SCUA collects, preserves, and makes accessible rare, unique, or otherwise significant materials outside the scope of the general UNCG library collection. We also deliver presentations, classes, tours, and exhibits.
Our collections include official records, personal manuscripts, rare books, textiles, A/V materials and artifacts. Subject strengths include women's history, literature, theatre, music, and dance.
*Sarah Maske is a senior at UNC Greensboro, with a double major in history and archaeology. She is interning in the Martha Blakeney Hodges Special Collection and University Archives for the spring 2019 semester.
SCUA intern, Sarah Maske
This semester, I am interning in the Martha Blakeney Hodges Special Collections and University Archives (SCUA) for HIS 390, a course offered by the History Department as a way for students to gain experience in the Public History field. My main project is to process material for the University Archives artifact collections. I am two and a half months into my semester long internship and I have loved every minute of my time here. The last four years I have spent a lot of time researching in the archives, but to work inside the stacks and to be a part of caring for a collection is a whole new experience for me.
I want to share some of what I learned about processing materials, and what it is like working with artifacts related to the University. Archival processing is essentially how materials are added to an archival collection. I found that researching the origins of an artifact and its significance to the University is my favorite part of the internship. Nevertheless, this is also one of the most frustrating parts of processing because sometimes it is hard to track the history of an artifact. Yet when your research is fruitful, it is so exciting!
Diebold Safe
When I am researching, I try to picture what type of life the artifact had. I sometimes wonder if an artifact was a person what stories it would tell. My favorite books as a child were the Strange Museum series by Jahanna N. Malcolm. The series was about two siblings who lived above a museum, and if they touched an artifact after the museum closed, they would travel back in time to meet the artifact’s owner. When I am processing an artifact I always think about this series. It is moments when I am struggling to find information on an artifact that make me wish time travel was not limited to a work of fiction.
So far, I have processed or reprocessed, at least 50 artifacts and each are unique in their own way. Some artifacts are connected to buildings (you would be surprised by how many bricks are in the artifact collection), while others are connected to a single student or faculty member. Some are important awards and others seem like the most obsolete objects, such as laundry cards. As a researcher with an archaeology background, I find these little artifacts rich resources to understand the everyday life of the students. For example, a laundry card contains a list of different articles of clothing, so as a researcher the card illustrates what types of clothing were popular in the 1940s.
Woman's College Make-Up Case
Sometimes I think about what artifact I could add to the collection that would be memorable and aid a researcher in understanding what it was like to be a student on campus in 2019. Would my flyer I kept from a lecture on Roman pigments or my Honors Ambassador name tag be helpful to a future researcher? To be honest, I keep a lot of objects and notes from my time at UNC Greensboro. Any flyer from an important event or course notes go in chronological order to be packed away in my room at home. At times, I worry that I toe the fine line between hoarder and collector. Anyone else would throw it all away, but I would like to think someone in the future, who thinks like me will think my notes from my courses and keepsakes are interesting. As someone who is actively using the artifact collection, I am appreciative of the people who thought to donate their buttons, rain caps, stickers, toasters, and paperweights. Each one of these artifacts lets me see a small glimpse into the past.
Every time I work in the archives, I experience something new. SCUA has a wide variety of artifacts, whether it’s bricks from demolished buildings, a makeup case, a handkerchief from a former Queen of England, or even an antique crib. One day, I might crawl under a chair to look for manufacturer’s markings and the next day box buttons from the most recent campus event. I am so lucky to work with artifacts that have interesting histories. Working with the University Archive Collection has helped me grow as a public historian, and I am forever grateful to SCUA for this experience.
Join us for the first annual Triad History Day on Saturday, April 6, 2019, from 10AM until 3PM, at the Greensboro History Museum (130 Summit Ave, Greensboro, NC 27401)!
Triad History Day is a one-day public festival focused on Triad history, both the stories and the people who preserve them. The event will feature a “history hall” with displays from history organizations, a series of lightning round talks focused on local history, as well as booths focused on oral history, preservation advice, and digitization of community materials. Learn more here: https://www.facebook.com/events/1245098408985423/
On March 14, 2019, more than thirty people stopped by Hodges Reading Room for an open house event to celebrate our new student-curated exhibit "UNC Greensboro Back to the Future: The Story of the 1960s." Student curators provided visitors with personalized tours of the exhibit and provided reflections on their experiences researching campus history.
