Woodruff Library Research Articles

The Atlanta University Center’s (AUC) Robert W. Woodruff Library’s Growing Partnerships and Outreach to Support Its Annual International Games Day

The Atlanta University Center’s (AUC) Robert W. Woodruff Library’s Growing Partnerships and Outreach to Support Its Annual International Games Day

“Halls Which Are Everywhere Denied Us”: Using Archival Research to Recover African American Feminist Media Activism

ABSTRACT This article investigates the public activism of TheWoman’s Era newspaper (1894–97), which was one of the first African American feminist periodicals to derive national circulation in the United States in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Considering TheWoman’s Era’s coverage of activist efforts to build African American public reading rooms and libraries, this article suggests that African American feminist writers and editors, such as Florida R. Ridley and Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, sought to revise the concept of the public sphere by broadening who had access to public space and altering how blackness was represented within these spaces. This article draws from archival work derived from Emory University’s Emory Women Writers Resource Project in collaboration with the Lewis H. Beck Center at Woodruff Library and the Virtual Library Project, which offers transcribed reproductions of TheWoman’s Era and includes downloadable images of individual pages and advertisements. Given the scope of such research, which attempts to read African American women’s public writing through a rhetorical and close-textual lens, Emory University’s digital archives provide a valuable frame of reference for charting the currency of specific terms, such as “public space,” “public interest,” “public opinion,” and “public good.” The goal of this project is to offer a discursive interpretation of how appeals to “the public” as both a material and a conceptual space denoting citizen rights and resources was used and deployed by African American feminist activists for the purposes of uplifting minority communities and developing African American women’s voices.

The Transfer Code of Practice: Overview and Updates

ABSTRACTThe Transfer Code of Practice is a National Information Standards Organization recommended practice and voluntary code for journal publishers containing best practices for transferring and receiving journals. The code helps publishers to ensure that journal content remains accessible by librarians and readers when there is a transfer between parties, and ensures that the transfer process occurs with minimum disruption. Publishers who register as Transfer-compliant are asked to endorse the code, and to abide by its principles wherever it is commercially reasonable to do so. Jessie Copeland, Head of Electronic and Continuing Resources of the Robert W. Woodruff Library of Emory University, and a member of the Transfer Committee, presented the current work of the committee and gave updates on current projects.

African People, Education for Liberation & Staying Human: Reflections on Walter Rodney and the Pan-African / Black Liberation Tradition

On March 25th, 2017, Dr. Joyce E. King delivered this talk as the day two keynote of the 14th Annual Walter Rodney Symposium at the Atlanta University Center Robert W. Woodruff Library, Atlanta, Georgia.

Funding the Future of African American Religion Archival Collections

Preparing academically rich collections for access by scholars and students is challenging, costly and time consuming. Concerns for maintenance, preservation, and access are paramount. Typical of 20th century archival collections, one is likely to encounter deteriorating and brittle documents, photographic prints and negatives, and obsolete formats such as open reel audio tapes, audio cassettes and video tapes. More recent collections may also contain computer media; the proliferation of formats and media types impacts the complexity of the work in providing access, as well as the costs. Without sizeable resources, it would take years to process these collections fully, especially those rich with audio and visual materials. Taking all of this into consideration, the Archives Research Center (ARC) and Digital Services Unit (DSU) of the AUC Woodruff Library decided to investigate options for grant funding to expedite the processing and digitization of these underutilized archival collections. This essay concerns the pursuit of a Humanities Collections and Reference Resources (HCRR) grants offered by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).

How less is truly more: Merging library support services

ABSTRACTIn the summer of 2010, to provide a “one-stop shop” service point to Woodruff Library patrons, the Circulation, Reference, and Learning Commons (LC) desks merged into the unified Library Service Desk (LSD) under Access Services. Last year, due to organizational changes in the library and IT, and anticipated support needs of the new LC spaces and technologies, Student Digital Life opened a separate LC Technical Support desk. The lessons of the year of the two desks, funding considerations, and the persistent goal to streamline the experience of our patrons resulted in transitioning the functions of the LC desk to LSD, thus evolving it to new organizational and operational levels.

Archive fever and the genesis of secrecy in Salman Rushdie

This paper examines the Salman Rushdie papers deposited in the Robert W Woodruff Library [Manuscript, Archives and Rare Books Library] of Emory University. Although at first glance this is by and large an old fashioned archive (of 215 boxes and 55 oversized papers), it is also a digital archive in the sense that much of the author's drafts, letters and sundry material are preserved in computers. The archive has managed to preserve the hard disks in their original form by simulating and incorporating these disks into a PC. The paper examines how the Rushdie archive has been catalogued and what a researcher trained in research methods and textual criticism may do with the archive. Its theoretical template comes from Derrida's short monograph Archive Fever as it reads the Rushdie archive as a repository as well as a ‘consignment’ which exists within certain laws and power structures. To explore an archive's concealed or repressed items, the paper carefully traces Rushdie's interest in the Islamic genesis of secrecy with reference to the available holograph notes and related material on the ‘satanic verses’ in the archive.

