SPEC Kit 347: Community-based Collections · 27
The collection was created in tandem with scholars, community groups, veterans’ organizations, and the Library
of Congress. Professors Robert Freeman and Dennis Wright of Brigham Young University’s Department of Religion
embarked on what they thought would be a small set of interviews done with veterans who were members of the
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Their small project has blossomed into over 2000 interviews with more
being collected.
Via a partnership between the Mazer Board, UCLA’s Center for the Study of Women, and UCLA Library. We collectively
secured an NEH grant to process and provide access to the Mazer collections via UCLA Library.
Special Collections reached out to an important community voice in 2004. About a year of conversations took place
with H. Baca and members of the Committee on Chicano Rights Archive Group. The Friends of the UCSD Library
contributed funds to permit the purchase of the materials in 2004.
Initially, in the late 1970s and 1980s, the Archives was assisting a researcher on this topic. While assisting the
researcher, staff duplicated and pulled together material they located for the researcher to develop a body of files to
assist future researchers on the subject. Materials were pulled together from various donors into the collection in the
1990s, and after 2000, when the USN JLS/OLS Archival Project began a long very active phase, staff and students
amassed considerable information from a wide variety of sources, which were then organized into this collection.
History professor Sidney Heitman established the Colorado State University Germans from Russia in Colorado Study
Project in 1975. The study project focused on northern Colorado and conducted extensive interviews with Germans
from Russia. The four-year project focused on the influence Germans from Russia had on Colorado, since they
constituted the state’s second largest ethnic group. The development of a comprehensive collection of material on Volga
Germans in Colorado was a high priority of the project. The original collection includes project files, oral history tapes
and transcripts, conference papers, undergraduate student research, clippings, slides, and sound recordings. In recent
years we have accessioned manuscript collections from members of the German Russian community and have built a
substantial named monographic collection that complements Dr. Heitman’s original study materials. A collaborative
website, hosted by CSU, highlighting materials housed at the State Archive of Saratov Province/GASO (Russian
Federation) also complements this collection.
In early 2009, a CSU Environmental History professor contacted us to inquire whether the CSU Libraries might be
interested in acquiring a collection of books and related materials from emeritus professor and retired NPS employee
John Albright. At that time, the Agricultural Archive was preparing to expand its collecting focus to include materials
related to the natural resources careers of many CSU alumni in the National Park Service and Forest Service. After
accepting the donation of the Albright collection, the archivist began contacting others in the natural resources field
to advertise the Libraries’ interest in collecting NPS-related materials, and Ken Mabery started thinking that CSU
might be a good repository to house the 50 boxes of NPS-related books and other materials that he and his friend Bill
Supernaugh had been collecting for many years. After numerous discussions, Ken donated the collection to CSU in 2012.
The CHHC began as a private collection assembled by a former record industry executive concerned with ensuring
that the history of the origins of Hip Hop, as underground street culture invented by black and brown teenagers in the
Bronx, NY, and surrounding neighborhoods in the 1970s, would be preserved for future generations. The donor selected
Cornell University to assume institutional stewardship of his collection. In the eight years since, it has grown from its
initial 15,000 items to more than 200,000 items.
The Panama Canal Museum, formerly located in Seminole, FL, closed in 2012 (12 years after opening) and transferred its
collection to the University of Florida George A. Smathers Libraries.
The group’s need to preserve and make available physical and digital collections.
Following the publication of the book, the library received the collection as a gift.
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