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UNC Greensboro’s Martha Blakeney Hodges Special Collections and University Archives Speaker Series will host Beth Ann Koelsch, curator of the Women Veterans Historical Project, on February 22, 2022, from 12 noon - 12:45 p.m. for a virtual event. In celebration of Black History Month, Koelsch will discuss the history of African-American women in the United States military and the American Red Cross. The event is free and open to the public. It will be held virtually through Zoom. Access the event by visiting https://go.uncg.edu/speakerseries. 

The Education Committee is now accepting applications for the C. David Jackson Memorial Student Scholarship for the annual SNCA conference, which will be held virtually on Thursday, March 17 and Friday, March 18, 2022.

This year, SNCA will offer up to four scholarships of $250 each. A one-year SNCA membership is also included. Since the conference will be virtual, recipients are encouraged to use scholarship funds that would typically go toward travel and lodging for additional professional development opportunities.

Scholarship funds will be disbursed to recipients prior to the conference as a one-time payment. Applicants must be students enrolled in an archival studies, public history, or library science program in North Carolina.

Applications must be received by Monday, February 14, 2022. We will notify applicants of the committee’s decisions in late February. You can find the application form and additional details here.

What jobs have you had in the archival realm?

I started out as an intern and assistant at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute's library when I was in graduate school. Since then, I have worked at a few academic institutions in roles that were at least in part processing archivist positions. I have been the Collections Archivist at Wake Forest University since 2015, where I work with materials at nearly every point in their lifecycles.

What is your educational background?

I have a bachelor's degree in English with minors in International Studies and Politics - I thought I might go into the foreign service. oops. And I received my master's in library and information science with an archives management specialization from Simmons College SLIS, in Boston.

What is your favorite part of your job and what do you consider to be the most important part of your job?

I like writing descriptions, finding aids, metadata, blog posts - all of it. Right out of undergrad, I was a research analyst and got used to writing long reports. I still enjoy sitting down to write, long or short. I also happen to think description is some of the most important work I do, to make things accessible to researchers. I always work with users in mind!

Tell us about something you're particularly proud of from your job or your institution.

I have been in my current position for seven years and am thrilled to see, every time I walk through our stacks or look at our website, how much we've accomplished. More finding aids available online, many more materials in our digital collections, more materials properly housed, more students taught about primary sources. Seeing the progress that my team has accomplished is wonderful.

What advice would you give to someone interested in pursuing a similar career?

I always recommend getting a job (or volunteer gig if you want to keep your current job) in or adjacent to libraries, to see what libraries and archives, and library and archives workers, are like before committing to the profession. Also look at job ads, especially in areas you would like to live, as you are thinking about getting a degree: what work sounds interesting and fits with your skill sets? Lastly, I highly recommend making friends in the field as you begin working or school - peer mentors have been as valuable as more traditional mentors in my professional (and personal!) life. 

Who has been key to shaping your professional outlook?

Colleagues, at every one of my jobs - service jobs, part-time work, internships, all my archives gigs - have helped me grow in a variety of ways. Between customer service handling, writing conventions, and my management style, I can thank my former coworkers for helping me build useful and important skills. I also have been affected by the pandemic, certainly; my priorities have shifted in these months of upheaval and change across the world and has helped temper aspects of my work life.

What do you hope to accomplish during your time in SNCA leadership?

I aim to support NC archives workers and bring us together in meaningful ways. So much is in transition right now, and what I can do is support our visibility and education in a time of evolution. Thanks to SNCA's volunteer committees and members for your contributions to this community -- the executive board wouldn't be here without you!

Theme: Renewal

The SNCA Program Committee is now accepting applications for the 2022 SNCA conference that will take place virtually March 17-18, 2022. Please submit via the online form. 

This year’s theme is Renewal. In Michelle Caswell’s 2021 book Urgent Archives: Enacting Liberatory Memory Work, she writes, "this is an urgent plea, but it also demands careful, considerate, slow work. Urgent and slow are not opposing forces in this conception, but rather work in tandem." As we continue professional (and personal, perhaps) transitions that were thrust upon us in 2020, we can also consider how to revisit, renew, and revitalize our modes of doing work - in the way that Caswell describes or otherwise. In these transitions, how are we working in new ways and adapting approaches to records lifecycles? What new and/or different approaches to our professional work, our concepts of labor, or ourselves have occurred? We welcome presentations that illustrate how renewal runs through our ongoing transitions and adaptations in our workplaces, our homes, and our profession.