Battle of Atlanta Project Discussion and Exhibit Set for July 17 at Emory's Woodruff Library

Battle of Atlanta Project Discussion and Exhibit Set for July 17 at Emory's Woodruff Library

Woodruff Library News and Notes

Woodruff Library News and Notes

“Of What is Past, or Passing, or To Come”: Recent Yeats Scholarship

“Of What is Past, or Passing, or To Come”: Recent Yeats Scholarship George Bornstein The Tower (1928): Manuscript Materials. W. B. Yeats. Richard J. Finneran, ed., with Jared Curtis and Ann Saddlemyer. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 2007. Pp. liii + 670. $99.95 (cloth). Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form. Helen Vendler. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Pp. xix + 428. $35.00 (cloth). Yeats’s Poetic Codes. Nicholas Grene. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Pp. xi + 247. $99.00 (cloth). The Last Minstrels: Yeats and the Revival of the Bardic Arts. Ronald Schuchard. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Pp. xxvi + 447. $110.00 (cloth). Influence and Confluence. Yeats Annual No. 17: A Special Number. Warwick Gould, ed. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. $100.00 (cloth). Yeats famously looked both backward and forward from the present, as his celebrated phrase from “Sailing to Byzantium” suggests. It applies well to the five books under review here. These works by Helen Vendler, Nicholas Grene, Ronald Schuchard, Warwick Gould, and the late Richard J. Finneran stand in different ways as major accomplishments by respected senior scholars in the field of modernist scholarship in general and of Yeats studies in particular. We sometimes forget how recent Yeats studies are in the academy. Sixty years ago those pioneers of the first generation of Yeats scholars Richard Ellmann and Thomas [End Page 609] Parkinson had to legitimate in their graduate programs (at Yale and Berkeley, respectively) the acceptance of a doctoral dissertation on so recent a writer as Yeats. Yet in just over twenty years after their resultant breakthrough books, the critical-biographical Yeats: The Man and the Masks (1948) and more textually-based W. B. Yeats, Self-Critic: A Study of His Early Verse (1951), Yeats would already come under fire from poststructuralist and then cultural critics as politically and sexually retrograde. The books discussed here exemplify the impressive textual, critical, and historical scholarship of the generation that came after Ellmann and Parkinson, and therein lies both their glory and their limit. On the one hand, that they bring such historical, biographical, critical, and textual approaches to disparate culminations makes them worth the attention of any student of modernist poetry and, particularly with Finneran’s edition, opens new avenues for younger scholars and graduate students to explore. On the other hand, methodologically the works display an indifference to changes in literary study for the past three decades that leaves plenty of territory for future scholars to investigate. Richard Finneran’s prize-winning edition of W. B. Yeats’s The Tower (1928): Manuscript Materials (brought to successful conclusion by Jared Curtis and Ann Saddlemyer after Finneran’s untimely death) deserves applause both for its textual accomplishment and for its creation of avenues for future work. The final volume to be published in the poetry series of the Cornell Yeats project (there is a separate, ongoing one for the plays as well), its 670 pages display both photo-facsimiles and facing typographic transcription of all known surviving manuscript drafts of the poems in that major modernist volume, including such major and influential works as “Sailing to Byzantium,” “The Tower,” “Meditations in Time of Civil War,” “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen,” “Leda and the Swan,” and “Among School Children,” among others. Collecting them was difficult, especially in the pre-internet age of card catalogues, handwritten lists, and often expensive travel to collections. Most of them are now in the great Yeats collection of the National Library of Ireland, much of it formerly in Yeats’s son Michael’s private collection at Cliff House in Dalkey outside Dublin, where Finneran and I among others first consulted them. More documents come from repositories like the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library, the Bodleian at Oxford, the Robert W. Woodruff Library at Emory, and the Beinecke at Yale. Their publication here completes the goal of the Cornell Yeats poetry series to make all known surviving manuscripts of Yeats’s poetry available to libraries and scholars throughout the country and the world. That opens a range of possibilities for textual, critical, and historical investigation to researchers not only...

Woodruff Library Prepares for Renovation

Woodruff Library Prepares for Renovation

Extreme Makeover Reference Edition: Restructuring Reference Services at the Robert W. Woodruff Library, Atlanta University Center

The Robert W. Woodruff Library, Atlanta University Center, recently restructured its system for information service delivery by moving from the traditional one-desk model to a dual component model that is delivered from two service points in close proximity. Under the former system, services were solely delivered by reference librarians. The new system offers the same array of information services provided by a combination of librarians and library support staff who have received special training. The observed outcomes have been a higher quality of customer service delivery, an increased use of research consultation services, a more informed and engaged library staff, and increased opportunities for reference librarians to make campus visits. This article outlines the entire process from conception to implementation, including staff training requirements, statistical data, and future implications.

