Manuscript Repositories Research Articles

Encoded archival description (EAD): Adoption and implementation

AbstractEncoded Archival Description (EAD) provides archival researchers with more in‐depth content‐related and contextual information than was previously available anywhere but in the physical repository. This has led to its use throughout the United States and in many other countries to increase access to archival and manuscript collections. Furthermore, EAD is one means of managing metadata that describe digital objects linked to archival finding aids. In spite of these potential benefits, the archival community in the United States has embraced EAD slowly. This paper examined EAD adoption in the U.S. and reports on a survey of 399 archives and manuscript repositories that participated in EAD educational workshops from 1993–2002. Among the factors found to be related to EAD adoption were prior adoption of the MARC format for the description of archival or manuscript materials and professional staff size. Implementation issues affecting adoption included the different technologies and skills required for encoding and display of finding aids and the lack of a consensus on either encoding software or display options.

The Vatican Library and its Manuscripts: Between the Past and the Future

The article takes an in-depth look at the origins and development of the Vatican Library, and its collections of manuscripts, acknowledging their significance for today: the future of yesterday and the past of tomorrow. The determined will of Pope Nicholas V opened the doors of the Vatican Library around 1451; his successors, up to today, have heeded his founding maxim: ‘for the common convenience of learned men’, through the centuries of organization, re-organization, and development. Today the Vatican Library is one of the greatest and most important repositories of manuscripts in the world. As we are confronted with the responsibility to preserve, to keep alive and to pass on that which we have received, we have to find the right balance between use and preservation. In this search, modern technologies can provide a pursuable path which would render a ‘sustainable development’ possible. The article considers the manuscripts from the point of view of new electronic technology, which allows for better access to information, for better scientific study and for better preservation of the manuscripts. The combination of computer programs and human ingenuity provide opportunity, as well as ample challenge to distinguish valuable from unfounded information, for present and future generations to experience, anywhere in the world, a library as a place to interact with others of different regions and times, a place to grow, to participate and contribute to the cultural growth of humanity, a place, ultimately, of freedom.

In a Class by Themselves: Faculty Papers at Research University Archives and Manuscript Repositories

Faculty papers are common in university archives and/or university manuscript collections, but little current literature exists about their acquisition, appraisal, administration, processing, and use. The survey reported herein examined the practices and policies on faculty papers employed by repositories in ARL-libraries and at formerly designated Research I universities. It reports criteria used to identify potential donors, how (and if) archivists pursue of faculty papers, formats of materials sought and retained, level of processing, and use by patrons and staff. More generally, it gauges practitioners' opinions toward what are often perceived to be large, yet underused collections.

Doing the Best We Can? The Use of Collection Development Policies and Cooperative Collecting Activities at Manuscript Repositories

Written collection development policies and cooperative collecting activities are two tools that archivists are encouraged to use in the course of creating and adding to their repositories' collections. Written collection development policies are advocated as a way to ensure that collections have a coherent and well-defined focus, while cooperative collecting practices are seen as a way to ensure that related materials are not scattered among far-flung repositories and that repositories' scarce resources are not needlessly squandered on unnecessary competitiveness for collections. However, not only are there numerous impediments to the effectiveness of either of these tools, many repositories do not use them. A survey of manuscript repositories reveals some of the reasons why more repositories do not engage in these practices, while quantitatively demonstrating the benefits they offer to repositories that do.

The New York James Joyce Society

As a married graduate teaching assistant with a child and working on a masters degree in English, my principal income in 1958 was only about twenty percent of what it had been in my former calling, the used car business. What psychic income there was in the automobile business died with my father the year after I got my B.A., and when I returned to graduate school, I needed even more urgently to continue working part time as a singer and producer of radio commercials until I could land a full-time teaching job. At Temple University I took Joyce with Mabel Worthington, who at the time was working on an index for her co-authored book with Matthew Hodgart, Song in the Works of James Joyce. Since I had access to a studio in the Temple University radio station on Tuesday nights (making singing commercials for the Clements agency), and to professional Philadelphia actors who could do Irish accents, I offered to make a demonstration tape of a chapter of Ulysses with the actual music referred to in the text as background for Bloom’s thoughts. Mabel agreed to accept it in lieu of a term paper and I was on the way to a career glossing Joyce’s musical references. When I completed the M.A. at Temple I got a job at the State University of New York, College of Fredonia, and a scholarship to complete my Ph.D. at Buffalo, a major Joyce manuscript repository, where I was privileged to work with Tom Connolly. Fredonia’s specialty in the New York State system was music, and many of its undergraduates were card-carrying members of either the musicians union or the American Guild of Variety Artists. The campus radio station was right next door to my office, and after I smoozed around for a month or so with the student staff and faculty director, I thought

