The North Carolina Folklife Institute (NCFI) requests funding to support the creation of metadata for the Digital Archive of North Carolina Folklife (DANCF), a searchable, browsable, free database of images of traditional cultures in North Carolina drawn from a consortium of hidden collections. Plans are underway for the DANCF website to be designed and permanently hosted by the University of North Carolina’s Wilson Library, on its Documenting the American South site. At the heart of the DANCF will be selected collections from the NCFI/North Carolina Arts Council extensive archive of images, a little-known collection created over the course of NCFI’s 35-year existence. These images, most by accomplished documentary photographers, depict an array of traditional arts, occupational traditions, foodways, cultural landscapes, and tradition bearers. In addition, the DANCF will include other important hidden collections: those of the Concerned Citizens of Tillery, whose archive is a valuable resource for the study of African American agricultural heritage and New Deal resettlement communities; the Core Sound Waterfowl Museum, whose photographs document the threatened maritime culture of the North Carolina coast; and documentarian of traditional Appalachian music Alice Gerrard.

Four French pamphlet collections that are primary sources for legal, social and cultural history; literary studies; and the history of publishing have been cataloged. 1. French Revolution Collection: More than 30,000 pamphlets and 180 periodicals published between 1780 and 1810. The periodicals and 12,000 anonymously authored pamphlets have already been cataloged; 18,000 pamphlets with known authors will be cataloged through this grant. 2. Recueil de pieces historiques: At the beginning of the19th century, the religious order of Saint-Sulpice assembled this collection of 2,600 biographical pamphlets to serve as educational models, especially for rhetorical writing. Funeral sermons, orations, commemorative verses, and discourses dating from the 16th to the early 19th century are included. First editions include short works by Bude, Pascal, and Moliere. 3. Publishers' prospectuses and catalogs: Parisian and rare provincial publishers are represented in this unique assemblage of information about French printing and publishing from 1700-1850. The collection consists of 700 pamphlets. 4. Trial and execution of Louis XVI: This collection of 600 rare government pamphlets published at the time of the trial provides information on the collection of evidence, defense by de Seze, public opinion (including that of American Tom Paine), moral and political reflections on judging and executing the king, and opinions of Convention deputies (e.g. Marat, Saint-Just, Robespierre).

The Merritt, Chapman and Scott Collection of photographs document the company’s marine salvage and construction activity from 1895 to 1935. The images provide comprehensive visual documentation of many aspects of the American maritime experience including the final decades of transition from sail to steam powered ships. They also reveal the dangers of shipping and water transport, including sinkings and accidents caused by human error, catastrophic mechanical failures and natural disasters. The photos provide a comprehensive record of the vessels, people, and structures associated with harbor activity and a working waterfront. Finally, they provide a record of a number of key historic events such as a grand reception for Theodore Roosevelt in 1910 and a 1912 pioneering flight by Frank Coffyn, a pilot trained by the Wright brothers. The majority of the selected images depict coastal activity from New Jersey to Rhode Island, with a strong focus on the New York City waterfront. The significance of New York as a hub for national and international shipping gives the photos of vessels, cargoes, and activity a broad geographic scope. For example, included are photos of key gatherings of U.S. Navy ships and photos of the OLYMPIC, the British-built sister ship of the TITANIC. Additional examples of geographic diversity include photos of the sunken battleship USS MAINE in Havana Harbor and a group of images depicting lock & dam construction on the Mississippi River in Illinois.

