Special Collections.

 

Worth by Marilyn Nelson

 

Source: Poetry Magazine, September 2005, p. 403 and available online at http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse/186/5#!/20607120.

 

 

2016 Events Spring Into View

edicionesvigiaArchives and Special Collections is excited to announce its preliminary schedule of programs and events for Spring 2016.  In the months and weeks ahead, handmade books, photographs, and rarely-displayed visual materials highlighting artists and artwork found in Archives and Special Collections will be featured in a series of exhibitions in the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center and Homer Babbidge Library.  Below is a list of exhibitions and events coming your way.  All are free and open to the public.

Flight by Force or Free Will (exhibition)
On view: 1 January – 26 February, 2016
Gallery: Thomas J. Dodd Research Center Gallery, UConn
Curator: Graham Stinnett, Archivist for Human Rights and Alternative Press Collections

Migration has occurred throughout human history.  The fluctuations of population from one geographic location to the next has occurred in times of tragedy, opportunity and emergency; by flight, by force and free will.  This exhibition highlights selections from Archives & Special Collections about expressions of displacement, forced migration, coercive settlement, asylum under the state and the globalization of refuge-seeking.  Prints, illustrations, pamphlets, artists books, multimedia, and photographs from the Human Rights Internet Collection, Mia Farrow Collection, University of Connecticut Films Collection, International Rescue Committee, (Central America) Records, Eric Reeves Papers, and Artist’s Book Collection, are represented.

Of Mice and Men: Emerging Infectious Disease in a Warmer, More Fragmented World” (Lecture, Teale Lecture Series)
Date: 4 February 2016, 4:00 PM
Location: Konover Auditorium, Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, UConn
Speaker: Rick Ostfeld, Senior Scientist, Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, Millbrook, New York

Exhibition prepared by Guest Curator Elizabeth Barbeau (title forthcoming)
On view: 7 March – 13 May 2016
Gallery: Thomas J. Dodd Research Center Gallery, UConn

Cyborgology: Female Automata and Science Fiction (tent. title) (exhibition)
On view: 1 March – 29 April 2016
Gallery: John P. McDonald Reading Room, Archives and Special Collections, Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, UConn
Curator: Giorgina Paiella

Comedy, Economics, and Climate Change” (Lecture, Teale Lecture Series)
Date: 3 March 2016
Location: Konover Auditorium, Thomas J. Dodd Research Center
Speaker: Yoram Bauman, Author, “standupeconomist,” and carbon tax activist

Cuban Bricolage: The Artists’ Books of Ediciones Vigía /
Bricolaje Cubano: Los libros artesanales de Ediciones Vígia (exhibition)
On view: 21 March – 21 May 2016
Gallery: Homer Babbidge Library, UConn
Curator: Marisol Ramos, Librarian for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Latino Studies, Spanish, and Anthropology

 

Semiotics in the archives: Reflections on ‘Eviction and the Archive’ by scholar Daniel Nemser

image of front cover of Book written by the architect Lucas Cintora defending his work at the Lonja de Sevilla which will housed the new Archivo General de Sevilla.

Book written by the architect Lucas Cintora defending his work at the Lonja de Sevilla which would later housed the new Archivo General de Sevilla.

“Until then I had thought each book spoke of the things, human or divine, that lie outside books. Now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves. In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was then the place of a long, centuries-old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind, a treasure of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors.” ― Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose.

Today’s story is not about books talking about books necessarily but of a book talking about archives and their buildings, and the rationale, in this particular story, to evict people from a building to replace them with books and records in the name of history and imperial memory. In a way you can say that this is story of semiotics of archives, signs and meanings found in an article talking about a book talking about an archive to be born…

As I said in a previous post, it is valuable to hear from our researchers and to learn about how they used our archival materials in their work. Professor Daniel Nemser contacted me in April 2014 asking for access to one of our rare books titled, Justa repulsa de ignorantes y de émulos malignos: Carta apologético-crítica en que se vindica la obra que se está haciendo en la Lonja de Sevilla (1) written by the architect Lucas Cintora in 1786. Prof. Nemser needed to consult the piece for a scholarly article he was writing. As far as we know, there are two known copies in the world, one located at the University of Seville’s library and the other at the Archives and Special Collections here at UConn Storrs (2). Prof. Nemser was able to visit us last May 2014 to consult the book and last September 2015 he contacted me to let me know that his article, “Eviction and the archive: materials for an archaeology of the Archivo General de Indias” was published in Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies that month.