Workshops will be held virtually in advance of the event, and the conference held and viewed virtually Thursday-Friday, March 17-18. As the Society of North Carolina Archivists, we collaborate with a variety of professionals to ally ourselves with the mission of preserving and making history accessible to all. We encourage submissions from archivists, librarians, and other memory worker allies from North Carolina and beyond our state borders.

We invite proposals for panels, lightning rounds, and individual presentations, as well as posters. All sessions will be pre-recorded.

• Panel and lightning rounds proposals: This format may be submitted by an individual speaker interested or by an individual on behalf of a group of presenters. Each should provide an abstract (150 words max) of the proposed topic. Panel sessions consist of 3-4 speakers who each have 15-20 minutes to present. Lightning rounds include more speakers with less time for each, usually 5-10 minutes. 
• Poster proposals: Please submit an abstract (150 words max) for your proposed topic. Since poster sessions will be virtual, poster presenters may want to consider proposing a lightning round. Alternatively, poster presenters may be invited to record a 2-minute audio summary to submit along with a PDF of their poster to make it more accessible and interactive despite the virtual format. The Committee invites submissions that reflect the diverse experiences and perspectives of those active in the field. 

Any individual involved in archives–including students, staff, volunteers, researchers, donors, academics, and allied professionals–are welcome to submit proposals. Students and new professionals are particularly encouraged to submit. Speakers are not required to be SNCA members. More details about the conference, including social events being held Wednesday, March 16, in cities around the state and the pre-conference workshops, will be shared when available. All proposals must be submitted via the online form.

Submission Deadline is: January 12, 2022.

Please email Stephanie Bennett at bennetse@wfu.edu if you have any questions, comments, or concerns. We look forward to your submissions! 

The 2022 Program Committee: Randi Beem, Stephanie Bennett (chair), Kait Dorsky, Liz Harper, Peggy Higgins, and Nancy Kaiser

Contributed by Gwen Gosney Erickson

This fall, Guilford’s Quaker Archives received several collections which are especially representative of their collection development priorities and of interest to both the College community and researchers beyond campus.  The archives has a special responsibility for comprehensiveness in documenting and for nurturing research relating to the spiritual, intellectual, and cultural heritage of Quakerism in the southeastern United States. It prioritizes acquisition of manuscript collections that meet this goal while also serving as informative primary sources for student researchers. These new collections provide unique sources relating to the lives of three notable North Carolina Friends.

The most recent donation is a collection of 19th-century documents kept through generations by descendants of Miles Lassiter (c. 1777 – 1850), a formerly enslaved man who was a member of Back Creek Friends Meeting in Randolph County, N.C. Based on research thus far, he was the only African American member of North Carolina Yearly Meeting when he died in 1850. These documents help complete the puzzle of his life as he navigated landownership and financial matters, including paying for medical care for his children, as he sought to establish a life of freedom for his family in North Carolina in the 1800s. The papers were donated by Miles Lassiter descendent Margo Lee Williams, who first connected with Guilford’s Quaker Archives early in her journey to discover her ancestor, which culminated in a book.

     

    The Willie R. Frye, Jr. Papers were donated by Kathryn Frye Adams ’75. Her father, Willie Frye ’59 (pictured at right), served as an active and influential Quaker minister in North Carolina for many decades. The correspondence and sermons are already being used as a source material for a history thesis by a Guilford undergraduate. The collection has much information about Frye’s commitment to social justice and his evolving LGTBQ+ affirming theology, which often put him at odds with others in his community.

A single item arrived the same time as the Frye Papers. Bill Adams, son-in-law of Willie Frye, donated a piece of his own family history. Bill’s father, E. Edward Adams, was a young man committed to pacifism and his Quaker faith during World War I. He kept small notebook documenting his reading materials, thoughts on war and being a conscientious objector, and being sent in 1918 from Yadkin County, N.C., to Camp Jackson, S.C., to be held with other pacifists.

