SCRC offers "Archives Basics" for community record-keepers

Participants in the "Archives Basics" workshop represented 15 community organizations.

The UK Libraries Special Collections Research Center hosted 15 community archivists and genealogists for a three-hour “archives basics” workshop on March 9, 2016.  Central Kentucky non-profit organizations represented included: the African American Genealogical Group of Kentucky, Episcopal Diocese of Lexington, Faulkner-Morgan Archive, First African Baptist Church, First Baptist Church of Berea, Isaac Scott Hathaway Museum/Robert H. Williams Cultural Center, Lexington Community Land Trust, Lyric Theatre, Main Street Baptist Church, Mary Todd Lincoln House, The Plantory, and U I D yoU IDentify local African American Friends and Family Facebook page. Several of the participants who attended are active in multiple organizations.

Topics included the historical value of organizational records, selecting records for permanent retention, inventorying and storing physical and digital records, providing access to researchers, digitization methods and standards, and outreach and exhibits. A break and a tour of Special Collections offered networking and small group discussion opportunities, as well as the possibility of seeing archival work in action.

The workshop built on a successful workshop that Special Collections held last November for African American church clerks and secretaries. Demand for an archival basics workshop grew as a result.

SCRC staff presenting included: Ruth Bryan, director of Technical Services and University Archivist; Nancy DeMarcus, University Records manager; Sarah Dorpinghaus, digital archivist; Reinette Jones, oral history librarian and African American studies academic liaison; Matthew Strandmark, education archivist; and Stacie Williams, Learning Lab manager. 

 “The records of community organizations and of individual community members are of great value to all of us in helping us understand who we are and what we can achieve together. Reaching out to community members and providing support for preserving and sharing those records is an important role for the Special Collections Research Center. We look forward to continuing to work together with former and future workshop attendees to advance our common mission,” said workshop organizer Ruth Bryan.

UK Libraries event: UPK author speaks on the American South and the Vietnam War

A reminder that historian and University Press of Kentucky (UPK) author Dr. Joseph A. Fry will visit campus to deliver a lecture on how the South's response impacted America's participation in the Vietnam War. Fry will speak 4 p.m. Monday, March 7, 2016, in the Great Hall of Margaret I. King Library on the University of Kentucky campus. The lecture is free and open to the public.

Fry's talk, “Place Matters: Domestic Regionalism, the American South, and the Vietnam War,” explores how place matters in how Americans have responded to and sought to influence U.S. foreign policy. The dynamic of domestic regional influence on U.S. foreign relations was especially apparent in the American South’s role in the Vietnam War.

From the general public to soldiers, college students and crucially placed political leaders, the South supported the war more strongly and longer than any other section of the country. As had been the southern practice since the 1780s, the South’s bellicose foreign policy stance was grounded in distinctly regional political and economic interests, racial views, ideological and historical assumptions, and religious values.

Although the South's support helped to sustain an increasingly unpopular war under both Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon, many of these same regional interests and values spawned an articulate minority opposition to the war. These antiwar protests, together with the war’s mounting agony, led even the South and its pro-war leaders to tire of the conflict by the early 1970s.

Fry is the author of "The American South and the Vietnam War: Belligerence, Protest, and Agony in Dixie," published by UPK in 2015. His visit to UK is made possible by sponsors UK Libraries and UPK.

Historian Dr. Joseph A. Fry to speak on the American South and the Vietnam War

Historian and University Press of Kentucky Author Dr. Joseph A. Fry will visit campus to deliver a lecture sponsored by UK Libraries and UPK. Fry will speak on “Place Matters: Domestic Regionalism, the American South, and the Vietnam War.” The lecture, to be held at 4 p.m. on March 7, 2016, in the Great Hall of Margaret I. King Library, is free and open to the public.

Fry is the author of The American South and the Vietnam War: Belligerence, Protest, and Agony in Dixie, published by UPK in 2015. He is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Fry's other books include Henry S. Sanford: Diplomacy and Business in Nineteenth Century America (1982), John Tyler Morgan and the Search for Southern Autonomy (1992), Dixie Looks Abroad: The South and U.S. Foreign Relations, 1789-1973 (2002), and Debating Vietnam: Fulbright, Stennis, and Their Senate Hearings (2006). He has published articles in Diplomatic History, the Pacific Historical Review, and various other journals and collections. He is the series editor for Biographies in American Foreign Policy published by Rowman and Littlefield Publishers. To date, 18 volumes have appeared. Fry's current research focuses on Lincoln, Seward, and U.S. foreign relations in the 1860s.