I was immediately intrigued and enchanted by the title of the article. It is not common to see literature scholars studying archives and their place in history. But this article delved into the history of the establishment of one of the most important archives ever created – an archive which documents “four centuries of Spanish colonial rule” and is considered the “first modern archives in Spain and one of the first in Europe” (page 131), el Archivo General de las Indias.

The article documented how a particular building known as La Casa Lonja de Mercaderes in Sevilla, designed by architect Juan de Herrera, a magnificent building to house the Consulado de Mercaderes (the city merchant guild), was repurposed to become the Archivo General de las Indias. After the construction “la Lonja”, the guild moved their office to the city of Cádiz and the building was abandoned, but right after people of poor means moved in and occupied the upper levels. The article explored how the founding of the archive, the eviction of its inhabitants and the modifications to the original building were part of an Enlightenment project by the Spanish crown to create a “modern archive” that justified their imperial project. Prof. Nemser explained that “the materiality of the archive itself would tell an epic tale about Spain’s colonial achievements and highlight the value of its ongoing colonial enterprise” (page 136).

The rare text from our collection was key to Prof. Nemser’s argument that the modifications of the original building by architect Lucas Cintora served to reshape the building’s functionality to conform to this enlightenment project. The modifications also represented a break with the past and the embrace of a new future, one that emphasized the importance of the Spanish empire and its validity to rule its colonies in the Americas. Prof. Nemser explained:

Since each type of building has a specific function and as such requires different formal characteristics, it will be necessary to “destroy” – Cintora does not pull his punches here – any elements of the original that are contrary to this new purpose. Of primary importance for an archive, he argued, was an open layout with what he called a “diaphanous” character. This was especially the case for an Enlightenment project such as the AGI [Archivo General de Indias], and as such it is understandable that the metaphor of light runs through much of the writing about the archive. In the structural transformation of the building, however, this metaphor takes on an architectural dimension: the need for light, clarity and transparency was precisely why the separation walls [inside the Lonja] had to be demolished (136).

As an archivist, it was fascinating to discover through the work of this scholar that Archives and Special Collections had a text in its collection that sheds light on the colonialistic root of the AGI. Prof. Nemser’s research left me pondering about the origins of other archival institutions, including our own. As Umberto Eco deftly explained in his novel The Name of the Rose, archives and libraries’ books are full of signs and meanings in constant dialogue with each others through the eyes of its readers.

We are honored and delighted to have facilitated Prof. Nemser’s research and to learn more about the complex history of archives.

 

Notes:

1: We recently digitized this book and now it is available at the Connecticut Digital Archive.

2: From the article, “According to Humanes Bustamante, 200 copies of Cintora’s book were printed but later withdrawn and destroyed (339n11). However, at least two copies remain. Zerner has analyzed a copy held at the AGI, while the copy I consulted is located at the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center at the University of Connecticut. I am grateful to Marisol Ramos for her assistance.”

The Story of Richard Scarry’s Busytown with Special Guest Lecturer Huck Scarry

ScarryBusiestpeopleeverP7Busytown, the bustling small town and home to such resident characters as Huckle Cat, Lowly Worm, Mr. Frumble, Police Sergeant Murphy, Mr. Fixit, and Hilda Hippo, was first depicted in the book Richard Scarry’s Busy, Busy World.  The fictional town was a central feature in several Richard Scarry books and has been depicted through time in a variety of formats, including games, toys, activity books, and an animated series.