ARCHON and the indexes to the National Register of Archives: past, present and future

The Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts, currently funded by the Department of Culture, Media and Sport in the UK, has been in existence since 1869. Its terms of reference are defined by Royal Warrant and include “to make enquiry as to the existence and location of manuscripts, including records or archives of all kinds, of value for the study of history, other than records which for the time being public records by virtue of the Public Records Act”. Since 1945 it has assembled in the National Register of Archives (NRA) a unique research resource of over 1.5 million pages of catalogues, for the most part freely contributed by archivists working in record offices, libraries, museums and other institutions. The indexes to the NRA are the principal means by which information about British manuscript collections and repositories is accessed online. This article describes how the NRA has developed in response to the challenges of computerisation and the advent of the World Wide Web, giving rise to a dedicated UK archival links server, ARCHON (Archives Online), and how both information structures might develop in the future.

"Green" Archivism: The Archival Response to Environmental Research

This article outlines the current relationship between archival materials and environmental research using information provided by a survey of repositories. The survey examined the use of archival sources in archives and manuscript repositories by environmental researchers and the efforts of archival institutions to meet the needs of such users. Results demonstrate trends in record use among environmental users and the lack of efforts by archivists to modify their programs to encourage and satisfy such use.

Implementing EAD in the Yale University Library

In 1995 the Yale University Library agreed to serve as an "early implementer" site for the FindAid DTD, now EAD. Three Yale manuscript repositories—the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Special Collections in the Divinity School Library, and the Manuscripts and Archives Department of Sterling Memorial Library, agreed to participate in this test phase by creating an integrated database of SGML-encoded finding aids, accessible via the World Wide Web. This case study describes the basic configuration of the Yale finding aid site, reviews the project's history and accomplishments since its inception in 1995, discusses the methods employed by the participating units to mark up legacy files and to integrate EAD into their routines for creating new finding aids, and suggests issues to be considered by others contemplating an SGML/EAD encoding project of their own.

The National Inventory of Documentary Sources in the United States (NIDS-US)

The National Inventory of Documentary Sources in the United States (NIDS-US), produced by Chadwyck-Healey, Inc., provides distribution on microfiche of manuscript collection and archival finding aids, known as registers and inventories. These publications are “tables of contents” to large collections of original documents, which were available from most repositories only on-site or on request. Chadwyck-Healey's on-going publication on microfiche of thousands of registers and inventories from some 300 repositories, with accompanying indexes, has been enhanced by the issuance of compiled indexes to NIDS-US and its companion NIDS-UK on a searchable CD-ROM. The company is now producing ArchivesUSA. which will combine on one CD-ROM the NIDS index, the National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections, and information on the general holdings information about some 4,000 archives and manuscript repositories in the United States. The use of NIDS-US is discussed.

Investing in the Past: Letters of Charles Henry Stocker, African-American Businessman of New Orleans, 1868-1874

During the decade before the Civil War, Louisiana's free people of color were by far the most prosperous group of African-Americans in the United States. While these elite blacks were denied the basic civil rights and social privileges of white society, they controlled substantially more property than free blacks in any other state. Their success was due in part to Louisiana state law which was unique in that it allowed free Negroes to make legal contracts, inherit, hold and bequeath property, to have right to trial if charged with criminal acts, and to sue and testify against whites in civil courts.(1) At the close of the Civil War, this financially and socially elite group sought to secure for itself position of continued prominence and separation from the general population of newly emancipated freedmen. The division between this elite class and other classes of African-Americans inhibited the development of political and social unity among black Americans. Few primary sources exist to document the experiences of blacks in America before the twentieth century. Social historians have relied largely on published sources such as contemporary black newspapers to identify issues, influences, and attitudes which were current in the lives of nineteenth-century African-Americans. Manuscript repositories hold scant records of black families, institutions, and individuals. The papers of white plantation-owning families often contain documentation of black slaves and laborers. who were owned or employed on plantations but seldom reflect the lives of free, socially and economically independent blacks. The Turnbull-Allain Family Papers contain the records of white planters with land holdings in West Baton Rouge, Iberville, and West Feliciana Parishes.(2) Within these papers, fifty-six items consisting of letters and financial statements from 1868 to 1876 document the struggle of Charles Henry Stocker and other New Orleans black businessmen to increase their fortunes by investing in rural plantation properties after the Civil War. The letters reflect social issues and attitudes which may contribute to our understanding of the complexities of Louisiana's elite class of free people of color. In 1860, over three-fourths of all free blacks in New Orleans were mulattoes, or people of mixed blood.(3) Terms for various shades of pigmentation which have been used in public and private documents include the following: griffe, the offspring of mulatto and Negro; mulatto, of white and Negro; quadroon, of white and mulatto; and octoroon, of white and quadroon.(4) Charles Henry Stocker, bright, well-educated, mulatto businessman from New Orleans, was born in 1839 or 1840, the grandson of white plantation owner. He represented class of Southern blacks which had lot in common with white, educated plantation owners but were as separate from them as they were from the emancipated freedmen with whom they shared only race. The estrangement of free people of color from slaves was legally as well as socially based. Before the war, free blacks were prohibited by law from close fraternization with slaves. The Stocker family appears to have been part of very exclusive family network of free blacks. These family networks enabled free persons of color to separate themselves from the dominant whites as well as from the population of slaves.(5) Stocker embodied many of the characteristics of the African-American politician in New Orleans after the Civil War, whom historian David Rankin describes as a young man of unusual ancestry, uncommon wealth, and exceptional ability.(6) Stocker's enlistment and career in the Confederate Army made him still more atypical of free people of color in New Orleans. In May, 1861, at age twenty-two, Stocker enlisted as private in the 3rd Company Battalion of the Washington Artillery. He and other elite gens de couleur supported the Confederate agenda which, they felt, would allow them to maintain their economic and social status. …

