Kevin Schlottmann, RBML’s head archivist, shares a selection of new and updated finding aids, as well as newly available collections. We have lots to share, including newly processed collections, recently digitized AV material, and some significant updated finding aids. At long last, the heavily used Random House records have an digital finding aid, replacing a […]
Kevin Schlottmann, RBML’s head archivist, shares these updates about finding aids that our archivist and collections management specialists converted from scanned PDF documents to more accessible digital use. The materials described offer a glimpse into the broad and deep collections that the RBML stewards. Also highlighted are examples of the other archival processing work, such […]
Processing collections according to updated archival standards gives RBML archivists the opportunity to discover anew our collections. In this post, Processing Archivist Celeste Brewer offers us insights into the practice of children writing letters during the Civil War-era. Historians typically foreground the writings and papers of “Great Men,” but as Celeste notes, paying attention to […]
Archival materials have the curious ability to change their meanings over time. Scholars in different eras, regarding the same items, can interpret them in vastly different—sometimes even contradictory—ways. Largely, this is scholarship functioning as it was intended, as different methods and fields of inquiry develop and are modified in turn. Yet it is especially true […]
Why would an archivist change the name of a collection? That’s the central question behind a new RBML exhibit. Dynamic Archives features examples of archival collections and materials whose naming, identifying and meaning have had to keep up with historical, social and political perspectives, as well as translation practices and epistemologies. […]