Richard Scarry, the popular and much-loved American author and illustrator of over 300 children’s books, is known for such classics as Richard Scarry’s Best Word Book Ever released in 1963, Richard Scarry’s Busy, Busy World (1965), Richard Scarry’s Storybook Dictionary (1966), and What Do People Do All Day (1968).  Selling millions of copies during his lifetime, many Scarry books, though regularly updated and re-issused, have never been out of print.  Several have have been translated into over 20 languages.

Join us tomorrow evening, Tuesday November 10, 6:00pm for a special guest lecture Huck Scarry 2The Story of Richard Scarry’s Busytown” with Scarry’s son, Richard “Huck” Scarry II. Also an artist and author of children’s books, Huck Scarry published a new Scarry picture book for the first time in the U.S. since the elder Scarry’s death in 1994.  With Richard Scarry’s Best Lowly Worm Book Ever! Huck Scarry began a season of re-releasing Scarry’s classics to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Richard Scarry’s best-known book, Richard Scarry’s Best Word Book Ever.  The guest lecture event will take place in the Class of 1947 Room, Homer Babbidge Library, University of Connecticut in Storrs.  The lecture is free and open to the public and is presented in conjunction with the 24th Annual Connecticut Children’s Book Fair taking place at UConn on Saturday and Sunday, November 14 and 15, 2015.

Richard Scarry’s personal papers and archives, preserved and available in Archives and Special Collections at the Dodd Research Center, document the creation, production, and distribution of his books for children. The archives are part of the Northeast Children’s Literature Collection and contain materials and correspondence concerning Scarry’s early work, with Western Publishing and Little Golden Books, beginning in the 1950s. The bulk of the material in the archives concerns the works produced by Scarry during his later association with Random House.

Human Rights Photographer’s Collection Donated to UConn

by Suzanne Zack, University Libraries, for UConn Today

RomanoChildLaborersPickCoffeeOnACoffeePlantationThe late U. Roberto (Robin) Romano was an accomplished photographer, award-winning filmmaker, and human rights advocate who unflinchingly focused his eye and lens on children around the world, capturing the violation of their rights.

Since 2009, Romano had made a limited number of his images available to researchers through the UConn Libraries’ Archives & Special Collections. Now, two years after his death, his total body of work, including video tape masters and digital video files, hundreds of interviews, thousands of digital photos and prints, plus his research files have been given to UConn and will now be available to those who examine human rights issues.

More than 100 of Romano’s images of child labor originally exhibited at the UConn’s William Benton Museum of Fine Art in 2006 are available online from the University Archives & Special Collections. These are the first of the more than 130,000 still images that will be available online for research and educational use once the collection is processed. The Archives & Special Collections plans to digitize the entire collection of analog still images, negatives, and research files, creating an unprecedented online resource relating to documentary journalism, child labor and human rights, and other social issues that Romano documented during his lifetime.  Continue reading…

 

Leap Before You Look @ICAinBoston: National Exhibition of Black Mountain College Arts and Artists

uconn_asc_1969-0001_gm_this_artThe teachers and students at Black Mountain College came to North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains from around the United States and the world.  Some stayed for years, others mere weeks. …They experimented with new ways of teaching and learning; they encouraged discussion and free inquiry; they felt that form in art had meaning; they were committed to the rigor of the studio and the laboratory; … They had faith in learning through experience and doing; they trusted in the new while remaining committed to ideas from the past; and they valued the idiosyncratic nature of the individual. But most of all, they believed in art, in its ability to expand one’s internal horizons, and in art as a way of living and being in the world.

Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933–1957 is the first comprehensive museum exhibition on the subject of Black Mountain College to take place in the United States. Featuring works by more than ninety artists, from painting and sculpture to photography and ceramics, the exhibition will be accompanied by a robust program of music, dance, performance, lectures, and educational programs. The exhibition had its premiere on Saturday at the ICA/Boston and will be on view from October 10, 2015 to January 24, 2016.

