1939 Year the Presidential Library System began. Franklin D. Roosevelt donated his presidential and personal documents to the federal government. 643 Number of hours of recorded telephone conversations the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum has collected. The conversation topics range from the assassination of JFK to dealing with the USSR. 45 Number of meetings … Continue reading By the Numbers: Presidential Libraries
Fostering Family History Services: A Guide for Librarians, Archivists, and Volunteers, by Rhonda L. Clark and Nicole Wedemeyer Miller, offers practical advice, with bibliographical notes, on how to establish a family history service within the framework of existing programming and outreach. The authors assert that providing family history resources is more about offering guidance and … Continue reading All in the Family
“It’s a very depressed area economically,” Gromalski says of Mahanoy City. “The coal region, which is made up of small towns, used to be booming. Now the mining industry has been gone for several decades, older people are getting older [and] younger people are moving away because there are no jobs.” To re-create pride in … Continue reading Community Reporting
Libraries have always played a role in preserving local history, but that job has become more complex as the formats in which materials may be available continue to multiply. On the other hand, the technologies to digitize and post local history resources online have become cheaper and more readily available, even to small libraries. Some … Continue reading Our Digital Heritage
Explore Chicago Collections is a consortium of 21 institutions located throughout the Chicago area that have pooled resources to offer a richer perspective of the city’s history. “We have all of these incredible archives and libraries here in Chicago,” says Scott Walter, university librarian at DePaul University and member of Explore Chicago Collections’ executive committee. … Continue reading All Together Now
Documentarian Ken Burns sits down for an interview with American Libraries to discuss his new children’s history book, Grover Cleveland, Again! He also reveals the common thread that unites nearly all United States presidents and presents an idea for improving the teaching of history.
Enter Christy Karpinski, who has since turned that internship into a permanent position as digital librarian and museum manager at Busy Beaver’s Button Museum, which now displays 9,000 pinback pieces of cultural history and ephemera. Karpinski’s background is in photography, but she has also made websites and organized digital collections of photos, which spurred an … Continue reading Bookend: Pushing Buttons
The answers lie in understanding the history of stereotypes in our profession and also in looking outside the profession to larger social conditions. We cannot separate our understanding of library stereotypes from the history of librarianship that influenced their development in the first place. Librarians are not explicitly responsible for the creation and perpetuation of … Continue reading The Stereotype Stereotype
The Marquis de Lafayette, a French aristocrat who fought for the US in the American Revolutionary War, is a ubiquitous but overlooked character in American history. He touched many significant events, people, and places: the Revolution, Herman Melville, Marie Antoinette, and also our modern parks, cities, and roads. The name “Lafayette” is everywhere in the US, … Continue reading On the Road with Lafayette
Your most recent book is a fascinating look at the Underground Railroad and antislavery networks of pre–Civil War New York City. Explain how you came across the document that shed new light on these events. ERIC FONER: It was totally accidental. Madeline Lewis, an undergraduate history major at Columbia who also worked for my family … Continue reading Newsmaker: Eric Foner
Musa Wakhungu Olaka, African global and international studies librarian at the University of Kansas, described the collaboration between the University of Southern Florida (USF) and Ibuka, an umbrella organization of various groups representing survivors of the 1994 Rwandan genocide. “The Rwandan genocide was a major tragedy to Rwanda and humanity,” Olaka said, “that resulted in … Continue reading Preserving Africa’s Heritage
Cambridge goes online Cambridge Archive Editions (CAE), in partnership with East View Information Services, has digitized its collection of British archival documents from the 18th to the 20th century, including original print volumes and accompanying maps, and made them available as online editions via the East View ebook platform. Twenty-five years’ worth of accumulated CAE … Continue reading Digitizing History
