“My name is Ashley Kraus and I am currently an English major in the LCS track here at the University of Cincinnati. This infographic was a project for my Rhetoric and Professional Writing class with Professor Laura Wilson, who allowed us to pick any topic we wanted. Since my career plans include going into library science, I felt it would be interesting to focus on information in that area. My main goal in creating this infographic was to provide UC students with some information about what the UC Libraries have to offer. There is great information and resources on the library website, so I incorporated links in the info graphic to provide quick access to that information. I enjoyed working on this project and am grateful to the Langsam Library staff for their help and recommendations.”

Ashley’s interactive infographic can be viewed at https://www.thinglink.com/scene/375473419237457921#tlsite

African American Newspapers, 1827-1998 provides online access to approximately 270 U.S. newspapers chronicling a century and a half of the African American experience. This unique collection features papers from more than 35 states including many rare and historically significant 19th century titles. Newly digitized, these newspapers published by or for African Americans can now be browsed and searched as never before.

The approximate 8,000 negatives and prints, which date from 1920 to 1956, include both interior and exterior shots of private residences and city scenes. They were taken as part of a failed subway development project in Cincinnati and also as documentation during various street projects.

The interior images offer an in-depth look at how a typical Ohio family lived. The products in their kitchens and the furnishings in their living rooms, with such things as player pianos and photographs on the wall, are all captured in the negatives and prints. The exterior shots show the layout of city streets and neighborhoods, stores and businesses, as well as the traffic and bustle of everyday life, not to mention the damage done by subway construction. Beyond the years of the subway project, the images of street renovations into the 1930s, ‘40s, and ‘50s eloquently illustrate the changing urban landscape.

“In this collection of historically significant materials, we have the opportunity to see how one Ohio city functioned in the first half of the 20th century,” said Kevin Grace, project co-director, university archivist, and head of the Archives and Rare Books Library where the collection resides. “Ohio residents, city planners, researchers, and scholars worldwide engaged in research in social, political, urban, and transportation history, as well as genealogical and family history research, will find much value in this collection.”

The photographic negatives and prints are part of the Archives and Rare Books Library’s Ohio Network Collection in the state’s Local Government Records Program, a diverse body of materials that document official government activity from the 18th to the 21st centuries. The Cincinnati subway and street changes archive, which also includes construction reports, householders’ damage claims, blueprints, minutes, and correspondence, in addition to the negatives and prints, is used by researchers and students studying urban planning and development, the history of Cincinnati, American history, civil engineering, and political science. Faculty and independent scholars avail themselves of the collection for in-depth research on neighborhood decline and revitalization, America’s transportation heritage, and urban political reform movements. Additionally, in the past three years, journalists, City of Cincinnati planning officials, and neighborhood activists have consulted the documents in order to provide input for street and housing renovations and for reviving interest in downtown Cincinnati tourism.

The project to digitize the negatives and prints is slated for completion in October 2013 at which time the collection will be fully available for research and study on the Web. “This collection will be a significant addition to collections of Cincinnati historical documents already digitized by UC Libraries and available to anyone anywhere via the digital collections website at http://digitalprojects.libraries.uc.edu/,” added Linda Newman, project co-director and head of UC Libraries’ digital collections.

“By making it a priority to digitize our unique collections such as the negatives and prints from the Cincinnati and subway street changes archive, we not only broaden the availability of such materials, but we also fulfill our mission to provide outstanding research collections in order to enable the University of Cincinnati to achieve its comprehensive mission of teaching, learning, research, health care, and community engagement,” said Xuemao Wang, dean and university librarian. “I want to express my appreciation to the State Library of Ohio for awarding UC Libraries this LSTA grant.”

The LSTA program is funded through the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and administered through the State Library of Ohio.

You can keep up with updates via their Twitter feed: https://twitter.com/springshare

Irish theatre critic William John Lawrence (1862-1940) was considered a major figure in documenting the history of Irish theatre.

William J. Lawrence

Yet, dozens of his notebooks on Irish theatre history from the 17th-to-20th centuries were never published. Efforts and outreach to make collections stored at the University of Cincinnati and at other institutions accessible worldwide will be presented at the 4th International Conference on Qualitative and Quantitative Methods in Libraries. The conference takes place May 22-25 in Limerick, Ireland, and brings together librarians from around the world as they explore best practices on making their resources available for research.

Kevin Grace, head of the UC Archives and Rare Books Library, will present at the conference. Grace says 99 of Lawrence’s unpublished notebooks are stored in UC’s Archives & Rare Books Library. They were purchased from the estate of William Smith Clark II, a former UC English professor and theatre historian, who acquired the notebooks in the 1940s. The notebooks have been housed in the Archives & Rare Books Library since the late 1960s.

The notebooks are considered to be the sole source of Ireland’s theatrical history, since a 1922 fire at the Four Courts Building in Ireland destroyed virtually all of Ireland’s pre-20th century historical records.

“His scores of notebooks on the topic preserved an important aspect of Irish and Anglo-Irish culture, not only in terms of theatres and plays and actors, but also in the culture of cities and towns,” says Grace. “They have not been published in any form, and contain Lawrence’s annotations, summaries of plays, anecdotes on the players, notes on the physical stage and on the staging of particular plays, reviews, images, announcements, biographies and production history.”

Grace says that UC is now reaching out to other institutions to form a cooperative web presence of finding aids for Lawrence holdings. In addition to the collection at UC, 11 of Lawrence’s notebooks are stored at the University of Bristol in England. The National Library of Ireland in Dublin also contains unpublished manuscripts, and there are collections at the New York Public Library and the University of Delaware. “We’re interested in building partnerships with these libraries to create a unified guide to Lawrence’s writings,” Grace says.

By the end of June, UC’s Archives and Rare Books Library plans to launch a website with detailed finding aids to UC’s collection and the other Lawrence collections around the world.

Grace says the web presence would open this history to scholars in a range of fields including urban studies, literature, sociology and theatre history.