Collections

Library Receives CPA Grant to Digitize “Black Art and Joy in Boston (and Beyond)”

Black and white image of Elma Lewis writing at a desk while wearing a cap and gown
Elma Lewis at the New England Conservatory of Music where she was conferred an honorary degree in 1977

The Northeastern University Library is proud to announce that the Archives and Special Collections has been awarded a City of Boston Community Preservation Act (CPA) grant to fund the project Black Art and Joy in Boston (and Beyond): Elma Lewis and the National Center of Afro-American Artists. This grant of almost $460,000 will support the digitization, cataloging, and publication of primary source materials from four archival collections that document the extraordinary work of Elma Lewis (1921-2004) and the cultural institutions she founded.

Dan Cohen, Vice President for Information Collaboration and Dean of the Northeastern University Library, said, “The University Archives and Special Collections department carefully preserves and protects access to some of the deep history and stories of Boston’s Black community. This project will augment and complement their and the Library’s Digital Production team’s effort to digitize significant portions of the Freedom House’s historical collection. We are thrilled to partner with the City of Boston and the Community Preservation team on this project.”

Lewis was a transformative force who trained a full generation of African American dancers, singers, musicians, actors, and visual artists in Boston. She formed the Elma Lewis School of Fine Arts in 1950 and established the National Center of Afro-American Artists in 1968, along with its museum in 1969. Her outsized influence on the Black arts movement in Boston, and how her ideas and techniques spread nationally and internationally, represents a crucial chapter in the city’s cultural history.

Black and white image of ballet dance class
A ballet class at the Elma Lewis School of Fine Arts, 1975
A green program for the Elma Lewis School of Fine Arts Children's Theatre presentation of FACES (A Play with Music)
A program for a children’s play at the Elma Lewis School of Fine Arts in 1981

This project amplifies the voices of those who were in Lewis’s orbit as teachers, collaborators, or students. It also highlights the influence of Afrocentric organizations on Boston, a necessary element to understanding Black civil rights work in the city and the rich network of organizations and individuals focused on community-building and empowerment.

The digitized collections will shed light on the decades of labor and coalition-building that are foundational to Boston’s existing Black arts infrastructure. By publishing them online, we make this history accessible to Bostonians at any time and for any purpose, while also reaching larger local and national audiences through participation in Digital Commonwealth and the Digital Public Library of America.

The curricular potential of this collection represents one of its most valuable forms of impact. The project will build on the successful Boston Public Schools Desegregation Collection, a collaboratively built collection of scanned archival materials documenting the desegregation of Boston’s public schools, in collaboration with the district itself. That project demonstrated how archival materials can be integrated into K-12 curriculum design, bringing primary source materials directly into classrooms across the city.

An archival box from the Elma Lewis collection, with a selection of photos and papers
A box of archival materials from National Center of Afro-American Artists records and some of its contents

These digital collections will enable Bostonians, including relatives and friends of those who appear in the collections, to access this evidence of their community’s rich cultural history. The materials will be freely available online, searchable, and integrated with our existing digital collections to provide a deeper and richer pool of resources illustrating the activities and accomplishments of Boston’s Black residents and leaders.

As we embark on this preservation effort, we honor not only Elma Lewis’s remarkable legacy but also the ongoing vitality of the Black arts movement in Boston that she helped establish. Through the CPA’s support, we ensure that future generations will have access to these invaluable records of creativity, resilience, and community building.

For more information about the project, please contact Giordana Mecagni at g.mecagni@northeastern.edu or 617-373-8318.

To learn more about what collections from Elma Lewis we hold, visit our research guide Finding Elma Lewis in the Northeastern University Archives and Special Collections.

This blog post was co-written by Giordana Mecagni, Head of Archives and Special Collections, and Molly Brown, Reference and Outreach Archivist.

