This is Ozarks at Large. I'm Kyle Kellams. October is American Archives Month. The professionals who preserve our archives, letters, maps, recordings, and yes, emails, do more than just protect them. Their processing, cataloging, and sharing of archives allows the rest of us to know our past — the good, the bad and the ugly — and to learn from that past.
Oct. 30, the University of Arkansas will observe the month with an open house. It's a combined effort of Special Collections, the Digital Services Department, the Libraries’ Preservation Department, and the Arkansas Folk and Traditional Arts program.
Joshua Youngblood, associate dean for Special Collections at the U of A, says this isn't the first in-person event for Archives Month.
Youngblood: It's not, but it's been a few years since we had one in person. So we always do events for October. October every year is Archives Month, and that's from the National Archives to state archives organizations to university archives like ours in Special Collections. It gives you an opportunity to showcase what you do, showcase the professionalism and hopefully plan some events.
Past few years, from COVID through renovation, we haven't been able to have one. It's been a long couple of years for us. We haven't been able to have an in-person one, so we've done some webinars, we've done a couple of drop-in events, featured exhibits, that sort of thing. But we haven't done an in-person event since — I think 2019 was our last one. So that's six years. Yeah, six years. So that's exciting for us.
Kellams: So what will we experience in person?
Youngblood: So first and foremost, you're going to experience our new space. So for anyone who hasn't been to Mullins Library since we opened up officially in April, the Special Collections is very noticeable, very prominent. And we're very proud of all the public spaces — the working processing spaces as well. We have a gallery, we have a new reading room, we have a classroom, and all of those spaces, almost the entirety of the first floor, along with our collaboration partners in the libraries, will be featured for the open house.
Kellams: Well, let's talk about those partners.
Youngblood: So we have Special Collections folks, of course. Our processing unit will have some recent openings, some recently processed archives to showcase. We'll have our reading room folks. Our Arkansas Folk and Traditional Arts folks will be showcasing their spaces, as well as having a featured performer, which I'll talk a little bit more about in just a second. And then we also will be working with our Preservation Department. It's actually the 10th anniversary of our Digital Services Department.
So Preservation, Digital Services, and Arkansas Folk and Traditional Arts, and then our processing and public services Special Collections folks will all be on hand. And we'll have tours to go to each and every one of those spaces all the way through the first floor.
Kellams: You mentioned some recently obtained archives?
Youngblood: Yeah. So we have been busy. Even though we haven't had an in-person event since 2019, we have still been acquiring new collections. Of course, we acquire university archives. We try to fulfill our mission of documenting our history and culture of Arkansas as fully as possible.
We have many recent acquisitions, so it was hard to pick just a few. But our own exhibit or showcase for the opening event will be the papers of James Whitehead — the Jim Whitehead papers. It's a really big deal.
Kellams: Novelist and poet.
Youngblood: Novelist and poet, and mentor to many, including Frank Stanford. Yes. So some of the Frank Stanford materials are included in the Jim Whitehead papers, as well as some of his other correspondence. That archive will be open, if not this week, next week — so even before the Oct. 30 date.
We’re very much anticipating and very proud of that collection.
Don House, the photographer — we’ve been working with Don for a number of years to get his entire archives into Special Collections. It is now fully on site and fully processed.
A small selection of Don’s — anything in proportion to the entire collection would be considered small, right? — but we will be showcasing some Don House. And as a little Easter egg for folks, there will be some correlations between Don House’s and Jim Whitehead’s and some of the other papers being showcased.
Another archive we’re very proud to announce is the Lindsley Smith archive. Lindsley was a representative for the state of Arkansas. She was an intern in the White House during the Clinton administration, and her archive is now fully processed and will be opened this month as well.
And then we just added a new collection on Bill Flanagan, the local painter, who of course was a founding member of Fenix Fayetteville, the Fayetteville Underground, and other organizations in Fayetteville’s art scene over many decades. He passed away a few years ago, but we’ve been working with his estate and with Phoenix Fayetteville to acquire some Bill Flanagan.
So we’re going to be showcasing some Bill Flanagan. Again, another Easter egg — there are some connections between Flanagan, House and Whitehead.
Kellams: Bill, of course, also took care of Evergreen Cemetery for a while.
Youngblood: He was hugely influential in our local community. And a great guy by all accounts.
When I first came to Fayetteville in 2011, one of the first people I met actually, because I went to a Fayetteville Underground opening, was Bill Flanagan, as well as Don House and Sabine Schmidt.
Kellams: So when someone has their archives delivered — let’s say Lindsley Smith, who was a legislator and educator — you don’t just say, “Here they are, now they’re in the collection.” They have to be processed and analyzed.
Youngblood: Right. And organized. A lot of it is about organization. Our primary rule is original order, meaning we try to reflect the original order of the materials that came to us. That’s not always possible because we have to reorganize things to make them intellectually understood and accessible, the order of the archives as a structure so they’re accessible to researchers for years and decades to come.