The Museum’s recent expansion and renovation project, completed in 2006, nearly doubled its exhibition space, greatly enhanced MoMA’s capacity to offer an array of dynamic programs and resources, and coincided with a remarkable growth in Library acquisitions, made possible by a series of gifts. While the Library catalogs close to 5,000 records yearly, collection processing has not kept pace with acquisitions, making material inaccessible to the Museum's staff and the general public. The requested grant will support a plan to process the following priority collections, which are unique or rarely held, for the benefit of students, scholars, educators, and others interested in the burgeoning study of modern and contemporary art from Latin America, Asia, and beyond: Special Collections (800 titles) are comprised of notable acquisitions documenting modern and contemporary art from 1880 to the present, and include rare serials and exhibition catalogs not found in most libraries across the country. The Latin American Collection (5,177 titles) is comprised of materials spanning 1920 through the present. A particular strength of the collection is its rare journals and artists' books. The Asian Collection (1,000 titles) is comprised of gallery catalogs, museum exhibition catalogs, artists' books, and monographs documenting contemporary Asian art between 1920 and 2009, with an emphasis on Chinese, Japanese, and Korean artists.

The common thread throughout these three significant-in-their-own-right collections is U.S. Catholic social action in the 20th century. St. Catherine University’s (SCU) Ade Bethune Collection includes the archives of Ade Bethune, world-renowned liturgical artist and social activist. In 1969 she helped found the Church Community Housing Corporation, a non-religious, non-profit organization, to develop affordable housing in Newport County. She designed the prototype for more than 30 new houses for first-time, low-income owners, including Newport's first solar-heated house. This community is vibrant yet today. Catholic University of America (CUA) holds the Catholic Charities, DC records (CCDC). CCDC serves today as a key advocate for progressive social legislation. CCDC provides strong leadership and support to enhance the work of local agencies in their efforts to reduce poverty, support families, and empower communities. Marquette University’s (MU) Dorothy Day-Catholic Worker Collection (DDCW) documents the faith-based movement of Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin. This social movement remains strong, evidenced by over 185 "houses of hospitality" around the globe. This project describes the audio recordings within the DDCW archive which capture voices of most influential Catholic social activists, intellectuals, and writers of the era.

The Stephen Jay Gould Collection was a gift to the Stanford University Libraries' (SUL) Department of Special Collections by Rhonda Shearer in December 2006. The collection documents Gould's work on evolutionary biology, paleontology, and the history of science as well as his more general interests, such as baseball and statistics. It consists of three main components: manuscripts, books and born-digital material. The manuscript material contains family and personal papers, correspondence, drafts of articles and books, biographical material, author files, subject files, research notes, teaching notes, reprints, audio and video tapes, 2,500 slides, ephemera, maps, artifacts and over 5,000 specimens gathered by Stephen's father, Leonard Gould, and by Gould himself when he was a child and throughout his lifetime. The two other main components, Gould's rare books and born-digital material, are being processed and cataloged concurrently with other funding. His library contains 1,500 rare books on the history of science and 8,000 other, more general books. The born-digital component consists of 141 diskettes, 3 computer tapes and 2 sets of punch cards of statistical data sets relating to his empirical studies (based on land snails in Bermuda and West Indian area). This project would process Gould's manuscript material to allow cataloging it simultaneously with the other two components of the collection and to ultimately integrate all three descriptions.

In 1935, Roman Vishniac (1897-1990), a Russian Jewish expatriate working as a biologist and photomicroscoper in Berlin, was commissioned by the Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) to photograph impoverished Jewish communities throughout Central and Eastern Europe. The resulting images are some of the most iconic and widely reproduced in Jewish culture: the final visual record of communities destroyed by the Holocaust. Vishniac’s archive includes never-before-seen negatives, contact sheets, notes, audio tapes, and family documents, making possible a critical re-examination of the life and work of this renowned photographer and the communities he documented. In addition to Vishniac’s most recognized images, the collection includes rarely seen photographs of Jewish agrarian training camps and health organizations; children’s refugee camps and technical schools throughout Europe in the '30s; images of post-war Displaced Persons Camps; and many of the photographs of refugees made after Vishniac immigrated to the U.S. in 1941. Among its most remarkable contents is recently discovered film footage of remote Jewish communities in the Carpathian Mountains--the only known filmed material of this subject--as well as footage from more urban locations. While a comparatively small group of Vishniac’s images have been exhibited or published, this archive brings a fresh perspective to his work through negatives and contact sheets which have never before been studied, printed or exhibited.

