Honoring East Boston Activist Mary Ellen Welch

Last week, East Boston activist Mary Ellen Welch passed away. Welch, whose work and legacy are preserved in the Northeastern University Library’s Archives and Special Collections, was a vibrant and prolific activist in East Boston. Her advocacy centered around civil rights, education, environmental issues, open space creation and preservation, social justice, and transportation issues.
Photo of Mary Ellen Welch, a white woman of Irish descent in black and white. She is smiling with her mouth closed and looking straight on into the camera.

Photo by Gilbert E. Friedberg, Boston Globe

Welch’s work founded and affected many facets of East Boston’s neighborhood. Since the 1960s, she advocated for East Boston residents on issues surrounding waterfront development, affordable housing, public schools, and the expansion of the Massachusetts Port Authority’s Logan International Airport. She was a former teacher at Hugh R. O’Donnell Elementary School in East Boston and served on the board of directors for Neighborhood of Affordable Housing (NOAH), an organization which supports East Boston residents and communities with affordable housing strategies, environmental justice, community planning, leadership development, and economic development opportunities. She is also former head of the Friends of the East Boston Greenway and founding member of the group’s predecessor the East Boston Greenway Council. In addition, Welch worked with Airport Impact Relief, the East Boston Neighborhood Council, and the East Boston Area Planning Action Council. In 2000, Welch was awarded the United States Environmental Protection Agency’s Environmental Merit Award. whitespace
Photo of Mary Ellen Welch, a white woman, pointing to a spot on what looks to be a neighborhood map. She is in a room with two other men seated watching her presentation.

Photo by Charles Dixon, Boston Globe

Welch’s friend and colleague, James Aloisi, offered a poignant tribute to Welch and her impact in Commonwealth Magazine. A portion is quoted below:
“Mary Ellen’s brand of advocacy was tough and determined but she could open her arms wide and embrace the joy in every moment that she was making a difference. She was a happy warrior in the fight for housing and mobility equity and social justice. In an interview, she summarized her approach to advocacy this way: ‘People who are activists don’t give up. Usually their activism involves something that’s deeply inbred and people are committed to principles of justice that they want to achieve. The joy of creating a better neighborhood is very satisfying. There is a joy in making where you live a happy place, a sustainable place for others.’”
You can find further records of Welch’s determined activism in the East Boston Community News, held at Northeastern’s Archives and digitized and available in Northeastern’s Digital Repository Service. The name “Mary Ellen Welch” shows up in nearly every issue, evidencing her wide array of organizing for social justice and her vital role in East Boston.  Mary Ellen Welch’s papers are housed in the Northeastern University Library’s Archives and Special Collections. You can view the finding aid here. Come visit her collection to continue to activate the gift of her records for future generations.  

2019 Call for CERES Proposals

The Northeastern University Library’s Digital Scholarship Group (DSG) invites Northeastern faculty and staff to submit project proposals for new research projects using the CERES Exhibit Toolkit. We also welcome proposals for using CERES in classroom assignments. The deadline for proposals is April 19, 2019 for projects beginning in the fall of 2019.

CERES enables the creation of complex scholarly narratives and exhibits through websites that dynamically integrate images, text, video, and other digital materials into a range of page layouts and possibilities for contextualization, while keeping those base digital materials preserved in a long-lasting archive. Visit our projects page for a full list of sites and exhibits that have been built using CERES.

CERES is designed to be easy to use, and our goal is to empower you and members of your project to be self-sufficient. Accepted projects receive in-depth consultation and training, but we also expect project teams to provide labor for things like digitizing items or creating content for the website. Part of the proposal process will be discussing with you ways to find sources of labor, so please don’t let a current lack of labor be a barrier to application. If you already have work study or interns, that is a bonus.

CERES supports many different features and activities, including:

  • Preservation and publication of long-term digital collections of primary source materials like documents, videos, letters, or interviews, such as the Holocaust Awareness Committee at Northeastern University or the Lower Roxbury Black History Project.
  • Classroom assignments where students contribute exhibits (singly or in groups) to a long-term cumulative space persisting from year to year, such as Literature and Digital Diversity, or adding to an existing CERES project that invites thematic contributions, such as the Early Black Boston Digital Almanac.
  • Exploration and integration of items from other existing digital collections, like the Digital Public Library of America, expanding a project’s ability to investigate concepts across collections.
  • Creation of long-term online research portals and exhibits that couple contextual scholarly narratives with special interactive features like maps, timelines, or image carousels, such as Thoreau’s Journal Drawings or the Northeastern University History timeline.
Over the summer and fall, we will be making some major improvements to CERES and adding new features, including connections to additional data sources (like Europeana and Wikimedia Commons) and podcasting support, so projects can also be imagining how they might take advantage of those options.