Molly Dupere, BLC Group Win ALA STARS Award

Headshop of Molly Dupere, a smiling woman with curly blond hair and a black blouse standing in front of a shelf of books
Molly Dupere

As Northeastern University’s community continues to expand, the library strives to provide equitable access to our resources, maintaining an e-preferred collections policy. For items outside of our collections, interlibrary loan is integral—and this service includes borrowing e-books whenever possible.

In 2023, representatives from 11 member institutions within the Boston Library Consortium (BLC) formed the eBook Sharing Working Group. I was proud to co-chair the group with Marc Hoffeditz, Resource Sharing Manager of the BLC. Pamela Diaz, Northeastern’s Resource Sharing Lending Coordinator, was also a member. Our charges were:

  • Investigating a vendor-neutral, consortial approach to e-book borrowing and lending.
  • Crafting documentation to detail e-book borrowing and lending procedures, including license negotiations, holding considerations, system alterations, and adaptable workflows.
  • Exploring potential avenues for consortial e-book sharing, advocacy, and group acquisitions.
Cover of E-Book ILL Roadmaps

After a year of work, research, and collaboration with the greater BLC community, we published the E-Book ILL Roadmaps: Charting Pathways for Broader Adoption of E-Book Interlibrary Loan in June 2024. Later that year, Marc and I presented at the BLC Forum, the Northwest ILL Conference, and the Access Services Conference, and we were happy to learn that the Roadmaps won the American Library Association’s 2025 STARS Publication Recognition Award. We are excited about the potential for libraries across the world to implement them in their own ILL departments.

A Decade of the Digital Repository Service

Northeastern University Library’s institutional repository, the Digital Repository Service, is celebrating 10 years of caring for the university’s scholarly, archival, and administrative high-value materials. From day one, the mission of the DRS has been to provide a long-term, sustainable home for the born digital and digitized content being produced by members of the Northeastern community.

More than just a technical system, the DRS is a service provided by the library to help solve a common problem for faculty, staff, students, researchers, and project teams: where can I store the digital output from my work? The DRS allows these projects developed at Northeastern to be maintained and shared with a wider audience. In addition to maintaining the DRS system, services provided by DRS staff include running training sessions, answering questions, consulting, and depositing files for users.

Side-by-side depiction of two versions of the Digital Repository Service homepage
The 2012 DRS prototype and the 2025 version.

Originally developed as a prototype in 2011, the system was created by a library team — three developers, the repository manager, a Northeastern co-op, and a library administrator — with the goal of constructing a completely realized system ready for production. The first version was ready to be used fully by the Northeastern community in June 2015.

The DRS was launched with some rough edges, which were slowly smoothed into the system users are familiar with today. We have received tremendous response from users about the usefulness of the system, as well as thoughtful and constructive feedback about how the system can be improved (e.g. faster page load times, better search functionality, and more control over files, among others).

The DRS homepage displayed on a laptop screen with a hand typing on the computer's keyboard
The DRS, as it appeared in 2015.

We have done our best to grow with the university community as its needs shift by increasing support for datasets, loading large batches of files on behalf of users and project teams, and tripling our original storage capacity, but there is always more to be done to meet the needs of our users.

The shape of the content stored in the DRS has shifted over the years, as well. Initially just for theses and dissertations, university photographs, and archival material, the DRS now fully supports various types of project materials for digital humanities research, datasets for researchers in various disciplines, oral histories, and many others.

Since its launch, DRS content has been viewed, downloaded, or streamed more than 1.1 million times, and we’ve had more than 13,000 members of the Northeastern community sign into the system. The DRS averages approximately 2,000 unique visitors and 4,000 views, downloads, and streams a day.

Screenshot of a DRS display of a research poster titled "Investigating and addressing the needs of research support staff"
The DRS provides a home for and access to research and projects by members of the Northeastern community.

The success of the system can be attributed to the combined efforts of staff in many library departments, including development and system administration from Library Technology Services and Digital Infrastructures; outreach and faculty support from Research and Instruction; data management support from Research Data Services; issue triage and metadata collaboration with Resource and Discovery Services; and continual support and advocacy from library administration. And, of course, Digital Production Services, the department primarily responsible for maintaining the system and supporting the service through digital production, metadata maintenance, and user support.

