Archives & Preservation

It sounds like a story from Jack London or Jon Krakauer: In 1966, two men traveled down the Yukon River in Alaska by canoe to recover papers from abandoned cabins. Paul McCarthy and H. Theodore “Ted” Ryberg were concerned that the generation of former gold miners who came to Alaska in the late 19th century were dying off, and they wanted to preserve that piece of Alaska history. Those explorations would prove pivotal to the Alaska and Polar Regions Collections & Archives formally founded by McCarthy in 1965 at the Elmer E. Rasmuson Library at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks.

Since its founding in 1984, the University of Mississippi’s Blues Archive has collected virtually everything related to the Blues, from sheet music, concert tickets, and recordings to record label business files and even clothing. Thanks to a website revamp and a multiyear grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) to digitize materials, this year the archive is starting its 40th anniversary in style.

On January 22, the Library of Congress (LOC) announced the launch of the COVID-19 Archive Activation website, an online tool created in collaboration with national oral history nonprofit StoryCorps, which will allow members of the public to submit audio accounts of their pandemic experience. Anyone wishing to share their story or interview others can take part. These oral histories will become part of LOC’s American Folklife Center collections and be made accessible at archive.StoryCorps.org.

Rhiannon Sorrell, assistant professor and instruction and digital services librarian at the Kinyaa’áanii Charlie Benally Library at Diné College in Arizona, was named a 2023 Library Journal Mover & Shaker for her work preserving and digitizing Native films and storyteller narration. We recently spoke with Rhiannon to find out more about what she’s working on.

Digitization projects in Maryland, Montana, and Houston, TX, present a glimpse of current trends in digital archives, as state and city libraries work to create collections that reflect local and regional history.

Magic tricks may be momentary, but the annals of performance magic leave a record, commenting on and reflecting the political, cultural, social attitudes of their day. Two collections, the University of Texas at Austin Harry Ransom Center’s Magic and Illusion collection and the American Museum of Magic’s Archives and Library, hold a wealth of information about magic and performers, with a focus on the 19th and 20th centuries.

From the first known caricature of Abraham Lincoln to a Pulitzer Prize–winning cartoon satirizing the Tammany Hall political machine, the Michael and Susan Kahn Political Cartoon Collection, now at UCLA, contains thousands of individual images, periodicals, books, and ephemera dating back to the late 17th century.

Since founder and president David Isay conceived of StoryCorps in 2003, the organization has recorded over 356,000 interviews with over 640,000 people in all 50 states, in over 50 languages, with the archive housed at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress.

Often, medieval book bindings—as many as one in five from the 15th and 16th centuries—are reinforced with fragments of pages from older printed volumes that bookbinders considered obsolete. Without the option of dismantling precious books to reveal the fragments, specialists turn to x-ray technology to reveal words that have been hidden from view for hundreds of years. A team at the University of Iowa recently used familiar medical technology—a computerized tomography (CT) scanner—to do just that.