This article appeared in the Volume 4, Issue 1 Spring/Summer Winter 2023 issue of the Appalachian Curator. Click here to view a PDF of the full issue. Welcome to the latest issue of the Appalachian Curator. We hope the summer’s going well for you, and that you’re finding time to catch up on projects and, hopefully, take some time off with family and friends. This issue features several articles from the University of Kentucky. Kopana Terry writes about the history of Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History at Kentucky, describing the extensive Appalachian oral histories there. Matt Strandmark describes Kentucky’s initiatives to expand their Appalachian collections and offers an invitation…
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Editor’s Column
This article appeared in the Volume 3, Issue 3 Winter 2022 issue of the Appalachian Curator. Click here to view a PDF of the full issue. I hope everyone’s doing fine as 2022 wanes and winter approaches. Based on a number of conversations with you I know we’ve all been extremely busy this year. Here’s hoping you find some time for rest and relaxation over the Winter Holidays. As my Mom was fond of saying, here’s to finding time to “recharge your batteries.” We have several articles of interest in this issue. Pauletta Hansel reports on the Urban Appalachian Community Coalition’s oral history program, which is up to 45 interviews and…
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Editors’ Column
This article appeared in the Volume 3, Issue 2 Fall 2021 issue of the Appalachian Curator. Click here to view a PDF of the full issue. Thanks for joining us again for another report from the Appalachian archival community. This issue includes an article on collections at the University of Tennessee, including updates on their Great Smoky Mountains collections and news about collections from Wilma Dykeman and Marilou Awiakta. Our featured collection this issue is the Appalshop Archive, which describes how Appalshop is collecting and preserving materials related to the various documentaries, community projects, audio recordings, and other projects that we know from Appalshop. This issue includes an article on…
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Editor’s Column
This article appeared in the Volume 3, Issue 1 Spring/Summer 2021 issue of the Appalachian Curator. Click here to view a PDF of the full issue. Welcome to the new issue of Appalachian Curator – we’re now into Volume 3! Thanks to all of you who have contributed to and read the newsletter over our first six issues. We look forward to hearing ideas about articles or features so don’t hesitate to get in touch if you have something that you think would fit in these virtual pages. Two feature stories highlight this issue. The first is an interview with Trevor McKenzie, the recently appointed Director of the Center for Appalachian…
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Editor’s Column
This article appeared in the Volume 2, Issue 3 Winter 2021 issue of the Appalachian Curator. Click here to view a PDF of the full issue. By Gene Hyde We’re pleased to offer the latest issue of Appalachian Curator, which unsurprisingly continues to document how the pandemic has challenged how Appalachian special collections provide basic services. In this vein, we have an article describing how various repositories are chronicling (or not chronicling) COVID at their institutions. Another article discusses how Foxfire and Blue Ridge Public Radio are collaborating on a crowd-sourced oral history project documenting COVID. During our most recent ASA Special Collections Committee meeting (virtual, of course) we started…
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Editor’s column
This article appeared in the Volume 2, Issue 2 Fall 2020 issue of the Appalachian Curator. Click here to view a PDF of the full issue. Welcome to the Fall 2020 issue of the Appalachian Curator. We hope you’re doing well as the season brings us shorter days and colder weather. Despite the challenges the COVID has brought, we are glad to feature two articles that highlight the good work archivists, librarians, and scholars are doing in the region. Our featured collection is the Historic Frank Foster Memorial Library by the Urban Appalachian Community Coalition in Cincinnati. Moving from urban Appalachia to rural North Carolina, “Influence and Legacy: The Farmer’s…
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Editor’s Column
This article appeared in the Volume 2, Issue 1 Spring/Summer 2020 issue of the Appalachian Curator. Click here to view a PDF of the full issue. So…how y’all doing? I don’t know about you, but I’ve found that this generally collegial greeting/query, something you’d say when meeting friends or family socially, now has deeper implications wrought by the pandemic. How are we doing as Appalachian archivists? Many archives – it’s likely that nearly all archives – are closed, or have been closed, hopefully to reopen sometime in the murky future. Smaller repositories may not reopen. Many of our colleagues’ jobs are at stake. Many of us are planning for the…
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Editor’s Column
This article appeared in the Volume 1, Issue 3 Winter 2020 issue of the Appalachian Curator. Click here to view a PDF of the full issue. Welcome to the Winter 2020 issue of the Appalachian Curator, which wraps up our first year of publication. The editors have been pleasantly surprised at how well the Curator has been received. As of this writing, we’ve had over 2,000 unique visitors, and you viewed individual stories and articles over 5,800 times. Thanks for reading …or at least stopping by and checking out the Curator! The Appalachian Curator is a publication of the Special Collections Committee of the Appalachian Studies Association, and we’re featuring an…
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Editor’s Column
By Gene Hyde This article appeared in the Volume 1, Issue 2 Fall 2019 issue of the Appalachian Curator. Click here to view a PDF of the full issue. Welcome to the second issue of the Appalachian Curator: A newsletter about Appalachian special collections and archives. Just a few weeks after the first issue of the Appalachian Curator was published in March 2019, an arsonist set fire to one of the buildings at the Highlander Research and Education Center in New Market, TN. Initial reports indicated that documents and other materials were destroyed. To find out what happened, and what the results were for Highlander’s rich archival history, we interviewed Susan Williams,…
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Editor’s Column
By Gene Hyde This article appeared in the Volume 1, Issue 1 Spring/Summer 2019 issue of the Appalachian Curator. Click here to view a PDF of the full issue. In 1966, West Virginia University librarian Robert F. Munn noted that a researcher wanting to write about Appalachia would discover “distressingly little in the way of useful primary and secondary material” about the region. [1] Munn’s observations were later echoed by Appalachian scholars Cratis Williams and Ronald Eller. Lack of archival resources was a problem, and scholars were concerned. Over the decades since Munn identified this problem, archivists and librarians throughout Appalachia have worked to identify, collect, arrange, describe, and make…