This exhibit was curated by graduate student Erin Blackledge with assistant from undergraduate students Alexis Castorena and Malory Cedeno. Sarah Colonna, Associate Faculty Chair for Grogan College, and Erin Lawrimore, University Archivist and Associate Professor, served as grant coordinators and faculty advisors for the exhibit. Student curator stipends were funded through a grant from the UNC Greensboro Interdisciplinary Collaboration Committee.
"UNC Greensboro Back to the Future" is available for viewing in Hodges Reading Room through June 2019. Hodges Reading Room is on the second floor of Jackson Library. The exhibit is open Monday through Friday between 9am and 5pm.
By combining reflections and poems from current undergraduate students from Grogan Residential College with primary sources from the 1960s, "UNC Greensboro Back to the Future" explores the enormous social changes that arose during this momentous decade and demonstrates how UNCG students today reflect on its past. Topics explored include campus desegregation, civil rights movements, and the transformation from Woman's College to UNCG.
This exhibit is part of UNC Greensboro's year-long celebration "The '60s: Exploring the Limits." You can learn more about the campus's upcoming events and activities to examine and understand this decade at sixties.uncg.edu.
Join us for the first annual Triad History Day on Saturday, April 6, 2019, from 10AM until 3PM, at the Greensboro History Museum (130 Summit Ave, Greensboro, NC 27401). Triad History Day is a free one-day public festival focused on Triad history, both the stories and the people who preserve them.
The event will feature a “history hall” with displays from history organizations, a series of lightning round talks focused on local history, as well as booths focused on oral history, preservation advice, and digitization of community materials.
Visitors can learn more about local archives, museums, libraries, and other historical organizations in the “history hall.” Participating institutions include representation from all over the Triad. See the complete participating institution list below.
Visitors with photographs or other records that help document Triad history can bring materials to the scanning station at Triad History Day. There, archivists will scan the materials for inclusion in UNC Greensboro’s community history portal. Visitors will also receive a copy of the scan.
An oral history booth will allow participants the opportunity to record a 15-minute interview about an interesting story related to the Triad region. Interviews may involve two friends having a conversation, a family member interviewing a family member, or an individual being interviewed by a UNCG graduate students serving as an oral history facilitator. Interviews would be made available through the TriadHistory.org digital collection portal.
A series of short talks about local Triad history will take place throughout the day, with speakers announced in late March.
Join us on Friday, March 15th at 2pm for a kick off event for the campus-wide Archives, Archiving, and Community Engagement discussion group. This group will be led by UNCG University Archivist Erin Lawrimore and is sponsored by UNC Greensboro's Institute for Community and Economic Engagement (ICEE) Faculty Fellows Program.
We will meet in Hodges Reading Room (219 Jackson Library) to chat about how we can collaborate to ensure that artifacts of community-engaged scholarship as well as the archives of our partner communities are preserved in a sustainable, accessible way.
Everyone - faculty, staff, administrators, students, and community members - is welcome to join us and help guide the direction of the group's discussions throughout 2019. For more information, please see: http://communityengagement.uncg.edu/archives-archiving-and-community/.
We're once again going to Hop into History at Gibb's Hundred Brewing this semester! We've got three dates scheduled this Spring:
Thursday, February 21
Thursday, March 21
Thursday, April 18
All will be from 5-7pm at Gibb's location at 504 State Street in Greensboro.
The February event will focus on Charlotte Hawkins Brown and the Palmer Memorial Institute. The awesome folks at the Charlotte Hawkins Brown Museum in eastern Guilford County will be bringing artifacts that show Dr. Brown's work as an educator, as well as her work as a supporter of suffrage, civil rights, and social justice. Founded by Dr. Brown in 1902, Palmer was one of the first elite Black boarding schools in the South. Open until 1971, Dr. Brown transformed the lives of more than 1,000 African American students. You can learn more at the Facebook event page: https://www.facebook.com/events/2188513461398141/.