Robert W. Woodruff Library of the Atlanta University Center, Custodian of the Morehouse College Martin Luther King, Jr. Collection: “Until Further Notice”

On June 23, 2006, the American Library Association was holding its Annual Conference in New Orleans, Louisiana, the first major conference to return to the city post Hurricane Katrina. My scheduled visit of four days was abruptly cut short as a result of two communications: a call from Walter Massey, President of More-house College in Atlanta, Georgia, and an e-mail from William Potter, Dean of the University of Georgia Libraries. By the time the day was over, I learned that a collection of manuscripts and books documenting many of the writings, speeches, and notes of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. . . .

Emory’s Woodruff Library Acquires Love Letters of Ted Hughes and Assia Wevill

Emory’s Woodruff Library Acquires Love Letters of Ted Hughes and Assia Wevill

'Friendship's Garland' and the Manuscripts of Seamus Heaney's 'Fosterage'

The manuscript drafts of Seamus Heaney's 'Fosterage', written in the early 1970s and held at Woodruff Library, Emory University, reveal a complicated process of revision involving twelve separate drafts of the poem. During this process, Heaney includes and later excises multiple references to the contemporary 'Troubles' in Northern Ireland, focusing finally on his friendship with Michael McLaverty (to whom the poem is dedicated) and on the theme of artistic style, which is the final poem's dominant concern. Particular references in the drafts link this poem to other early poems such as 'The Tollund Man' and 'The Betrothal of Cavehill'.

Dearest Chums and Partners—Joel Chandler Harris's Letters to His Children: A Domestic Biography (review)

Reviews379 enee, although gender and its role in Dawson's life are examined. Ellen Peel's "Semiotic Subversion in 'Desiree's Baby,' " offers an intriguing assessment of the semiotic and political approaches to Kate Chopin's widely anthologized work, but critical language frequently overwhelms the essay. "Evangeline's Darker Daughters: Crossing Racial Boundaries in Postwar Louisiana" by Alice Parker is a critical reading of Sidonie De la Houssaye's French text, Les Quateronnes de la Nouvelle-Orléans (The Quadroons ofNew Orleans). However, Parker's esoteric analysis of De la Houssaye's difficulty in exploring issues of race, gender, and sexuality would be formidable to many readers. The finest segment of this entire text is the bibliography. Dorothy H. Brown's "A Note on the Bibliography" entertains while clearly stating the bibliography's parameters: (1) women who wrote chiefly in the genres of poetry, drama, and fiction; (2) native Louisiana women who either remained to pursue their careers or who wrote elsewhere; (3) women who were educated in the state, moved there to make it their home, or who visited for extended periods; and (4) women who wrote in English (De la Houssaye's work is the exception). Brown also explains some of the difficulties in selecting appropriate information from the various sources. Each entry contains biographical statistics, data on each author's body of works, and secondary document information, all of which serves as a guide to further research and to gauging the writers' popularity, whether in their own time or afterwards. Brown impressively meets the tremendous challenge of being as complete as possible, especially in supplying comprehensive material from out-of-print or relatively inaccessible nineteenth-century reference works. The 113-page bibliography places writers in three sections: nineteenth century, approximately sixty-two entries; twentieth century (deceased), approximately thirty-seven; and contemporary writers, approximately ninety-seven. Dearest Chums and Partners—Joel Chandler Harris's Letters to His Children: A Domestic Biography. Edited by Hugh T. Keenan. University of Georgia Press, 1993. 531 pp. Cloth, $39.95. Reviewed by David B. Parker, assistant professor of history at Kennesaw State College, who is Tar Heel bom and bred. Parker is the author ofAlias Bill Arp: Charles Henry Smith and the South's "Goodly Heritage." As his children began to leave home in the 1890s, Joel Chandler Harris often took time away from his Uncle Remus stories and other projects to write letters to them. After Harris's death in 1908 a number of these letters were reprinted or excerpted in Uncle Remus's Home Magazine and in Julia Collier Hanis's Life and Letters ofJoel Chandler Harris, for years the standard biography. Now Hugh T. Keenan, professor of English at Georgia State University, gives us Dearest Chums and Partners. Keenan's volume, complete with introduction, annotations , chronology, and the other scholarly apparatus one expects in a definitive collection , contains all of the nearly three hundred surviving letters from Harris to his children. AU but two of the letters are in the Harris Collection at Emory University's Woodruff Library. The book's main title is from a letter Harris wrote to daughters Lillian and Mildred while they were students at Saint Joseph's Academy, a Catholic school in Washington, 380Southern Cultures Georgia. Harris's letters to his "dearest chums and partners" fill more than half the book. They are often playful, with riddles, puns, poems, and drawings. The letters also tend to be quite lengthy. "I haven't the least idea what I'm going to write about," Harris noted at the beginning of one letter, but he went on for two pages about the weather, his cows, sick children in the neighborhood, a magazine subscription, chimney cleaning, grandchildren, and so on. It became a running joke. "There is positively nothing to write about in this neck of the woods," he told the girls in another letter packed with news about the rain, the death of a calf, the welfare of two new puppies, visits from friends, and more. This is the trivial side of the "domestic biography" of Keenan's subtitle: more than you ever wanted to know about Joel Chandler Harris's private daily life. But there are...