The Gordon Parks Collection includes over 26,000 items, including photographic prints, negatives, color slides, contact sheets, and Parks' own related notations. It contains works that span the entirety of Parks' sixty-year career from his early days working for the Farm Security Administration, to his fashion work with Vogue, to his civil rights work with Life Magazine, and finally to his color abstract work from his later years. Shortly after Parks' death, his estate established the Gordon Parks Charitable Trust and his entire personal Collection was moved into a temporary storage space. At the same time, the Collection was placed under the supervision of the Meserve-Kunhardt Foundation (MKF), which, in turn set up a division, the Gordon Parks Foundation (GPF), to receive and administer Parks' life work. GPF is currently in the third year of a three-year transfer process during which the entire Collection is being gifted to GPF. In the summer of 2009, the collection moved to The Purchase College Library and Neuberger Museum of Art in Purchase, NY. This grant will focus on cataloging Parks’ negatives, color slides, and contact sheets approximating 10,000 items in total.

The Alexis Carrel Collection at Georgetown is the world’s most extensive and important body of materials relating to the entire career of the Nobel laureate, medical researcher, and public health theorist. Included are Carrel’s research files, laboratory notebooks, offprints, photographs, and specimens for work on suturing blood vessels for which he received the Nobel Prize in 1912; innovations in France and at the Rockefeller Institute in wound sterilization, cell research and tissue culture; pioneering experiments in organ preservation outside the body, which laid the groundwork for modern organ transplants; and voluminous correspondence with leading intellectual and literary figures, especially Paul Claudel, Paul deKruif, John Dewey, Upton Sinclair, Sinclair Lewis and Charles Lindbergh. Carrel’s prodigious writings, much of it unpublished, cover the relationship between medicine and faith, war and human rights, as well as drafts, revisions and the final manuscript of his influential book, Man the Unknown. Some scholars of Carrel have had inventory-level access to part of the collection. Full cataloging would have a major impact on such hotly contested fields as sociology of religion, bioethics, and the history of genetics and eugenics.

The collection comprises approximately 7,300 posters from the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) in the following categories: film studios (3,300), art exhibitions (1,600), theaters (1,100) political campaigns and propaganda (700), and festivals, sports, and recreation (600). It was formed by Thomas Hill, a German book dealer and collector, who acquired most of them from the East German Association of Fine Artists in Berlin, Germany. The posters in the collection, were commissioned by major GDR performing arts organizations, including theaters, opera houses, and ballet companies; the state-sponsored film studios; and art museums and galleries. In addition, the collection includes campaign posters from the first free elections in East Germany in March 1990 and the first German election after reunification in October 1990. The materials date from the beginning of the GDR in 1949 to the German reunification in 1990. Examples from all periods of GDR history are represented in all categories, with the exception of the theater posters, the majority of which date from the 1960s through the 1980s.

The six archival collections proposed for this project -- the Lloyd Alexander, the Virginia Lee Burton, the Carolyn Haywood, the Evaline Ness, and the Tomi Ungerer collections and the Frederick R. Gardner collection of Robert Lawson -- are part of the Free Library of Philadelphia’s Children’s Literature Research Collection (CLRC) and were included among 59 unprocessed Free Library special collections described in a recent survey by the Philadelphia Area Consortium of Special Collections Libraries (PACSCL). The collections vary in size and contain a wide range of archival material, including original manuscripts, notes, etchings, drawings, illustrations, sketchbooks, correspondence, galley proofs, mock-ups, dummies, color separations, tapes, photographs, and slides, as well as some published books and reviews. Each of the individuals to whom these materials relate made important contributions to 20th-century American children’s literature as the authors and/or illustrators of well-known and enduring children’s books. Five of them won nationally-recognized literary awards for their work, such as the Caldecott and Newbery medals, the National Book Award, and the Hans Christian Andersen Award. Together, the archival materials in these collections offer key resources for studying the literary and stylistic development of these six authors and illustrators as well as valuable insight into the nature and development of 20th-century American children’s literature and culture.

