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 Kami Ahrens, Curator and Educational Outreach Coordinator, Foxfire In March 2020, the Foxfire Museum responded to the nation-wide shutdowns by launching a crowd-sourced oral history program, as so many museums and archives did. For over 50 years, Foxfire has been collecting oral histories, including experiences during the Influenza Pandemic of 1918. This project aligns with our organization’s mission to preserve, protect, and promote Southern Appalachian history. Initial submissions to the project were largely from a class assignment out of the University of North…
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Reparative Description at University of Tennessee’s Special Collections
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 Amanda Touchstone and Laura Romans, Betsey B. Creekmore Special Collections and University Archives, University of Tennessee For a long time, the Manuscripts unit of the Betsey B. Creekmore Special Collections and University Archives has wanted to conduct an audit of every published finding aid description in SCOUT that represents a Manuscripts collection. (SCOUT is an online catalog of our special collections.) It was a priority — but often put off in favor of a collection that needed to be processed on a deadline or to…
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Chronicling COVID-19 at Appalachian Special Collections
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. In March 2021, as the pandemic entered its second year, Curator editors asked Appalachian archivists if they were collecting information about how their institutions were responding to COVID-19. Had repositories collected information? If so, why types of information? Several institutions responded, and their reports are below: Appalachian State University As Coordinator of Special Collections and the University Archivist, I made the decision not to pursue creating an online location for individuals to submit their COVID stories. The decision wasn’t made lightly but was made for…
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Working during COVID: Appalachian archives respond
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. Appalachian Curator editors asked regional archivists how they responded to working during the COVID pandemic. We received ten responses from a range of collections that reflect the different types of archives we have in Southern Appalachia – large research universities, smaller public and private liberal arts colleges, and a public library. Several general themes are consistent in these responses – repositories closed, staff developed new workflows and tackled new projects, and many places have reopened with limited hours, limited access, and different workflows. West…
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Scholarly Responses to the Pandemic: Lloyd Tomlinson, West Virginia University
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. Researching in a Pandemic Lloyd Tomlinson I defended the prospectus for my dissertation in February, and immediately started filling out funding applications and planning for a summer of research. A couple of weeks after that is when I first remember hearing about the coronavirus. By March, West Virginia University had made the decision to shift all classes online and to not have students return for the second half of the semester. Accompanying that decision was a moratorium on all travel related to university travel. By…
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Scholarly Responses to the Pandemic: Savannah Paige Murray, Virginia Tech
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. My Archive Fever by Savannah Paige Murray I am a frequent sufferer of what French philosopher Jacques Derrida has diagnosed as “Archive Fever.” For Derrida, le mal d’archive, or the sickness that afflicts some archival researchers, represents the “feverish desire” of longing for the archive (Steedman 1159). For sufferers of Archive Fever, it is simply not enough to visit an archive. The Fever brings about an intense need to possess the archive itself. Archive Fever elicits “a compulsive, repetitive, and nostalgic desire for the archive”…