Reviews

Catalogue of seals in the Public Record Office: monastic seals, Volume I Compiled by Roger H. Ellis London: HMSO, 1986 viii + 104 pp., 56 plates. £25 The records of a commission of sewers for Wiggenhall, 1319‐1324 Edited by A. E. B. Owen William Asshebourne's book Edited by D. M. Owen Norfolk Record Society Publications, Volume 48, 1984 for 1981 122 pp. Calendar of entries in the Papal Registers relating to Great Britain and Ireland. Papal Letters, Vol. XVIII. Pius III and Julius II: Vatican Registers (1503‐1513), Lateran Registers (1503‐1508) Edited by Michael J. Haren Dublin: Stationery Office for the Irish Manuscripts Commission, 1989 lxxiii + 751 pp., illus. IR£50 The commissions for building fifty new churches: the minute books, 1711‐27, a calendar Edited by M. H. Port London Record Society Publications, Volume XXIII, 1986 xl + 193 pp. £12 to non‐members Papers of British politicians 1782‐1900 London: HMSO for the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts, Guides to Sources for British History 7, 1989 xi+ 125 pp. £10.95 Women's words. A guide to manuscripts and archives in the Alexander Turnbull Library relating to women in the nineteenth century Compiled by Diana Meads, Philip Rainer and Kay Sanderson Wellington: Alexander Turnbull Library, National Library of New Zealand, 1988 xi + 137 pp., illus. NZ$22 Manuscript sources for women's history: a descriptive list of holdings in the Special Collections Department, revised edition Atlanta: Special Collections Department, Robert W. Woodruff Library, Emory University, 1987 27 pp. Free Guide to the Sources of Asian History International Council on Archives India 3.1: National Archives. New Delhi: National Archives of India, 1987. 165 pp. Indonesia 4.1: National Archives (part 1, institutional archives; part 2, local archives). Edited by Mona Lohanda. Jakarta: National Archives of Indonesia, 1989. 214 pp. Guide to the sources of Korean history. Seoul: Government Archives and Records Service, 1990. 738 pp. National History Guide Committee (Nepal) Source Manual Series, nos. 1‐3. Edited by Shaphalya Amatya. Kathmandu: National Archives, 1988‐90. 105 + 166 + 150 pp. The role and resources of national and university repositories. Report and discussion document Society of Archivists/Standing Conference on National and University Libraries, 1989 80 pp. £6 Electronic records management and archives in international organizations: a RAMP study with guidelines Charles M. Dollar Paris: UNESCO, 1986 (PGI‐86/WS/12) iv + 160 pp. How to manage your records: a guide to effective practice Edited by Peter Emmerson Cambridge: Institute of Chartered Secretaries and Administrators, 1989 ix + 190 pp. £27.50 Records management handbook Doncaster: Fellowes Manufacturing (UK) Limited, 1988 20 pp. Les archives des entreprises. Conseils pratiques d'organisation, 2nd edition Isabel Guérin‐Brot Paris: Archives Nationales, 1989 87 pp.60F A guide to tracing the history of a business John Orbell Aldershot and Brookfield, Vermont: Gower, 1987 x + 116 pp. £15 Aus der Arbeit der Archive. Beiträge zum Archivwesen, zur Quellenkunde und zur Geschichte. Festschrift für Hans Booms Edited by Friedrich P. Kahlenberg Boppard am Rhein: Harald Boldt Verlag, 1989 xxii + 988 pp. DM96

Theodore Draper Research Files

Journal Article Theodore Draper Research Files (Woodruff Library, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia) Get access Susan M. Hartmann, Susan M. Hartmann Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar David Wigdor David Wigdor Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 76, Issue 1, June 1989, Page 169, https://doi.org/10.2307/1908350 Published: 01 June 1989

Confederate Sheet Music at the Robert W. Woodruff Library, Emory University

Confederate Sheet Music at the Robert W. Woodruff Library, Emory University