Terry Brandsma Recognized as an OCLC Top Contributor

Terry Brandsma, information technology librarian and associate professor for UNC Greensboro’s University Libraries, has been named as a Top Contributor to the OCLC Community Center. Brandsma has been recognized again this year for his continued commitment to sharing, collaborating and helping move the OCLC Community Center forward.

Lindsay Gypin Hired as Data Services Librarian and Assistant Professor at UNC Greensboro’s University Libraries

Lindsay Gypin has accepted the position of data services librarian and assistant professor at UNC Greensboro’s University Libraries. Gypin is working on her Ph.D. from the University of Denver in research methods and statistics. She received her master’s degree in library and information science from the University of Denver and her bachelor’s degree in English education from Colorado State University.

This is the fifth and final in a series of Archives Month posts around this year's theme, North Carolina Travel, Tourism, and Vacation. It was written by Nathan Saunders, Associate Director Library Specialized Collections at UNC Wilmington.

Thousands of North Carolinians drive down Interstate 40 every Summer to enjoy Wilmington’s beach communities and historic sites. The North Carolina Azalea Festival, founded in 1948, has however grown over the past decades to become the region’s single most important tourist event. Before 2020, the annual celebration attracted hundreds of thousands of visitors to the Lower Cape Fear every April.

From the WWAY Television News Archive

Like other festivals throughout the South, planners drew these visitors in large part by highlighting familiar tropes of “moonlight and magnolias” southern gentility while ignoring the region’s historic Black communities. As all-white civic groups led the parade, hosted garden tours of Wilmington’s most elite white homes, and each year crowned white C-list soap opera actresses as Queen Azalea, the Festival’s events projected the image of Wilmington as a peaceful, leisurely spot to live and play while obscuring the Black labor that made it possible for white elites to relax and socialize in the clubs that planned the festival each year.

The Azalea Festivals of the 1980s witnessed the beginnings of an uneven but interesting culture shift. While not completely redirecting the event’s focus, a few key developments revealed an implicit understanding that the Festival’s first forty years were less than representative of the city’s population. Black celebrities began to figure more prominently in the Festival during the 1980s as officials named professional football player and actor Bubba Smith the parade’s first Black grand marshal in 1982, followed a year later by Diff'rent Strokes actor Todd Bridges, and then by favorite son Michael Jordan in 1984. The 1985 Azalea Festival saw the first Black Queen Azalea – Cosby Show actress Phylicia Rashad. As the female lead of the highest rated sitcom of the 1980s, Rashad was arguably the most famous of the Queens to date.

Phylicia Rashad (From the WWAY Television News Archive)

Azalea Festival musical acts were more diverse from an earlier date, with Cab Colloway, Dionne Warwick, and the Four Tops performing during the 1970s and early 1980s. The Festival’s staunch commitment to middle-of-the-road adult pop and country acts gradually gave way, however, so that by the second decade of the new millennium the Azalea Festival stage regularly featured rappers like Nelly (2015) and Snoop Dogg (2016). Festival patrons could therefore tour gardens with teenage hoop-skirted belles twirling parasols by day while enjoying decidedly non-genteel music by night.

1984 advertisement in The Front Page

As the official Azalea Festival program slowly and unevenly expanded its celebrity invitations and entertainment offerings, some members of the Wilmington community coordinated their own unsanctioned events on Azalea Festival weekend. The Raleigh gay and lesbian newspaper The Front Page throughout the 1980s advertised various attractions and gatherings that coincided with the April influx of visitors to the Port City. David’s, a gay bar downtown on Market Street, put its own spin on the Azalea Pageant, which culminated in the coronation of a rival Queen Azalea.

1988 advertisement in The Front Page

The Festival in fact named actress and Wilmington native Briana Venskus the first openly bisexual Queen Azalea in 2019. It turns out that Venskus presided over the end of an era for the Port City’s celebration of leisurely southern civic mindedness. In the aftermath of the unprecedented cancellation of the 2020 Azalea Festival due to COVID and the ensuing racial unrest that followed the murder of George Floyd, Cape Fear Garden Club officials announced that in an effort to promote diversity and inclusion, garden tours would no longer feature the belles that had been one of their hallmarks since 1969.

