Collections

Ready to Research: Newly Processed Collections Asian American Resource Workshop and the Fenway Alliance

Black and white image of people marching and holding signs
Demonstration against the construction of the DD Ramp into Chinatown, circa 1997, photographer Anne Marie Booth. Asian American Resource Workshop records, Northeastern University Archives and Special Collections.

Introducing the Asian American Resource Workshop Finding Aid
Contributed by Dominique Medal

The Asian American Resource Workshop (AARW) was founded in 1979 as one of Boston’s first pan-Asian organizations. AARW expanded from an initial focus on cultural and educational programming to addressing social and economic justice issues facing the Asian American community, including violence against Asian Americans and urban renewal and development in Chinatown.

Two women painting a mural
Two women painting a mural of faces, circa 1990, photographer unknown. Asian American Resource Workshop records, Northeastern University Archives and Special Collections.

The records held by the Northeastern University Archives and Special Collections date from 1979 to 2012 and document AARW’s activities through administrative records, photographs, reports, documentaries, promotional materials, and subject files.

The collection focuses on AARW programs, including Asian and Pacific American Heritage Week, the Boston Asian American Film Festival, the Civil Rights Capacity Building Project, the SafetyNet Violence Prevention Project, and the Sticky Rice Project.

To learn more about the Asian American Resource Workshop records, explore the finding aid and digitized content from the collection in the Digital Repository Service.

Introducing the Fenway Alliance Finding Aid
Contributed by Irene Gates

The Fenway Alliance is a consortium of Fenway neighborhood cultural organizations and educational institutions (including Northeastern University). It was first founded in 1977 as The Boston Plan. The consortium addresses areas of shared concern that range from security and parking to physical improvements of the neighborhood.

The records date from the 1970s to the 2010s and document the administrative records, plans, reports, photographs, and subject files. A recent donation by the organization’s Director of Planning from the late 1970s to the 1990s includes photographic slides such as the one featured here.

A body of water with lush trees and grass behind it. A stone bridge is visible in the distance
Back Bay Fens, July 1988, photographer unknown. Fenway Alliance records, Northeastern University Archives and Special Collections.

Collection topics include Fenway area transportation, housing, demographics, physical landscape, historic preservation, and cultural programming. Some major projects undertaken by the Fenway Alliance in the past include the Avenue of the Arts designation, the Fenway Cultural District designation, and the Muddy River restoration.

To learn more about the Fenway Alliance records, explore the finding aid.

Sourcery Request Button is Live for Archives & Special Collections

Sourcery logo

For the past several years, Northeastern University Archives and Special Collections has partnered with the University of Connecticut’s Greenhouse Studios to test and pilot Sourcery. Sourcery is a platform that aims to remotely connect researchers with primary sources at a variety of cultural heritage institutions through scan requests. With this mission, the Sourcery team hopes to provide broader access to archival materials for any researcher anywhere.

Icon of the Sourcery button

The newest development for this project is a Sourcery button that can be found in the archives’ finding aid catalog, ArchivesSpace. When users view a specific collection’s finding aid, the Sourcery button will appear. Clicking it will generate a citation of the collection’s series or folder currently being viewed and bring the user directly to Sourcery to make a request for a specific file from the institution where the collection is located.

To use Sourcery for archival research, create an account at the Sourcery app website. Once registered, requests can be made directly from the Northeastern University Archives and Special Collections’ finding aid catalog via the purple Sourcery button in the upper right corner of the page.

A tip for researchers: The more specific, the better! While the Sourcery button appears the moment you open a collection’s finding aid, try navigating within the finding aid’s organization to provide a more granular citation. Making requests for specific items within a collection by going to that item’s (or file’s) page will greatly help archives staff fulfill requests in a timely manner.

Screenshot of Sourcery in action

As the archives continues to prepare for a full opening, staff are looking forward to assisting researchers on any platform!

For more information about Sourcery’s progress, visit their substack blog.

Washington Post Now Available

The Northeastern University Library is pleased to announce that we now offer online access to the Washington Post for all current Northeastern faculty, staff, and students.

The new subscription allows the Northeastern community to keep up with breaking news and opinion directly through the Washington Post website at washingtonpost.com or wapo.com. Northeastern readers will be able to select and read all articles without encountering a paywall, as well as share 10 “gift” articles with non-subscriber friends each month. Access includes the Washington Post app, photos, video, audio, reader comments, newsletters, and yes, games and crosswords.

The Washington Post is an important newspaper of record, with the largest circulation in the greater Washington, D.C., area. Its strengths are inside-the-beltway political coverage, national and international news, and a tradition of award-winning investigative journalism.

Setting up access to the Washington Post is easy! Create an account with your Northeastern email address and then follow these instructions to activate free digital access.

As always, we welcome your feedback and please let us know if you need assistance with your account setup.

Boston Globe Archival Advisory: Highlighting the Dairy Festival

This blog post is the first in a series by members of the Northeastern University Library’s Digital Production Services and Archives and Special Collections teams sharing their favorite images and their role in the Boston Globe Library Collection digitization project.

