Archives and Special Collections

Archives, Historical Records, Special Collections

Boston Public Schools collection project complete

The following is a series written by archivists, academics, activists, and educators making available primary source material, providing pedagogical support, and furthering the understanding of Boston Public School’s Desegregation history. The beginning of a multi-archival scanning project that would result in the Boston Public Schools Desegregation Collection occurred in 2014 after a collaboration with the Boston Public Schools on school desegregation curricula. Now, in 2018, six archives’ materials totaling in over 4,500 items have been unified through an effort of selection, scanning, and cataloging. As of February 1, the collection is now available for public research through a portal created by the Northeastern University Archives & Special Collections: https://bpsdesegregation.library.northeastern.edu. The portal includes guides on how to use the collection, materials for educators, and other resources including timelines, exhibits, and links to other school desegregation collections. You are invited you to explore the collection as you see fit, by browsing materials contextualized through the portal or by searching using the Digital Public Library of America widget on the home page. Materials narrating the experiences of students, teachers, parents, and other community members in the midst of school desegregation in Boston await you. This project was made possible by the collaborative efforts of the Northeastern University Archives and Special Collections, University Archives and Special Collections at UMass Boston, Boston College Libraries, the Moakley Archive and Institute at Suffolk University, the Boston City Archives, and the National Archives and Records Administration in Boston and the support of Digital Commonwealth and the Digital Public Library of America. Along with collaborative partnerships, this project received financial and administrative support from the Boston Library Consortium.

Northeastern Archives featured in “Empower : The Campaign for Northeastern University”

Empower : The Campaign for Northeastern University

Northeastern University recently revealed the final total of its historic Empower campaign: $1.4 billion raised, for students, faculty, and research. President Aoun fêted Empower’s success at an event with donors on October 26 in the Cabot Center. Attendees engaged with interactive exhibits highlighting faculty and student research, including, on a giant 180-degree screen, videos that featured Northeastern’s history, its bright future, and the impact of Empower. Northeastern’s Marketing and Communications Department worked closely with staff from the Archives and Special Collections department to find photographs, documents, maps, stored in the Archives to illustrate the deep and rich history of the University, starting with its beginnings in 1898 as the Evening Institute for Young Men. Archival items used in the video include photographs of early sports teams and King Husky I, the dog who was the first Northeastern mascot, and selections from the Cauldron yearbook. The video traces the history of Northeastern’s programs, including the nation’s first-ever Automobile School and cooperative education, and the development of campus from the YMCA and the site of the first World Series to the construction of Richards Hall and beyond.  In all, over 100 archival items were included in this testament to Northeastern’s growth and development.  

BPS Desegregation Project: Visualizing Racial Disparity in Boston, c. 1970

The following is a series written by archivists, academics, activists, and educators making available primary source material, providing pedagogical support, and furthering the understanding of Boston Public School’s Desegregation history. View all posts This post was reprinted from Anna Kijas of the Boston College Libraries Digital Scholarship Group: https://ds.bc.edu/visualizing-racial-disparity-in-boston-c-1970/ with permission by Molly Brown, 11/13/2017 During the spring and summer of this year, I collaborated on an exhibit, Desegregating Boston Schools: Crisis and Community Activism, 1963-1977, with Sarah Melton and Dr. Eric Weiskott. The main exhibit is at the John J. Burns Library, and a smaller complementary exhibit is on view in the Reading Room, Level 3, Thomas P. O’Neill, Jr. Library. Curating this exhibit required doing research in special collections at John J. Burns Library, specifically in the Louise Bonar and Carol Wolfe collection, Citywide Coordinating Council Records, and the Robert F. Drinan, SJ Congressional Papers. One aspect of this exhibit was to create visualizations and infographics using racial demographic data for the City of Boston, racial distribution of students within the Boston Public Schools, and outcomes of the Boston School Committee election of 1973. The data for these visualizations was drawn from the materials in the Bonar/Wolfe collection, Citywide Coordinating Council Records, 1970 Census, and Analyze Boston. To complement the materials in the exhibit in the John J. Burns Library, which include a map depicting the total black population in the City of Boston (1970) juxtaposed with the wards won by the only black candidate—Patricia Bonner-Lyons, who ran for the Boston School Committee in 1973—I created these three density maps. The maps were created with tract-level 1970 Census data, which depicts the neighborhoods within the City of Boston as established by the Bureau of the Census. The shading (light to dark) of each neighborhood correlates with the number (low to high) of people according to race, as documented in the 1970 Census. From these visualizations it is easy to see that neighborhoods, including South Boston, West Roxbury, Roslindale, and Jamaica Plain were predominantly white, while the neighborhoods of Roxbury and Dorchester were predominantly black.

