A journal of rediscovery
Kathryn Hujda is an assistant curator at the Performing Arts Archives and Upper Midwest Literary Archives, University of Minnesota Libraries Archives and Special Collections. This is the second part of a two-part interview. Click here to read part one. MG: What is a special collection? KH: Special collections contain
Continue readingDigitization in Archives: An Interview with Kathryn Hujda
by Carolyn Bernier What [does] it feel like to be the world’s best-known museum button? @MPMsnake1 @CarolynBarolyn I’m happy to have rattled my way into so many hearts.2 -Twitter conversation between the author and the Milwaukee Public Museum’s rattlesnake button, August 24 and 29, 2016. The rattlesnake button at Milwaukee
In 1961, after moving from Minnesota to New York City, a singer-songwriter named Bob Dylan was looking for a deeper perspective on America’s past. He found it at the archives of the New York Public Library. In one of the rooms on its upper floors, Dylan read through 100-year-old newspapers
Continue readingBob Dylan and Horace Purdy: Two Writers Who Teach Us about History
“. . . the art of how you tell a story is often as meaningful to the audience and as moving to the audience as the story itself.”1 —Julie Taymor, Director and Costume Designer for The Lion King On a recent visit to the Haas Library Archives at Connecticut State
“We don’t know where this Internet is going, and once we get there it will be very instructive to look back.”1 —Donald Heath, president of the Internet Society in Reston, Virginia By my door, along with a stack of items to be dropped off at charities and recycling centers, sits
Continue readingArchive Series: The Internet and the Future of Digital Preservation
Truman Warner served in World War II as a medic. He then went on to a career as a professor, author, and historian. He captured much of the war in his photos and clippings. All of these materials have since been preserved in a digital archive at Western Connecticut State
Continue readingArchive Series: A Kind Warning About History
Everything I’d been doing the past five days was surreal, so why should this moment be any different? Cresting a steep hill, I passed under a banner of Buddhist prayer flags and entered a wide plateau. Our guide set down his pack and called for a break as I struggled
Continue readingAt the End of the Ice at the Top of the World: Ghosts
They call it the Stone Church. It’s a natural cavern above a brook in the woods off of Route 22 in Dover Plains, New York. Its entrance, formed by giant boulders, shaped haphazardly over the eons, forms an upside down “V” that gives it the appearance of a steeple. I
Continue readingSkull Talk: Stone Church in Dover New York a Shrine of History & Natural Beauty
– Jennifer DiCola Matos is the executive director of the Noah Webster House in West Hartford, Connecticut. The house was the birthplace and early home of Noah Webster, author of The Blue Back Speller and An American Dictionary of the English Language. The house runs tours seven days a week
Continue readingInterview with Jennifer DiCola Matos, Executive Director of the Noah Webster House
Stopped at a traffic light in the upscale bedroom community of Bedford, New York, I looked out the car window at what seemed to be a stone storage shed at the edge of a Catholic church’s parking lot. A sign indicated that it was a historic, one-room schoolhouse, and I
Continue readingSkull Talk: One-Room Schoolhouse 46 Miles from the Big Apple