Applicants will be notified by May 17, 2019, and we will schedule planning meetings in early summer. We are happy to meet with anyone interested in submitting a proposal to talk about possibilities. For more information, please contact us at dsg@northeastern.edu.

Apply here: http://dsg.neu.edu/projects/new-projects/project-application. We look forward to working with you!

 

About CERES

 

The Northeastern University Library’s Digital Scholarship Group is currently engaged in a long-term strategy to build a repository infrastructure that supports community engagement with digital materials: the Community Enhanced Repository for Engaged Scholarship (CERES). The CERES Exhibit Toolkit is a WordPress plugin and theme developed by the Digital Scholarship Group. This research and publishing platform will support what we have identified as the most common tasks in the digital humanities workspace: annotating, cataloging, text encoding, proofreading, transcribing, translating, and publishing. The end result will be a contributory and collaborative repository environment for many different types of users, which ideally will encourage community engagement with digital objects. The CERES Exhibit Toolkit is one component of this expanding repository infrastructure that will allow CERES project teams to easily publish their materials on the web. Read more here.

Archives and Special Collections Debuts New Finding Aids Directory

Our Archives and Special Collections recently debuted a new site for collection finding aids. Finding aids help researchers locate specific materials in archival collections, so they’re an essential part of the archives experience. Staff have been working to ensure a smooth transition from the old method of locating finding aids so researchers are still able to find collections easily.

Archives and Special Collections staff have created subject guides for all our collections, which include both materials related to the history of Northeastern University and manuscript collections that capture the history of social movements, underrepresented communities, and infrastructure in Boston. These special collections cover a wide range of Boston history topics, from African Americans, the Latinx community, and women, to housing justice, education, the Central Artery/Tunnel Project (Big Dig), and more.

When on the Archives Catalog homepage, you can browse through these categories by clicking the Subject Guides link towards the bottom of the page:

Screenshot of Archives Catalog homepage

From the main Subject Guides page, you can choose where you would like to start your search. By clicking on the “Show Subgroups” buttons, you can see all of the different subgroups for each subject guide. So if you wanted to do some research for Black History Month, after clicking to see all the subgroups, you will see the African American subgroup under Manuscripts.

Screenshot of Archives Catalog - Subject Guides page, with African American subject heading highlighted

After clicking on the link, you’ll be taken to a page listing all of the special collections related to African American history in Boston:

Screenshot of Archives Catalog page listing all collections related to African American history

Collections are also listed under multiple subject areas to help make them more accessible.

We hope these new subject guides help our researchers find all of the collections that we have to offer in Archives and Special Collections! And as always, if you have any questions or would like to come visit us, feel free to stop by Snell Library Room 092 or email us at archives@northeastern.edu.

Learn to Write a Data Management Plan, Find Out What Social Media Knows About You, and More

"You Are Here" artwork by Mario Klingemann

How does your commute make you feel? Map it! What does Facebook know about you? Download your data! What do you need to say about your data in a grant proposal? Learn about data management plans!

We’re hosting a few events this month to coincide with Love Data Week and Endangered Data Week, and you’re invited to:

Check out the full lineup and register for your spot: bit.ly/snelldata19

“You Are Here” by Mario Klingemann on Flickr, CC BY 2.0

February Workshops in the Recording Studios: Learn Podcasting, Video Recording, Sound Design, and More

Looking for a place to record your podcast or video project? Need to develop your media production chops? What is good sound design? The expert staff in the Library’s Recording Studios can teach you how in our multi-part workshop series beginning February 4. Click each flyer to enlarge:
 
Flyer describing Intro to Snell Studios workshops Flyer describing Intro to Podcasting workshops
 
Flyer describing Intro to Video Recording workshops Flyer describing Intro to Sound Design workshops
 
Use the links below to register for a workshop. Each workshop is offered on multiple dates—click on “Show More Dates” for each workshop to see when it will be offered!

Register:

Questions? Please contact Isaac Schutz, the Recording Studios’ Co-op, at i.schutz@northeastern.edu or 617-373-2465.
 
Students record video in the Snell Library Recording Studios