In the wake of COVID-19, Wilmington has yet to hold another Azalea Festival. Those Chamber of Commerce leaders who pioneered the event during the late 1940s appear to have achieved their original goal of bringing tourist dollars to the Port City during the off season. At the same time, they would have found little familiar in the Festivals of the 2010s. Only time will tell if anything at all from old Azalea Festivals persists, besides the beautiful flower that symbolizes spring in the South.

This is the fourth in a series of Archives Month posts around this year's theme, North Carolina Travel, Tourism, and Vacation. It was written by Kathelene McCarty Smith, Interim Head of the Martha Blakeney Hodges Special Collections and University Archives at UNC Greensboro.

As both the resident “lady doctress” and an amateur photographer, Dr. Anna Maria Gove was a very unique faculty member of the State Normal and Industrial College (now UNC Greensboro). The University Archives has many of the earliest images of the college thanks to the lens of Dr. Gove. When she first arrived on campus in 1893 as a young physician, she had graduated from Woman’s Medical College of New York Infirmary only the previous year. She would remain at the school as physician, professor of hygiene, and director of the Department of Health until her retirement in 1937.

Figure 1. Dr. Anna Maria Gove

Born in New Hampshire and educated in the Northeast, Gove had little direct knowledge of the South. Her intellectual and cultural interest was piqued by her new North Carolina home, and apparently, the sight of a female doctor setting up practice at the State Normal also caused a great deal of curiosity. It was reported that a male physician traveled from another town just to see with his own eyes what Dr. Anna Gove actually looked like.

Figure 2. The faculty camera club, clockwise from bottom left: Anna Gove, Edith McIntyre, Mary Petty, and Melville Fort

Gove set up her office in the Brick Dormitory and began caring for sick and infirmed students during office hours, but during her leisure time, she started a faculty camera club. This adventurous group incorporated several of the female professors who would soon become her close friends, including Edith McIntyre (Professor of Domestic Science), Melville Fort (Art Professor), and Mary Petty (Chemistry Professor). Together they journeyed over hills and dales, taking photographs of the local surroundings, picnicking in neighboring fields, and capturing interesting scenes around Guilford County.

There is only one photograph of the camera club as a group, which was taken in a professional studio using a canvas backdrop (Figure 2), with members, cameras, cases, and a tripod figuring prominently. The club members’ composition in the photograph is especially interesting because the photographer who took the shot must have been aware that he/she also seemed to be the subject. The configuration causes the viewer to have the same sensation. Gove is the photographer kneeling at the front left, with an expression of eager anticipation, waiting to get her shot.

Figure 3. Edith McIntyre (Left) and Gove (Right) on a Camera Club Expedition

Images from this period survive in Gove’s manuscript collection housed at the Martha Blakeney Hodges Special Collections and University Archives at UNC Greensboro. Some are carefully marked “Fort,” presumably because they were taken by Melville Fort, another member of the club. It can be assumed that the others were all taken by Gove. Many of the photographs include campus buildings and landscapes and serve as significant illustrations of the history of the university. Other images reflect Gove’s intellectual curiosity of her surroundings, such as a traveling Wild West show where she seemed comfortable taking photographs not only from the stands, as a member of the audience, but also behind the scenes where she took pictures of cowboys and others touring with the show.

True insight to Gove’s personality may be most evident in photographs such as one from a Guilford County tobacco auction (Figure 4). Taking a close look at this photograph, it is easy to see the surprise on these men’s faces as they stop long enough for the small but gutsy photographer to capture the scene.

Figure 4. A tobacco auction in Guilford County

Whether the women became too busy teaching, or because Gove began to travel further afield for postgraduate study, personal trips, or her service during World War I, the faculty camera club apparently did not last long. Although she continued to take photographs, Gove also began to collect postcards of her extensive travels throughout North Carolina.

Figure 5. Postcards of the Carolina coast and a tobacco field

She was an avid correspondent, constantly writing to friends and relatives, but she also gathered images for her personal collection, both from North Carolina and other parts of the United States. As for her favorites from North Carolina, she seemed particularly fond of scenes of tobacco fields, the seashore, the mountains, resort hotels, and flowers that are indigenous to the state. She also collected postcards from historic sites such as the Old Mill in Salisbury, the birthplace of President Andrew Johnson in Raleigh, and Old Salem. There were even some cards that captured more colorful scenes such as mountain stills. While it is fortunate that these photographs and postcards survive, it is regrettable that, in most cases, she did not annotate the cards that she collected from the places that she visited, so we have little history of either the camera club or the context of her travels. Luckily, she did keep the postcards that others sent to her, and they can be found in her extensive manuscript collection.