The DRS is not the first system of its kind supported by the library. It adopted its first repository system in the early 2000s, followed by IRis in 2007. The library’s commitment to maintaining the scholarly output of the university was formed during those early years, a commitment we have refined and strengthened over the more than 20 years of dedicated support for faculty, staff, and students working to help fulfill the university’s mission. It’s been a great pleasure to support the Northeastern community in this way, and we look forward to the next 10 years and beyond.

Box by Box: Inventorying the Frederick Salvucci Papers

By Julia Lee and Aleks Renerts

Processing assistants Julia Lee and Aleks Renerts recently went through more than 150 boxes of papers belonging to transportation and infrastructure leader Frederick Salvucci. Salvucci’s contributions to infrastructure are numerous: you can become familiar with the scope of his impact by reading his Wikipedia page and listening to his oral history with Head of Archives and Special Collections and University Archivist Giordana Mecagni. The papers he donated to Northeastern encompass his time at MIT, where he has taught since the late 1970s, and document infrastructure projects students were involved in and that he advised on throughout the world.

With the goal of improving access to these records for researchers, Julia and Aleks went through each box carefully, refoldering materials and assigning descriptive keywords. They have selected a few items from the collection to highlight.

“The Inner Belt” Belt

A black belt with "THE INNER BELT" in white lettering

This commemorative wearable belt is a pun referencing the Inner Belt project. The Inner Belt was a proposed eight-lane highway that would have connected I-93 to I-90 and I-95, stretching from Somerville through Cambridge, across the Boston University Bridge, and through Boston and Roxbury. Plans for the highway would have placed major intersections along its length, disrupting the landscape of many of the neighborhoods of Greater Boston. In the late 1960s and ’70s, construction of the highway was blocked by the actions of a group of city planners, community activists, universities, and politicians, including Salvucci. The defeat of the Inner Belt project marks a significant moment in the history of Boston, transportation in the city, and its history of urban development, as well as setting the tone for Salvucci’s career and focus on the role of community in transportation.

MIT Commencement Exercises

Pink cover labeled "Massachusetts Institute of Technology Commencement Exercises 1994." "Killian Court, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Friday, May 27, 1994, 10:00 AM" In the center of the page is a circular photo of a domed building

Salvucci taught at MIT as a senior lecturer from 1978-1983 and from 1991 to the present. He has taught courses on transportation and urban planning through the Department of Civil Engineering and worked for MIT’s Center for Transportation Studies (now the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics). Salvucci’s students were conscious of his impact in the field. Comments on his teaching from the Spring 1991 term repeatedly emphasized his knowledge, experience, and enthusiasm for the material. His ability to give students insight into the “real world” of transportation and civil engineering was praised, and my personal favorite comment creates a delightfully succinct picture of the Salvucci classroom experience: “Great war stories with great analysis.”

Document with a variety of images of trains, railroad tracks, wheels, and construction sites. It reads "Tercer Encuentro UPR / MIT, 8-15 de enero de 1997, Tren Urbano, Auspician: UPR, MIT, DTOP, GMAEC, CIIC

Tren Urbano Encuentro Reports

The MIT/UPR Encuentro Reports represent the nine-year partnership between the MIT Transit Lab, the Puerto Rican Transportation Authority, and the University of Puerto Rico (UPR). From the 1990s to the 2000s, MIT students, overseen by Salvucci, collaborated with students from UPR to “study and advise on the design, operation, and scheduling of the Tren Urbano rail system.” The encuentro (meeting) reports demonstrate the specific concerns and strategies relevant to the Tren Urbano project and showcase student contributions over several years of consultation. This collaborative project formed the model for future partnerships between MIT and various transit authorities around the world, many of which are also well-represented in Salvucci’s work and papers.