Also, if you want to do some preliminary reading to learn more about a connection between Dr. Brown and UNCG, we have a Spartan Stories post from a few years ago about how the state's Jim Crow segregationist laws impacted her students and their ability to attend performances in Aycock (now UNCG) Auditorium: https://uncghistory.blogspot.com/2015/02/charlotte-hawkins-brown-walter-clinton.html.
Our Well Crafted NC project continues to grow! Well Crafted NC is a collaborative project that documents the history of North Carolina beer and brewing through oral history interviews with industry leaders and archiving the records of individual small businesses. The craft beer industry in North Carolina has an annual economic impact of over $2.1 billion and provides more than 12,000 jobs across the state, so Well Crafted NC was created to ensure that the history of this important business sector is preserved.
In Summer 2018, University Archivist Erin Lawrimore received a UNCG Faculty First Award to support a series of oral history interviews with women brewers and brewery owners in North Carolina. Twenty-three women's stories were recorded for the project, bringing to total number of interviews in Well Crafted NC as of January 15, 2019, to 34. You can read more about this work in the Spring 2019 issue of UNCG Research Magazine (see the article online here). You can also listen to some of the women interviewed during this project talk about the importance of the Pink Boots Society, an organization focused on supporting women in the beer industry, in this video:
Additionally, the Well Crafted NC team received a grant through UNCG's Community-Engaged Pathways and Partnerships Collective Scholarship Fellows program, which aims to strengthen collective approaches to community-engaged scholarship through the development of sustainable pathways and partnerships that build deep, reciprocal processes to achieve mutually beneficial, community-identified priorities. The team, which includes faculty from the University Libraries as well as the Bryan School, will work with the Triad Brewers Alliance to document the history of local breweries and train local breweries on how to utilize their history to increase marketing and tourism for craft beer in the Triad.
We also received an in-kind award (100GB of digital storage) from Archive-It to create two web archive collections focused on beer and brewing. The Archives of Beer and Brewing will focus on documenting websites of influential craft breweries across the U.S.
The Beer Bloggers Archive will focus on prominent national beer blogs. We're asking the public to help us identify beer blogs for inclusion in this web archive collection. You can nominate sites here.
In addition to the grants and special projects, in November 2018, the Well Crafted NC team set up an exhibit and information booth at the North Carolina Craft Brewers Conference in Winston-Salem. Erin Lawrimore was interviewed by Spectrum News for a piece on the importance of craft beer to North Carolina. You can see that piece here.
There are also a number of upcoming opportunities for folks to learn more about Well Crafted NC through presentations and exhibits.
On Wednesday, January 23 at 4pm at ZSR Library at Wake Forest University, Erin Lawrimore will discuss the original concept for the project, the continued development of the project through strategic partnerships and grant funding, and new initiatives focused on helping breweries integrate history into their individual and regional marketing efforts. You can learn more on the event's Facebook page. This event is free and open to the public. A reception, with an exhibit of materials from Well Crafted NC, will follow.
On Saturday, January 26 at 7pm at the Beer Growler in Winston-Salem, Richard Cox will join journalist and beer blogger Kat Bodrie for a discussion of the history and future of craft beer in North Carolina. We will also have an exhibit focused on North Carolina beer history. This event is free and open to the public. More details can be found on the Facebook event page.
On Saturday, March 2 at 1pm at Highland Brewing Company in Asheville, Well Crafted NC will have an exhibit focused on the history of women in North Carolina beer as part of the annual Biere de Femme festival, sponsored by Pink Boots Society North Carolina. Biere de Femme is focused on highlighting women in the craft beer industry. 100% of all proceeds go toward scholarships to help women in North Carolina and beyond improve their lives by giving them education and marketable skills in the beer industry. This is a ticketed event, and tickets are currently available here. The event also has a Facebook page you can follow for updates (including a list of participating breweries).
We hope that you'll join us for one (or more) of these upcoming events! You can learn more about Well Crafted NC and keep up with news about other events and activities on our Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.