Figure 6. Birthplace of President Andrew Johnson

For a closer look at her photographs and postcard collection as well as her personal papers, please see the Dr. Anna Maria Gove Papers, https://gateway.uncg.edu/islandora/object/mss%3AMSS0002?page=1. The postcards in the collection have been digitized, and her photographs are still being processed (with hopes of digitizing them after they are processed).

Contributed by Kait Dorsky, University Archivist at UNC School of the Arts

The UNC School of the Arts Archives is excited to announce the launch of two new access points to our collections:

• The UNCSA Archives Collections Database, which includes finding aids for collections such as
  • The Christina Giannini Collection of Design Drawings, which includes costume and stage design drawings for dance and theatrical productions by companies such as North Carolina School of the Arts, Agnes de Mille Heritage Dance Theatre, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Ballet Internacional de Caracas, Chautauqua Institution, Joffrey Ballet, Roundabout Theatre Company, and State Street Ballet.
  • Collections from affiliate organizations of UNCSA, such as the North Carolina Dance Theatre and the Civic Music Association of Winston-Salem.
  • Collections of programs and posters from UNCSA performances.
• The UNCSA Archives Digital Collections, home to more than 13,000 digitized items from the collections, including photographs and posters from past UNCSA performances, campus life, and more.

The UNCSA Archives collects material documenting the history of the school, dating from its founding in 1963 to the present. Collections include campus publications, sound and video recordings, performance programs and posters, and photographs, as well as material related to professional affiliate programs and the creative careers of members of the UNCSA community.

This is the third in a series of Archives Month posts around this year's theme, North Carolina Travel, Tourism, and Vacation. It was written by Ed Morris, Executive Director of the Wake Forest Historical Museum & Wake Forest College Birthplace. If you're intrigued by the following artifact and want to travel to see it in person, you can find more information on the website of the Wake Forest Historical Museum.

For the first half of my career, I was an archivist at the North Carolina State Archives. In 1998 when my wife, Cathy Jackson Morris, became State Archivist of North Carolina, my career took a shift to museums and historic sites. In the museum business like in archives, provenance is an important factor.

The Wake Forest Historical Museum has long held a small collection of the papers of Dr. Calvin Jones. The bulk of his extensive papers are housed at the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. At his death in 1846, Jones bequeathed his papers to UNC, where for more than thirty years he served as a trustee.  Other items came to the Wake Forest Historical Museum from various individuals but mainly from Jones Family descendants.  Among those papers held in the Wake Forest Historical Museum’s archival collection are lists of furnishings mentioning a specific bed, a bill of sale from Raleigh furniture maker David Royster dated July 1826, and an earlier memorandum from Dr. Jones to his private secretary on things to do, which included writing Mr. Royster and asking when his “desk and bed would be done.”

In the spring of 2020 on the very day word came that the Covid pandemic would close pretty much everything across North Carolina, the Museum received a phone call with an offer. Dr. Calvin N. Jones, the great-great-great-grandson of the original Dr. Jones, was offering to the Museum the very bed described in those documents. The current Joneses, then residents of Winston-Salem, were moving to New Jersey to be close to their family. Their new home would not accommodate the massive bed with its eight-foot-high post. Documentation being everything to the provenance of the bed, we of course acted quickly to make arrangements to find a rental truck and travel from the town of Wake Forest to Winston-Salem down a nearly deserted Interstate 40 to take possession of this major artifact for the Dr. Calvin Jones House, a part of the Wake Forest Historical Museum’s complex.

Thanks to archival documentation and the family story, the bed has concluded its nearly 200-year journey from North Carolina, to Tennessee, then Indiana, back to Tennessee and now coming back home to Wake Forest. The bed is once again in the house and bedroom where it was first used in 1826. Not only does the Museum have the artifact but the archival documentation of its very creation.