Statement of Strategy, London Transport

Cover of a "Statement of Strategy 1994-1997 London Transport." Cover has a blue background with cartoon images of people waiting under an "Underground" sign and people walking onto a red double decker bus

Boston was not the only city to benefit from Salvucci’s knowledge. Through MIT, he worked with Transport for London (TfL), the government body in charge of most of London’s transportation network, on their Crossrail project. Crossrail, as its name suggests, involved the creation of a new east-west rail line through London with connections to existing major train routes in the UK. Today, it is known as the Elizabeth Line, as Crossrail was the name specific to the construction project. Salvucci’s papers at Northeastern include correspondence and reports from his involvement with TfL that document both Crossrail and the beginnings of London’s Oyster card fare system. I’m personally appreciative of Salvucci’s work in London, as it was the Elizabeth Line that got me to and from Heathrow Airport during a recent trip to the UK.

To learn more about accessing the Frederick Salvucci papers, email the Northeastern University Archives and Special Collections at archives@northeastern.edu.

Julia Lee (she/her) is in her first year of the Simmons University Library and Information Science graduate program. She received her BA from Northeastern University with a combined major in English and theatre.

Aleks Renerts (he/him) recently completed a dual MA degree in history and library and information science, with a concentration in archives management, from Simmons University. He received his BA in history from McGill University.

Ready to Research: Roxbury Tenants of Harvard records (Jeane Neville) and Ken Kruckemeyer papers

Two recently processed collections document the organizing power of everyday Bostonians who fought development proposals that would have negatively impacted their neighborhoods.

Roxbury Tenants of Harvard records (Jeane Neville)

The Tenants' View newsletter of the Roxbury Tenants (of Harvard) Association: May 7, 1970. Headline is "Harvard Agrees to Basics of Our Housing Plan!" and includes an article, map, and announcement for an upcoming Neighborhood meeting
The Tenants’ View newsletter, May 7, 1970. Roxbury Tenants of Harvard (Jeane Neville) records, Northeastern University Archives and Special Collections

The Roxbury Tenants of Harvard (RTH) formed in 1969 to oppose Harvard University’s proposed expansion into the Mission Hill neighborhood, which would have displaced residents. RTH was successful in pressuring Harvard to build a relocation housing development instead of a teaching hospital complex.

The RTH collection captures the unfolding of events, and the negotiations between RTH and Harvard University, over the course of the 1960s and ’70s through meeting minutes and agendas, notes, reports, flyers, canvas sheets, writings, correspondence, and media coverage. Jeane Neville, a Radcliffe student in the late ’60s, became involved in organizing the Mission Hill residents; these records were retained by her and donated to the Northeastern University Archives and Special Collections by her brother Padraic Neville after her death.

To learn more about the Roxbury Tenants of Harvard (Jeane Neville) records, explore the finding aid.

Ken Kruckemeyer papers

Hand-drawn map of proposed highways in Boston, outlined with snakes. Title reads "Caution! Highly Poisonous" with a skull and crossbones. Bottom left corner reads "Cuidado bastante peligroso!"
Cover illustration by D. Chandler Jr. of bilingual “Stop Turnpikes Over People” informational resource, undated. Ken Kruckemeyer papers, Northeastern University Archives and Special Collections

An architect by training, Ken Kruckemeyer began organizing around issues such as transit and housing in the 1960s after moving to the South End. He soon became involved in the local anti-highway movement of that period. His papers document anti-highway activism, as well as activism around Tent City and Melnea Cass Boulevard. They also document the planning, environmental impact studies, and construction of the Southwest Corridor Project, for which Kruckemeyer served as project manager.

Explore meeting materials, reports, studies, notes, correspondence, newsletters, flyers, and more in Kruckemeyer’s papers. To learn more about what’s in the collection, check out the finding aid.

To access the Roxbury Tenants of Harvard (Jeane Neville) records or the Ken Kruckemeyer papers, email Northeastern University Archives and Special Collections at archives@northeastern.edu.