Archives and Special Collections is thrilled to be a part of the exhibition, where items from the literary collections are on display together with works loaned from archives and museums throughout the United States and Europe. Items on loan from Archives and Special Collections include a painting by poet and artist Fielding Dawson titled “Cy Twombly.”  Dawson, whose papers reside here in the archives, was a student at Black Mountain College in the early 1950s along with fellow students Cy Twombly, Robert Rauschenberg, and Dan Rice.  Rare documents, manuscripts and “This” (pictured) a poetry broadside by Charles Olson printed at Black Mountain College are also on view in the exhibition. Charles Olson’s archive of manuscripts, letters, diaries, photographs and books resides here at the Dodd Research Center. A rich document of the poet’s life and work, the archive includes a variety of materials from his time at Black Mountain College where he began teaching in 1948 and assumed the role of rector (formally) in 1954. Olson’s poetics were very much influenced by the artists, faculty, students and atmosphere of experimentation that he encountered at Black Mountain College, and that in turn influenced a generation of writers that were later associated with, according to the New American Poetry editor Donald Allen, the “Black Mountain School.”

Organized by Helen Molesworth, the ICA’s former Barbara Lee Chief Curator, with ICA Assistant Curator Ruth Erickson, the exhibition argues that Black Mountain College was an important historical precedent, prompting renewed, critical attention to relationships between art, democracy, and globalism.  The college’s influence, and its critical role in shaping many major concepts, movements, and forms in postwar art and education, can still be seen and felt today.

1966: Collections from 50 Years Ago on Display

At the Archives & Special Collections, we have been ramping up our interoperability.  What does that mean exactly?  Twinkling screens, chatter of audio recording and tactile interactions with materials on exhibition.  Currently, we are featuring collection materials from 50 years ago in the archives to help highlight the year 1966.  These selections contain personal correspondence and work from famous artists and activists like Ed Sanders, Allen Ginsberg, Diane Di Prima and Abbie Hoffman.  Popular culture and ephemera from comic books to Life magazine relating to the politics of War in Vietnam, LSD, the rise of Black Power and the battle against Communism.

Included in the exhibit are Alternative Press Collection materials documenting the War in Vietnam ranging from the scholarly to the ephemeral. The Poras Collection of Vietnam War Memorabilia contains posters, death cards, publications and satirical army culture objects demonstrating the antagonisms of war at home and abroad.  From a personal collection of Navy Corpsman Cal Robertson, his correspondence from Vietnam in 1966 while deployed over two tours as a medic attached to a marine platoon, detailing the daily grind and uncertainties of waiting in the jungle and relaying safety concerns to loved ones back home.  The Alternative Press also includes a trove of anti-war publications such as the Committee for Nonviolent Action.

CQo9zv4VEAAjShs.jpg largeThe physical exhibit in our reading room is but one element of our program to promote access to collections through outreach.  Media displays within the Archives Reading Room featuring additional photographs and videos demonstrate the interactive qualities of physical objects outside of a static display.  Currently, the newest arrival to the reading room is a large tablet-like touch table which has digital content loaded from our Omeka exhibit on1966 which will be unveiled in the coming month on the web.

For more information, follow us @UConnArchives on twitter and facebook where we1 promote exhibits like this one and events happening around the Archives.

 

Black Experience in the Arts: Rare Sound Recordings Now Available

 

I grew up in Brooklyn on a diet of the public schools and the Brooklyn Dodgers, spending probably as much time in Ebbetts Field as anybody else did during that period.  I am a violinist.  That’s unusual, I suppose, for two reasons: one, because there are not a lot of violinists in this world, and there are even fewer black violinists. It leaves one feeling a bit like a rare bird. I must admit I didn’t think terribly much about that when I started playing the violin.  I suppose if I had, I probably wouldn’t have done it.