The Paul Jeffrey Collection documents his career as a jazz performer, band leader, arranger, and educator. It consists of annotated musical scores, miscellaneous parts, audio and video recordings in various formats, as well as assorted photographs and personal papers. The collection has been rehoused into 153 records cartons and 54 oversize boxes. The majority of the collection (176 boxes) consists of music scores, parts, and photocopies of scores and parts. Of these 176 boxes, only 61 have some form of order; in some cases the boxes match up with a rough list created by the donor. Of the 61 boxes, 17 are oversize; the remaining 37 oversize boxes while unorganized are largely scores with some form of identification. The other 78 boxes of music parts and scores (all records cartons) have little or no order and consist largely of random sheets and scattered parts. The remaining 31 boxes, primarily containing recorded media, are largely unordered. This includes ten boxes of reel to reel audio tape, seven boxes of computer discs and audio cassettes, a box of DAT and Hi8 video, four boxes of slides and photos, four boxes of LPs and 78s, and two boxes of publicity materials. A hard drive with musical scores and related files is also part of the collection.

The Denver Public Library Friends Foundation requests funding from the Council on Library and Information Resources for “In Plain Sight: Uncovering Hidden Manuscript Collections of Western Authors, Environmentalists, Researchers and Historians.” The eighteen manuscript collections included in this proposal form an integral part of the Library’s Western History and Conservation Collections. The synthesis between the two collections increasingly overlaps as historians write about the development of land in the West and the impact of change on regional cultures and Native Americans. Included are original manuscripts, correspondence, unpublished materials, research notes, photographs, family and personal papers, and other materials documenting these writers’ lives. Also included is documentation of research in conservation, environmental history, the American West, Mexican/Spanish folklore, Colorado history and Native Americans. Project authors include Thomas Hornsby Ferril, the Colorado Poet Laureate known as the “most honored poet of the Rocky Mountain West;” Arthur L. Campa, who studied and wrote about Spanish and Mexican folklore and Ina Sizer Cassidy who was Director of the Federal Writers' Project in New Mexico and participated in the New Mexico Association on Indian Affairs. Conservationists include Howard Zahniser, who helped draft legislation that became the Wilderness Act (1964); and Ray Alcorn and George Laycock who wrote extensively on the environment and wildlife.

Papers of community organizations, institutions and government agencies that relate to Harlem and its architectural history. Organizational and government records include reports and studies commissioned by state agencies and nonprofits (153); subject files and conference and committee files (76); and publications by or about the respective organizations or agencies regarding the development of Harlem. Twenty oral histories of Harlem residents, which include performance and visual artists, politicians, community activists, and intellectuals and scholars, highlight the social impact of Harlem’s development from the intimate perspective of local residents. Documentary photographs provide a tangible visual reference to the structural changes and include representation of architectural structures such as residential and commercial buildings, historic landmarks, vacant lots and construction sites that document the evolution of Harlem’s redevelopment. Architectural drawings illustrate the vision of the architect and the design process. The collection contains building plans and includes both preliminary and presentation drawings and renderings. Nine monographs such as When Harlem was Jewish, 1870-1930; The Battle of Harlem Heights, September 16th 1776. Vertical files (34) containing clippings and promotional material about various development projects. Sanborn Map of Harlem neighborhoods identifying conditions and status of city owned and privately held buildings.

These multi-generational family collections are drawn from two institutions to form one inter-related collection of New York State material, spanning the 17th through the 20th centuries. The materials include almost every non-digital format in which people recorded their experiences, including diaries, letters, court documents, maps, photographs, deeds, account books, leases, pamphlets, tax receipts, and church records. There are 21 separate family collections, which often intersect either through intermarriage and/or business relationships. Together they offer overlapping insights into understanding forces of social change that affected Americans, especially war, land development, the creation of transportation networks, and scientific advances. The families (with an example of the topics they illuminate) are: Anderson (Louis Kossuth); Burgess (political science); Chrystie (US Navy); (De Witt) Clinton (Erie Canal); Devereaux (Utica business development); Fish (Revolutionary War); Goldmark (American Chemical Society); Harison (Constitutional Convention); Hoyt (NYC social life); Jay (anti-slavery); Kane-Hand (railroads; Spanish-American War); Kent (Chancellorship of NYS); Kernan (railroads); Ludlow (estate records); Morgan (Congress); Mott (subdividing the Bronx); Renwick (physics,engineering); Sage (lumbering, subways, canals); Van Schaack (Tories); White (hydraulic cement, canals); and Williams (geology, paleontology).