Density map depicting population according to racial demographics (white, black, and hispanic) in the City of Boston, ca. 1970. (Click on the image to open the interactive map in separate tab).

There are many different GIS platforms and tools available, but for this project I used Tableau Public a freely available software that enables you to create interactive data visualizations (not just maps!). The neighborhoods in these maps are created with a shapefile that I generated from the Neighborhood Change Database 1970-2010. Tableau Public provides the option to connect a spatial file, which will then allow you to render a spatial visualization and identify the specific dimensions (for this map: population by race) that will be shown in an info box upon clicking or hovering over the map.

Dimensions are visible in the pop-up box.

The full workbook for this visualization can be downloaded from the “City of Boston 1970 (test)” page on my Tableau Public profile page. Anna Kijas:: https://wp.me/p8gxJc-k8 https://ds.bc.edu/

Northeastern Archives’ Elma Lewis honored by Celebrity Series of Boston

Elma Lewis, whose papers reside in the Northeastern University Archives and Special Collections and is the founder of the Elma Lewis School of Fine Arts, the National Center of Afro-American Artists, and the Museum of the National Center of Afro-American Artists will be celebrated along with choreographer Alvin Ailey by the Celebrity Series of Boston at John Hancock Hall on Wednesday, December 6 at 7:00 PM. Celebrity Series of Boston’s event is entitled “REVELATIONS: The Legacies of Alvin Ailey and Boston’s Elma Lewis.” The event is free and open to the public. If you are interested in attending please follow this link to register and find more information: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/revelations-the-legacies-of-alvin-ailey-and-bostons-elma-lewis-tickets-39629597192?aff=cswebsite If you are interested in finding out more about Elma Lewis and her legacy in the arts and African American communities in Boston visit the Northeastern University Archives and Special Collections finding aid for her papers here: http://www.library.neu.edu/archives/collect/findaids/m38findprint.htm

Select Archives and Special Collections materials are now available in the Digital Public Library of America

NAACP pickets School CommitteeNearly 9,000 primary source documents and images curated and digitized by Northeastern University Libraries’ Archives and Special Collections are now available in the Digital Public Library of America. The DPLA is a national resource that brings together digital materials held by American libraries, archives, and museums. Northeastern University Libraries’ contribution to DPLA was made possible through our membership in Digital Commonwealth (our local DPLA Hub), who harvest the metadata and thumbnails from the DRS and make them available in the DPLA. The full set of contributed materials include videos from Northeastern’s Holocaust Awareness Week programming, records from the Inquilinos Boricuas en Acción community development program, and many more. More than a third of the contributed materials document the desegregation of Boston Public Schools and busing of students in the 1970’s and 1980’s. With assistance from the library’s Digital Metadata & Ingest group, Archives staff organized, selected, and digitized approximately 3,300 photographs, documents, and other printed ephemera created in the years before and after the busing proclamation was issued by Judge Garrity in 1974. The Archives chose to focus on Boston’s history of desegregation as part of a coordinated effort with other institutions in the Boston Library Consortium to collect and digitize materials that “illuminate the complexity of state- and city-wide politics, community activism, and advocacy.” As Northeastern, UMass Boston, Suffolk University, and other Boston-area institutions make their primary source materials available to the public, the DPLA’s collection of artifacts documenting the desegregation of Boston Public Schools will grow. The end result will be a robust shared archive that will aid in national teaching and learning activities focused on the history and legacy of segregation and racism in the Unites States. The Boston Public Schools, for example, are already integrating these primary sources into the curriculum in an effort to “ensure that every Boston Public Schools student learns about this important and troubling chapter in our city’s history.” These 9,000 files are just the beginning of Northeastern University Libraries’ contribution to the DPLA; we will continue to contribute to Digital Commonwealth and DPLA as more materials become available in our local repository.