 

Sanford-Allen-WebOn October 29, 1974, Sanford Allen, one of the first African American musicians to play with a major symphony orchestra and the only African American in the New York Philharmonic since 1964, spoke to a rapt audience at the University of Connecticut.  The recording of his lecture, interview and performance is being preserved and made available digitally by Archives and Special Collections.  The sound recordings are part of a large archive that document a groundbreaking course and performance series led by faculty of the Music Department, Edward O’Connor and Hale Smith, and the Center for Black Studies, entitled Black Experience in the Arts.

Between 1970 and 1990, hundreds of African American artists, actors, musicians, composers, TV producers, dancers, opera singers, poets, historians, critics, and journalists visited UConn at the invitation of Edward O’Connor and Hale Smith.  Smith, a performer and arranger who had worked with jazz greats such as Dizzy Gillespie, Chico Hamilton and the pianist Ahmad Jamal, joined the UConn faculty in 1970.  Originally supported by a grant from the Ford Foundation, Black Experience in the Arts brought Orde Coombs, Conrad Buckner, Stanley Crouch, Edythe Jason, Louise Meriwether, Frederick Tillis, Oscar Walters, Jayne Cortez, Raul Abdul and others to the University, sometimes for repeat visits over the course of their careers.

Stay tuned as we continue to preserve and to make these valuable recordings more widely known and available at archives.lib.uconn.edu

Hello From New Graduate Student Intern Nick Hurley

by Nick Hurley, Graduate Summer Intern

20150615Nickblog01

Hello! My name is Nick Hurley, and I was lucky enough to be selected as the Archives and Special Collections Graduate Intern for summer 2015. I am currently one semester away from earning a Master’s Degree in History, and received my B.A. in History from UCONN as well. This past Monday marked not only my first day as an archives intern, but my first foray into the field of archival studies and management. For the foreseeable future, my focus will be the Bruce A. Morrison Papers.

Bruce A. Morrison is a former Congressman from Connecticut who served from 1983-1991. While in office he served as Chairman of the House Immigration subcommittee, and authored the now-famous Immigration Act of 1990. After an unsuccessful campaign for Governor of CT in 1990, Morrison became 20150615Nickblog03heavily involved in the quest for peace in Northern Ireland, and was instrumental in paving the way for the eventual IRA ceasefires in 1994 and 1997. During this time he also served as the director of the Federal Housing Finance Board, and as a commissioner on the Commission for Immigration Reform (1992-1997). A lawyer by profession, Morrison founded a lobbying firm after leaving public office in 2000, and continues to remain active in Irish-American advocacy. He lives today in Maryland.

I’ll be looking through Mr. Morrison’s papers and arranging the collection (some 110 boxes!) in preparation for digitization (to include updating the online finding aid.) Once that is complete, the physical documents will go back into the stacks, and the digital copies will be added to
Archives and Special Collections digital repository
. I’m excited to be following the collection through every aspect of the archival process, from start to finish. I think it will be a great way for me to make the best use of my time here, and I can already tell from the work I’ve been doing that I’ll 20150615Nickblog02be learning a lot about archives organization and classification: what belongs, what doesn’t, and how to group certain documents together in a way that makes sense to both an archivist and potential researchers.

But I’m also hoping to become familiar with the more technical aspects of archival work, because I’ve had almost no exposure to them until now. If I can leave here in August with a good understanding of how materials are digitized and loaded into a digital database, and a lot of experience navigating and utilizing collection management systems like the Archivists’ Toolkit, I’ll consider the summer a success! Moreover, I’ll feel much better prepared to apply for jobs at museums and archives that require some level of experience.

In addition to my internship here at the archives, I will be volunteering at the New England Air Museum in Windsor Locks, Connecticut from June-August. Following graduation, I hope to enter the field of Public History through employment at a museum or similar institution. I am a lifelong resident of CT, born and raised in Glastonbury.

I’ll be posting on here from time to time with updates as the summer—and my project on the Morrison Papers—progresses. Stay tuned!