October is American Archives Month, 31 days allowing for the celebration of the preservation of history and voices, from the National Archives in Washington, D.C., to the genealogy department at your local library.
In the spirit of American Archives Month, we’re checking in on Special Collections at the University of Arkansas, housed on the first floor of Mullins Library in the central part of the UofA campus. Yesterday, we explored some of the oldest objects in Special Collections. Today, more about the mission and general collection.
Casiday Long, research services coordinator for Special Collections, and Jennifer Day, director of public services for the department, met me in the collections reading room last month. Casiday Long says this space is the public access point for all the archives.
“The work that our archivists do is very important, but wouldn’t mean as much unless people were able to interact with it. And so in the reading room, any topic that people can really think of, historical or not, we have materials for.
“For example, right now we have a lot of students with an Ozarks history class that are doing research for that topic. We have people that do a lot of political research with Senator Fulbright’s papers and Mark Pryor or David Pryor’s papers. And like I said, if you can think of a topic, we probably have things that can satisfy your curiosity.”
Indeed, if your curiosity bends toward a familiar Arkansas figure or subject, say, architects Fay Jones or Edward Durell Stone, or composers like Florence Price or William Grant Still, or politicians like J. William Fulbright or Asa Hutchinson, this place has you covered. But the far more obscure can be explored here as well. There is a box with the label “Feral Hogs,” for example.
Jennifer Day says this reading room, open 9 to noon and 1 to 4 Monday through Friday, and the contents of Special Collections experience a 50-50 split between on-campus and community users.
Much of this material becomes available through work that is done just behind the reading room in the digitization lab. This room is a shrine to shifting technologies. Here are machines that convert old media to digital files. This microfilm reader. A reel-to-reel machine. DVD players. A turntable. Cassette deck. Able to take a document or sound from the past 110-plus years and convert the words or syllables.
“We do it all in-house, and so if people request an item, we can digitize it and email it to them if they can’t make it in person. The goal is to always digitize something only one time to reduce its amount of use. So once we digitize something, we put it on our catalog so that other people know it’s already been digitized and it’s easier for them to access that way.”
There are plenty of pieces of history here eligible to be digitized beyond this lab. With the turn of a tumbler wheel, scores of shelves are revealed, each with stacks of books, documents and papers. Casiday Long says if something relates to Arkansas, you can likely find it here.
“There are kind of two, three if counting architecture records, but kind of two main divisions in our holdings. And one is manuscript boxes. So kind of the more traditional boxes, folders, papers. And then the other side of that is books.
“And we have two collections, main collections within our books that we hold in Special Collections. One is the Arkansas Collection, which is the largest amount of Arkansiana publications anywhere.”
So anything about or by an Arkansan is in this part of the library. Every novel by writers like Charlaine Harris, creator of the True Blood series, or Donald Harington or Ellen Gilchrist, here.
“It’s written by an Arkansan, it’s here. If it’s written about an Arkansan, it’s here. Or we at least try to have it here.”
Pulitzer Prize-winning poet John Gould Fletcher’s work is here, as are the books he cherished. He donated his personal library to the University of Arkansas. Past the Arkansas shelves, rare and international books.
“They’re usually purchased for classes, so we have a lot of Italian literature from all different eras because we work a lot with our World Languages department. We have a lot of Spanish material for the same reason.”
Architecture is also a major component in this room. Catherine Wallack, architectural records archivist, opens a drawer on one of the many cases stored here, holding architectural plans and blueprints.
“We have in the neighborhood of, I think, 50-plus map cases or flat files, each of which has five drawers in it for the oversized materials, much of that being the architectural collection. And they get heavy with material.”
She randomly selects plans created by Arkansan Neil H. Park, one of the first professionally trained landscape architects to practice in Arkansas. He was honored with the Rome Prize for Landscape Architecture in 1933.
“He did work for U.S. institutional work and designed residential projects for some of the biggest names, particularly in Little Rock.”
There are three-dimensional records here, too, models of projects by architects like Fay Jones that were never built.
“This is an unbuilt chapel. And this is a project that I think it was in Eureka Springs for some monks, the Hermitage model. And this was, I believe, surrounded by water. Really interesting project and an interesting form for Fay Jones, too, this roughly circular one with the skylight on there. And then that characteristic kind of naming, webby framing up there.”
Research of these materials can celebrate the creativity of Arkansas, but there can also be research done here about lynchings in Arkansas, the devastating floods of 1927 that killed thousands and diseases that claimed lives in a poor state. There’s so much information here that Jennifer Day and Casiday Long say they can often be surprised by what is here.
“Absolutely. I think it would take many years to discover all of the wonderful things that are preserved here in the Special Collections.”
“But our processors that you’ll meet here later on are definitely kind of the front line of knowing what we have because they see all the things unprocessed, so they don’t even know what’s in a box.
“By the time it gets to us in the reading room, it’s been cataloged. We know what’s in there, but the processors definitely get the jack-in-the-box surprise of what’s in each box.”
Just how those jack-in-the-box surprises are found, recorded, categorized, digitized and made available to us, that’s the subject of our next visit to Special Collections on tomorrow’s Ozarks at Large.
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