Archival Ardor

I scheduled visits to twenty-six ACA member colleges who chose to participate in an inventory of college archives, special collections, museum artifacts, and other similar materials needing preservation. I traveled Kentucky, North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia. During each visit, I worked with librarians and archivists to identify collections. I gave each collection a name and counted the number of items or boxes in that collection. Materials ranged from the Presidential collections and papers of Andrew JOhnson and Abraham Lincoln to collections of Native American arrowheads and Appalachian rural life artifacts. Several colleges had large audio and video collections. The detailed inventories were sent to the participating colleges so that the archives and library may be able to use that report on campus. The purpose of this inventory was to document the kinds of materials and breadth of subject matter available at ACA member colleges which may have preservation and/or digitization needs. These needs may be met in the future dependent upon a future assessment by subject specialists to determine scholarly value of these collections. This project was funded by the Andrew Mellon Foundation. The .pdf version of the summary report may be downloaded here. (I did not include the title page since it named the grant number.) I also took photos of college campuses and of the college archives and collections.

This collection documents changes in welfare rights, miners' rights, mine health and safety, strip mining, and women's rights, among other things, in the Southern Appalachian Region. It all began with 237 cubic feet of unprocessed and unorganized materials, resulting in 268 manuscript document boxes arranged into 16 series. My work continued as I created the print finding aid and online finding aid. The finding aid for this collection, as well as one for the first set of CSM documents (1912-1970) is located online in the Southern Appalachian Archives collections. I also created an Online Exhibition featuring summaries of CSM's activism in Appalachia during the 1970s and 1980s. I included a number of photos, a timeline documenting CSM's projects and activities, and a page listing various resources. The online exhibition was to act as a stand-in for the on-location exhibition which was being delayed elsewhere on campus. The online exhibition is modeled after the Library of Congress online exhibitions.

While pursuing my M.L.I.S. at the University of Southern Mississippi, I worked as a student assistant in the McCain Archives. Under Ms. Arnold's direction, I first worked on the Gandy (Edythe Evelyn) Papers. I processed 42 scrapbooks of newspaper clippings and other materials that documented Gandy's public service career in Mississippi from 1959 - 1983. At the moment the collection is still listed as unprocessed due to outside circumstances.

Next, I reorganized the two collections, Hardy (William H. and Hattie L.) Papers and Hardy (William H. and Sallie J.) Papers. I also edited the pre-existing finding aids so it would properly reflect the collections and made them ready for online access.

A second personal website dedicated to a more visual history of family. This is a collection of old family photographs organized by name and genealogical association. It features photos of Shropshire, Payne, Grider, Gorin, and Heller genealogies. It is my desire to redesign this website to incorporate a searchable database with a record for each digital photo. For now all photos are posted as thumbnails on an individual's page. This project was inspired during my M.L.I.S. master thesis research. There is much I would change on this site now since I have learned so much since its creation, but I think it portrays my love and appreciation for digitizing old photos and documenting family histories visually.

This personal website was a labor of love for family, oral history, and Southern culture. It is a collection of oral histories with Kay Heller, Tommy Shropshire, and Doss Shropshire. In these transcriptions, siblings Kay, Tommy, and Doss describe what life was like growing up in small town Rolling Fork, Mississippi, in the 1950s through early 1970s. This first project was an undergraduate assignment in my studies at the University of Mississippi, but eventually my hope is to expand it to include others' oral histories who grew up in Rolling Fork, MS, during that those changing years.