Boston Public Library

Supporting Community Commemoration: 50 Years of the Garrity Decision

Outreach work in archives often intersects with observing anniversaries. This is especially true at Northeastern’s Archives and Special Collections, which houses records of community-based organizations that are still around today. This year, in 2024, community members across the Greater Boston area have been observing the anniversary of the court decision by Judge Arthur Garrity to desegregate Boston’s public schools.

My role as Reference and Outreach Archivist is to connect the community members and organizations with records relevant to their needs in the most meaningful way possible. I do this type of work regularly by providing classes, workshops, and reference and research services. But for occasions such as a 50-year anniversary, reference and outreach work requires customized approaches.

This summer, I managed a very customized approach to archival outreach: coordinating and designing a multi-archive and guest-curated exhibit on school desegregation for installation in the Boston Public Library’s (BPL) Gallery J. While discussion of creating the exhibit began a year ago, when leaders in the Boston Desegregation and Busing Initiative (BDBI helped submit a proposal to the BPL, the curation, exhibition selection, design, and installation happened quickly over the last couple of months. What resulted is a 20-case exhibition in the central branch of Boston’s public library entitled, “A History of Public Education Reform and Desegregation in Boston.”

A glass case containing archival documents and photos
One chapter of the “A History of Public Education Reform and Desegregation in Boston” exhibit in Gallery J of Boston Public Library
Archivist Molly Brown stands on a stool and hangs archival materials in a glass display case
Molly Brown installing exhibit pieces

Community historian Jim Vrabel lent his deep knowledge to propose an exhibit observing 10 chapters of Boston’s desegregation history, beginning in 1635 and ending today in 2024. Paired with each chapter was a timeline of events in the long history of education activism and desegregation in the city. Area archives, including the City of Boston Archives, the John Joseph Moakley Archive and Institute at Suffolk University, and the University of Massachusetts Boston Archives & Special Collections in the Joseph P. Healey Library, contributed records that were selected by Vrabel to illustrate the narratives in each chapter. This collaboration resulted more than 90 archival records and excerpts included in the 10 timelines.

After the exhibit narrative had been written and the archival materials selected, it was up to me to design, format, and caption the exhibit, as well as make reproductions to display in the exhibit cases. Northeastern University Library sponsored the printing of the reproductions. All of the exhibit elements were installed for viewing on Sept. 18, in time to serve as a part of BPL’s citywide forums on Sept. 28, offering visual and tangible evidence to the emotional personal stories and responses to the events of school desegregation that still reverberate today.

A glass case containing archival documents and photos

But not all outreach takes place in an exhibit. Sometimes, a custom outreach project looks like making large-scale reproductions of documents and photographs to spark conversation, kept and stewarded by a partner organization, as I did last September for the BDBI. Other times, it can be providing in-depth rights and permissions labor, approving use of images in projects and suggesting other images to include, as I did for the BDBI and WGBH for their digital walking tour of school desegregation history.

Beyond the digital resources, you can also view the exhibit for yourself by visiting the Boston Public Library’s Central Branch (700 Boylston Street). It will be on display in Gallery J until Jan. 7.

Follow the BDBI for more events and updates, and consider attending their forums at the BPL this Saturday, Sept. 28.

Mellon Foundation Awards $505,000 Grant to Extend Funding for the Boston Research Center

Boston Research Center logo

The Northeastern University Library has received a $505,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation to support the final developmental phase of the Boston Research Center. This grant builds upon two previous grants from the Mellon Foundation — which helped Northeastern launch the BRC with a $200,000 planning grant in 2017, and a $650,000 implementation grant in 2019.

“We deeply appreciate the Mellon Foundation’s ongoing support of the Boston Research Center and our library’s efforts to work with the communities that surround Northeastern’s campuses,” said Dan Cohen, Dean of the Northeastern University Library. “Along with our partners in the Boston area, we have learned a great deal about how to express our neighbors’ stories, culture, and history.”

The BRC is dedicated to bringing Boston’s neighborhood and community histories to light through the creation and use of new technologies, allowing Boston residents to share underrepresented stories from city’s past. In its most recent phase, the BRC has focused on specific community projects to help share the stories of these neighborhoods and organizations. The Mellon Foundation’s grant will help develop tools and workflows to curate and disseminate these collections, making them accessible to the community and easy to build upon in future work.