Society of Southwest Archivists guide to archival and manuscript repositories

Society of Southwest Archivists guide to archival and manuscript repositories

A Guide to the history of Pennsylvania

Introduction The Historical Literature Indian Pennsylvania Early Settlement and Peacetime Politics, 1680-1750 Revolutionary Pennsylvania, 1760-1790 Democratic Pennsylvania, 1790-1850 Pennsylvania and the American Civil War Industrial Pennsylvania, 1876-1919 Modern Pennsylvania, 1919-1990 Research Collections Archives and Manuscript Repositories College/University Archives Corporate Archives Historical Libraries/Societies Public Repositories Subject/Theme Collections Index

Russian Archives in Transition: Caught Between Political Crossfire and Economic Crisis

This article results from the author's experience in Russia during 1992, where, under IREX sponsorship, she was working collaboratively with the State Archival Service of the Russian Federation—Rosarkhiv (until the October 1992 presidential decree took effect in December 1992, the Committee for Archival Affairs of the Russian Federation—Roskomarkhiv), the State Public Historical Library (GPIB), and the St. Petersburg Branch of the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences establishing a computerized database (ArcheoBiblioBase) for a directory and bibliography of finding aids for archives and manuscript repositories throughout the Russian Federation. In addition to the sources cited, coverage of many issues comes from a multitude of discussions with Russian archival leaders. Particular appreciation is due to the several friends and colleagues on both sides of the Atlantic who critiqued earlier drafts. A slightly variant form of the present article appears as the introduction to Russian Archives 1993: A Brief Directory, Part 1: Moscow and St. Petersburg, Preliminary English Version, edited with an introduction by Patricia Kennedy Grimsted; foreword by Vladimir Petrovich Kozlov (Washington, D.C.: IREX, February 1993). A Russian translation of this article will appear in Novaia i noveishchaia istorii, 1994, no. 1. An earlier version of this text, together with prefatory commentary by Vladimir Kozlov, Deputy Chairman of Rosarkhiv, appeared in the July and September editions of that directory. The article continues the Grimsted series published in the American Archivist and distributed by IREX: Patricia Kennedy Grimsted, "Glasnost" in the Archives? Recent Developments on the Soviet Archival Scene," American Archivist (AA) 52 (Spring 1989): 214-36; see also comments by two Russian specialists in AA 53 (Summer 1990): 468-75, and the present director of the Estonian archives in AA 53 (Fall 1990): 576-81; Grimsted, "Perestroika in the Archives? Further Efforts at Soviet Archival Reform," AA 54 (Winter 1991): 70-95 (a pamphlet reprint is available from IREX; describes conditions in Soviet archives to the end of 1990); "Beyond Perestroika: Soviet Archives After the August Coup," AA 55 (Winter 1992): 94-124 (an expanded preprint is available from IREX; continues the story to the end of 1991). See also the booklet, Intellectual Access to Soviet-Area Archvies: What Is to Be Done? (Princeton, N.J., March 1992; IREX preprint). The article remains as it was revised at the end of January 1993. Although the present version (15 September 1993) is edited slightly due to publication delays in the American Archivist (especially in regard to temporal references and a few factual errors), it does not take into account the important developments on the Russian scene in the subsequent months of 1993. To be sure, revelations from declassified secret contemporary files continue. Scandals in connection with the sale of publication rights to sensational unclassified documents have occasioned the firing of most of the leadership and the closing for several months of the Center for the Storage of Contemporary Documents (TsKhSD) at the former Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) Central Committee headquarters at Staryi Ploshchad. Budgetary deficiencies forced most central archives to close for the month of August, and maintenance problems kept the elevators shut down in the stacks of the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GA RF) for most of the year. A conservative parliament has held up the restitution of captured records. Most important, on a more positive note, on 7 July 1993 parliament passed the Law on the Archival Fond of the Russian Federation and Archives ("Osnovy zakonodatel'stva Rossiiskoi Federatsii ob Arkhivnom fonde Rossiiskoi Federatsii i arkhivakh"), and it was subsequently signed into law by President Yeltsin, giving Russia its first comprehenisve archival law in history. The new law replaces the series of Soviet-style decrees, but considerable opposition can already be heard about various provisions of the new law, especially the lack of respect for private archives. An initial decree of implementation-"On the Realization of State Policy in Archival Affairs" ("O realizatsii gosudarstvennoi politiki v arkhivnom dele"—Postanovlenie SM RF)—was issued by the Council of Ministers on 23 August 1993, and additional plans for implementation are being being drawn up. Economic and administrative remedies to other archival problems are still being considered. The Presidential Archive is being moved to Staryi Ploshchad, while controversy continues about the extent of transfer and access that will be possible to KGB files of various categories. Discussion of these and other developments on the Russian archival scene will require a new essay, which is now being prepared as introduction for the published edition of the collaborative directory resulting from further updating of ArcheoBiblioBase. Archives in Russia 1994 is now planned for publication in parallel Russian and English editions in 1994.

