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Uncovering New Chicago Archives Project: Mellon-Funded Exploration of African American Literary History

The UNCAP initiative, a 3-year Mellon-funded project (2007-2009), aims to identify, process, and catalog collections vital to African American cultural history in Chicago. This collaboration between faculty and libraries introduces user-driven programs, services, and graduate student training, promoting interdisciplinary primary source research skills. Faculty engagement leads to new research areas, curriculum development, and collaborative scholarship, advancing humanistic fields. The project aligned with BMRC and other initiatives faces challenges in training, goal alignment, and cross-institutional collaborations.

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Uncovering New Chicago Archives Project: Mellon-Funded Exploration of African American Literary History

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  1. UNCAP Uncovering New Chicago Archives Project • 3-year Mellon-funded project (Jan 2007-Dec 2009) • Partners • Library • Faculty • Graduate Students • Local Archive-holding Institutions • Precursor project: Mapping the Stacks

  2. Mapping the Stacks Professors Goldsby and Stewart • Post-depression, pre-civil rights era African American literary and cinema history • Mapping The Stacks: Mellon Officer’s Grant • “to identify primary source materials (books, films, photographs, newspapers, magazines, manuscript archives, recorded oral histories, and other ephemera) in need of processing and cataloguing.”

  3. UNCAP Goals • Hidden collections initiative • Identifying and processing collections important for African American cultural history • Faculty-Library collaboration • User-driven collections, programs, services • Process and preserve important research materials • Train graduate students to process collections in their field • Cross-institutional discovery tool

  4. Faculty-Library Collaboration:User-driven Collections, Programs, Services • Not just consultation - Not just scholarship • User involvement in Library decision-making and processing • No one size fits all • Processing level dependent on • Nature of collection • Institutional context and mission • Needs of researchers using collection • Faculty participation in identifying and placing collections

  5. Faculty-Library Collaboration:Training Graduate Students • Primary source research skills • Hunting is fun, but overwhelming • Discovering patterns and relationships • Fostering interdisciplinary investigation and conceptualization • English (including Poetry and Poetics), Cinema and Media Studies, History, Art History, and Music • Discovery for seminar and dissertation research

  6. Faculty-Library Collaboration:Faculty Benefits • Discover new areas of research • Curriculum development • Scholarship production • Student recruitment • Fostering collaborative research in humanistic fields • Breaking the mold of individualistic research • Science model

  7. Organizational Architecture

  8. Organizational Architecture Related Initiatives BMRC: Black Metropolis Research Consortium

  9. Cross-institutional Discovery Tool • One Tool For: • Multiple institutions with differing needs • Hierarchical relationships within project • Collection survey and finding aids • Multiple formats • Personal and institutional papers • Radio transcripts • Image collections • Oral histories • Sound recordings • Newspaper clippings • Stock arrangements • Etc.

  10. Challenges and Opportunities • Training students and faculty in archival theory and practice • Marrying goals of faculty and library • Collaborations with libraries in other areas undertaking similar initiatives (e.g. Johns Hopkins Mellon-funded Diaspora Pathways Archival Access Project) • Infrastructure available for other collaborative projects (e.g. BMRC)

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