By gathering documents, images, and personal narratives, and creating metadata for community resources, the BRC ensures that everything from public art and oral histories to important neighborhood sights are recorded to help disseminate area history and culture. Recent projects include:

  • The Harriet Tubman Memory House Project, which contains photographs, oral histories, flyers, architectural plans, and other digitized materials that tell the interwoven stories of Boston’s South End neighborhood, the United South End Settlements and Harriet Tubman House, gentrification, community action, and resilience.
  • The East Boston Memoir Project, which contains photographs, oral histories, newspapers, and other digitized materials that make available the history of East Boston.
  • The Neighborhood Public Art Project, which contains an interactive map documenting Boston’s rich and diverse history of public art.
  • The Chinatown Collections Project, which contains historical records documenting the people, organizations, and historical collections of Boston’s Chinatown in a bilingual database.

Located in Northeastern University Library, the BRC is managed by the Archives and Special Collections and the Digital Scholarship Group. It works in collaboration with the Boston Public Library along with many community organizations and individuals.

Archival Context: Freedom House at the Norman B. Leventhal Center

A faded flyer with red text reading "Clean Up Paint Up Join your neighbors Don your work clothes Get busy Make your town a better place to live in Safer too Start at home Make it bright Clean your streets Clean your yard Paint inside Paint outside Fix-up and repair Plant-up too

On March 18th, the Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center in the Boston Public Library (BPL) debuted their exhibit “More or Less in Common: Environment and Justice in the Human Landscape.” The exhibit examines how social justice and injustice are confronted in the study of the “human landscape” and how we can use questions of social justice to help us build healthier and better environments for the future.

Northeastern’s contributions to the exhibit come from our Freedom House, Inc., records and in particular, their records on urban renewal and neighborhood-led clean-up campaigns. The exhibit features two fliers calling Roxbury neighbors to action in various clean-up and maintenance projects. Neighborhood improvement programs designed to protect Upper Roxbury from urban blight began in 1949 when Freedom House joined with community members to organize neighborhood clean-up projects and playground construction.

A multi-colored guide with the title "Let's get M.A.D. and clean up Washington Park"

Freedom House worked closely with the city to improve the services provided to Roxbury. At the same time, Boston was beginning a formal urban renewal campaign that did not initially include Roxbury. A telegram from Freedom House founders Muriel and Otto Snowden to Mayor John F. Collins resulted in the inclusion of the Washington Park Urban Renewal Project in Boston’s campaign. By 1963, Freedom House had entered into formal contracts with the Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA) and the Action Boston Community Development to serve as a liaison between the planners and technicians and the residents of Washington Park. This relationship lasted until the BRA withdrew from Roxbury in the late 1960s, leaving much of its work undone.

The Leventhal Center’s exhibit takes our Freedom House records, and many other institutions’ records, and composes them into a complicated vision of how human landscapes were confronted and contended with in the past and how they can be reimagined for the future.

Visit the exhibit in person at the BPL’s historic McKim Building during the BPL’s visiting hours, which can be found here.

Or you can view the digital exhibit, along with lesson plans and resources for further study, here.

Find out more about the Freedom House records, the Snowdens, and Roxbury neighborhood history here.

Google Book settlement forum, July 21, 2009 at the Boston Public Library

 

A panel about what the Google Books settlement agreement means for the academic, library, and business communities.

Speakers:

  • Daniel Clancy, Engineering Director, Google Books
  • John Palfrey, Henry N. Ess III Professor of Law and Vice Dean for Library and Information Resources, Harvard Law School
  • Ann Wolpert, Director of Libraries, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  • Hal Abelson, Class of 1922 Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Moderated by Maura Marx, Executive Director, Open Knowledge Commons.

Google Book Search is an ambitious project to digitize the world’s books. Six years, many million works, and two U.S. lawsuits later, the project is now set to change dramatically. Google has reached a settlement agreement with authors and publishers that, if approved by the court, will have sweeping implications for writers, readers, scholars, librarians, and the public at large.

The panel of speakers will explain and discuss the settlement. The panel will be followed by a question-and-answer session.
http://bpl.org/news/calendar.htm?trumbaEmbed=view%3Devent%26eventid%3D84588833

Ex-BPL head Bernie Margolis compared to Babe Ruth…

“Just as the Yankees took Babe Ruth, Boston’s loss is our gain,” said Tom Dunn, New York Education Department spokesman, speaking of Boston’s well-liked ex-public library head, Bernie Margolis.  Margolis was ousted from the Boston Public Library last year by Mayor Menino, and has just landed a very plum job as State Librarian and Assistant Commissioner of Education for the state of New York.  Congratulations, Bernie, it was good to know ya! Read more in yesterday’s Globe: http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2008/10/22/ex_bpl_chief_margolis_lands_library_education_post_in_ny/ Karen Merguerian