Archives and Manuscript Repositories in the USSR, Ukraine and Moldavia. Book 1: General Bibliography and Institutional Directory

Archives and Manuscript Repositories in the USSR, Ukraine and Moldavia. Book 1: General Bibliography and Institutional Directory

Latin America vs East Asia: A Comparative Development Perspective.

This handbook is designed to help researchers, journalists, students, and business people to locate the rich array of Washington institutions and organizations that focus on issues pertaining to Central Asia and the Caucasus region, particularly in the post-Soviet period. Washington's status as a major repository of documentation on every aspect of the region is strong and growing daily. Beyond the Library of Congress, which intensively collects newspapers and other published materials from the region, and the Foreign Broadcast Information Service, which does the same for radio, there are hundreds of national and international public, non-profit, and private organizations and institutions in Washington with extensive links to Central Asia and the Caucasus, all of which maintain active archives and collections. The Guide includes more than 270 entries. It describes the structure and scholarly and technical resources of libraries, archives and manuscript repositories, museums and galleries, collections of sound and visual recordings, map and film collections, and the holdings of research centers and information agencies. Academic programs and departments of the metropolitan area's many institutions of higher learning are covered, along with international organizations, U.S. and foreign government agencies, association and advocacy groups, scientific organizations, educational and cultural organizations, corporations, technical assistance organizations, religious organizations, publications and media operations, bookstores and online resources. An index of organizations and institutions enhances the Guide's usefulness.

Archives and Manuscript Repositories in the USSR: Ukraine and Moldavia, Book 1, General Bibliography and Institutional Directory. By Patricia Kennedy Grimsted. Harvard Series in Ukrainian Studies and the Canadian Library of Ukrainian Studies. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988. liii, 1107 pp. Maps. Tables. $125.00, cloth.

Archives and Manuscript Repositories in the USSR: Ukraine and Moldavia, Book 1, General Bibliography and Institutional Directory. By Patricia Kennedy Grimsted. Harvard Series in Ukrainian Studies and the Canadian Library of Ukrainian Studies. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988. liii, 1107 pp. Maps. Tables. $125.00, cloth.

Archives and Manuscript Repositories in the USSR. Ukraine and Moldavia. Book 1. General Bibliography and Institutional Directory

Archives and Manuscript Repositories in the USSR. Ukraine and Moldavia. Book 1. General Bibliography and Institutional Directory

Directory of archives and manuscript repositories in the United States

Directory of archives and manuscript repositories in the United States

Directory of archives and manuscript repositories in the United States: by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission

Directory of archives and manuscript repositories in the United States: by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission

Academic Archivists and the SAA, 1938-1979: From Arcana Siwash to the C&U PAG

This paper traces the historical development of archivists and archival programs in institutions of higher education, from their existence as a handful of manuscript repositories in the 1930s to the creation in 1979 of the Society of American Archivists's College and University (C&U) Professional Affinity Group representing 40 percent of the society's membership. The evolution of C&U activities is illustrated using surveys of academic archivists, publication projects, and education and training programs. The role of academic archivists within their institutions, their influence on the wider profession and on archival institutions, and the increasing importance of their collections are examined in detail.