News from the Field

David Free

UNC-Chapel Hill joins project to investigate slavery and U.S. universities through archival records

In 2005, archivists at the University of North Carolina (UNC)-Chapel Hill developed “Slavery and the Making of the University.” The exhibition was one of the first systematic efforts on campus to examine the ways enslaved people enabled the university’s founding, growth, and wealth. Sixteen years later, a new generation of archivists at the Wilson Special Collections Library is leading efforts to reconstruct the lived experiences of enslaved individuals at and around the university.

Their efforts are part of On These Grounds: Slavery and the University, a national collaborative project that takes a new approach to archival documents and the way archivists describe them. At the heart of the project is a database built around enslaved individuals and milestones or experiences in their lives, such as being born or dying, being sold or leased, receiving medical care, being baptized, or laboring in a particular location or at a trade. If enough institutions encode their slavery-related records using the same terms and data structures, and then enter that information into a single database, the compilation could eventually illuminate the lives of enslaved people and allow researchers to trace those lives through disparate documents.

On These Grounds was developed collaboratively at Michigan State University, Georgetown University, and the University of Virginia, in partnership with web publishing platform Omeka. A grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation supports the work and will provide $14,000 to fund a graduate student to work on the project. Learn more about the project at https://onthesegrounds.org/s/OTG/page/about.

Nominations sought for ACRL Board of Directors

Be a part of shaping the future of ACRL. The ACRL Leadership Recruitment and Nominations Committee (LRNC) encourages members to nominate themselves or others to run for the position of ACRL vice-president/president-elect and director-at-large in the 2023 elections. The deadline for nominations is February 15, 2022.

To nominate an individual or to self-nominate, please submit the nomination form available at www.surveymonkey.com/r/acrlboardnominations. LRNC will request a curriculum vita and/or a statement of interest from selected individuals prior to developing a slate of candidates.

If you have any questions about the nominating or election process, please feel free to contact LRNC Chair Rachel M. Minkin at minkinr@msu.edu. More information about the ACRL Board of Directors is available on the ACRL website at www.ala.org/acrl/resources/policies/chapter2.

Texas A&M University Libraries help preserve SEC history

The Texas A&M University Libraries Preservation Unit teamed up with the Southeastern Conference (SEC) to save decades worth of historical documents related to the athletic conference. SEC began working with the University Libraries in 2018 on how to best preserve the conference’s historical records and documents spanning more than nine decades. A team of experts from the University Libraries Preservation Unit traveled to SEC headquarters in Birmingham, Alabama, to meet with conference officials and assess the collection and determine the best course of action for the preservation efforts. A year later, the Preservation Unit began processing SEC’s historic records and objects.

All digitization, digital file processing, rehousing, conservation treatments, and logistics were handled exclusively by the University Libraries’ Preservation Unit faculty, staff, and student employees and were completed at the end of summer 2021. The work included scanning more than 21,000 pages of historical records. Once the work was completed, the Preservation Unit presented SEC with a full written report of work completed, including guidance for continued excellence in collections stewardship for storage, exhibition, as well as the digital preservation of their new digital collection produced from this project.

PALCI, NISO announce consortium agreement

The Partnership for Academic Library Collaboration & Innovation (PALCI) and the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) have announced a consortium agreement to provide NISO Library Standards Alliance (LSA) membership to all PALCI members for an initial period of three years, beginning January 2022.

The agreement will provide library staff at 73 PALCI member libraries with full LSA membership benefits, including free access to NISO’s educational webinar program, unlimited participation in NISO Working Groups/Standing Committees, and discounted registration for all nonwebinar events, including the annual NISO Plus conference.

As lead organization for the consortium, PALCI will continue to be a NISO Voting Member and will provide a central point of contact between NISO and the PALCI member organizations. Lehigh University, another PALCI member who had previously joined NISO, will also continue independently as a full NISO Voting Member.

Hill Museum & Manuscript Library creates understudied manuscript traditions database

The Hill Museum & Manuscript Library (HMML) at Saint John’s University has developed a new database to support and enhance the study of understudied manuscript traditions.

Created as part of a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), HMML Authority File is an open-access database, which establishes accurate and consistent data (“authorities”) for the names of persons, places, works, organizations, and families related to the manuscripts and artwork in HMML’s Reading Room and Museum, which provide free access to the collections of more than 800 libraries worldwide.

Authorities are used by libraries and scholars to identify and link manuscripts and collections. Many of the manuscripts HMML has preserved in Africa, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East contain names that have not been included in international authority files, making them harder to find and study.

In 2020, nearly 40 percent of HMML’s cataloged manuscripts contained names that lacked authorities in either the Library of Congress or the Virtual International Authority File. Today, authorities added to HMML Authority File are also added to the Library of Congress’s Name Authority Cooperative Program as part of HMML’s partnership in the Program for Cooperative Cataloging.

Currently, more than 10,000 names have been added to HMML Authority File, with more than 50,000 names expected in the coming years. These efforts will support librarians and scholars around the world to recognize previously unknown contributors to manuscripts; differentiate authors and texts that had been treated homogeneously; reunite separated materials; and trace the migration of handwritten texts across religious traditions and geographic, political, and linguistic divides.

Learn more at https://haf.vhmml.org/.