#finding aids

From the Eleanor Leacock Papers (Special Collections Research Center) Zambia field notes and photograph of Eleanor Leacock, a prominent Marxist/feminist anthropologist active from the 1940s to the late 1980s. Her area of focus was social and gender relations, feminist theory, and racism in American education.

Newly processed by our archivists!

Map Collection Finding Aid Now Online

National Aviation Day

In celebration of National Aviation Day, which is observed each year on Orville Wright’s birthday, we are sharing this post from Archives Technician Kim.

During this period of teleworking due to the coronavirus, Kim has been updating finding aids for Record Group 181: Records of Naval Stations and Shore Establishments. Finding aids are tools that help a user find information in a specific record group, collection, or series of archival materials. 

Kim has been updating the finding aid for the Naval Weapons Center at China Lake, California. While researching the topic, she was browsing the National Archives Catalog and found this nice image of an A-6E Intruder aircraft during an early morning test flight in November 1988. 

The A-6 Intruder was designed as a long-range, all-weather aircraft that was first flown in 1960. For more information about this aircraft, see the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum webpage.

#FindingAidFriday

If you are familiar with our Archives department, you might already know that not all of the archival or manuscript materials in our collections are online.  In fact, only a small portion of our materials are available as digitized content through our digital collections.  However, a good portion of our collections have tools for discovering and identifying what’s relevant to your research available online.  These are called finding aids, and they are openly available, searchable, and even broadly discoverable through our own website as well as web tools like ArchiveGrid.  

Despite this, we find that most new researchers aren’t super familiar with or confident about using finding aids.  Let’s face it, archives can be intimidating and confusing. It doesn’t help that sometimes archivists and librarians toss around discipline-specific jargon and things get more complicated.

Don’t worry, we’ve got your back and we are here to help!  Why? Because archives are meant to be used and we want to help you use them!  We want you to discover a little bit more about the collections we have available at our institution.

Start by checking out this video that guides you through the process of searching within a finding aid.  Many thanks to our very own Reference and Instruction Specialist, Heidi, who created this video!

Second batch of materials for the Marcelo Mirisola Papers collection

Marcelo Mirisola on his maternal grandfather's lap, Osasco, SP, 1967 

Interview with Marcelo Mirisola, A Tribuna, July 15, 2012

A second batch of materials for the Marcelo Mirisola Papers archive has arrived at the University of Michigan Library. In the coming months, we will add all these new materials to the Marcelo Mirisola Papers finding-aid, ensuring they are fully accessible for research and study.

Last Lords of Palenque draft and photograph of Victor Perera, Sephardic-American writer, journalist, and political activist from the Victor Perera Papers (Special Collections Research Center)

Newly processed by our archivists!

Notebook of “Purple Mountain” in Sli Chorea Dhuibhne (The Dingle Way), 1999.  Jim Cohn Papers, Box 15, folder 3. University of Michigan Library, Special Collections Research Center. 

On this #FindingAidFriday, we are highlighting the recently processed papers of Jim Cohn, poet, writer, recording artist, editor, publisher, and curator of the online Museum of American Poetics. The Jim Cohn Papers (1953-2019) were donated in 2019 and encompass approximately fifteen linear feet of material documenting Cohn’s work across his several vocations through correspondence, research files and drafts, interviews by and of Cohn, published essays and poetry, journals, photographs, and audiovisual materials.

Join us on the 6th floor of Hatcher next Thursday, 21 November between 4-6p for our next Third Thursdays at the Library event of the semester!