At least 50,000 negatives, prints, glass plates, and research files document ships and waterfronts that characterized the Pacific Northwest from the 1850s through 1970s. Maritime shipping was the region's economic lifeblood:ships built from huge timbers carried lumber to international and West Coast ports. Many images feature Coos Bay, Oregon, an archtypal timber town that by the mid-1900s became the largest lumber shipping port in the world. Evidence of that vibrant history has disappeared: almost all shipping stopped when timber harvest slowed in the 1980s: once-bustling waterfronts are empty, mills razed and wharves abandoned. This collection was started ca. 1900 by maritime historian Victor C. West's mother, who photographed the steam schooners replacing sailing vessels. The late Mr. West added images of West Coast ships and harbors dating back to the 1850s, including Southern Oregon's "mosquito fleets." By following the shipping reports West photographed every ship under any flag entering the international port of Coos Bay from 1930-1970 -- up to 300 ships annually. He acquired additional maritime images from other sources, with special attention to images of some European navies. The collection appears to include rare photographs of small timber camps and coal mines (1870s-1900s). The collection was acquired by our museum in March 2009 after 15 years in storage elsewhere. It has never been indexed.

The College of Charleston's commitment to building a Jewish archives signals its dedication to a broadened view of history and a program of addressing underserved constituencies. The Jewish Heritage Collection is the largest and fastest growing archives of its kind. Since its founding in 1995, JHC has amassed a wealth of materials acquired for their rarity, age, fragility, and intrinsic worth. Collections now come in at a rate that is gratifying but alarming, too, because we lack sufficient staff and funding to promptly conserve and catalog them. With support from CLIR, the College of Charleston processed and cataloged 410 cubic feet of recently acquired collections, including the William A. Rosenthall Judaica Collection, an unparalleled assemblage of first editions, fine art prints, postcards, and artifacts; the Holocaust Archives, consisting of memoirs, photographs, correspondence, and memorabilia from 65 survivors and veterans who witnessed the Shoah; and 100 uncatalogued collections that document Jewish experience in the American South from colonial times to the present. Each collection is evidence of the astonishing diaspora and assimilation of southern Jews, an historic phenomenon that has been both the context and a moving force for some of the most important developments in American Jewish history, including the birth of the Reform movement in the early 19th century. The project also includes processing 200 oral histories of local and national significance, and 26 linear feet of books.

The Chicago History Museum (CHM) requests funding to 1) catalog and assess its manuscript holdings from Chicago’s beginnings to the present day and American history through the Civil War; and 2) arrange and describe priority collections in the processing backlog that document Chicago-area social conditions, religious communities, neighborhoods, politics, labor history, education, and ethnic history. Priority collections to be processed include the papers of Illinois congressional leaders Sidney Yates, Carol Moseley-Braun, and Charles Percy (1,733 combined linear feet), and records from a broad spectrum of community and social service organizations (21 known priority collections at 983 lf), community leaders (11 at 225 lf), labor organizations (5 at 103 lf), and labor leaders (3 at 8 lf), with an emphasis on the post-1945 period. Once processed, these collections (53 for a total of 3,052 lf) will become an indispensable resource for urban and social historians and document Chicago’s changes in the postwar period, the impact of national urban policy on cities, and the evolution of community organizing. Additional collections will be prioritized for processing under this grant following the assessment survey; these materials will provide further historical context and enhance the aggregate importance of the collections to be made visible and accessible through this project.

The Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History has, over the years collected manuscripts and objects that document the depiction of African Americans in popular culture as well as their role in political organizations that sought to eradicate racial stereotypes and teach racial pride. The largest of these acquisitions was the Hanif Wahab collection, whose origins date back to when Dr. Wahab began collecting African American artifacts and documents that span about 90 years. Initially stored in Wahab's home, some items were displayed on the second floor of the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. branch of the Cleveland Public Library beginning in 1987. By 1990, the collection evolved into the Tubman Museum. By 1994, the museum's holdings included approximately 6,000 items of historical significance to African Americans including photographs, military records, prints, magazines, letters, books, sheet music, political buttons and antique household items. Hanif Wahab, who had a degree in history from Wilberforce University, was director of the museum. The Wright Museum, which acquired the collection in 1998 when the Tubman closed, has inventoried the collection but the inventory is incomplete and not accessible to scholars because of missing location information. Because of the size and scope of the collection and the backlog of other collections, the Museum to date has not pursued a full cataloging and arrangement and description of the collection.

The collective breadth and depth of the combined world's fair collections at the Wolfsonian-Florida International University, California State University, Fresno and the Hagley Museum and Library is far greater than the sum of its parts. In aggregate, the three collections encompass 212 world's fairs all over the globe between 1851 and 2005 and include approximately 20,000 items. Each institution adds its particular strengths to the project, for example original art and design drawings and multi-faceted ephemera from the Wolfsonian, an extensive collection of photographs and postcards from CSU, Fresno and valuable trade catalogs, trade cards and posters from the Hagley. Wolfsonian Library: 1853 pieces of ephemera, 2 archival collections, 2400 postcards, 118 posters, 21 paintings, 301 drawings, 10 panels as well as 600 photo postcards and 750 photographs (already digitized but needing metadata). Total = 6055 items. California State University, Fresno (CSUF): 2057 pamphlets, 200 maps and plans, 135 pieces of sheet music (117 already digitized but no metadata), 60 posters (24 digitized but no metadata), 18 films, 4255 photographs (1997 digitized with metadata records in ContentDM; 2258 digitized but needing metadata) and 3232 postcards. Total = 9957 items. Hagley Library: 2550 pieces of ephemera (trade catalogs, trade cards, pamphlets and brochures), 600 posters, 1600 MARC records to be converted to MODS records. Total = 4750 items.

The proposed project enables the integration of the ENV Archives and Visual Resources Library of the College of Environmental Design (ENV), Cal Poly Pomona. These facilities share a number of archival collections but differences of media caused them be be separated: the Archives holds drawings, photographs and manuscripts and the Visual Resources Library specializes is 35 millimeter slides. The facilities share the works of Richard J. Neutra, Raphael Soriano and Craig Ellwood, each seminal figures in the history of the modern movement in southern California. The ENV Archives owns the collections of Donald Wexler and landscape architect Francis Dean. Wexler is the youngest member of the Palm Springs mid-century circle of architects, and Dean was a partner in the firm Eckbo Dean Austin and Williams (EDAW), California’s preeminent postwar landscape architecture firm. Each individual was affiliated with ENV as an instructor or critic; as such their holdings are part of our institution’s legacy and connect us with the region’s contribution to world architecture. A small percentage of the materials has been published. As a whole, the collections reflect innovations in technology, building and urban typologies (Dean was involved with early examples of pedestrian malls), and the evolution of the modern aesthetic in southern California’s mild climate.

This California Digital Library (CDL) project has uncovered 33 hidden collections at institutions across California related to the state's environment and environmental history. The collections were selected and assembled for their unique and diverse perspectives on this broad theme. They document an array of important sub-topics such as irrigation, mining, forestry, agriculture, industry, land use, activism, and research. Together they form a multifaceted picture of the natural world and the way it has been probed, altered, exploited, and protected in California over the past century. Highlights include the corporate records of Unocal, a major oil company; the papers of Frank Sherwood Rowland, the Nobel-prize winning scientist who discovered the effects of CFCs on the ozone layer; the Rudi Becking collection, describing the political battle to enlarge the Redwood National Park; several collections illustrating the development and impact of hydraulic mining; the records of prominent California leaders in the Sierra Club and other activist organizations; field research on the development of the citrus industry; and materials on the state’s tidelands controversy, with a complete environmental profile of Los Angeles Harbor. Project partners: California State University Chico; California State University Fresno; Humboldt State University; UC Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles, and Riverside; and University of Southern California.