When we bring the material in, we have to ensure preservation. We have to make sure all the protections are in place for privacy and other considerations. Then we create an order, hopefully in collaboration with the donor themselves.
For the case of Lindsley Smith — her government career, her education career, her community activist career, local government, state government — all those need to be reflected in there.
Oftentimes we’ll come up with series or groupings within an archive. Then we create an electronic finding aid — a description of it that’s available to anyone around the world. You can discover it through your favorite search engine or come to the Libraries’ website and look at it.
That finding aid is really crucial. But that’s the end result after getting the material in, organizing it, ensuring preservation, and then creating an intellectual order to it. That process can take a long time.
We are very, very good at it. My colleague Katrina, who’s the head of our processing, and Amy Allen, who’s the university archivist — they’re as good as they come. But some of our collections can be quite big and complex, so it takes a long time.
Kellams: You also mentioned featured artists. I believe we’re going to hear some music?
Youngblood: We are. We’re going to have Cory Winters with us, as well as his mentee, Allison Langston. Cory and Allison were part of the Traditional Arts Apprenticeship Program. Cory will be performing shape-note singing.
He’ll also be announcing that he had an original song included in The Sacred Harp, the 2025 edition of The Sacred Harp, which is the go-to text for people who do Sacred Harp singing.
Cory will be a featured performer. After some opening remarks — and I don’t want to forget to mention refreshments; we’ll have food and drinks — we’ll feature Cory in our classroom space singing.
Kellams: If you don’t know what shape-note singing is, there was that Civil War movie Cold Mountain. There was a good scene in that. Even if you’ve seen that movie, if you haven’t heard it live — it’s something.
Youngblood: It is deeply moving.
Whatever your spiritual background is, you will have a spiritual experience with shape-note singing. It’s a really powerful thing. It comes from the heart. It’s an amazing a cappella style of singing. Cory is fantastic at it, and he’s going to be representing the Apprenticeship Program, which we’re very proud to host in AFTA and Special Collections.
Kellams: This all happens on the 30th?
Youngblood: It’s all on the 30th. Yeah, 4:30 to 6:30. So 4:30 will be the opening, and we’ll start tours — we’ll have tours going on an on-demand basis. We’ll have folks in every one of our spaces, almost the entirety of the first floor again. About 5:30, we’ll have remarks. We’ll hear from Dean Battles and a couple of other people, and then we’ll feature Cory again singing and keep doing tours until about 6:30.
We’ll have food and drink available, so we hope to see people. You can spend as much time as you want.
Kellams: Let me ask you one more question about acquiring papers and collections. Is it sometimes a negotiation? Do you have an unofficial list — like there’s someone we should really be able to preserve what they’ve worked onand what they’ve done?
Youngblood: This process of acquisition and bringing collections in can take many forms. Sometimes it’s someone like Jim Whitehead, who even if he weren’t university faculty, we’d still be very interested — novelist, poet, accomplished educator.
Then there are people like Don House, where maybe other folks, connections, or stakeholders in the community would really like his collection brought in. But he didn’t have a current university affiliation or a home picked for his collection. So it was years — I wouldn’t go so far as to call it negotiation — but years of conversation.
There’s mutual understanding: How is it going to be processed? There are people documented in there, so what will privacy rules look like? How much of it can be open? We are on the side of opening as much of an archive as we can, but there will be restrictions in place for certain collections.
There are also collections — like Don’s and some of our music collections — where there could be copyright or monetary issues. Someone might still be making a living off that work, so we have to work out ways to open as much as we can while allowing the right processes for them to make a livelihood off their life’s work.
Don’s collection is absolutely amazing — thousands and thousands of images documenting more than 40 years of this area, including portraits, research projects, and original writing, including books still in print with the University of Arkansas Press.
As complicated as that process is, as long as the “negotiations” took — very much worthwhile to get it done.
Kellams: All right, I can’t wait. I have not been to the space yet, so I cannot wait to see it.
Youngblood: Oh, great. And I will say also our reading room, which is open to the public — 9 to 4 Monday through Friday — will be featured. If you haven’t been to our new reading room, I’d love for you to come by.
We’re going to be featuring Fay Jones drawings there, as well as selections from the archives of Florence Price, the African American composer from Little Rock. We’re very proud to be the home of her archive. We’ll have some Florence Price material on display, Fay Jones, and the other collections I’ve talked about. So it should be a lot for everyone to see.
Kellams: Thanks so much for coming in.
Youngblood: Thanks for having me.
Joshua Youngblood is the associate dean for Special Collections at the University of Arkansas. The Archives Month open house is Thursday, Oct. 30, from 4:30 until 6:30 p.m. at Mullins Library on the U of A campus. The event is open to the public. We talked earlier this month in the Anthony and Susan Hui News Studio.
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