My name is Kim Kennedy and I’m the Digital Production Librarian in the Northeastern University Library. In our recent push to digitize Boston photographs from the Boston Globe Library photo morgue, I coordinated the work with our vendor Picturae. In four months, they digitized 59 boxes of material. I developed a workflow to perform quality control checks on the digitized items and helped prepare them for upload to our Digital Repository. Most of these images are limited to the Northeastern community while we determine the rights status of the photographs, but a subset has been reviewed and is available to the public.

Some of my favorite images are of the Boston Common Dairy Festival, an annual event in which cows returned to the Boston Common (in the 17th and 18th centuries, the Common was used as a cow pasture by colonists).

Black and white image of three children posing next to a fake cow with a sign that says Milk Products
Roy Magnussen, Greg Gannon, and David Bruno pose with the Dutch Cow, a paper mache cow made by a third-grade class in Raynham, June 6, 1973. Photo by Ed Farrand, Boston Globe Library Collection
Black and white image of two girls feeding hay to a cow
Sandra Lee Nickerson and Vicky Lynn Nickerson of Rockland feed hay to a cow at the 15th annual Dairy Festival on May 30, 1970. Photo by Charles Carey, Boston Globe Library Collection
Black and white image of a girl looking at a bull
The Dairy Festival on June 5, 1967. Photo by Joe Dennehy, Boston Globe Library Collection

Here are some resources to learn more about the Boston Common Dairy Festival:

Boston’s Uncommon Park; Common and Garden Provide Togetherness in 75-Acre Refuge, September 27, 1964, New York Times

An Uncommon Common, August 28. 1994, Boston Globe

The Singing Cowsills to Sing Out for “Cowes” During Boston Common Dairy Festival, June 1969, Vermont Farm Bureau News

Reflecting on reparative description initiatives in the Digital Repository Service

In an effort to engage in reparative description and a desire to improve the Library’s approach to processing and publishing digital collections by incorporating inclusive, non-discriminatory principles into our workflows, the Digital Production Services Department has been seeking new methods of description for digital collections that do not perpetuate harm to our patrons or to the communities described in the collections.

Admittedly, these are not new concepts. Building on the work of institutions and organizations such as the Digital Transgender Archive, Digital Public Library of America, and Digital Commonwealth (along with a host of other colleges and universities), our department has chosen to move forward with a three-pronged approach:

  1. Creating an actionable list of reparative metadata practices we can engage in on the item and collection level with the Library and Archives’ collections in the Digital Repository Service (DRS).
  2. Implementing updates for the upcoming version of the DRS, including new and expanded features which support inclusive description and mitigate harm.
  3. Writing and generating institutional buy-in for a library-wide statement on conscious and inclusive description of our resources.

Much of this work is still underway, but we have made a lot of progress generating item-level statements to provide context to sensitive and questionable materials. We documented criteria for selecting items that need statements, instigated a regular group review with members of Archives for content that rises to the need of consideration, created thematic categories of content that merits item-level statements, and generated documentation to track and manage the addition of these statements to DRS resources. We have currently added contextual statements to over 120 individual items with our institutional repository. If you would like to review these materials in greater detail, here is a link to a set of materials we’ve added statements to (some materials may require you to sign into the DRS).

Here are some statistics from the initial implementation of this work:

  • Over 50% of the sensitive content contains overt racism or other forms of discrimination. The next most common category is graphic description of bodily harm, which almost exclusively comes from the Boston Globe Library Collection.
  • The content types vary, but almost 80% of identified digital objects are photographic in nature, with a much smaller portion of textual or audiovisual materials.
  • Two most commonly used statements are as follows:
    • This item has been flagged for racist or harmful content. We are preserving and making this item available as part of the historical record, but it does not reflect the values of Northeastern University Library. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact the Northeastern University Library Archives and Special Collections at archives@northeastern.edu.
    • This item has been flagged for a graphic depiction of bodily harm that may not be appropriate for all audiences. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact the Northeastern University Library Archives and Special Collections at archives@northeastern.edu.

Takeaways from patterns we have noticed in the process of identifying materials for statements:

  • As an institution that collects a wide variety of community-focused Civil Rights Era materials, there are a lot of items within the DRS that benefit from additional context and/or acknowledgement. For example, the Freedom House, Inc., records (M16, public collection) follows the institutional history of a community organizing group built to centralize activism for neighborhood improvement, quality education, and social, racial, and religious harmony in Roxbury, Mass. They collected a number of materials from an anti-busing racial hate group called ROAR, whose pamphlets and press releases we have digitized and added content statements to.
  • Photographs often lack context on the item level and therefore can be more jarring in their sensitivity. This is especially evident in the Boston Globe Library Collection, which contains thousands of print photographs taken by newspaper staff or contract photographers. Organized by topical subjects, the photo archive contains imagery related to difficult themes such as anti-busing demonstrations, fires, crime, and bombings.
  • There are items in the DRS which may be upsetting to some viewers, but after reaching consensus with the Archives staff, we do not feel that they rise to the level of needing contextual statements, given that their visual meaning is derived from their academic and research merit, such as marine animal necropsy photos in the Ocean Genome Legacy Project (public collection).

Ultimately, this is an ongoing process—one that will continue to need reflection and consideration from Library and Archives staff, as well as additional research on what other respected institutions are doing to provide context and mitigate harm. Inclusive descriptive practice is iterative, and as we continue this work, we will continue to reflect on the most effective ways to serve our users.