We wish to process and catalog two groups of rare or unique research materials on art and cultural history from around the world spanning antiquity to contemporary times. These materials provide insight into the history of objects and their cultural context focused on the encyclopedic collections represented in the Brooklyn Museum and are relevant to researchers interested in the cultures represented in the Museum's collection. 1. Archives: Approximately 700 linear feet of unique archival collections from the following curatorial departments: Asian Art; Decorative Arts; Arts of Africa, Pacific, and Americas; Egyptian, Classical and Ancient Middle Eastern Art; European Painting and Sculpture; American Painting and Sculpture; Contemporary Art; and Prints, Drawings, and Photographs. 2. Institutional Files: Approximately 5,000 files of rare exhibition catalogs, pamphlets and checklists under 50 pages reflecting an encyclopedic cultural and geographic scope. Many are not listed in Arcade or in WorldCat. Of those records found in WorldCat, many are held by only a few institutions. We hope to catalog these rare publications on art and cultural history so that their existence and location are known.

The Boston Personalism Project consists of the personal and professional papers of Edgar S. Brightman, Allan Knight Chalmers and L. Harold DeWolf, all major contributors to the influential school of American philosophy and theology known as Boston Personalism (BP), the movement which was known as a major influence in the intellectual and philosophical development of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. These collections include the manuscripts, correspondence, audio recordings, photographs, scrapbooks, printed material, holograph notebooks, and other items of these three important figures of BP. Other materials in the Project include the collections of some of their fellow theologians and philosophers in the movement, and represent one hundred years and three generations of philosophical thought. Edgar S. Brightman was an influential theologian who reinterpreted Boston Personalism for the twentieth century. Allan Knight Chalmers, a crusading civil rights lawyer for the NAACP and mentor to Martin Luther King, Jr., was involved in the Scottsboro case. L. Harold DeWolf, a theologian, philosopher, and ethicist, served as Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dissertation advisor. The earliest material in the Project includes a cache of letters and notebooks of the founder of BP, Borden Parker Bowne, and a large collection of the letters and manuscripts of Bowne’s patron, BU President William F. Warren.

BPL’s Map Collection is comprised of 4,000 maps ranging from 1540 to the present. Use of the map collection has been severely limited because it is inaccessible. Of the 4,000 items in the collection, none has been cataloged. Descriptions and paper catalog cards exist for a quarter of the collection, but they are of unknown provenance or are incomplete. Though BPL has produced publications that describe parts of the collection, none are comprehensive and were developed by people with varying degrees of expertise. Further, these do not point to any catalog, rendering them useless to researchers. A map collection of this depth and importance is rare in a Southeastern public library. The Library holds original maps by Dutch cartographers Rumold Mercator (1541-1600), Willem Janszoon Blaeu (1571-1638), Sebastian Münster (1489-1552), Levinus Apollonius (16th century), Petrus Apianus (1495-1552), Pieter van der Aa (1659-1733), and Jodocus Hondius (son of Jodocus Hondius, the Elder) (1594-1629). French authors whose original maps are in the collection include Guillaume Sanson (d. 1703) and Guillaume de L'Isle (1675-1726). Original British maps in the collection are authored by Herman Moll (d. 1732) and Henry Popple (fl. 1733). Authors of original American maps in the collection include John Melish (1771-1822), Henry Schenck Tanner (1786-1858), Joseph Hutchins Colton (1800-1893), John Pinkerton (1758-1826), and Robert E. Lee (1807-1870). The history of mapmaking is reflected here.